$57,077.60, Surging by the Minute (Jo Comerford)

by Dollars and Sense

Tom Engelhart's last post of the year over at TomDispatch, is In Nightmares Begin Responsibilities: Why War Will Take No Holiday in 2010. It's a great one! Here's a tidbit:

In Afghanistan, here's what we know. The president is surging at least 30,000 troops into that country, reportedly accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 private contractors, and an extra crew of civilian employees of the U.S. government as well. What initially was announced as a six-month surge is now expected to last 11-12 months (if things "line up perfectly," according to the general in charge). That means the surge itself will probably still be underway next November. Fittingly, then, the Obama administration has made it clear that it won't even consider beginning what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has called a "thorough review of how we're doing" in Afghanistan until December 2010, a process that, based on the last set of presidential deliberations, could last months. Put another way, war in the present escalated form is simply what's on the books for 2010. Period.

Moreover, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry recently assured Afghans that July 2011, the date the president mentioned for beginning a withdrawal of American forces, is not "a deadline" of any sort. According to Thomas Day of the McClatchy newspapers, he insisted, in fact, "that a strong American military presence will remain in Afghanistan long after July 2011."

Read the full post.

And from a few days ago at TomDispatch, an excellent account of the cost of the surge in Afghanistan, by Jo Comerford. Here's Tom's introduction:

A remarkable "lesson" in the economics of surging in Afghanistan, the costs of the president's escalation as you've never seen them before: Jo Comerford, "$57,077.60, Surging by the Minute" http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175179/

Were you curious as to just what it will cost American taxpayers per minute to get those 30,000-plus extra surge troops dispatched by President Obama into Afghanistan? The answer, writes Jo Comerford, TomDispatch regular and executive director of the National Priorities Project is: $57,077.60 -- based on the (low-ball) figure of $30 billion overall that the president offered in his West Point speech.

Want to know what that $30 billion could do on the domestic front? "According to a recent report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers."

Or what if the president only sent in 29,900 troops? For the cost of that extra 100, the amount of money -- $100 million -- the State Department has allocated to assist refugees and returnees from Afghanistan through its Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration could be doubled.

As Comerford points out, however, in this unique little "lesson" in the economics and politics of Afghan War Costs 101, that $30 billion is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to what may turn out to be a trillion dollar war in Afghanistan. (Right now, in fact, the combined cost of the Iraq and Afghan Wars is approaching the trillion dollar mark.)

She concludes: "At just under one-third of the 2010 U.S. federal budget, $1 trillion essentially defies per-hour-per-soldier calculations. It dwarfs all other nations' military spending, let alone their spending on war. It makes a mockery of food stamps and schools. To make sense of this cost, we need to leave civilian life behind entirely and turn to another war. We have to reach back to the Vietnam War, which in today's dollars cost $709.9 billion -- or $300 billion less than the total cost of the two wars we're still fighting, with no end in sight, or even $300 billion less than the long war we may yet fight in Afghanistan."

This is a unique piece that makes a different sense of the war in Afghanistan. Don't miss it.

Read Jo Comerford's post at TomDispatch.

Labels: Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, Jo Comerford, Tom Engelhardt

 

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12/22/2009 04:58:00 PM