Billions for Kabul, Not a Dime for Detroit

Dear Mr. President,

Today’s NYT (“Taliban Seize Police Force In a Hamlet” p. A4) reports that yesterday the village of Kala Khel received “some of the best news they had heard all year”—the entire Afghan Local Police unit assigned to their hamlet had been kidnapped by the Taliban Wednesday night. The 14-man unit has been beating and stealing from villagers every day since they arrived 5 months ago. So much for the American strategy of local militias taking over as we leave; most Afghans see them as little more than thugs, criminals, village toughs and, many times, Taliban sympathizers. But train them we do—to operate just like their mentors, the Special Forces—and what do they do but act like a bunch of Afghan Rambos, stealing possessions (they especially like motorcycles) and extorting money from villagers, beating, sometimes torturing and killing them like the ones in Wardak Province earlier this year who tortured and killed 17 civilians—or maybe it was the U.S. Special Forces who did it. Or maybe a covert team of CIA assassins; it’s hard to tell one group from another, they all have big guns, facial hair and a mean look. How many billions have we spent on this program, Mr. President, and how many more billions did you commit to? It’s reported that we’ll be propping up the most corrupt government in the world—Afghanistan’s—for at least another decade and that means more billions a year to train, equip and pay their 350,000 man security force they can’t afford. Meanwhile, in a NYT Op-Ed today, “Come See Detroit, America’s Future” by Charlie LeDuff, we get a look at the future of America as seen through bankrupt Detroit—tens of thousands of abandoned homes, streets unlighted, cop cars with floorboards rusted through, no computers or air conditioning, firefighting rigs without maintenance, bodies lying in the open for 6½ hours before an understaffed morgue can send someone to pick them up, a 58-minute wait for a 911 call (the whole system down for 15 hours the other day) and cops taking gunshot victims to hospitals in their squad cars because there are no ambulances available (2/3 of the city’s fleet is broken on any given day). Detroit owes $18 billion and who’s going to pay? Not the banks or the fat cat bondholders, their loans secured by physical assets that will be sold off. It’s the pensioners, the poor, the civil servants. Billions for Kabul, not a dime for Detroit. The collateral damage of war. Jefferson County, Alabama, Stockton, Detroit… who’s next?