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The Trillion Dollar Man
Bin Laden, the Man with the clicker, caused the US to spend $1.283 Trillion on Military Operations Since 911.
The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11
Amy Belasco
Specialist in U.S. Defense Policy and Budget March 29, 2011
Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress
Summary
With enactment of the sixth FY2011 Continuing Resolution through March 18, 2011, (H.J.Res. 48/P.L. 112-6) Congress has approved a total of $1.283 trillion for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the three operations initiated since the 9/11 attacks: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) Afghanistan and other counter terror operations; Operation Noble Eagle (ONE), providing enhanced security at military bases; and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). This estimate assumes that the current CR level continues through the rest of the year and that agencies allocate reductions proportionately.
Of this $1.283 trillion total, CRS estimates that Iraq will receive about $806 billion (63%), OEF $444 billion (35%) and enhanced base security about $29 billion (2%), with about $5 billion that CRS cannot allocate (1/2%). About 94% of the funds are for DOD, 5% for foreign aid programs and diplomatic operations, and 1% for medical care for veterans.
Between FY2009 and FY2010, average monthly DOD spending for Afghanistan grew from $4.4 billion to $6.7 billion a month, a 50% increase while average troop strength almost doubled from 44,000 to 84,000 as part of the troop surge announced by the President last year. Troop strength in Afghanistan is expected to average 102,000 in FY2011. DOD’s plans call for troop levels to fall by less than 4,000 in FY2012 unless the President decides otherwise as part of his decision to “begin transition to Afghan security lead in early 2011. . . [to a ] a responsible, conditions-based U.S. troop reduction in July 2011.” At the same time, the President announced a long-term U.S. commitment to a NATO summit goal of “a path to complete transition by the end of 2014.” It is currently unclear how quickly or slowly troop levels will fall this summer or in later years to meet these goals.
While spending on Afghanistan grew between FY2010 and FY2011, DOD’s average spending in Iraq fell from $7.9 billion to $6.2 billion (per month) or by about 20% while troop strength dropped from 141,000 to 96,000, by about one-third, as the U.S. withdrawal continues. Troop strength in Iraq is projected to average 43,000 in FY2011 and to fall to 4,450 in FY2012 with all troops out of Iraq by December 2011 according to the U.S. security agreement with Iraq.
NOW THE QUESTION: WAS IT WORTH IT?
NOW THE QUESTION: WAS IT WORTH IT?
This is what it cost you per hour!
5:43 PM | 0
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Our Pakistani Allies
They knew they could get away with harboring bin Laden.
As my old friends at The Spectator in London pointed out on Monday morning, I scooped the entire planet in breaking the news of Osama bin Laden’s death: “Osama bin Laden is dead, says Mark Steyn.” This was in The Spectator’s edition of June 29, 2002, which turned out to be a wee bit premature. I jumped the gun, much like Osama’s missus in Abbottabad, but by nine years.
Nor, to be honest, was a teensy-weensy near-decade discrepancy in the date the only problem with my scoop. Much of that Spectator piece was preoccupied with the usual assumptions about Public Enemy No. 1 — caves, dialysis, remote wild Pakistani tribal lands where Western intelligence hasn’t a hope of penetrating unless you turn a cousin of the village headman, etc. All these assumptions prevailed until a few days ago, when it emerged that Osama, three wives, and 13 children had been living in town in a purpose-built pad round the corner from the Pakistani military academy for over half a decade. Brunch every Sunday with a couple of generals at his usual corner table at the Abbottabad Hilton? Eggs Benedict, hold the ham?
The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well — elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery — indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.
If this were a movie, the crowds cheering “USA! USA!” outside the White House would be right: The bad guy is dead! We win! The End. But the big picture is bigger than Hollywood convention. In the great sweeping narrative, the death of Osama bin Laden is barely a ripple, while the courtesies afforded to him by the Pakistani establishment tell us something profound about the superpower’s weakness and inability to shift the storyline. Bin Laden famously said that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse they naturally prefer the strong horse. Putting a bullet through his eye is a good way of letting him know which role he’s consigned to. But the strong horse/weak horse routine is a matter of perception as much as anything else. On September 12, 2001, General Musharraf was in a meeting “when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later.” The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf’s I’m-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he’d been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if they didn’t get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant it.
