If that is what it takes, the only reason for not doing it is because the industrial-military complex want to keep all the money for themselves.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
(Above proposal is not mine, but that of a guy named "Henry").
In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.
The religious right is motivated by the suspicion that someone, somewhere,
is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
A recipe for victory in Afghanistan
There is a population of roughly 30 million Afghans, those are large families, so let's say there will be about 6 million households. Give each head of household 500 USD a month. Thats $36 billion a year. Way less that what we are spending now and three times the country’s GDP. Give Mullah Omar a McDonald’s franchise and we are all set.
5 comments:
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Your estimate is probably low because it would be hard to get that much money past Karzai of the Afghans and his war & drug lord buddies and the Taliban without at least half sticking to them. Still, it's cheap at 3 times the price.
ReplyDeleteRight Effin On ! Best solution I have heard for Afganistan.
ReplyDeleteToo simple to work tho.
Can you maybe dress it up like a fancy game plan with lots of lines or 500 page thesis? That might interest the powers that be.
w3ski
Montag, yes, you guessed it, I was snarking. I'm well aware of the corruption problem, see the prior post.
ReplyDeletew3ski, alas it isn't that simple. Afghanistan is so corrupt that if we airdropped 38 billion dollars over Afghanistan tomorrow, the next morning 37 billion dollars of that cash would show up in various Afghan officials' bank accounts.
- Badtux the Sadly-not-that-simple Penguin
That idea makes too much sense, you're going to have to re-work it. There are many in the taliban who are fighting because it is a job. If you stabilised the country, got rid of Karzai - a tinpot dictator that just happens to have powerful friends, then the country will have some chance.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed that article, it makes a very good point, the ideas that we have been using as a state are not working. Can anyone be surprised by the state of the nation at this stage.
ReplyDelete