Since 9/11 the US government has spent more than 1.5 trillion dollars on the War on Terror. Fourteen nations have been bombed or attacked by the US military, and we are no safer today than we were one day prior to 9/11. As a matter of fact, we are probably less safe with the world being torn apart by US bombs and the spreading of anarchy throughout the Middle East, yet the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again with the same results.
We have an insane policy of bloodletting and killing, thinking this will make the problem go away, but as any rational person knows the more people you kill the more enemies you create. Every time you kill someone with a drone bomb, you create 10 new enemies. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the onetime commander of all coalition forces in Afghanistan, created the phrase “Insurgent Math” when he rightfully pointed out “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.” Every rational person would probably agree with McChrystal’s assessment, but the US government doesn’t, and we continue to make the same mistakes of killing innocents and thinking we can “kill our way to victory”. The big question is; are we really as stupid as we seem by repeating a fruitless useless policy, or are the decision makers bright enough to realize that their policy only insures constant warfare, which just might be the game plan. Sound silly? Then think about a different policy, and the result, if we tried a sane approach to dealing with the world’s nations.
Let us assume that intelligent folk realized you cannot kill your way to victory and embarked on a completely different policy to fight the war on terror. What if the US government set aside 1.5 trillion dollars, the conservative estimate of our spending in the war on terror so far, and decided to build schools instead? Think about it. What if we built one hundred thousand schools in Afghanistan after 9/11? Do you think the Taliban would have the same kind of public support from Afghanis?