Afghanistan War: US Spend USD50million to kill 1 Taliban Freedom Fighter?

This is a very interesting article about how much the Afghanistan war is costing the United States. If the figures are correct then it is possible that the US Spends USD50 million to kill just one Taliban Fighter. How many fighters are there, if you kill one probably three more will replace the the fallen, it will be an endless war for the mighty US with no end in sight. 


Does the US have such deep pocket that it can last until the last Taliban fighter is taken down, I doubt so. History tells us that all mighty armies that ever invaded Afghanistan never get to stay long, the Brits even the USSR had to withdraw under fire. The US should just cut its losses and go as soon as fast as they possibly can.

Spending millions to kill each terrorist
Ron Smith


We cannot win the war in Afghanistan through conventional military means, so what, exactly, are we doing there?
Ron Smith
4:51 p.m. EDT, October 7, 2010


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.


The best estimate of Taliban killed annually by coalition forces is roughly 2,000.The direct cost to the Pentagon of waging war in Afghanistan for 2010 is about $100 billion. Indirect costs are approximately another $100 billion.


"One has to simply divide one number into the other," says Mr. Nasuti. "That calculation reveals that $100 million is being spent to kill each Taliban soldier."


He cut the estimate in half by doubling the number of slain fighters to 4,000, even though that is highly unlikely. So, under the lower estimate, the cost to the American taxpayer to kill 20 individual Taliban members is a breathtaking $1 billion.


Using Mr. Nasuti's calculations, Killing the estimated 35,000 Taliban fighting the occupation would cost $1.75 trillion. We've been at it over there for nine years, and our generals say a military victory is not in the cards. But we have to stay until the job is done.


What job? Are we to magically transform that land and its people into a facsimile of American democracy? Only a child, a simpleton or a foreign policy intellectual could possibly believe that....


read more here.


Ron Smith can be heard weekdays, 9 a.m. to noon, on 1090 WBAL-AM and WBAL.com. His column appears Fridays in The Baltimore Sun.