A person shows US dollars outside an exchange office, remained close since August 15th, following their reopening after Taliban takeover on September 04, 2021 in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Bilal Guler | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
WASHINGTON — $290 million every day for 7,300 days. That’s how much money America spent on 20 years of war and nation-building in Afghanistan, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Yet it took just nine days for the Taliban to seize every provincial capital, dissolve the army and overthrow the U.S.-backed government in August.
When Taliban fighters seized Kabul without firing a single shot, President Joe Biden blamed Afghans for failing to defend their country.
U.S. President Joe Biden reacts during a moment of silence for the dead as he delivers remarks about Afghanistan, from the East Room of the White House in Washington, August 26, 2021.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
“Afghanistan’s political leaders gave up and fled the country,” he said on Aug.16. “The Afghan military gave up, sometimes without trying to fight.”
Absent from Biden’s rhetoric was any mention of America’s culpability in a war that began when U.S. soldiers invaded Afghanistan seeking revenge against al-Qaeda for the terrorist attacks that killed 2,977 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
Today, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul is closed and the American soldiers are gone.
But the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States spent waging its war on Afghan soil can still be seen…