A decade later, we’re back to September 10. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did a decade ago, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they’d think it over and get back in six weeks, give or take. They think they’ve got the superpower all figured out — that America is happy to spend bazillions of dollars on technologically advanced systems that can reach across the planet, but it doesn’t really have the stomach for changing the facts of the ground. That means that once in a while your big-time jihadist will be having a quiet night in watching Dancing With The Stars when all of a sudden Robocop descends from the heavens, kicks the door open, and it’s time to get ready for your virgins. But other than that, in the bigger picture, day by day, all but unnoticed, things will go their way.
In the fall of 2001, discussing the collapse of the Taliban, Thomas Friedman, the in-house thinker at the New York Times, offered this bit of cartoon analysis:“For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones — and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.”
But they didn’t, did they? The Flintstones retreated to their caves, bided their time, and a decade later the Jetsons are desperate to negotiate their way out.
When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader, the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later — and, indeed, the locals fought for king and (distant imperial) country as brave British troops during World War II. Even more amazingly, generations of English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi’s skull winding up as Lord Kitchener’s novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national greatness.
Not a lot of that today. It’s hard to imagine Osama’s noggin as an attractive centerpiece at next year’s White House Community Organizer of the Year banquet, and entirely impossible to imagine America’s “educators” teaching the tale approvingly. So instead, even as we explain that our difficulties with this bin Laden fellow are nothing to do with Islam, no sir, perish the thought, we simultaneously rush to assure the Muslim world that, not to worry, we accorded him a 45-minute Islamic funeral as befits an observant Muslim.
That’s why Pakistani bigshots harbored America’s mortal enemy and knew they could do so with impunity. Bin Laden was a Saudi with money, and there are a lot of those about, funding this and that from South Asia to the Balkans to Dearborn, Mich. They’ve walked their petrodollars round the Western world buying up everything they need to, from minor mosques to major university Middle Eastern Studies departments. By comparison with his compatriots, Osama squandered his dough. In that long-ago Spectator piece, I wrote, “Junior’s just a peculiarly advanced model of the useless idiot son — a criticism routinely made of Bush but actually far more applicable to Osama, who took his dad’s fortune and literally threw it down a hole in the ground.”
A lot of American policy followed it. A decade on, our troops are running around Afghanistan “winning hearts and minds” and getting gunned down by the very policemen and soldiers they’ve spent years training. Back on the home front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the U.N., the EU, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and in the “Facebook revolutions” of “the Arab spring,” the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of Muslims support bin Laden’s goal — the submission of the Western world to Islam — but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is entirely unnecessary to achieving it. Will being high-flying Jetsons with state-of-the-art gizmos prove sufficient in a Flintstonizing world? The Pakistanis are pretty sure they know the answer to that.
As my old friends at The Spectator in London pointed out on Monday morning, I scooped the entire planet in breaking the news of Osama bin Laden’s death: “Osama bin Laden is dead, says Mark Steyn.” This was in The Spectator’s edition of June 29, 2002, which turned out to be a wee bit premature. I jumped the gun, much like Osama’s missus in Abbottabad, but by nine years.
Nor, to be honest, was a teensy-weensy near-decade discrepancy in the date the only problem with my scoop. Much of that Spectator piece was preoccupied with the usual assumptions about Public Enemy No. 1 — caves, dialysis, remote wild Pakistani tribal lands where Western intelligence hasn’t a hope of penetrating unless you turn a cousin of the village headman, etc. All these assumptions prevailed until a few days ago, when it emerged that Osama, three wives, and 13 children had been living in town in a purpose-built pad round the corner from the Pakistani military academy for over half a decade. Brunch every Sunday with a couple of generals at his usual corner table at the Abbottabad Hilton? Eggs Benedict, hold the ham?
