President Trump vowed on Monday to beef up the American military presence in Afghanistan, a strategy that promises to extend the longest war in U.S. history and add billions to its financial cost.

One current estimate pegs the conflict's total cost at $841 billion. That comes from Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Cordesman, who served as a consultant to the Departments of State and Defense during the Afghan and Iraq wars, says that figure includes Trump's budget request for next year.

Related from CNN: Afghanistan: 16 years, thousands dead and no clear end in sight

Other estimates place the 16-year cost in the trillions of dollars because they measure a broader range of factors.

For instance, Neta Crawford, a co-director of



About two weeks ago, hundreds of Nigerian girls were kidnapped from their secondary school, but we’ve hardly heard a peep about it in U.S. media. Though schools in Borno, the state where the girls were abducted, have been closed due to militant attacks, the students had returned to take a physics exam. They are thought to have been taken by an Islamic group named Boko Haram, which means “Western education is a sin” or “Western education is forbidden.”

Salon staff writer Mary Elizabeth Williams poignantly asks, “Where are the girls now? And does the rest of the world care about their fate?”

Salon: On April 14, [the] kidnappers broke into the [Government Girls Secondary School in the Sambisa Forest], killed two guards, and loaded the girls into trucks and drove