A Proposal to End the War

Dear Mr. President,

I read that one Hellfire missile costs $68,000. It surprised me that they cost that much and that number stuck in my head. Then I read the other day that the Pentagon’s budget for your wars in Afghanistan and Iraq this year is $118 billion (I don’t think that includes Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, though, those covert wars are off the books) and it struck me that the people you’re killing live in pretty impoverished areas of the world, so I looked up the average income for both Afghanistan and Pakistan and sure enough, Pakistan: average annual income $663; Afghanistan: $426. That’s dollars per year, Mr. President, not thousands or millions. A single Hellfire missile, rather than raining death, destruction and hatred, could support 160 Afghans for a whole year and 103 people in the “lawless” tribal regions of Pakistan where your Whac-A-Mole war with al Qaeda leaders is concentrated. And if you want to look at it on a larger scale, Afghanistan’s entire GDP, according to the CIA website, is only $17.8 billion per year. That’s less than what we spend in just two months to kill them. You see where I’m going with this, Mr. President? It would cost less to buy them off than to kill them off. Of course, we’d have to figure out how to keep Karzai and his corrupt cronies from siphoning most of it off but that’s a logistical problem and I’m sure with all those smart people you’ve got hanging around, somebody could figure it out. Pakistan is a little more difficult. Their GDP, again according to the CIA website, is more like $200 billion so you probably don’t want to buy that country as well, although Afghanistan and Pakistan together would make quite a package. However, there are only about 7.5 million people in the Tribal Areas, so for less than a billion bucks you could give everyone there their $663 for the year and save a bundle. That’s quite a deal, Mr. President. Think about it. For less than the cost of two months of war, we could be real humanitarian heroes and help make things better for them, maybe even begin to understand them as humans and why our Middle East policy has failed so profoundly. And instead of being the Assassin-in-Chief, you could be the Great Humanitarian. Then you’d actually deserve that Nobel Peace Prize you got.