The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost American taxpayers about $3.7 trillion, according to a report out of Brown University, roughly about quarter the size of the total debt burden now crippling US Congress and President Obama. Now we have reports that a lot of that money has been wasted.
The Wall Street Journal tells us that $34 billion has been wasted and misspent in contracting services for the military following a three-year investigation from the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report lists some very badly conceived projects, like the $1 million spent every day paying Afghan farmers to work their own fields, money diverted to insurgents to pay for "protection", a costly water treatment plant in Nasiriya, Iraq, that produced murky water and lacked steady electric power and the construction of an Afghan military academy that would cost $40 million to operate and maintain and the fact that 75 per cent of the money went to just 23 contractors.
According to a Reuters fact box, more than 6000 US troops and 2300 contractors have died since the wars began and 137,000 civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq have perished in the conflict.
And the question is why? Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are dead, the Taliban is marginalized, and al-Qaeda has been all but destroyed. But Iraq and Afghanistan are far from being stable democracies. It's an experiment that's failed, and has cost the dysfunctional US economy trillions
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