The cost of Afghanistan

[QuarterMillionMan]

I had to somehow tie this topic to $$$. Without getting into politics, how might you fix this debacle, with 13 dead military, civilians dead, numerous injured, and things will get worse before it gets better? Costs will now skyrocket. Expand the perimeter to allow more to get to the airport. Drone strikes to take out equipment left behind. What a mess.

[james.hendrickson]

@QMM - well you could use carrots and sticks to get the Taliban to do what you want - at this rate, all the Americans won't be out by the 31st.

Its sad, really its sad to see the US fail like this.

[kork13]

I'm deep in the thick of making this evacuation from Kabul happen... My team & I are controlling every single aircraft in & out of that airfield.... Watching 20 years of blood & treasure evaporate, hearing fear & chaos & desperation over the radio, taking the phone calls when folks are killed/injured/put in lethal danger, and all the while pulling off a constant stream of miracles to keep everyone as safe as we can manage... It's an impossible task that we're handling to the best of our ability, but we were hamstrung from the start, months ago, by indecisiveness & poor leadership (from the national & strategic levels) paired with bad (non-existent) planning.

The financial cost of this operation is 110% meaningless. The human cost to the mental health of everyone involved in it, or ever involved in Afghanistan, is already proving to be extremely high. I'm terrified for my team in the days & weeks after this wraps up & they actually have the time to process what's happening there & what their role in it is/will have been.

I won't discuss more detail than that for security reasons.... but my team & I are all really struggling with how to handle everything that we're doing right now & how this is all playing out. My leadership team is already building plans for bringing mental health providers into our unit after this debacle wraps up. I only hope that we can do enough for our folks.

I'm not sure how to say all of this, partly because these issues are so sensitive & raw & ongoing for me. But quite frankly, there is little to nothing that can be done at this point to make it better. Armchair quarterbacking is easy, pulling it off is not. All we can do is make the best from our bad circumstances & work within the bounds of what we have. The only way this could have been done better is if national & strategic leaders would have told us back in April to start civilian evacuations, BEFORE pulling out all of our military forces, then once that mission was complete, THEN get the military forces out. This withdrawal was done backwards, and thousands of people will face the consequences.

[bjl584]

I won't attempt to air chair quarterback. There are countless factors going on behind the news headlines that we don't even know about or couldn't probably even understand.
I'm just praying for those who were lost and those who are still there trying to get out.

[disneysteve]

I honestly have no opinion as I haven’t followed the story enough to say anything intelligent.

As a site mod, though, just a reminder that this is a site dedicated to personal finance. If there is some financial piece to this story, feel free to discuss it, but please refrain from political comments, finger pointing, etc.

[Like2Plan]

I'm deep in the thick of making this evacuation from Kabul happen... My team & I are controlling every single aircraft in & out of that airfield.... Watching 20 years of blood & treasure evaporate, hearing fear & chaos & desperation over the radio, taking the phone calls when folks are killed/injured/put in lethal danger, and all the while pulling off a constant stream of miracles to keep everyone as safe as we can manage... It's an impossible task that we're handling to the best of our ability, but we were hamstrung from the start, months ago, by indecisiveness & poor leadership (from the national & strategic levels) paired with bad (non-existent) planning.

The financial cost of this operation is 110% meaningless. The human cost to the mental health of everyone involved in it, or ever involved in Afghanistan, is already proving to be extremely high. I'm terrified for my team in the days & weeks after this wraps up & they actually have the time to process what's happening there & what their role in it is/will have been.

I won't discuss more detail than that for security reasons.... but my team & I are all really struggling with how to handle everything that we're doing right now & how this is all playing out. My leadership team is already building plans for bringing mental health providers into our unit after this debacle wraps up. I only hope that we can do enough for our folks.

I'm not sure how to say all of this, partly because these issues are so sensitive & raw & ongoing for me. But quite frankly, there is little to nothing that can be done at this point to make it better. Armchair quarterbacking is easy, pulling it off is not. All we can do is make the best from our bad circumstances & work within the bounds of what we have. The only way this could have been done better is if national & strategic leaders would have told us back in April to start civilian evacuations, BEFORE pulling out all of our military forces, then once that mission was complete, THEN get the military forces out. This withdrawal was done backwards, and thousands of people will face the consequences.

I am not in the military, so I don't know much about the subject but I do know that even a stoner rock band would not preform a concert without security. (And, what ended up happening? Using more troops in a more tenuous situation). That is definitely stunning. I am deeply concerned about the ongoing situation.

What the military has done with the evacuations is absolutely amazing.

[myrdale]

There are own two reasons I can come up with for the United States to be present in a foreign country, strategic and economic.

From the economic standpoint, it's my understanding Afghanistan has vast mineral deposits. As far as everyone pushing for electric "green" cars, well all that lithium has to come from somewhere.

From the strategic standpoint, if we ever were go to war with Russia (they are no threat), or China (we owe them too much), Afghanistan would have given us a position in the region.

