Taps Coogan – August 17th, 2021

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After nearly 20 years of fighting, the US War in Afghanistan has come to a tragically mishandled close. The Taliban has seized the entire country and declared total victory. That may have been inevitable. Haunting videos of Afghanis clinging to the landing gear of departing Amenrican planes and falling to their deaths definitely was not.

As it turns out, and as most Americans not working in DC have long understood, the overwhelming majority of the 300,000-man Afghan army was a mix of people tired of suffering very heavy casualties amid poor logistics and support, just there to collect a paycheck, or just a line on the ledger of some corrupt Afghani official. After 19 years without enduring military progress, how could that possibly have been a surprise?

In addition to the thousands of American lives lost in Afghanistan, the US is estimated to have spent $2.26 trillion on the war ($300 million a day), almost all of it after the original military objective of rooting out Al Qaeda had been achieved.

For those keeping track, that works out to be roughly $60,000 spent per man, woman, and child in Afghanistan. To put that in perspective, the average annual wage in Afghanistan is roughly $378. So, to be entirely hypothetical, instead of fighting a war without an articulated military objective in search of a political solution for nearly 20 years at the cost of innumerable lives, the US could have spent that time, and the next 130 years, simply writing every living soul in Afghanistan checks for the average wage and saved money doing it.

In reality, we should have ended the military mission after routing Al Qaeda from the country.

The tragic end to this 20 year policy failure should be the biggest reckoning for the defense-political establishment in American history. Everybody knows it won’t be and that’s the real problem.

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