The aimless war in Afghanistan will cost US taxpayers $45 billion this year

America’s forever war in Afghanistan will cost $45 billion this year, a Pentagon official told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.

Now in its 17th year, there seems to be no end in sight to what has mostly become a futile effort at nation building. Depending on how you calculate it, the total cost of the war to date somewhere between $841 billion and $2 trillion.

With numbers like that, since the government was going to blow hundreds of billions or trillions anyway, it’s hard not to ponder all the problems we might’ve been able to solve here in the United States for that amount of money, or even a fraction of it.

The human cost is also staggering. More than 26,000 civilians have been killed, tens of thousands more injured, more than 2,000 American soldiers have been killed, and many more injured. The trauma and destruction of war will be felt for generations to come.

After all of that, it isn’t clear that the United States has accomplished very much. The Taliban continues to gain ground, report after report has come out documenting waste and fraud in US spending in Afghanistan and it is known that our military has long looked the other way as Afghan security forces sexually abused children and continued funding units engaged in human rights abuses.

All that has been established is that the U.S. federal government is absolutely terrible at rebuilding countries, spending money responsibly, protecting human rights and fostering stable governments.

At the rate things are going, the American people can look forward to decades more of aimless war and occupation on the other side of the planet with little to show for it but body bags, misery and wasted resources.

How much more money do we have to spend? How many more people do we need to kill? How many more soldiers do we need to send to their deaths? For what?

The sooner we cut our losses and bring the troops home, the better.

Sal Rodriguez is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. He may be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com