The big story over in Afghanistan is that US special forces have begun to fund Afghan militia in a similar fashion to the Anbar Awakening, offering local resistance to the Taliban. The last time this country funded a local fighting force in Afghanistan they created the structure for Osama bin Laden to flourish, incidentally.

In return for stabilising their local area the militia helps to win development aid for their local communities, although they will not receive arms, a US official said.

Special forces will be able to access money from a US military fund to pay for the projects. The hope is that the militias supplement the Nato and Afghan forces fighting the Taliban. But the prospect of re-empowering militias after billions of international dollars were spent after the US-led invasion in 2001 to disarm illegally armed groups alarms many experts.

Speculation from unnamed sources is that $1.3 billion dollars has been earmarked for this effort, which may or may not be on the books. This brings into light the difficulties of coming up with a real price tag for the war, which the White House is putting at twice the number of the Pentagon. There’s just no precise number to place on operations in Afghanistan – making the overall total ripe for abuse. So David Obey, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, wants to provide revenue to pay for the war at some level.

Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, warned that if President Barack Obama decides to send additional troops to Afghanistan, it should be funded with the new tax.

“If we have to pay for the healthcare bill, we should pay for the war as well,” Obey told ABC News in an interview, “by having a war surtax.”

Obey said his proposed tax would be a “graduated” tax on income that would help offset the roughly $40 billion in new costs needed to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a cost estimated by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Peter Orszag.

The idea of raising taxes in wartime has become a sadly foreign concept in America, though the Bush era is actually the unique one. 2003 featured the first tax cut in a time of war in American history.

Carl Levin has also discussed financing a troop surge, which is partially about fiscal responsibility, but also about making it difficult on the President to carry off an escalation, given the near-term tax increases. It certainly marks a difference between the folks screaming about the budget deficit who never paid for anything they did while running the government, and the folks being blamed for runaway spending who actually feel compelled to create an offset.

Tragically, one of the best solutions in Afghanistan would cost almost no money – convening a loya jirga, or Grand Council, aimed at reconciliation among the forces fighting a civil war in that country.

UPDATE: Tim Fernholz spoke to a spokesman for Obey and got some operational details of the plan:

Essentially, below the $150,000 level, the 15 percent bracket for a family, there would be an increase of 1 percent of your current level, so for most people that would be 15.15 percent. Separate changes would happen between the $150,000 to $250,000 income level and above $250,000, which would be set by the president depending on his eventual decision on what to do in Afghanistan; currently, the war costs about $68 billion a year, but that could increase if the White House decides to send more troops or spend more money on development projects.