In a speech today, Afghan President Hamid Karzai discussed the ongoing negotiation with the US over continuing its military presence through 2024, saying that he wants the “partnership agreement” to include a pledge from the US to give the Afghan government a minimum of $2 billion a year to pay for its own military.
The US has been negotiating on the pact since last summer, and the agreement to allow the Afghan government total control over night raids (which US officials say they won’t abide by anyhow) was seen as a major breakthrough in pushing the deal through the Afghan parliament.
US officials have said that they will almost certainly provide far more than the $2 billion demanded annually, saying they will probably pay closer to $4 billion. They objected to putting it in writing, however, saying the partnership agreement was never meant to cover every aspect of US involvement in Afghanistan.
Recently the spiraling costs of propping up the Afghan military have become a subject of discussion among NATO member nations, who after years of annually pledging to make the Afghan military bigger now find themselves on the hook to pay for virtually the entire behemoth themselves.
Why not paying ANY COUNTRY this Billions? – per capita of course.
The defense industry would be satisfied and possibly would need no longer wars any year? Only paying is better than paying AND DYING !
However, I would prefer to have a state owned defense industry. Producing as much as required, i.e. as less as possible to save efforts, and no-longer defense-lobbyists in the government and no war mongering media campaigns. Also for the private defense industry it is waste of money to pay or buy newspapers or TV stations for war mongering or e.g. promoting the Clinton sex-scandals till he finally rises the defense budget. Finally the US people pay for both, the 30 millions of this year long Clinton sex scandal AND a huge defense budget AND a series of wars: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, , Sudan, Lebanon, Jemen, the Proxi-/preparational war in Syria and soon Iran.
Of course this is not the whole story. Also the planned pipelines to the booming Asian markets through Afghanistan+Pakistan of the US Oil-Mafia around Bush+Condy Rice (CHEVRON) are an issue, also raw materials. We surely could get all these wants better and cheaper without war, but our defense industry wants his profits.
Also I did miss to mention this:
The United States and its Slave States occupied Afghanistan, so that the CIA can distribute the Afghan opium into its target areas in the world – in order to crash competing countries and to get a secret source of money through the sale of opium. Only this way the world-wide dirty murder or regime-change wars or civil war funding that never could be officially financed in a "democratic system". See Afghan opium study:
or http://www.youtube.com/user/IceManLikeGervin#p/c/…
C.I.A (Cocaine.Import.Agency)
Do not forget: We turned the drug dealers of Kosovo, "naturally" opposing the state police, into the Kosovo liberation army, to use them for a war to kill Milosevic and trying to cash in the country. At least to Kosovo was an success: It is the first drug mafia that even got its own state. So the opium our military jets from Afghanistan bring in, can be easily distributed world wide in their diplomatic suite cases. Its a differentiated system to give any industry the profits they want.
I think that the article here should always mention such background things. Mostly I miss in articles here the connection of the news subject to the background information. I know, journalist schools do teach, not to do this – perhaps now some readers understand why they teach this.
The officila method of brainwash works with always with a small directed bias of selection and presentation of of single news topic, that like a mosaic, in the sum build up the wanted picture they want to create. And they create it within the brains of the reader who are doing build up their picture themself. This is an excellent method, that never looks like brainwash.
I would answer the corrupt Karsi and his corrupt brother with a note with a reply of "NUTS to you" attached to a nuclear tipped ICBM to Afghanistan.
Ya, lets nuke them and teach them a lesson. After all, they begged us to brutally occupy them.
Atta boy, pluck 'em.
And why is this a problem? We already pay Israel a huge welfare check, and Afghanistan isn't asking even as much as Israel gets. Sure, print some more dollars, write some more checks. Hey, if you've got paper, you've got money- right?
How about putting each nation's foreign aid package to a public vote- let the American public decide what nation(s) gets their tax dollars, if any, and let no nation be an automatic recipient. Post a listing of the annual amounts we send overseas and put it to a vote- this is supposed to be a democracy, isn't it? You know, that old one-man-one-vote thing?
And here's the thing- if the government budgets in a certain amount for a nation to receive and it gets voted down afterwards, that money gets returned to the taxpayers directly. They can't say the money's not there because it had to be there to be in the budget, right?
Oh, wait- *yawn*- I must have been dreaming.
Pull all our troops and equipment out and let the pricks defend themselves.