What would you spend £12 billion on?

The UK government has spent about £12 billion on the war in Afghanistan since 2001, and this figure is set to rise in the coming years. And that is apart from the millions spent by UK charities and NGOs on supposed rebuilding of the country.

All this for a war of occupation that is causing death, injury, and trauma, not only to millions of innocent Afghan babies, children, women and men, many of whom have never known anything else in their lives but war and invasion by foreign forces, but also causing the same death, injury and trauma to increasing numbers of our own soldiers, sent to fight in an under-developed and weaker country than our own, justified by lies and ever-changing excuses.

According to the article, this war spending equates to £190 for every man, woman and child in the UK. This roughly eqautes to £10.6 million for Boston, £14.5 million for South Holland, £23.7 million for South Kesteven, £24.8 million for East Lindsey, and £123 million for Lincolnshire as a whole (based on 2001 census figures for population).

Think what a difference that money could have made to our area - a bypass road for Boston, a West-East bypass for Grantham, no need for NHS cuts to Skegness or Grantham hospitals, more doctors and nurses, no need for school closures in Lincoln, more teachers for smaller class sizes, more dentists, an increase in social housing building programmes, and much more.

And that's not all. There would be 187 British soldiers still alive today, and with their families. There would be approximately 31,000 Afghan civilians still alive, and there may have been fewer refugees. And with Opium production increasing sharply since the fall of the Taliban government, there would be fewer heroin addicts in the UK and in Afghanistan.

So over to you, is this good use of taxpayers' money? And if you were in Government, what would you spend £12 billion on?
(please click on underlined hyperlinks for sources)