We are not the world police. It's not our job to build their nation for them. We backed Sadam Hussein in Iraq, and Gaddafi in Libya. Grated they were arguably bad people, they didn't have issues with terrorist. But they weren't exactly our allies either. Do we think Afghanistan would have been different in the long run?

There is a documentary from about 10 years ago, "What Winning Looks Like", which shows the general corruption involved in the Afghan military and government. I am not convinced it is any less so today.

For the most part, it isn't completely a Biden problem, this has been rolling along though four presidents.

It's like having gangrene in your leg and limping along until you and your buddy get drunk and decide to lob it off with a hack saw. It's a painful bloody mess that could have been executed a lot more efficiently, but ultimately it needed to be done.

[ua_guy]

The tab for "Afghanistan" totals more than $2 Trillion US Dollars.
In perspective, that's about 2/3 our annual national budget deficit, and roughly 10% of the nation's outstanding debt.

In other discussions, the rough cost of keeping Bagram AB in Afghanistan operational and a small deployment for strategic purposes would run about 1% of the US Defense budget ($725 Billion FY 2020), or very roughly $7.25 Billion annually, just to keep a minimal presence in Afghanistan. The US defense budget accounts for about 54% of the nation's discretionary spending, and while 1% of the budget almost amounts to a rounding error, I think most people are with me when I say "every billions counts". We balk at things and programs which cost much less and are not recurring expenses on our own US soil. What are we actually getting for our money in Afghanistan? What have we gotten for $2 trillion dollars already spent?

An overwhelming majority of Americans want the US OUT of Afghanistan, whether right or wrong. A former president promised to do so and then negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban whereby he gave them back 5,000 of their own fighters who were imprisoned. Not only that, he asked Pakistan to release one of their most powerful leaders who is now the guy leading the takeover of Kabul. I'm literally not kidding, there is no political spin, this happened, period, Pakistan let the guy walk free at Trump's request. How did that help, how many years of progress did that erase?

We can all agree that the "price" of human life doesn't have a dollar value. It's superseded by human worth as being somebody who is loved and dearly missed; humans we would bring back from tragedy, if we could, no matter what the cost. Everyone agrees yesterday was unbelievably tragic, unintended, and nothing makes the loss of loved ones "worth it".

The US State Department has been telling American Citizens to leave, NOW, since at least April of this year. The original exit deadline set by Trump and the Taliban was May 31st. Why citizens didn't listen to that warning is beyond my wildest imagination, but I can't see how it helped the current situation.

[rennigade]

I honestly have no opinion as I haven’t followed the story enough to say anything intelligent.

As a site mod, though, just a reminder that this is a site dedicated to personal finance. If there is some financial piece to this story, feel free to discuss it, but please refrain from political comments, finger pointing, etc.

Where was your mod hat the past 1.5 years for the dozens of covid threads when not a single mention of finances were discussed?


As for cost...short term, its peanuts. How much equipment did we leave behind? Couple billion? Thats nothing compared to the overall military budget. Im trying to figure out the long game here. We're not just going to stop policing that place. Its far too rich in resources. And we're not just going to stop being in wars/conflict. Too much money at stake.

If im playing 4D chess, pull out the troops and leave innocents behind. This gets the worlds attention. We already know not everyone is going to be pulled out by aug 31, which means there are going to be a lot of deaths, which is terrible. These people like to behead, there are going to be a lot of videos circulating. Me being a slack jawed simple minded american, those sort of things make me angry. What better way to convince a nation to invade again than showing innocent civilians being slaughtered. It will get everyones approval and no one will bat an eye to fund the war chest even more. These sort of tactics have been done time and time again, why stop now?

[myrdale]

The US State Department has been telling American Citizens to leave, NOW, since at least April of this year. The original exit deadline set by Trump and the Taliban was May 31st. Why citizens didn't listen to that warning is beyond my wildest imagination, but I can't see how it helped the current situation.

The assumption of any Americans or Afghan supports that we were going to keep kicking the can down the road falls squarely on them. Personally I heard nothing of our withdraw one day, and then the next day people are falling off of air planes. I don't know how much this was publicized but the people there have some responsibility for having have stayed till the very end.

The previous administration may have brokered the deal for our leaving, but the current administration has full control of implementing or modifying that deal as they see fit. Actually I knew nothing of Trumps original deal until Biden pointed the finger at Trump yesterday. While the president may be the head of the military, Congress should still have significant input on what we do. Personally I believe our intelligence communities / government was well aware that the Afghan government would fail and the Taliban would be back in power.

[myrdale]

Where was your mod hat the past 1.5 years for the dozens of covid threads when not a single mention of finances were discussed?

Completely off the rails from the topic at hand. That said, this virus has had a profound effect (justified or not) on business, culture, and daily life. Finance is intimately tied into every part of this (government restrictions, eviction rules, business policies, government handouts).

[james.hendrickson]

Completely off the rails from the topic at hand. That said, this virus has had a profound effect (justified or not) on business, culture, and daily life. Finance is intimately tied into every part of this (government restrictions, eviction rules, business policies, government handouts).

