My newspaper this morning informed me that the war in Afghanistan has so far cost $17 billion. Out of curiousity, I consulted a putatively reliable source and did some math.

The population of Afghanistan as of July 1, 2001, was estimated to be 26,813,057 (I love the precision of that "57"). Since then, there's undoubtedly been a reduction ~ casualties, refugees, and so on. But I thought, heck, if they're going to be so precise, the least I can do is use that number.

So what, you ask, is $17 billion divided by 26,813,057? Well, it's about $634.02. Now according to our experts at the CIA, gross domestic product per capita of Afghanistan in July 2001 was approximately $800, a sizeable proportion of which was derived from poppies. Estimates of the cost of rebuilding the country range from a conservative 6.5 billion dollars up to 25 billion dollars, according to ReliefWeb.

Would we have gotten a better value for our money if every single Afghani had been given $634.02 worth of food, cash, and agricultural assistance? Would it have become less of a breeding ground for terrorists? Would we have captured Osama Bin Laden? ... Oh wait, scratch that last bit.

I'm not sorry the Taliban are out of power.

I am sorry that an incredibly poor country is now even farther in the hole.

And I'm even sorrier that so many innocents died.

Money's been pledged to help rebuild Afghanistan. I hope my country will do what's needed.

11:32:32 PM    please comment []

Every night, it's the same routine. I watch some bad TV. Then I read in bed (I've just finished a book by Marcus Borg called Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, which I recommend, and I'm also doing one poem every evening from Alice Fulton's Sensual Math). After I turn out the light, I turn, on the right side of the queen-sized bed, onto my left side, with my elbow crooked under the pillow beneath my head.

I spend probably five minutes in that position, with a small airline pillow between my curled knees to keep my hips aligned. Eventually, I turn onto my stomach, with no pillow under my head in the middle of the bed. This is when I truly begin to relax. But I know, somewhere in my sleep-clouded brain, that I'm not supposed to sleep on my stomach. So after awhile I turn onto my right side, in a mirror image of my first pose, on the left side of the bed. I fall asleep.

This is a weird tyranny of habit. I do it every single night. I have no idea if I could reliably fall asleep any other way than this idiosyncratic rotation and migration across the bed. Living alone for a long time allows this sort of oddity to persist unchecked. God help the poor soul who dares to infringe on the sacred rituals of oblivion!

1:00:18 AM    please comment []