The question (with a decade of support still looming) is what are we doing with the inbound shipping?

With a 7 billion dollar shipping bill, this is about 3 billion in free inbound shipping. Even if we can't use this much inbound shipping, India is planning on an iron mine and steel mill. Or we could simply buy supplies the Afghanis want anyway and make at least a billion in profit.

My pitch is for this:

Afghanis use 6 million inefficient stone or mud wood stoves. These can be upgraded with insulated firebrick and better designs that use half the fuel. The materials (such as vermiculite) cost about a thousand a truckload.

The real goal is to eliminate the need for half of the brush they grow along irrigation ditches. This has been the Taliban's greatest tactical asset (trust me, I flew 220 medevac missions there). This is billions worth of security savings. It would take about two million dollars' worth of vermiculite to not only upgrade their stoves, but every brick kiln in the country.

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Robert you bring up a very good point. A large proportion of the items that are likely to be dismantled, rendering them rather useless, or destroyed could be put to use in various ways to create more sustainable and economically viable solutions for the everyday problems often faced in Afghanistan.

Are these items inventoried at each base? Once the cost benefit analysis has been conducted and certain items have been marked for destruction or sale there should be a team and a strategy in place to identify potential uses of each as well as oversight of disbursement of goods.

Who is currently overseeing this initiative?