The belated dispatch of Osama testifies to what the United States does well — elite warriors, superbly trained, equipped to a level of technological sophistication no other nation can match. Everything else surrounding the event (including White House news management so club-footed one starts to wonder darkly whether its incompetence is somehow intentional) embodies what the United States does badly. Pakistan, our “ally,” hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery — indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers.
If this were a movie, the crowds cheering “USA! USA!” outside the White House would be right: The bad guy is dead! We win! The End. But the big picture is bigger than Hollywood convention. In the great sweeping narrative, the death of Osama bin Laden is barely a ripple, while the courtesies afforded to him by the Pakistani establishment tell us something profound about the superpower’s weakness and inability to shift the storyline. Bin Laden famously said that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse they naturally prefer the strong horse. Putting a bullet through his eye is a good way of letting him know which role he’s consigned to. But the strong horse/weak horse routine is a matter of perception as much as anything else. On September 12, 2001, General Musharraf was in a meeting “when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later.” The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf’s I’m-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he’d been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if they didn’t get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant it.
A decade later, we’re back to September 10. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did a decade ago, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they’d think it over and get back in six weeks, give or take. They think they’ve got the superpower all figured out — that America is happy to spend bazillions of dollars on technologically advanced systems that can reach across the planet, but it doesn’t really have the stomach for changing the facts of the ground. That means that once in a while your big-time jihadist will be having a quiet night in watching Dancing With The Stars when all of a sudden Robocop descends from the heavens, kicks the door open, and it’s time to get ready for your virgins. But other than that, in the bigger picture, day by day, all but unnoticed, things will go their way.
In the fall of 2001, discussing the collapse of the Taliban, Thomas Friedman, the in-house thinker at the New York Times, offered this bit of cartoon analysis:“For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones — and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.”
But they didn’t, did they? The Flintstones retreated to their caves, bided their time, and a decade later the Jetsons are desperate to negotiate their way out.
When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader, the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later — and, indeed, the locals fought for king and (distant imperial) country as brave British troops during World War II. Even more amazingly, generations of English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi’s skull winding up as Lord Kitchener’s novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national greatness.
Not a lot of that today. It’s hard to imagine Osama’s noggin as an attractive centerpiece at next year’s White House Community Organizer of the Year banquet, and entirely impossible to imagine America’s “educators” teaching the tale approvingly. So instead, even as we explain that our difficulties with this bin Laden fellow are nothing to do with Islam, no sir, perish the thought, we simultaneously rush to assure the Muslim world that, not to worry, we accorded him a 45-minute Islamic funeral as befits an observant Muslim.
That’s why Pakistani bigshots harbored America’s mortal enemy and knew they could do so with impunity. Bin Laden was a Saudi with money, and there are a lot of those about, funding this and that from South Asia to the Balkans to Dearborn, Mich. They’ve walked their petrodollars round the Western world buying up everything they need to, from minor mosques to major university Middle Eastern Studies departments. By comparison with his compatriots, Osama squandered his dough. In that long-ago Spectator piece, I wrote, “Junior’s just a peculiarly advanced model of the useless idiot son — a criticism routinely made of Bush but actually far more applicable to Osama, who took his dad’s fortune and literally threw it down a hole in the ground.”
A lot of American policy followed it. A decade on, our troops are running around Afghanistan “winning hearts and minds” and getting gunned down by the very policemen and soldiers they’ve spent years training. Back on the home front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the U.N., the EU, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and in the “Facebook revolutions” of “the Arab spring,” the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of Muslims support bin Laden’s goal — the submission of the Western world to Islam — but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is entirely unnecessary to achieving it. Will being high-flying Jetsons with state-of-the-art gizmos prove sufficient in a Flintstonizing world? The Pakistanis are pretty sure they know the answer to that.
