So far the war in Afghanistan has cost the U.S. more than $233 billion, according to the Northampton-based National Priorities Project, which analyzes federal financial data. NPP notes that the number of troops in Afghanistan, slated to grow by another 30,000 within six months, is now about 12 times the number sent to the area that hid Osama bin Laden after the terrorist strike on Sept. 11, 2001 (5,000 then; 62,000 today), and that so far 20 soldiers from Massachusetts have died in Afghanistan.

The budget for the Afghanistan campaign totaled $20.8 billion for 2001 and 2002 together; for this year alone it will be $60.2 billion. The total for this war is headed for $325 billion next year, according to the NPP, if you add in the cost of 30,000 additional troops in Afghanistan. The White House estimates the cost of sending each soldier to Afghanistan, including travel and support services, at $1 million. All that is on top of $656 billion already paid out to fight in Iraq.

In 2001, in an article in the Weekly Standard called "The Case for American Empire," Max Boot exuded Anglophile nostalgia as he wrote that "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." The neocons of that era liked to think as though money were no object; questioned by Congress early in 2003 about how much it would cost to invade Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz's answer was simply that it would cost more not to do it.

But former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson notes in The Sorrows of Empire (2004) that Britain in the heyday of its empire could afford military actions abroad because it had far more favorable trade balances than the United States has had from the beginning of its Iraq adventure until now. "In the nineteenth century," Chalmers pointed out, "the British Empire ran huge current account surpluses, which allowed it to ignore the economic consequences of disastrous imperialist ventures like the Boer War. On the eve of the first World War, Britain had a surplus that was 7 percent of GDP."