The bill, please

On Tuesday, we just knew that the USA has approved an increase in the deployment of troops currently on tour in Afghanistan. That doesn’t surprise anyone. They will be 17,000 more soldiers to the ground, more than half of the promised 30,000 that will sum 60,000 boots in Central Asia. Of those, many will go from the Iraqi pan to the Afghan fire. We knew as well that the average tour will be of 12 months instead of 15, like it is now. Way longer still than the 6 months tours of British soldiers.

Afghanistan has been since the beginning of the presidential campaign a key and fair war for Obama, not like Iraq. Maybe because of that, the new president’s team is working hard on increasing not only the military aid, but also the coordination, the diplomatic efforts -and not just in Afghanistan- and the economic aid. Although the latter will have to be carefully controlled from now on.

There should be more carefully controlled as well the performance of these new troops. According to the last numbers, the toll for civilian causalities caused by the NATO has increased in a 30% from last year. On clear terms, that is 829 people. Talibans, allegedly the bad ones, killed 1.160 civilians in the same period. The gap is not so big.

Afghan society demands less promises and more action. Even more if the US military has exact numbers -30 seems to be it- for when a civilian death toll is aceptable and therefore, counted as an accident, not as collateral damage. And it is demanding more than just a $2.000 payment per death person. In the total numbers, that’s just the change.

This is more worrying taking into the table that from that economic aid we talked about at the beginning, apart from being wasted -as we already had said in this blog-, doesn’t go back into the local country, but into the donors in a 40%. In 2005, it was estimated that Afghans received $57 per capita; in Bosnia it was $679 and in Kosovo $526.

Photo: US MoD