Afghanistan - At What Cost?

I read today about the U.S. efforts to help Afghanistan get electric power to the 90% who do not have it. I first read with pride that we have financed and built a generation plant that would ease the suffering of this stone-age country.

I read further that the plant had huge cost overruns, along with shoddy workmanship and the requisite corruption. That plant, built at a cost of about $305 million dollars (and who knows if this is the real cost), is now mostly idle because the Diesel fuel required to run the turbines is too expensive. So the Afghans are importing cheaper electricity from other sources. They say, "thanks, but no thanks" to our now completed power plant. We have spent over $60 b-b-billion for this war in Afghanistan. We are fighting an essentially unseen enemy, who looks like every other civilian in the area. Our troops are required to hold fire to avoid killing civilians. They have to be shot at first (with that method's concomitant troop losses), before they can engage. Then when they do engage in a firefight and a "civilian" is killed while they were having lunch with a Taliban fighter, the U.S. gets raked over the international coals for its actions.

I probably am not for a precipitous withdrawal allowing the Taliban and their pals in al-Qaeda to have free rein, but we'd better develop new Rules of Engagement that allow us a chance to win this war. $60 billion could have bought us about 20 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers - not that we need them...yet.