The war in Afghanistan has cost U.S. taxpayers $713 billion, which is more than 10 times what college tuition costs American students every year, according to the Department of Education.

Instead, thousands have died and the student debt load is growing at alarming rates.

Truthout:

…every hour, the war in Afghanistan is costing We the People another $10.17 million.

The Taliban offered to hand over bin Laden on a silver platter, but we said no, and now it’s cost us hundreds of billions of dollars.

But what if George W. Bush had taken up the offer from the Taliban, and even sweetened the deal like he did with the opium?
What if he did something similar to what he had done just months before, and offered to give the Taliban money, if they promised to cut down on terrorism and on al Qaeda’s presence and influence in that nation?

We could have given the Taliban $2 billion, enough to double the nation’s GDP and make everybody in the country twice as wealthy, and it still would have only been a drop in the bucket compared to what we’ve spent on the war in Afghanistan.

And, if we had done that, we would have saved ourselves enough money to provide a free public college education to every single eligible student in America.

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—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata