Afghanistan: a $33bn turning point?

Eight long years and Congress is this week considering a further subvention of $33bn dollars to the Afghan war effort. It is hard to imagine what bereaved military families feel their loss is about. The shock in the Cameron “out in five years” may have been that it suggests the UK will be in there for even longer than anyone imagined.

Cast our minds back to 9/11 and many thought it reasonable to “go after” Bin Laden and his Taliban harbourers and training camps. Hard to remember that the “invasion” was not unsuccessful – in that the woman-oppressing, music and dance disliking, terror exporting Taliban were displaced as the government.

But sudden diversion to fight a war of choice in Iraq; together with the installation of the user-friendly Karzai sapped both success, support, and potentially any viable way of extricating from Afghanistan. On Washington’s Capitol Hill the chair of the House Appropriations Foreign Operations Sub-committee – congresswoman Nita Lowey is trying to halt all non-humanitarian aid to Afghanistan amid reports that the Kabul government is blocking corruption investigations which appear to reveal that $3bn has been flown out of the main airport in the past three years.

Does that mean that for every $30bn of military expenditure that Congress votes through for the Afghan war, they have to build in an extra sum of $3bn? So does this explain why the sum Congress is currently considering amounts to a staggering $33bn? (30+3=33)

The vote on the money comes as General Stanley McChrystal announces he’s leaving the US army altogether. What a chaotic situation! The man leading the spending of tens of billions of the US and UK taxpayers’ money one moment, enjoying civi-street after a bout of insubordination the next. Does the McChrystal affair reveal a deeper malaise – that the people who think they know what they are doing, don’t?

Perhaps even that the people who don’t know what they are doing (us?) do? We still have no idea why he said what he did to an unknown reporter on Rolling Stone.