I proposed this as satire a few years ago for Iraq, might as well use it in Afghanistan. Because it’s cheaper, way less dangerous, and it would probably work as well as whatever we’re supposed to be doing there now.
Call it Operation Golden Shower. We need a dozen planes, but nothing fancy mind you, no C-147s or B-52s required. A small fleet of Super Otters deemed too dangerous even as jump planes or maybe a few seized smuggler aircraft would do it. Put pallets of cash in them, fly over Afghanistan, throw the money out the door and watch it flutter to the ground.
We’re spending what, 50 – 100 million a day right now? Operation Golden Shower could run on less than half that. Toss 25 million a day out the door, mostly in one-dollar bills, but throw in a few fives or tens into every pallet as a sort of Cracker Jack prize.
They say money can’t buy love, but in the words of Louie DePalma, it’ll be Valentine’s every day of the year in Afghanistan as long as we are throwing millions of dollars out of planes every day. They will be naming their streets and children afer whoever is in charge. It’s also selective: play ball, turn in local terrorist creeps and heroin smugglers, and you get piles of cash dropped on your village and field. Fail to do so and no Golden Shower for you. Hold fair elections and allow observers in to monitor the proceedings, and you get cash on the barrel head and on every head. Fuck up, rig the ballot box, and no Yankee dollars for you.
I’m only half kidding. The point is we spend so much money in this shithole, long after we have “won” and bin Laden is whacked, for reasons no one can explain, that we could just pay every adult Afghani enough money per day to keep them happy and peaceful. I see no reason why this wouldn’t work as well as anything else. And even if it didn’t, it costs way less and no American get killed.
Politically impossible… unless the job is contracted out to one of the large arms manufacturers…
… and what’s dropped on scary, distant, brown people is somehow “enhanced” dollars. By enhanced, I mean explosive. Or, at the very least, plain paper. (Laced with a deadly neurotoxin.)
The wingnut response, of course, would be that those brown people who are Muslim and speak a different language don’t deserve that money, while those patriotic defense contractors obviously do.
It’s that same misguided concern over who “deserves” the money that makes wingnuts tear down education and welfare, while happily paying $50,000 per inmate per year.
I’m glad I read the whole post, because when I saw the heading I thought you would be suggesting pissing on them.
Ewwwww!
Read the headline and went “eewwwwwww” as well.
You might want to look up “golden shower” :-b
I can’t be the only person disturbed by this piece and the terminology used therein?
Here’s a piece that refers to India as a “shithole”. If you mean military and political quagmire or morass, those might be better terms than the one the bigots are fond of.
So, how much does the US have to give up for Florida and the 2000 presidential election?
That’s money coming from the people on the ground, right?
I think the seduction of Danaë by Zeus was the original golden shower.
What a obnoxiously flippant and condescending post, with, as Brownian said, a smug disregard of the fact that U.S. elections aren’t precisely a model for the world, either.
Actually, let me be a little more blunt here: It’s also racist and dehumanizing as hell. Glad to know that you think Afghanis are all savages inhabiting a “shithole” who can be pacified with greenbacks, that you don’t give a fuck how many get killed, so long as Americans aren’t, and that you’re highly aggrieved at how ungrateful those savages are that we invaded them.
If I were you, I’d stick to science posts in the future.
I didn’t say they were savages, and if Afghanistan isn’t a shithole I don’t know what is. Maybe Somalia and/or parts of Yemen are worse places to live?