Return On Investment

Apparently, former Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has an article in The Financial Times (subscription only) criticizing the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war. La-di-dah.

Sunday, Tom Tomorrow reiterated Brzezinski’s comments from a 1998 interview in which he pats himself on the back for convincing Jimmy Carter to secretly fund the anti-Communist Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, drawing the Soviets into the war six months later.

Brzezinski says he sent Carter a message the day the Soviets invaded saying that they now had the opportunity to give the Soviets their own Vietnam war. Apparently, that was a good thing to the likes of Brzezinski, who seems not to care that a lot of non-combatants die in places like Vietnam during wars, but what the hey, that’s realpolitik, isn’t it?

It did get me to wondering though, what with people like Putin running post-Soviet Russia, a suspicious mind might wonder if a few well-placed millions of dollars might just have gone to a little payback for the whole Afghanistan thing. What if you could spend a little bit of cabbage and lure someone with big pockets into shooting billions upon billions of dollars into a hole like Afghanistan or Iraq? What if, like Brzezinski, you didn’t care a whit about the people who lived (or died) there? As a budding capitalist nation, would a little levelling of the playing field be a good return on investment?