We cannot win the war in Afghanistan through conventional military means, so what, exactly, are we doing there?
October 07, 2010|By Ron Smith
Is there any way to look at the war in Afghanistan as anything but a mounting failure? I don't think so. The "metrics," as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would say, aren't looking good.
This week, as the ninth anniversary of the start of the Afghanistan war was observed, we learned that the death of each Taliban fighter we battle costs at least $50 million. That's a conservative estimate. It could actually be $100 million. This figure came not from the Pentagon, which goes to great lengths to conceal such accounting, but from an enterprising reporter named Matthew Nasuti, who works for Afghanistan Press.
Consider the source, you say. OK, but aside from the fact that Mr. Nasuti worked "at a senior level" within the U.S. Air Force, math is math. Numbers don't tell the whole truth about anything, but they tell a lot.
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-10-07/news/bs-ed-smith-20101007_1_afghanistan-war-taliban-fighter-lower-estimate