2:20 PM | 0
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Deport them
Does Britain have to tolerate this?
These people should be deported. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen:
These people should be deported. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen:
12:19 PM | 0
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I believe in the old and sound rule that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood.
Written By bross on Friday, May 6, 2011 | 11:14 AM
Hat Tip : International News
All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle...Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American.
11:14 AM | 0
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Reverend's Reviews: Dragons Slays
Written By bross on Thursday, May 5, 2011 | 11:00 PM
Josemaria Escriva (played here by Charlie Cox, best known from Stardust and the Heath Ledger-starrer Casanova) was a young priest during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's. He received a vision that showed him one didn't have to become a member of the clergy or live an overtly religious life to do God's will in one's life. Escriva subsequently founded Opus Dei, Latin for "Work of God," which is probably best known among moviegoers as the conspiratorial, murderous order depicted in The Da Vinci Code. While Escriva is shown flagellating himself in one scene in There Be Dragons, not unlike the self-abusing albino monk played by Paul Bettany in Ron Howard's 2006 movie, the resemblances pretty much stop there. Escriva, who died in 1975, was canonized as "the saint of the ordinary" in 2002 by Pope John Paul II (who was just beatified himself). Today, Opus Dei counts 90,000 members worldwide, including the new Archbishop of Los Angeles and two of this film's producers.
To its credit, Joffe's screenplay takes as much inspiration from Oscar Wilde's famous (and truthful) quote, "Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future" as it does Escriva's biography. There Be Dragons features a decades-spanning mystery as its main storyline. An investigative journalist (played by Dougray Scott of Mission: Impossible II and Desperate Housewives, among other credits) is writing a book about Escriva, whom his elderly father knew personally as a young man. Escriva and the writer's father, Manolo (a strong turn by American Beauty's Wes Bentley), were fellow seminarians for a time and became close friends. They parted ways, however, when Manolo enlisted in the war effort.
While Escriva is founding Opus Dei, Manolo becomes enmeshed in a love triangle between himself, his military leader (Rodrigo Santoro of 300 and I Love You Phillip Morris) and a lovely Hungarian revolutionary played by recent Bond girl Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace). Secrets are buried and both friendship and faith become tested in these characters' wake.
There Be Dragons is overly earnest at times, and the film's array of British and American actors don't even try to play Spaniards convincingly. Cox makes an attractive and admirable man of God, but Escriva as written here is mostly one-dimensional. An impressive supporting cast of pros including Derek Jacobi, Geraldine Chaplin and Charles Dance helps to give the movie greater credibility.
The production is beautifully designed by Oscar-winner Eugenio Zanetti (What Dreams May Come) and photographed in gorgeous hues by Gabriel Beristain (Derek Jarman's Caravaggio). There Be Dragons is truly one of the best-looking movies in recent memory.
I came away wishing it were a bit more objective in depicting a recent saint about whom much is known as well as the religious order he founded, but this is still one of the more genuinely spiritual contemporary films to hit the big screen.
Reverend's Rating: B
Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Blade California.
11:00 PM | 0
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entertainment
Obama's 'I', 'I', 'I', Victory Tour
David Beamer, the father of United 93 passenger and 9/11 victim and hero Todd Beamer, had some harsh words for President Obama today.
David Beamer feels Obama has inappropriate aggrandized his own role in the death of Osama, politicizing the moment for his own gain.
Beamer said he welcomed news of Osama’s killing, but that he feels “some chagrin” at the way Obama has handled the aftermath, claiming that the President put too much emphasis on himself while announcing the operation that took out Osama, telling Fox News:
“And frankly it started May Day 2011 when the president announced what had happened. The excessive use of the personal pronoun that he used in his remarks, I really felt that was the beginning of the Commander-in-Chief putting too much spotlight on himself, taking too much credit for what the remarkable Americans had done.”
Continue reading on Examiner.com: 9/11 victim criticizes Obama for Osama victory lap - National post-partisan | Examiner.com
4:29 PM | 0
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