Joshua Craze at Triple Canopy:
An omnipresent feature of liberal chronicles of the occupation is a fixation on how much was wasted: the $2.13 trillion spent and the 176,000 people who died. Surveying the destruction wreaked on Afghanistan, these accounts conclude, unsurprisingly, that the war was a total failure. The Taliban are once again in control of Kabul. Al Qaeda runs gold mines in Badakhshan and Takhar provinces. The Afghan army is a distant memory. This humiliation is often presented as a mystery. How could so much money—more than was spent on the Marshall Plan—and “goodwill,” in the New Yorker’s words, have achieved so little?
But the occupation succeeded! Every military failure was a triumph. Behind every botched mission was someone getting paid; more failures meant more opportunities to profit. Accounts of spending in Afghanistan strain comprehension if one believes that America intended to win and not merely accelerate the enormous post-9/11 transfer of wealth from Washington to the military-industrial complex. (During the war, the stock prices of America’s five largest defense firms increased tenfold.)
More here.
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