So over here, you spend trillions in give-aways and it gets you 98% of the vote of your fellow children.

I can see how he would think it can work over there as well.

But how does 400 bucks stack up against 79 virgins?

But it will help fund them.”

Well, that is sort of true and sort of not true. The Taliban leadership are not going to be swayed by money, that is probably true. But the rank and file, the individual men in the villages who are recruited by the Taliban may be. The Taliban uses money to recruit and to intimidate and to control. Giving these men jobs and putting them to work providing for their own infrastructure gives them some investment in building a community and makes it more likely they will act to resist the destruction of it.

What I am not getting is what they are going to pay these men to do. One thing that irritates me is the apparently lack of priority of the power production at the dam in Kandahar. Most of Afghanistan has no electricity. It is pretty much like the US in the 1920′s. You can not build a cement plant or a grain elevator with modern drying facilities or pretty much anything else without a source of energy. Afghanistan produces a tiny amount of oil and does have some coal bed gas resources. They do have coal. In the 1990′s they were producing about 100,000 short tons of coal a year and that is down to 1,000 tons/year now.

You can not (as mentioned above) make cement to make anything without energy so without energy all the cement must be imported. You can not build water purification, distribution, and waste treatment without electricity to pump that water around. Nearly 30% of US electricity use is for the moving of water around and treating it on both ends of the cycle. Afghanistan has no electricity. Most of the coal beds are in the relatively stable areas of the North-central part of the country. In order to have anything for these men to do, you must first get energy production up in order to start building. I believe the priorities should be:

1. Get the coal mines operating again and begin to build power plants and provide distribution to the rural areas. Sort of like a Rural Electrification Administration for Afghanistan. Then you can begin to build water treatment and distribution and infrastructure support industry such as cement kilns.

2. Get the hydro power production working and begin branching out distribution from there. The Kandahar dam would be a major portion of that. Maybe the creation of a hydro system in a valley somewhere in central Afghanistan could be like a TVA project in the US.

So you initially take men from the South, put them to work in central Afghanistan as miners. This gets them sending money back home to their families. Once power reaches the villages, they have something to buy with that money and can begin to have clean water supplies, indoor plumbing, waste water treatment and can then be brought into the 20th century (we can worry about the 21st century later). Then you can also begin to build railways and recruiting people to build tunnels and bridges. Just getting basic infrastructure installed could cause a major economic boom there.

But it all relies on energy production. Without coal and hydro, we are simply pushing a rope.