From the Washington Post:
The AfPak War Combating Extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan Diverse Sources Fund Insurgency In Afghanistan Restricting Cash Flow Difficult, U.S. SaysOne Hundred and Six Million Dollars! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ah!By Craig Whitlock Washington Post Foreign Service
KABUL — The Taliban-led insurgency has built a fundraising juggernaut that generates cash from such an array of criminal rackets, donations, taxes, shakedowns and other schemes that U.S. and Afghan officials say it may be impossible to choke off the movement's money supply.
Obama administration officials say the single largest source of cash for the Taliban, once thought to rely mostly on Afghanistan's booming opium trade to finance its operations, is not drugs but foreign donations. The CIA recently estimated that Taliban leaders and their allies received $106 million in the past year from donors outside Afghanistan.
$106 million per year might get you third place in the American League East behind the Yankees and Red Sox.
How much is the U.S. spending in Afghanistan?
This is much like the war frenzy of the summer of 2006 when Hezbollah's military juggernaut, with its inexhaustible $100 million in Iranian funding, was the biggest threat since Hitler. I recall that during the Israel-Hezbollah 2006 war, the Wall Street Journal ran a breathless article called "Why Hezbollah Is Proving So Tough On the Battlefield" about a "fortified, 5,000-square-foot Hezbollah military base with a radio tower, secure satellite communications and a unit of more than a dozen guards."
5,000 square feet is 1/8th of an acre, but who's counting? Not many, that's for sure.
The truth is that the human race is going soft. Fewer and fewer people want to engage in combat, so the enormous U.S. military tax dollar sinkhole has to be all the way over in Afghanistan just to find somebody so backward and barbaric, the Pathans, as to want to fight.
