Posts Tagged ‘numbers’
Let’s Talk Numbers
Friday, August 20th, 2010
According to Jack Kem, the Deputy to the Commander of NATO training mission in Afghanistan, the Afghan army now stands at around 134,000 troops. The number of police stand at 115,000.
Add this to the almost 120,000 NATO troops and their attendant 100,000 private contractors and you get a combined number of around 379,000 souls devoted to fighting the Taliban.
To put this into perspective, according to Major-General Richard Barrons, as of March 3, 2010, Taliban forces are estimated to number about 36,000 insurgents.
379,000 against 36,000. I’m no math genius but this looks to me like the Taliban are out numbered Ten to one.
Or to put it another way, with a population of barely 30 million, there are there is one soldier, policeman or foreign contractor for every 77 people in the country.
And the cost? The US has ponied up more than 335 billion dollars for it’s war effort in Afghanistan so far with no end in sight. This staggering amount of money has been spent on a country where two-thirds of the population live on fewer than 2 US dollars a day.
This is past insanity. It is bat shit crazy.
What is even crazier is that the enemy we are afraid of, al Qaeda, according to our own C.I.A. numbers as few as 50 men!
We have poured a third of a trillion dollars into a dirt poor country to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat’ a rag tag bag of fundamentalist nut jobs who’s greatest “victory” over our country was to highjack four airliners using box cutters and fly them into buildings?
300 billion dollars to hunt down 50 guys? Talk about over kill.
To put it into further perspective, Neighboring Pakistan has recently been the victim of catastrophic flooding that has affected some 20 million people. The US military has offered the use of four Chinook Helicopters and two black Hawk helicopters to support flood relief.
Six helicopters to help relief efforts for 20 million people?
By any measure, the United States has completely lost perspective as to what is important in the world. You can’t defeat box cutters with daisy cutters. Thousands of soldiers can’t defeat terrorists who aren’t there. And drones armed with Hellfire missiles are no use against catastrophic floods.
