Skip to main content

A modest proposal: ending the Afghan War for only $82.5 billion

It works like this: value lives in Afghanistan the same way the US military has been authorized to do by our government.

Here's what happens when we kill civilians:

On the back of an Afghan army truck, U.S. officials paid $40,000 in Afghan currency to representatives of the 15 people killed — $2,500 for each death plus $500 for two wounded men and $1,500 for village repairs.

Lt. Col. Steven Weir, a military lawyer who helped oversee the payments, said the payments were not an admission by the U.S. that innocents were killed.

"It's a condolence payment," he said. "The villagers said none of them were in the Taliban, just peaceful individuals from the village. So by this payment they will understand it's not our goal to kill innocent people. This may help them understand we're here to build a safer and more secure Afghanistan."

When asked if the U.S. was paying money to relatives of people that the U.S. had wanted to kill or capture, Weir said: "If we did accidentally shoot someone, we want to make that right, and if we have to pay money to someone who didn't deserve it ... it's kind of like it's better to let nine guilty people go free than to jail one innocent person."


Let's see, there are roughly 32.7 million people in Afghanistan. Round that up to 33 million in order to allow for Al Qaeda foreigners, stray goats, and anybody we want to kill in nearby Waziristan as part of the package. At $2,500/head that would only be $82.5 Billion in blood money and we could go home.

Victory would be ours.

Skeptics have asked, If we kill them all, who will get the money?

A little reflection provides several possible answers. We could either

1) Seek out Afghans living in the US (insuring that they are also unemployed former union members) and pay them for the cost of exterminating their relatives.

2) Put the money against the Afghan government's debt to the US and NATO for intervening in their country--in other words, pay it back to ourselves.

3) Provide it as a settlement incentive to anybody willing to move into Afghanistan and take over the opium trade while finishing the natural gas pipeline project for us.

Meanwhile, in a related development, Defense Secretary Robert Gates tells Pakistan and the US Congress that the Obama administration policy has exactly the same policy on cross-border incursions as the Bush administration:

"Both President Bush and President Obama have made clear that we will go after al-Qaida wherever al-Qaida is, and we will continue to pursue them," Gates said.

"Has that decision been transmitted to the Pakistan government?" the panel's chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked.

"Yes, sir," Gates responded.


Funny, that's exactly what Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque says of Obama's nuanced statements on Israel and Gaza:

Now we can see why Obama kept silent on Gaza while Bush was still in the White House: because he held precisely the same views as Bush on the subject. There is nothing in Obama's statement that could not have been said -- or was not actually said -- by Bush. You couldn't slide a piece of onion-skin paper between the stances of the two men on Gaza.


Whch is cool, since there are only 1.5 million Palestinians, which means we could throw them into the Afghanistan Endlosung for the relatively modest price of $3.75 Billion. Given the current rate of sending Israel over $2.5 Billion per year in aid, that would get us [and them] out of the whole mess for two years' worth of blood money (assuming we used the rest to bulldoze the bodies and the buildings).

I nominate Jonathan Swift to succeed Bob Gates as SecDef.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?