Michael Yon on Afghanistan

It is sort of depressing news today from Michael Yon but if don't understand the good with the bad - then you'll never come close to the truth.

Our military and our allies kill Taliban by the dozens on a regular basis, but in an area the size of Afghanistan and the surrounding region, this is irrelevant. Combine the populations of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida; Afghanistan has more people. Killing a few dozen Taliban here and there is like coming to Florida and killing a few dozen rabbits. But in Afghanistan, we hunt using satellites, spy drones, and so forth, then swooping in on the killer rabbits with expensive airmobile operations. What does it really cost to kill one terrorist in Afghanistan? The answer is probably in the millions of dollars, and since reconstruction has been a failure, if the entire budget, along with the true long-term costs and soft-costs, of the war in Afghanistan is divided by the number of real terrorists killed, the price of killing one easily-replaceable, illiterate terrorist might be in the tens of millions, or more. It’s as if we were shooting diamonds at them, while dropping bombs made of gold. If killing bad guys is all we do, we will be spending a lot of money to lose a war.