That article is completely ludicrous. For starters, just to show they have no idea what they're talking about, there's this:
The United States has spent more money funding the Russia/Ukraine conflict, a war they are not directly involved in, than they did throughout the 9-year-long Afghanistan war.
9 years???? We had U.S. troops in country and also were supplying Afghan troops with weapons, ammon, and other support for just short of
20 freaking years. So right off the bat, that's clear evidence that they are being either deliberately deceptive, or just don't know what the hell they're talking about.
Even forgetting the cost of all the ammo, fuel etc., we expended on ourselves and on the Afghan army, all the equipment that was destroyed/damaged, the cost of paying our troops plus funding the Afghan army for 20 years, - forgetting
all that - we left over 20 billion dollars worth of equipment and rolling stock behind when we left. Does anyone actually believe that other than that particular stuff we left, we only spent $1B/year??
So clearly, the claim that we only spent $40 billion in Afghanistan over the cost of 20 years, just 2 billion dollars a year, is a joke. The actual cost ranges from somewhere between $850 billion to well over a trillion dollars.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/02/08/fact-check-post-distorts-us-expenditures-ukraine-afghanistan/11149759002/Apparently, whoever wrote that article got their 40 billion dollar figure from a report that said that in terms of just
humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, We spent approximately $40 billion during the period 2001 through 2009.
So, not only does the number cover less than half of the war, it also ignores
all military spending on Afghanistan, not just supporting our own forces, but also including all the support we gave to the Afgham army over that 20 years.
So the only real question is whether the person who wrote that article is just a fool, or a liar.
