Hat tip Instapundit. Up till now I thought jihadis were cheap! A fascinating calculation, whether or not Alaa's assumptions are correct.
To launch and maintain a terror campaign on the scale that has been going on in Iraq requires enormous resources. This may sound a platitude but it is surprising how few are those who really realize the full import of this fact. There is a big difference between simply acknowledging some fact and truly realizing it. On a T.V. program that I have just been watching, Mr. Mohammed Al-Askari, the consultant for the Iraqi Ministry of Defense stated that according to estimates in the ministry the average car bomb costs about US $100,000. So if you estimate the cost of only this favorite weapon of the enemy with a rate of at least five per day, this amounts to $500,000/day. Add to that the cost of other operations and of financing and maintaining a clandestine army of tens of thousands, paying salaries, bribes etc., feeding, housing and all kinds of logistics, maintaining and management of foreign networks and the transport and smuggling of thousands of Jihadists from places as far as Europe, not to mention Arab and Moslem countries; just compare all that effort with the cost of even the simplest family undertaking, such as organizing some trip or holiday; and the dimension of the financial aspect might dawn upon you.
The U.S. army maintains about 150,000 troops in Iraq, the numbers on the enemy side, most certainly, are not less than this figure if not much higher. If we estimate that the cost of the upkeep of the average terrorist is only one tenth of his American counterpart including the cost of weapons, operations, logistics etc., which is surely an underestimate, we conclude that the budget of the “insurgency” is consequently 10% of the American budget of the war. And we all know that this budget is almost $100 billion annually. It follows that the “insurgency” requires at least $10 billion annually. That is almost a quarter of the annual budget of the Iraqi State that has been recently announced with much fanfare as being one of the biggest in our history. This kind of financing is orders of magnitude beyond the means of any local Iraqi group. No amount of kidnap money, extortions, thefts; or even the amounts looted previously by the Baathists can provide such finance. |