Afghanistan Weekly Reader: $1 Billion per Week for Ten Years of War
Yesterday President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron confirmed their commitment to winding down the Afghanistan war by the end of 2014. Next year U.S. and allied forces will transition to an advisory role, leaving local forces in charge of Afghanistan’s security. Critics call this hasty and irresponsible. But after ten years it’s hard to see how a war could wind down more slowly.
A large majority of the American public believes the Afghanistan war is not worth fighting, and it’s not hard to see why. Over the past ten years the U.S. has spent more than $550 billion in Afghanistan alone. That averages out to over $1 billion per week. Compared to the average U.S. household income of less than $1,000 per week, $1 billion is simply staggering.
$1 billion per week for the past ten years. There are better ways to spend taxpayer dollars than a war that should have ended years ago.
From ASG
3/12/12
One Civilian, One Year In Afghanistan: $570,000
Afghanistan Study Group by Mary Kaszynski
Soldiers aren’t the only Americans serving in Afghanistan. Some 1,142 U.S. civilians from the Department of State and other non-defense agencies are currently in Afghanistan. Deploying a civilian is cheaper than deploying a soldier, but it is still expensive: up to $570,000 per year, according to the most recent estimate from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
ARTICLES
3/7/12
Intractable Afghan Graft Hampering U.S. Strategy
The New York Times by Matthew Rosenberg and Graham Bowley
The United States is leaving behind a problem it underwrote over the past decade with tens of billions of dollars of aid and logistical support: a narrow business and political elite defined by its corruption, and despised by most Afghans for it.
3/12/12
Afghanistan Massacre Blows Hole in GOP War Support
Wired by Spencer Ackerman
The recent downward turn taken by the longest war in American history, capped by a massacre of children allegedly committed by a U.S. sergeant on Sunday, has unmoored support from even ordinarily-bellicose politicians. Surprisingly, they’ve gotten to the left of President Obama, whose administration is downplaying the significance of the massacre. They also sound more reality-based than an administration that’s investing significant blood and treasure in a deteriorating war with unreliable local allies in a part of the world with dubious strategic significance.
3/13/12
Billions in cash flees Afghanistan, economy threatened
Reuters by Michael Georgy and Hamid Shalizi
Wealthy Afghans are carrying about $8 billion — almost double the state budget — in suitcases out of the country each year, an amount likely to rise as the exit of foreign troops nears and threatening to ruin the fragile economy
OPINION
3/13/12
Too many wars, too few U.S. soldiers
The Washington Post by Robert H. Scales
The media is trying to make some association between the terrible crime of this sergeant and the Army’s inability to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Perhaps the Army could have done more. But I think…the real institutional culprit is the decade-long exploitation and cynical overuse of one of our most precious and irreplaceable national assets: our close combat soldiers and Marines.
3/13/12
New U.S. strategy needed in Afghanistan
CNN by Anthony Cordesman
We need to face the fact that the tragic killing of Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier only highlights the growing problem the United States faces in creating any kind of strategy for Afghanistan that can survive engagement with reality.
