(dod photo)
This isn’t exactly the point he’s making, but this observation from Mark Kleiman sure is striking:
US expenditure budget for Afghanistan this year is to be $65 billion; I’m not sure how much NATO and other countries add to that. The US budget alone is more than 5 times the Afghan GDP of $12.5B ($400 per capita).
This seems to me to really throw into relief some questions about the efficacy of what we’re doing there. If Afghanistan’s total output is only worth $12.5 billion, then think about how much you might be able to accomplish with $6.5 billion a year in bribes rather than ten times that amount in defense expenditures. Meanwhile in the real world all signs point toward an additional increase in the quantity of resources dedicated to the Afghan war.
Previous in TP Yglesias
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