Ending The Afghan War Would Save Taxpayers 40,000 Times More Money Than Defunding NPR

By Zaid Jilani

Today, two deficit-cutting bills will be voted on in the House of Representatives. One bill, introduced by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) and fellow Republicans, would end all federal funding to National Public Radio (NPR). The other bill, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Walter Jones (R-NC) and being pushed largely by progressive Democrats, calls for setting a strict timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan that would mandate the end of combat operations in that country by the end of 2011.

Conservatives claim that defunding NPR would save taxpayers a great deal of money; former NPR employee Juan Williams even argued that NPR funding was taking away from “school breakfast programs [and] college scholarships.” Yet NPR receives only around 2 percent of its annual $161 million budget from federal grants, totaling approximately $3.2 million. Meanwhile, the FY2011 cost of the Afghan war has hit $113 billion.

Assuming that the costs of both the NPR funding and Afghan war would be the same for next year, that means that ending the Afghan war would save approximately 40,000 times more taxpayer dollars than defunding NPR’s grants from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts and Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Additionally, as the National Priorities Project shows, ending the war could help free up money for countless domestic priorities, like hiring millions of teachers or funding health care for tens of millions of poor children. Here are just some of the alternatives that could be funded for the cost of one year of the Afghan war:

- Health Care For 55 Million Low Income Children

- 1.6 million Elementary School Teachers for One Year

- 1.9 million Firefighters for One Year

- 14.1 million Head Start Slots for Children for One Year

- 13.8 million Military Veterans Receiving VA Medical Care for One Year

- 1.6 million Police or Sheriff’s Patrol Officers for One Year

- 19.3 million Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550

- 13.6 million Scholarships for University Students for One Year

Americans recognize these truths about the relative costs of the Afghan war versus NPR. That’s why polling shows that only a quarter of Americans want to see cuts to funding for public broadcasting, while the vast majority of Americans no longer support the Afghan war and want a clear exit from that country. If Republicans really want to “listen to the American people,” as they pledged to do last fall during their campaign, they would support ending the war in Afghanistan and really saving taxpayers money, not endorsing gimmicks to please the more extreme members of their base.

UPDATEDuring the floor debate on the Afghanistan issue, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) blasted his colleagues for attacking NPR but supporting the war. "The fiscal conservatives are going to be overwhelmingly in support of slashing NPR and go home and brag about how they're such great fiscal conservatives...At the same time, they won't consider for a minute cutting a real significant amount of money!" Watch it:

UPDATEThe House just voted 228-192 to cut off funding to NPR and 93-321against the resolution calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan this year. Numerous Republicans defected to vote against defunding NPR and to vote for ending the war in Afghanistan. No Democrats voted to defund NPR but more voted against ending the war in Afghanistan than voted for ending it.

Retired general: GOP is undermining national security to score partisan points

By David Edwards and Muriel Kane In the wake of the arrest of alleged terrorist Faisal Shahzad, a number of Republican politicians have expressed outrage that the naturalized American citizen is being afforded the constitutional rights of citizenship. Major General (ret.) Paul Eaton told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Tuesday, "I am a little surprised that we're here to defend our Constitution against a Republican senator and a Republican representative's attack on it." Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Representative Peter King (R-NY) have both suggested that it was an error to read Shahzad his Miranda rights and to keep him in the civilian justice system rather than immediately handing him over to the military. "From a national security perspective, it's damaging," Eaton said of their statements. "Right now, the FBI and our police forces are looking over their shoulder every time they hear a Republican come off with a remark like that. ... Since January of 2009, we have seen a relentless attack on our FBI, on our armed services, on our policemen by the Republican Party. Any opportunity that they can find ... they have pursued. ... I want them to cut it out." Eaton, who retired from the Army in 2006, has since been a supporter of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He is currently a senior adviser with the National Security Network, a progressive think-tank with close ties to the Obama administration. It was Eaton who slammed former Vice President Dick Cheney last fall as an "incompetent war fighter," after Cheney had criticized the Obama administration as weak on national security, and he appears to be carrying out the same function now.

"It's a purely partisan approach," Easton said of the Republican criticisms. "They're after trying to frustrate the president in his role as providing for the national security. And in so doing, they're actually attacking the viability of the national security of the United States. ... They've chosen to go off the reservation, and they're doing a bad job."

In the wake of the Fort Hood shooting, the Christmas day underpants bomber, and this latest botched car bomb, the Obama administration is clearly concerned about these kind of "lone wolf" incidents, which may paradoxically reflect al Qaeda's growing weakness and inability to mount more serious attacks.

Last fall, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins testified before Congress that after eight years of constant assault, al Qaeda has been reduced to "a strategy of weakness," which "envisions an army of autonomous terrorist operatives, united in a common cause, but not connected organizationally."

Jenkins' suggestion that al Qaeda might reach out to disaffected young Muslims in the United States was quickly seized upon by conservatives to criticize the Obama administration and call for harsher measures. When asked by Raw Story how he felt about his warnings being misappropriated, however, Jenkins pointed in response to a recent article, in which he had written:

"The past decade also saw an unprecedented assertion of presidential authority, electronic surveillance without warrants, the detention of individuals solely on the basis of their having been declared enemy combatants, secret and indefinite imprisonment without trial, and the use of coercive interrogation techniques that before 9/11 would readily have been labeled torture. These were the greatest dangers posed by terror: that it would erode our own democracy, our traditional respect for human rights, our commitment to the law itself. Fortunately, these excesses were challenged in the courts, in Congress and by the electorate, and they are now being corrected."

This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast May 4, 2010.