Senior Taliban leader killed again

There's a never-ending stream of Taliban leaders being killed. The latest, according to CNN, was Maulawi Dadullah, who was dispatched by drone in northwestern Pakistan the other day along with a number of bystanders, or his "senior aides" if you will.

There is of course no way to independently verify such a report.

But based on the track record we can safely surmise that two or three senior leaders have already emerged to take his place. Here's a list of 74 "Senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders" executed by American air strikes just in Pakistan.

And here's a British story boasting about the "industrial scale" slaughter of senior Taliban leaders over the course of a few months in 2010.

But apparently the Taliban are stronger than ever, and today control more territory than at any time since the invasion.

Maybe it's time to try something else.

The long goodbye; why can't we admit Afghanistan is a dead end?

Obama's remarks at the conclusion of the NATO blabfest in Chicago don't  offer much hope that anything has been learned in this decade plus debacle.

There's still that streak of wishful thinking that wants to believe at any cost that something has been accomplished.

Something... anything.

Well, we got bin Laden, didn't we?

That could and would have happened whether or not we'd spent a trillion dollars and thousands of lives turning the Afghans against us over these past ten years.

But at least the Taliban are on the ropes.

Not so much on the ropes as in the wings, waiting for their time to come again, as eventually it must.

While Obama and General John Allen and of course the hapless Karzai are still making reassuring noises, the rest of the coalition has said "we're outa there and we're not coming back".

They will however send money to assuage their troubled consciences.

Which is another way of avoiding the inevitable, of prolonging the goodbye, of denying that this is a dead end.

The 350,000 strong armed forces we're building up will cost over four billion dollars a year to maintain.

I have before me a graph showing Afghanistan's GDP for the past fifty years. At the time of the US invasion Afghanistan had a Gross Domestic Product of $2.6 billion. Since then it has spiraled steadily upward due to the infusion of both military and reconstruction spending.

Absent that foreign money infusion, it is reasonable to expect that the GDP will again settle in that range. Afghanistan will then be in the position of having a military that costs more than 100% of its GDP to maintain.

That can't be done, not by the Afghans.

Not by anybody. Every cent of that military spending will have to come from other countries. Every year. In perpetuity.

It won't, of course. Soon enough there'll be new priorities. Afghanistan will fall into the memory hole.

Goodbye Karzai... welcome back Mulla Omar.

"New" Afghan Army costing eight times Afghanistan's annual spending

That little nugget was an aside in a recent New York Times story about contractors in Afghanistan.

Contractors. Have to admit I didn't get the "contractor" thing at the beginning. First time contractors got really big news was when those four guys were hung from the bridge in Falluja.

What the hell, I thought. How barbaric! Why would you want to hang contractors? I know over the years there's been the odd contractor I've had to get a bit pissy with, but hang them from bridges?

Small claims court, maybe. Hanging? No!

Only slowly did I come to the realization that a "contractor" is not a contractor in the conventional sense in which we've understood that word right up until the 21st century.

I thought contractors were electricians and plumbers and framers and drywall guys. Why are they hanging drywall guys from a bridge in Falluja?
Didn't make any sense.

Now I get it of course. "Contractors" is weasel-speak for "mercenaries". Apparently there is a sound business model favoring the use of mercenaries as opposed to your standard US Army troops.

The key word is "business". America is in the process of out-sourcing war to the private sector. And why not? Everybody knows the private sector is more efficient.

According to the Times, there are now more "contractors" in Afghanistan than there are US troops. Every one of them is a profit center. Every one of them is exempt from the rule of law and the laws of war.

And when they die, hey, no big deal, they don't even count as a casualty of war! Talk about a win-win!

Anyway, our private mercenary armies are neck deep in training this new Afghan Army. Training and maintaining this army is costing twelve billion dollars a year.

According to the NYT, every penny of that comes from the American taxpayer.

Something to think about the next time you read a story about Afghan soldiers turning their guns on their American trainers.