While the Americans have burst into celebrations after the assassination of Osama (what is a better word than assassination?), few people seem to have realised that USD 1.2 trillion has been spent in finding a man who would have been dead anyway in another ten years. Now, to put things in perspective, the annual GDP (2009) of the US, and its external debt is close to $14 trillion. So, you could have effectively used the $3900 that every American citizen has shelled out for catching hold of Osama to repay 10% of the country's external debt, or its entire current account deficit. However, I do agree that most Americans would be more than happy to donate this amount for the 'War on terror', considering that they can always print more money to take care of the rest. Not many Indians would be ready to partake of about Rs 2 lakhs per person to find and kill Dawood Ibrahim.
For Indians, even if you consider 1% of the amount being directly allocated to Osama's head, the man was worth Rs 54,000 crores. Had I been Osama, I would have made a dozen or so video tapes deploring US, each with a little makeup showing me little older, then popped a box of sleeping pills, and asked my close followers to burn my dead body. The videos would have been broadcast every two years on Al-Jazeera in serial order, and the current generation of the US Army would have spent its entire life combing the desolate regions of Afghanistan, looking for a man long dead and gone.
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