It costs the US $50 million to kill each member of the Taliban

[Silent Hunter]

The objective isn't to kill as many Taliban as possible. If it were, we would just carpet bomb the whole region. The objective is to create some kind of state in Afghanistan that is non-Taliban controlled and stable.

Never in the entire history of the "country" has there even been "some kind of state," much less a "stable" one.  It's an impossible task.

Your grasp of history is appalling.

Quite. It was pretty stable until 1979, IIRC.

[Silent Hunter]

The objective isn't to kill as many Taliban as possible. If it were, we would just carpet bomb the whole region. The objective is to create some kind of state in Afghanistan that is non-Taliban controlled and stable.

Never in the entire history of the "country" has there even been "some kind of state," much less a "stable" one.  It's an impossible task.

Your grasp of history is appalling.

Quite. It was pretty stable until 1979, IIRC.

There has not ever been an Afghan "government" that has had any sort of effective control of anything beyond the immediate vicinity of Kabul.  The rest is controlled by various tribal warlords or coalitions of warlords.  "Stable" governments in the past have merely avoided irritating the warlords in the rural (for lack of a better word) areas too much.  The idea that Afghanistan can be made some sort of unitary state is historically, culturally, ethnically, linguistically, economically, militarily, and logistically (since much of the country is inaccessible from other parts except by horseback or even helicopter) impossible.  For good reason - "Afghanistan" as a country is an entirely artificial construct brought about by the fact that it was such a crappy and ungovernable scrap of land that neither Britain nor Russia ever felt like including it in one of their 19th-century annexation sprees.

I do read other sources than Wikipedia; I'm currently reading a book on the history of warfare with footnotes.

It doesn't have to be a "unitary" state. A federation or confederation is perfectly possible. India works with even greater diversity; many of the states in Europe were Afghanistans earlier in their history.

[Silent Hunter]

Haha that is some shoddy logic, even for politics.

Explain, please.

Afghanistan wasn't an "artificial" Anglo-Russian construct; although its borders were. The country came into existence in 1747.

Being an "artificial construct" hasn't stopped a number of countries from being stable democracies either; Jamaica, Ghana, Slovenia, even the United States.

[Silent Hunter]

Haha that is some shoddy logic, even for politics.

Explain, please.

Afghanistan wasn't an "artificial" Anglo-Russian construct; although its borders were. The country came into existence in 1747.

Being an "artificial construct" hasn't stopped a number of countries from being stable democracies either; Jamaica, Ghana, Slovenia, even the United States.

I meant the article, sorry.

No problem.