The Afghan balance sheet

Damian "Babbling" Brooks has an excellent post up at The Torch:

Kudos to Mike Blanchfield for breaking the number down to a figure Canadian taxpayers could digest — what it means to them. I assume that since he started breaking it down, he won't mind if I take it a bit further...

$1,500 per household over a decade works out to $150 per household per year. Assuming three people per household, that's $50 per Canadian per year. That works out to about 13.7¢ per Canadian per day to run the Afghan mission.

Just to give you a bit of perspective, World Vision — certainly a noble-minded and worthwhile charity — asks for about ten times that daily amount to sponsor a single child.

Damian goes beyond the costs and tallies up some benefits:

• more than 1,500 wells dug, 600 roadway culverts built, and more than 3,000 kms of canals rehabilitated
• humanitarian food assistance to more than half a million Afghans in 2007 alone
• more than 530 Community Development Councils elected in 9 districts, which facilitated more than 700 community projects completed, including improvements to transportation, water supply and sanitation, irrigation, power supply, education, health, and agriculture
• maternal health care professionals being trained in emergency obstetric care and monitoring
• approximately 350,000 children being vaccinated against polio
• measles and tetanus vaccination program reached more than 76,000 children and 63,000 women
• non-food kits (teapots, soap, gas stoves, towels, buckets, kitchen sets, blankets, floor mats, sweaters and health kits) supplied to 1,500 families
• more than 30,000 Afghans received functional literacy training and more than 4,000 received vocational training throughthe World Food Programme in 2007 alone
• More than 5,000 people (the majority of them women) have received literacy training through UNICEF

...and that's just in Kandahar province, folks.