Excellent point myrdale - the reality is that the covid situation probably had the white house and the military leadership distracted, which is one of the reasons for the debacle in Afghanistan that we're seeing now. The country's bandwidth for dealing with additional crises is just really limited right now.

[james.hendrickson]

I'm deep in the thick of making this evacuation from Kabul happen... My team & I are controlling every single aircraft in & out of that airfield.... Watching 20 years of blood & treasure evaporate, hearing fear & chaos & desperation over the radio, taking the phone calls when folks are killed/injured/put in lethal danger, and all the while pulling off a constant stream of miracles to keep everyone as safe as we can manage... It's an impossible task that we're handling to the best of our ability, but we were hamstrung from the start, months ago, by indecisiveness & poor leadership (from the national & strategic levels) paired with bad (non-existent) planning.

The financial cost of this operation is 110% meaningless. The human cost to the mental health of everyone involved in it, or ever involved in Afghanistan, is already proving to be extremely high. I'm terrified for my team in the days & weeks after this wraps up & they actually have the time to process what's happening there & what their role in it is/will have been.

I won't discuss more detail than that for security reasons.... but my team & I are all really struggling with how to handle everything that we're doing right now & how this is all playing out. My leadership team is already building plans for bringing mental health providers into our unit after this debacle wraps up. I only hope that we can do enough for our folks.

I'm not sure how to say all of this, partly because these issues are so sensitive & raw & ongoing for me. But quite frankly, there is little to nothing that can be done at this point to make it better. Armchair quarterbacking is easy, pulling it off is not. All we can do is make the best from our bad circumstances & work within the bounds of what we have. The only way this could have been done better is if national & strategic leaders would have told us back in April to start civilian evacuations, BEFORE pulling out all of our military forces, then once that mission was complete, THEN get the military forces out. This withdrawal was done backwards, and thousands of people will face the consequences.

Kork - your experience in Afghanistan may be more widely shared that the public realizes.

There have been tens of thousands of Americans who have gone through AF in the past 20 years.

I'm one of them. In 2010 and 2011 I was a contractor in Kabul. Several of the Afghan interpreters that we worked with were not able to get Visas - everyone who worked for my company has been pulling every string they could to get these guys Visas and out of the country - we've had some luck but several of our guys are still stuck on the ground. They're certain to face Taliban reprisals unless they can escape.

Something else most Americans don't realize - Afghanistan is a Darwinian place. Violence is casual and intense, extortion is common, abuse is normalized there, and torture was frequently practiced when Afghans were captured by the government or the Taliban. Its deeply disturbing to Americans who have never known life without the safety that police and the courts provide. In fact, its so alien to our lived experience that Joe and Jane average on the street have literally no cognitive category that allows them to understand the situation fully.

A lot of people say we shouldn't be involved and Afghanistan really isn't our problem - that's in the nation's long term interest and its correct, but it doesn't help the generations of men and women who've been through that place, and it won't help the Afghans who risked their lives to help us. Most of them will be out of luck.

And, that's the real cost of the war - it's not the money, its the picking up the pieces when its done.

On a positive note, we should be thanking our lucky stars that we do live in country with working infrastructure and financial systems. By and large here in the US, when you turn on the lights, the power comes on, and when you check your accounts online - the balances are accurate and everything works. Because not everyone has that.

[kork13]

The thing to remember is that the Taliban simply wants outsiders to leave, so that they can resume their form of control over the people. The Afghan people have always been very good at waiting out invaders, and this is no exception.
The Taliban, in and of themselves, were never a threat to the US or just about any other nation. From an international standpoint, the problem was always the company they kept (Al Qaeda, etc.). They are ideologically adversarial to ISIS-K (the turds that launched the attacks yesterday), so we can expect that the Taliban will continue to fight against them, as well as any rebel/opposition groups similar to the former Northern Alliance or the current rebels up in Panjier (sp.) that would oppose their control of the country.

All of that said, there is hope for less-bad conditions to remain once we do finally & fully pull out. The last 20 years have opened the eyes for generations of Afghanis, with a taste of what freedom & opportunity could be like. Women and men alike are more educated, and children may yet have continuing opportunities for education. If the opposition groups can negotiate a power-sharing government that is at least somewhat more moderate, even if still a theocracy dominated by the Taliban, the country and its people could still end up in a better place.

Most likely end result in my mind: China will come in and do the same influence-enslavement that they've done in Africa -- offer to manage & develop Afghanistan's infrastructure, try to mine all of the precious metals hiding below, and in the meantime make Afghanistan totally reliant upon Chinese support.... Then it'll be China's turn to realize that the Afghanis don't like to be controlled by external forces.

[QuarterMillionMan]

What behooves me is why the Afghan military who had something in the area of 3x's the amount of forces vs the taliban allowed the taliban to take over. The Afghans it seemed could have kept their power and held onto to their own control but the media says they just gave up.