EDITORIALS

Your tax dollars at work

Well, it’d make a heckuva goat barn

“What the hell were they thinking?” -An American Army general in Afghanistan

FOR TWO Sundays in a row, the in-depth feature on page 3A of Arkansas’ Newspaper has been about Afghanistan. Specifically, how your tax money is being spent there. And there’s an awful lot of it being spent there. Just not always in the right places and right ways and right amounts.

Just ask Kohadamani Hamidullah, a lieutenant colonel in the Afghan army who’s doing his best to fight the Taliban these ever challenging days. It’s no secret that Washington is out to end combat missions for American troops there by the end of next year. And so American officers are trying to prepare Afghan officers for the switch by getting them to issue their own orders-and carry them out. In preparation for the day when American forces will be in that country only in an advisory capacity.

Colonel Hamidullah seems to have learned quickly enough how to be an officer: He wants a lot of stuff. Speaking his best English, he told a reporter from this country: “I need armored Humvees, [with a] route-clearance package, motor pool, repair shop, good mechanics, air support, medevac, artillery . . . .” Oh, yes, better uniforms, too. The colonel already has 46 Humvees in his battalion-but only 16 of them run. He showed them to the reporter: “Broken. Broken. Broken. All broken.”

The internet is overrun with numbers when it comes to how much the war in Afghanistan is costing the American taxpayer. The numbers are in the billions. Billions every month. And if a colonel fighting the Taliban can’t even keep his Humvees running, where are all those billions going?

For a clue, see another in-depth feature story on Page 3A of your trusty statewide newspaper on July 14. We reprinted a Washington Post report about a 64,000-square-foot headquarters building that’s just gone up in southwestern Afghanistan. It has all the fixin’s when it comes to a modern HQ building. Like an operations center with tiered seating, a briefing theater, fancy furniture and equipment-and modern air conditioning. (It gets hot in Afghanistan.) All in all, this pharaonic structure cost (you) upwards of $34 million.

The most telling detail about this massive investment: Nobody’s using it. And nobody plans to use it.

American commanders said years ago that they’d never have any need for this enormous building, complete with all its plush accessories. But it was built anyway. It stands there empty, a massive tribute to excess.

“What the hell were they thinking?” one general asked. Naturally he was speaking on condition of anonymity. “There was never any justification to build something this fancy.”

But when did justification matter when it comes to throwing the taxpayers’ money at military contractors? Hey, there’s a war on. Anything goes!

Up in northern Afghanistan, We the People of the United States spent more than $80 million and signed a 10-year lease on some property that our officer class finally figured out was vulnerable to attacks and abandoned. Over in Kandahar province, the U.S. military spent another $45 million to build a motor pool, but it’s now not much more than a warehouse.

THE rationalization for this waste of $34 million on a plush HQ unmarred by any actual occupancy? Well, if we don’t use it, maybe the Afghans can. Only some American officials say the expense of keeping the thing lighted and cooled may be too much for Afghans to tolerate. Besides, the U.S. military just put up a new headquarters for Afghan troops next door.

There’s thought of just tearing the thing down. Who was it who said the best way to fight a recession was to bury bottles of cash at suitable depths and then have the unemployed dig them up again? John Maynard Keynes? We all seem to have become Keynesians since-and on an ever grander scale, at home and abroad. And our national debt shows it.

And meanwhile, Colonel Hamidullah’s trucks still sit, waiting on repairs.

Something tells us this is a government operation.

Editorial, Pages 14 on 07/25/2013

Upcoming Events