A great and glorious thing it is To learn, for seven years or so,/The Lord knows what of that and this, Ere reckoned fit to face the foe-/The flying bullet down the Pass, That whistles clear: " All flesh is grass."
-from "Arithmetic on the Frontier", Kipling
In this year marking our eighteenth anniversary in Afghanistan, the old calculation of America's War on Terror no longer seems to sum. Our war planners should have read Rudyard Kipling's poem "Arithmetic on the Frontier" about the 2nd Anglo-Afghan War. If so, they will learn that, even back then almost 200 years ago, the math just did not add up. Kipling knew that the cost of training a British soldier- "for seven years or so"- compared to the cost of a Pashtun tribesman's life- shooting a "ten-rupee jezail" (an old flintlock rifle)- was a bad deal for their Empire. As even a poet counted, "The odds are on the cheaper man".
The estimated cost to train, equip, and transport a US Army private to the field is about $40,000. To support that same soldier in field combat for a year and then muster him out of service costs about ten times more. On the ledger’s other side, whether he be Pashtun or Saudi, an insurgent comes from a country whose unemployment rate is well above America’s. As Kipling noted, "The troopships bring us one by one/At great expense oftime and steam/To slay Afridis where they run."
Kipling's cost of a British soldier on duty in the subcontinent- "Three hundred pounds per annum spent/On making brain and body meeter/For all the murderous intent"- did not justify a policy of "force protection" that is the top operative aim in the American military today. In his day, "No proposition Euclid wrote/No formulae the text-books know/Will tum a bullet from your coat." But Pentagon accountants now know that the alternative policy of "civilian protection", if it were to endanger soldiers, will cost a lot more.
The continuing news of Afghan civilian deaths from US airstrikes go straight into America's debit column- but with higher moral costs, as it turns out, than monetary. The lives of a fixed number of US soldiers, trained at great expense, are threatened, so the homes of an unknown number of civilians, maybe twenty, maybe one hundre, get bombed..
Eleven years ago, after NATO's notorious bombing of the town of Azizabad in Herat Province, the US outlined a new policy aimed to lessen the ill will caused by dickering over civilian body counts. We agreed to pay compensation first- roughly $2,500 per person- based on the number of casualties reported locally, and to investigate and confirm the facts second.
But in an active war zone, even local reporting can be clumsy. In one incident in Lashkar Gah, 18 bodies had been pulled out of the rubble and another 12 were feared to be underneath . The Azizabad strike was said by Afghan officials to have killed 90 civilians. The US first estimated the civilian toll to be "5 to 7", with "more than 30 insurgents", but after a UN site visit confirmed the higher toll, the US estimate was revised officially upwards to "more than 30".
Besides the cost of lives lost , Kipling added the cost of pilferage- "One sword-knot stolen from the camp/Will pay for all the school expenses/Of any Kurrum Valley scamp". Yet this petty thievery pales in comparison to the not-so-petty profiteering off today's wars. A charge made against a top fundraiser for John McCain, who won fuel contracts for US forces in Iraq even though the highest bidder, and made a $210 million profit- seven times more than if the contracts had gone to the under bidder, proves that a savvy player can net a lot more than the price of a "sword-knot".
And what, after almost two decades, has this long war accomplished? Kipling answered best, "And after?- Ask the Yusufzaies/What comes of all our 'ologies". The same might be asked of the economic "'-isms" and political "'-ocracies" that Americans peddle overseas. Such words are incomprehensible Greek and Latin to Yusufzai tribesmen , who live by their own rules called the Pashtunwali. It is no wonder that Washington's once favorite slogans "Hearts and Minds", "Tehran next", and "The road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad" were quickly put on the sale shelf, destined for the trash heap until a chicken hawk politician needs them next.
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_arith.htm