Imagine if our needs here at home were as much a 'necessity' for our politicians as their wars

[bigtree]

from Tom Dispatch: http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/4638-afghanistan-by-the-numbers.html


Imagine for a moment, as you read this post, what might have happened if Americans had decided to sink the same sort of money -- $228 billion and rising fast -- the same "civilian surges," the same planning, thought, and effort (but not the same staggering ineffectiveness) into reclaiming New Orleans or Detroit, or into planning an American future here at home. Imagine, for a moment, when you read about the multi-millions going into further construction at Bagram Air Base, or to the mercenary company that provides "Lord of the Flies" hire-a-gun guards for American diplomats in massive super-embassies, or about the half-a-billion dollars sunk into a corrupt and fraudulent Afghan election, what a similar investment in our own country might have meant.

Ask yourself: Wouldn't the U.S. have been safer and more secure if all the money, effort, and planning had gone towards "nation-building" in America? Or do you really think we're safer now, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7%, an underemployment rate of 16.8%, and a record 25.5% teen unemployment rate, with soaring health-care costs, with vast infrastructural weaknesses and failures, and in debt up to our eyeballs, while tens of thousands of troops and massive infusions of cash are mustered ostensibly to fight a terrorist outfit that may number in the low hundreds or at most thousands, that, by all accounts, isn't now even based in Afghanistan, and that has shown itself perfectly capable of settling into broken states like Somalia or well functioning cities like Hamburg.

Costs (money)

-Annual funding for U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002: $20.8 billion.
-Annual funding for U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, 2009: $60.2 billion.
-Total funds for U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, 2002-2009: $228.2 billion.
-War-fighting funds requested by the Obama administration for 2010: $68 billion (a figure which will, for the first time since 2003, exceed funds requested for Iraq).
-Funds recently requested by U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry for non-military spending in Afghanistan, 2010: $2.5 billion.
-Funds spent since 2001 on Afghan "reconstruction": $38 billion ("more than half of it on training and equipping Afghan security forces").
-Percentage of U.S. funding in Afghanistan that has gone for military purposes: Nearly 90%.
-Estimated U.S. funds needed to support and upgrade Afghan forces for the next decade: $4 billion a year ("with a like sum for development") according to former Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West. (According to the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon, "It's a reasonable guess that for 20 years, we essentially will have to fund half the Afghan budget.")
-Afghan gross national product: $23 billion ("the size of Boise" Idaho's, writes columnist George Will) -- about $3 billion of it from opium production.
-Annual budget of the Afghan government: $600 million.
-Maintenance cost for the force of 450,000 Afghan soldiers and police U.S. generals dream of creating: approximately 500% of the Afghan budget.
-Amount spent on police "mentoring and training" since 2001: $10 billion.
-Percentage of the more than 400 Afghan National Police units "still incapable of running their operations independently": 75% (2008 figures).
-Cost of the latest upgrade of Bagram Air Base (an old Soviet base that has become the largest American base in Afghanistan): $220 million.
-Cost of a single recent Pentagon contract to DynCorp International Inc. and Fluor Corporation "to build and support U.S. military bases throughout Afghanistan": up to $15 billion.

read more: http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/4638-afghanistan-by-the-numbers.html

[valerief]

1. Well, if we want univeral health care we can always move to Iraq where our

tax dollars pay for it.

[bigtree]

4. sure

great health plan . . . if you're working for one of the myriad of U.S. contractors who siphon off the reconstruction bucks.

[valerief]

5. And the Iraqis, too. nt

[bigtree]

6. sure

. . . if you're in the 'zone' with the enabled, assumed Iraqi authority there. I don't think much of the 'reconstruction' money reaches the average Iraqi citizen.

[panader0]

2. Kinda answers the "How we gonna pay for health care?" argument.

And that's just Afghanistan. The US could protect itself much better and much cheaper without stupid wars. We destroy countries' infrastructure at great cost ( and profit to the weapons people) then build the infrastructure back, (at great profit to Halliburton), and, at the same time, we are blind to our own infrastruture which is falling apart.

[Nite Owl]

3. War tax!

Like the Blue Dogs say everything must be paid for right? No war unless it is paid for and since the military needs all those planes and bombs it would have to be a tax.