You Get the War You Pay For

[from 11/25/09]

A recent story in the New York Times, written by Christopher Drew, about the Afghan War, had this sentence: "Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant." I liked that. It was a very nice, neat, clarification of the situation at hand. With the help of that sort of clarification, we can all decide what we want to do about it all. Do we want to panic? If so, and I assume so, by how much?

I mean, money doesn't grow on trees. Fruit grows on trees. Know how many apples you have to sell to make one million dollars in the apple business? Neither do I. But if apples were money, I'd be out in the orchards right now, and I'd know the answer to that question.

We need to conserve our valuable resources. We need to spend our war money the best possible way, to get the best bang for our bucks, so to speak (heh). Do we really want to waste our money killing Afghans (rugs) with our soldiers? Couldn't we kill Afghans more cheaply? Or maybe we don't want to kill Afghans at all. Maybe we could find a way to use our million per soldier to just get them to go away and leave our country alone.

When you think of it that way, a lot of options seem to leap out at you, or me, or one of us. Here's one picked at random from the many that are impinging on me now. We give every single soldier about five hundred dollars for a nice outfit, including decent shoes, $1000 worth of Afghan spending money (more than you need to live a year in a medieval economy where the per capita GDP is $760), a $3 English/Afghan/English phrase book, a $5 Afghan tour map, and tell him/her to go spread the remaining $998,492 around buying Afghan "friends".

Here's how that could go. There's 28 million Afghans, give or take. There's 68,000 US soldiers, give or take. We are talking about divvying up $67,897,456,000, thereabouts, amongst the 28,000,000 Afghans, giving each one, assuming it's spread equal, roughly $2,425, man women and child, or about three years worth of spending money for everyone now working the poppy farms or related to someone who is.

And we can provide that three years worth of Afghan friend-making money every single year, thus tripling these people's standard of living. They'd be friends with us three times over, all the time, until we got tired of it. Then, when we've got them completely dependent on us, we could pull out all our troops and totally destabilized their country, and say, "Sayonara suckers! You messed with the wrong dudes!" And we'd have won.

That was just one of the dozens and dozens of ideas that are hurtling at my brain, for how better to spend our war money.

Here's another one, just as random. Bring the troops home. Send social service workers instead, with the $68,000,000,000 we would have used to keep the troops there for a year. Have the social service workers put on massive, and I mean on the scale of Blitzkrieg-massive, Turkey dinners all over Afghanistan, all on the same day. For all that money, every single Afghan could be stuffed with 20 turkeys, 200 pounds of stuffing, 100 pounds of yams and corn and corn/mixed vegetable/medley/garbage, unknown quantities of (what's that crap? oh yeah) cranberry sauce and enough pumpkin pie with whipped cream on top to stupor them all sick.

Then, we send our troops back in and they meet no resistance.

Or not. Think how long it will take them to get back on their feet. Maybe we could just repeat annually, and keep our troops home indefinitely. How 'bout that?