Not Coming to Your Town Anytime Soon

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity
--Goethe

I've never been very good at math. That's how I ended up with a B.A. and not a B.S. (it's not that I'm a liberal arts kind of guy, and I certainly know how to b.s., so it's too bad I couldn't get the degree to go with it.) Anyway, the frustrated accountant in me wants to hold this administration accountable, so here's my latest foray into the world of high finance:

The New York Times reports that Official Afghan statistics estimate 70,000 Afghani police officers have been trained by U.S. contractors (Texas-based, no less). The figure is widely thought to be inflated, and a more realistic figure offered is 30,395. I don't know why they couldn't go the extra five, but the NYT's has its reasons.

Whatever figure you accept, these police were trained by 377 police advisors, at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of $1.1 billion. Here's how I see the breakdown--

Best case scenario: $1.1 billion / 70,000 trainees = $14,285 per trainee
Worst case scenario: $1.1 billion / 30,395 trainees = $32,900 per trainee (my computations were actually based on a rounded down figure of 1 billion, but it's close enough for government work.)
For 377 instructors, if you divided that $1.1 billion evenly among them, you would arrive at a salary of $2,652,519 per employee. Seems like a lot of money per trainee.

And what has this outlay of funds bought for the American taxpayer?