War ranks top amongst the most affordable things in a nation, or community of people seeing that wars tend to divide nations. Over history, a number of nations have gone to war, despite not being in a position to provide health care, or even toilets and water for all their citizens. The same nations though have had no problem affording rockets, missiles, shells, bullets, rifles and other war paraphernalia.

The affordability of war is partly attributed to the fall of the iron curtain, the Soviet Republic. The  Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), with a threat of going to war with the United States during the cold war era, stockpiled lots of weapons. When the USSR collapsed and broke into individual countries, many of the stockpiles were left in the hands of nations struggling to establish themselves. Corruption in such nations meant that this huge stockpiles were available for sale in the International market at throwaway prices.

Even the United States went ahead to contravene it’s own laws and purchase plane loads of weapons for arming national forces in Afghanistan. The demand was so high that even those repackaging the weapons from China boxes left many of them in their original packaging. Why should the US spend a fortune to buy its own weapons to fund the Afghan police, while very cheap weapons were available amongst Afghan neighbours?

(Read More: The Stoner Arms Dealers - The Rolling Stone)

The law is an ass that often finds it cannot defeat economics, when demand is high and supply is low, or supply high and demand is low, the law can go do unprintable things to itself.

Costofwar.com says the United States had spend about $570.9 billion (KES 48.7 trillion) in Afghanistan by Septmber 2012. Another $807.4 billion (KES 68.9 trillion) was spent in Iraq, where the US has withdrawn its troops. Kenya’s budget, for comparison, is at KES 1.45 trillion shillings.

The US pulled out of Iraq in December 2011, four months shy of a 9 year stay in the country. 4,400 US soldiers returned home in caskets while 32,000 were injured. Iraqbodycount.org documents about 130,000 war related civillian deaths, a figure that the Taliban and Iraq factions have generously contributed to.

In 2012, with US absence, suicide bombers and vehicle bombers have killed 7.5 people a day, while guns have been involved in killing 4.7 people per day?

But why does war continue if the US withdrew? See, just like George Bush attacked Iraq to search for nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction (the irony), the Taliban also attacked Iraq under the guise of flushing out invaders, “non-muslim invaders”.

After the non-muslim invaders left, the Taliban have turned their action on a faction of Muslims known as the Shia. The Taliban themselves come from a faction known as the Sunni. Targets have been mosques, weddings and other civilian gatherings. The Shia is a minority group of Muslims (10% to 20% of global muslims) that has throughout history found itself under attack, including genocides at various points. Wikipedia lists Iraq as having the second biggest population of Shia’s at 6o to 70 percent of the population. Over 90 percent of Iranians are Shias and the two countries account for over 50 percent of the global Shia population.

But who are the Taliban? The Taliban were the government of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, before the US ousted them from power. The Taliban are from the dominant Pashtun tribe in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is country at war, which is nothing new. 40 percent of Kenyans are below the age of 15. Of the remaining 60 percent, we can assume more than half are under the age of 35. About 70 percent of Kenya’s 40 million people will be therefore lying if they tell you they lived at a time when Afghanistan was another peaceful Middle Eastern Nation.

For 34 years, since 1978, Afghanistan has found herself too attractive for other to resist. It started with the Soviets, yes, those whose weapons now arm Afghan policemen and military.

The Soviets felt that occupying a sixth of the World’s surface, or the equivalent of North America (USA, Canada, Mexico), about 22 million kilometres squared (1 million kilometers by 22 million kilometres), 11 different times and 10,000 kilometres from one end to the other was just not working out . They therefore invaded Afghanistan to try and add to the above numbers.

The growth of communism and the USSR, like Rome, didn’t come in a day. Daoud Khan had overthrown his cousin, then King of Afghanistan in 1973, when he was on a trip abroad. He had a slight communism leaning and the support of stronger communists. In 1978, the communists decided Daoud wasn’t being of much help, and overthrew him. Daoud died fighting with his pistol and was buried with more than 20 members of his family who were dispatched to join him.

The Soviets came in to help the communists. The Afghanis, united by Islam, did not like the non-islamic policies by the new government and fought hard. Meanwhile, the US, Pakistan, Britain, China and Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia were very wary of an expanding Soviet Union and thus funded the Afghans through Pakistan security agencies. Wikipedia estimates at least $ 3 billion (Kes. 256 billion)went to funding the anti-communist uprising.

It took 10 years for the USSR to finally figure out that they were probably unwanted in the first place. 14,000 of them were dead together with 18,000 of their supporters. About 2 million Afghans had been killed and 5 million had fled the country.

The USSR also left 1,568 tanks, 828 armoured personnel carriers, 126 jets and 14 helicopters. In addition, the supplied Afghanistan with petrol and between 2 and 6 billion dollars a year  (Ksh, 170 billion to Ksh. 512 billion a year). It costs Ksh. 30 billion to construct Thika Road 20 years later, 100 billion was a lot of money then.

See, Pakistan is India’s bitter rival, and USSR was supporting India then. The US was a bitter rival to the USSR too and was scared that is USSR took Afghanistan, it would soon take other neighbours including Pakistan. The two and others thus came together to humiliate USSR and stop them.

The plan by the allies - Pakistan ,  US, Saudi Arabia and the rest, was to take advantage of the strong islamic unification in Afghanistan. They would promote and arm radical islamists, Mujahideen, who would then fight the communists. Osama bin Laden was one of the Mujahideen leaders.

With the departure of the Soviets, the allies stopped supporting the Mujahideen, with the exception that the Afghan government would fall in a couple of years. However, the Soviets had left so many weapons that the Afghan government was able to continue the war on its own. There was also the assistance in cash and oil from the USSR.

The allies therefore had to come back to finish what they started.

However, the communists had their own problems. Discontent including unemployment led to the collapse of the USSR in 1992. The collapse meant that the USSR could not continue supplying oil to Afghanistan, or billions of dollars in aid, leading to the collapse of the communist Afghan government in 1992.

Mission accomplished. The Soviet Union had collapsed and together so had communism in Afghanistan.

But that was not the end of the war in Afghanistan, in fact, it got worse.

Join us next week to find out what happened next.

Article sourced largely from Wikipedia entries. Other resources are Yahoo Answers, Quora ,  http://costofwar.com and http://iraqbodycount.org