The Marshall Plan cost $12.7 billion, and some people think that investment saved much of western Europe from communist or fascist uprisings and civil war. Adjusted for inflation this comes to about $115 billion in 2014 dollars.
So far we have spent $107.5 billion on the reconstruction of Afghanistan, and we are planning to keep spending billions a year.
So... $115 billion to rebuild after liberating Europe and North Africa from the Third Reich, and East Asia from Imperial Japan.
ReplyDelete...and $107.5+ billion to rebuild Afghanistan after blowing it up in pursuit of a radical Islamist faction that is 1) still operating and 2) spawning even worse splinter factions which are destabilizing other parts of the world.
Oh, and the puppet government we installed is both ineffectual and corrupt, and by removing the prior regime we single-handedly revived the Afghani opium trade.
Oh yeah, and it was we who originally put the Taliban in power to begin with, using them as a chess piece in a proxy war against the Soviet Union.
Money well spent?