The US spent more to 'reconstruct' Afghanistan than it did to rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan
As the U.S. continues its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s worth taking a look at how much the nation has spent on aid–and how effective it has (or hasn’t) been.
Certainly, the numbers are high. A July quarterly report (PDF) released by special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction John F. Sopko declared that in passing $104 billion mark ”the United States will have committed more funds to reconstruct Afghanistan, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it spent on 16 European countries after World War II under the Marshall Plan.” It is safe to say that the $103.4 billion current-day dollars spent on the Marshall Plan led to better nation building, and critics were quick to malign much of the spending in Afghanistan as ill-conceived and poorly managed.
But as this Reuters graphic makes clear, a number of social and economic indicators describe an marked improvement quality of life in Afghanistan. Against the most recent numbers, Afghan life expectancy has jumped by 5 years since 2002 and total GDP has quintupled. In 2011, the number of children who died before the age of five was less than 40 percent of the 2003 figure, and the number of women dying in child birth was almost one-fifth the 2002 rate. Doctors per 1,000 people have tripled; access to reliable electricity has better than quadrupled; school enrollment has better than octupled; and high school enrollment has tripled.
In the long wars triggered by the 9/11 attacks, making people’s lives tangibly better beats torture every time, and the Taliban massacre of scores of Pakistani school children this week can’t be winning hearts and minds in the region. The war in Afghanistan has taken more than 3,400 U.S. and Coalition lives, with over 20,000 wounded, at a price tag of almost $1 trillion. It is important to recognize that some good has come from those costs.
http://blogs.reuters.com/data-dive/2014/12/19/the-good-news-in-afghanistans-marshall-plan/
= new reply since forum marked as read
