How Much Does Killing a Taliban Soldier Cost?

(Oct. 27) -- The Pentagon has disputed a press report that it's now costing U.S. taxpayers an average of at least $50 million for every single Taliban soldier killed in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

The report, originally posted on the Afghan news website KabulPress.org, arrived at the $50 million figure by dividing the amount of money now being spent yearly on the war in Afghanistan -- about $100 billion -- by the number of enemy now being killed annually, estimated at 2,000.

The Pentagon sees that as a specious calculation. "It is important that you understand that the simplified logic in the Kabul Press article is flawed [because] capturing and killing Taliban is not the overall objective," U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John L. Dorrian, a Pentagon spokesman, told AOL News.

"The most strategic mission we have is in growing the size and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces. They represent the ability of the international community to one day turn over security responsibility," he said. "We have always said that we are not going to kill or capture our way out of this industrial-strength insurgency."

Dorrian added that the war effort includes stabilizing the Afghan government, fighting corruption and overseeing infrastructure improvements to roads, power and water systems, all of which costs large sums of money.

Matthew Nasuti, the Massachusetts-based reporter who wrote the KabulPress.org article, isn't buying it. "That's stunning to say that killing Taliban is not the main objective," he told AOL News. "I don't say my numbers are sacred, but no matter how you play it, the numbers are bad.

"My goal was to highlight that we're wasting a lot of money," he added. "We really cannot afford to fight the Taliban because the U.S. military is so wasteful. I think we can win, but we're mismanaging the war."

Nasuti, who was a captain in the U.S. Air Force in the 1980s, later worked for the Bechtel Corp. managing defense contracts, then briefly for the U.S. State Department. He joined KabulPress.org last year, where he has written extensively about how the U.S. military, State Department and Agency for International Development waste tax dollars.

The Pentagon's dismissal of Nasuti's claim about the high cost of killing a single Taliban fighter came two days before WikiLeaks, through several international news outlets, posted 391,832 classified Iraq war documents on the Internet. That followed the 77,000 classified documents WikiLeaks posted last summer about the war in Afghanistan.

One of those documents, from September 2009, detailed an incident in which a Reaper drone with advanced radar and Hellfire missiles was flying above southern Afghanistan when it lost its satellite link to the pilot who was steering it remotely from a base in the U.S. Fearing the drone would fly into neighboring Tajikistan, commanders ordered an Air Force jet to shoot it down. After a jet fired on the drone, destroying its engine, the satellite link was re-established. Pilots were then able to steer the damaged drone and crash it into a remote mountainside. The document concluded: "There were no sensitive items on board the Reaper, but it did go down with its ordnance."

A Reaper drone has a 66-foot wingspan and, when unarmed, a price tag of $13 million.