U.S. must work aid into war funds

The book "Three Cups of Tea" has spent some 20 months on the New York Times best-seller list. It tells the story of former mountaineer Greg Mortenson, who has devoted the past 15 years of his life to building schools in an area of Pakistan that is often referred to as the birthplace of the Taliban.

According to Mortenson, his foundation can construct and maintain a school for a generation for about $20,000. They can do this in part by getting the remote communities in which they work to donate the land and much of the labor needed for the schools. The dividends, both in terms of the opportunities created for the children of these communities and the goodwill generated, are enormous.

Since 2002, the U.S. Congress has appropriated $830 billion for the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of these interventions have resulted in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in those two countries and have generated a great deal of hostility toward the United States, particularly among Muslims.

What if just a fraction of the money spent on those two interventions had been spent on schools instead? At $20,000 each, one half of 1 percent of the money appropriated to date would be enough to build and maintain 207,500 schools, or one school for every 300 Iraqis and Afghanis.

Might that have been a more cost-effective way to reduce the threat of terrorism than the path our country has followed for the past seven years?

Of course, a great amount of damage has been wrought by the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of schools, hospitals, power plants and other buildings destroyed, people injured and lives cut short. Spending a few billion dollars on schools now wouldn't begin to reverse the damage.

In 2008, former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz and former Chief Financial Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce Linda Bilmes estimated the cost of the invasion and occupation to the Iraqi economy alone to be $8.6 trillion.

As long as the president and Congress insist on perpetuating the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, Strength Through Peace believes that any further appropriations should include a significant percentage of humanitarian aid for rebuilding those two countries and providing medical and resettlement aid to their citizens.

We recently met with Rep. Betsy Markey to discuss the upcoming supplemental appropriations bill for Afghanistan and Iraq and were pleased to hear her say that she believes 40 percent of future appropriations for occupying those countries should be devoted to humanitarian aid. Unfortunately, the bill that recently emerged from the U.S. Senate only included about 5 percent for humanitarian aid, with most of the remainder being devoted to military operations.

A joint House-Senate conference committee will meet soon to develop the final appropriations bill for Iraq and Afghanistan for the remainder of 2009. We call on Markey to state she will refuse to vote for any bill that does not provide at least 40 percent of its funding for humanitarian aid.

We urge readers of the Coloradoan to contact Markey's local office at (970) 221-7110 to ask her to adopt this position.