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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (505303)	8/17/2009 12:43:24 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1584324

While plainly some Taliban members are an ideologically committed hard core who won't lay down their guns, a lot — perhaps most — would presumably stop attacking U.S. and allied forces if they could earn more from that than they currently do for fighting. Vice President Joe Biden has estimated that only 5% of those fighting for the Taliban are "incorrigible, not susceptible to anything other than being defeated," while 70% are in it only for the money. The remaining 25%, he said, fall in between. So if the U.S. opted to pay all Taliban fighters $20 a day — double what they get now — to stop fighting, that would amount to a $300,000 daily bill, or one-fifth of 1% of the war's current cost to the U.S. taxpayers of $133 million a day. The monthly cost of buying off the Taliban rank and file would be $9 million, less than the price of a single AH-64 Apache helicopter. Yes, but what happens when we stop? What's the alternative? What happens when we stop fighting and pull out? After all, the Taliban have been in Afghanistan far longer than the US. AT first, I thought the post came from Brumar and I was surprised at how reasonable the question was...........than I realized it was from you. <g>