(CanWest) Afghan mission cost $3.5 billion and counting

OTTAWA - The Harper government estimates the price tag for Canada's ongoing involvement in Afghanistan will exceed $3.5 billion by early 2009, a figure critics say dramatically lowballs the cost to make it more politically palatable.

In published estimates of the financial costs of sending troops and aid to Afghanistan released this week, the government says it had already spent about $2.3 billion on ''Canada's multifaceted engagement'' by June 2006.

That includes $1.8 billion for the ''incremental costs'' - the extra expenses incurred by going to Afghanistan - for the Canadian Forces and $466 million for development activities funded through the Canadian International Development Agency.

Meeting the commitment to keep the military and provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan until February 2009 - an extension approved by Parliament in May - is pegged at another $1.25 billion. That figure is yet to be confirmed, the document cautions.

NDP Leader Jack Layton criticized the expenditures in the House of Commons on Thursday, noting the figures show the war, not the rebuilding of the country, account for the lion's share of costs.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=a8be4320-1615-4243-93aa-596a973fb46d&k=35618

instead of peacekeeping and reconstruction because peacekeeping and reconstruction doesn't give harper the PR as the "national security PM" ala bush as the war president.

"NDP Leader Jack Layton criticized the expenditures in the House of Commons on Thursday, noting the figures show the war, not the rebuilding of the country, account for the lion's share of costs."

I wonder if those figures include the shipping of the tanks to Afghanistan that the faux cons said weren't going but now they are?

I presume the incremental costs of $1.8 billion are those expenses above and beyond the normal money spent to pay and equip the soldiers in Afghanistan. While it is true that those expenses would be incurred anyway, they might have been put to other and better uses. In that sense they are sunken costs, spent on a venture that will probably have no long-term benefits for Canada. Indeed, the venture will probably cause us long term disadvantages, in international credibility (outside of the neo-con White House).

And, of course, three dozen dead soldiers and hundreds of wounded (so far).