The end? Nothing ever ends...

With the writing on the wall, you'll hear a lot more of this:

Karzai said: "Afghanistan will certainly need help for another 10 years, until around 2024. We will need training for our own troops. We will need equipment for the army and police and help to set up state institutions."
Referring to the Taliban regime, he added: "If we lose this fight, we are threatened with a return to a situation like that before Sept. 11, 2001."

Afghanistan is a sinkhole for all the blood and treasure anyone could sink into it, and this shilling for baksheesh has set the gears in my head into motion. It's napkin math time ladies and gents, lets see what my Frontier Arithmetic comes up with; specifically the cost of what brought us into that tar pit, versus what it's cost since.

Wikipedia has the total fatalities "in and around Afghanistan" for coalition countries at about 2800 (their figures as of 30 Nov 2011). This sounds about right to me so I'll work with it. Likewise, the amount that the USA has spent on Afghanistan to date will be impossible to determine exactly, but http://costofwar.com/en/ has it as $464Bn at the time of writing. I won't bother with what Canada has spent, but I'm sure we had better things to do with the money, even if it has been a big boost the the Canadian Army and (lesser extent) Air Force.

Now, the cost of the 9/11 attack that triggered it all is almost equally fraught. Here is one account which has it in the neighborhood of $2T. A lot of that is stock market "loss" but looking at property losses alone it's over $100B. Canada of course was physically unscathed in the 9/11 attack, but we've still spent billions in and because of Afghanistan. This is an amount that Canada can easily absorb, the same can not be said for US expenditures.

The happily departed OBL stated Al Queda's plan as one of "Bleed to Bankruptcy" and it was more successful than it should have been. Based on the above the balance sheet for nation building in Afghanistan (as opposed to Special Forces and air support) isn't looking good. For the umpteenth time, it's been diminishing returns since 2002, and there will be little to show that we accomplished anything. Bad geopolitical investment.

I can't say I've given up predicting the course of things over there, but our side has lost a lot (modern terms) of troops and poured a lot of money down the Central Asian drain. I don't think that the Taliban will be as successful as last time, but the hard-won progress in the Afghan provinces has been very temporary and as soon as we leave every idiot gang with guns will move in all over the south and east.

If nothing else, remember that the USSR did the same things we did; propped up a government, built stuff, etc., with the difference that they bombed "civilians" ON PURPOSE when they felt it necessary and never apologized. Whatever temporary cooperation we've bought over there will dry up as soon as our money does and the troops aren't there to keep the Talibs down. Should look great in the history books; I wonder who'll try the place next? China perhaps?