This:
The State Department and USAID now spend about $320 million a month in Afghanistan, for a total of $18.8 billion over the course of the war so far. That makes Afghanistan the single largest recipient of American aid, ahead even of Iraq. Even so, the aid figures are dwarfed by American military spending in the country.
And what might that military spending amount to?
The United States currently spends about $10 billion a month in Afghanistan and has 100,000 troops there.
Well that's quite a lot of money. But troops cost more than State Department employees, right? I'm sure there are somewhere around that many nation builders there too, right? After all, that's what we're there to do.
The State Department and Agency for International Development, known as USAID, now have about 1,300 civilian employees and contractors in Afghanistan, up from 531 in January 2009.
So... our spending on non-military development amounts to 3-4% of overall spending in Afghanistan. And our civilian presence in Afghanistan is... well, before we compare 'boots on the ground', we should know how many DOD contractors (pdf) we've got on Afghanistan, since the above number includes civilian contractors.
According to DOD, in Afghanistan, as of March 2011, there were 90,339 DOD contractor personnel, compared to approximately 99,800 uniformed personnel. Contractors made up 48% of DOD’s workforce in Afghanistan at that time.
That's 1,300 civilians and 190,000 soldiers and DOD contractors, meaning civilians are 0.7% of our personnel in Afghanistan.
Maybe this requires more argumentation, but it strikes me as almost self-evident that we will continue to fail in Afghanistan, given the insistence that men and women with guns should make up the vast majority of our presence there.
Of course, I get that troops may be considered necessary if our civilians are to be safe, but it's hard to imagine every member of our foreign service delegation in Afghanistan needing 143 troops forming a perimeter around them.
How exactly is this comparatively small group meant to get an entire government that serves its people up and running? The same Times article notes that our obscene spending in Afghanistan feeds directly into corruption and directly distorts the economy by paying Afghans "up to 10 times what they might make working for the Afghan government, and these high salaries encourage 'a culture of aid dependency' while undermining efforts to improve the Afghan government, the review said."
We're directly supporting corruption and the destruction of any sense of normality or equilibrium in the Afghan economy, while we're too busy holding our guns to help create an accountable government. How is another X years of this supposed to improve anything for Afghanistan?