Cynics did some hostile long division: £2.25m per bus when established hybrids then cost no more than £350,000 each.
But in a country whose recent history is one of warring factions and hostile ethnic divisions, America cannot allow Northern Alliance occupation of Afghan cities to become the order of the day.
Yet in my experience of the town, where I grew up and whose local comp I attended,there has always been a palpable, occasionally even hostile, sense of class division.
The anti-immigration rhetoric has become so openly hostile that social division seems only a step away.
Although the power of the Holkar family was broken, the remaining troops remained hostile and a division was retained to disperse them.
Now the government's top civil rights attorneys face a choice: Fight for what they believe in under an administration that shows every indication of being hostile to their division's mission, or quit.
Unlike Blair in 1997, he is up against the six "golden rules" that handicap many long-serving governments: longevity in office and the associated boredom of the electorate; a depleted stock of able ministers; loss of reputation for economic competence; an increasingly hostile press; internal divisions over policy and the succession; and a revived and credible opposition.
In the afternoon the crowd turned hostile, however, and a division of troops opened fire on it, killing five.
What isn't clear, though, is how the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn would be able to pick up on this amorphous, "anti-establishment" vote, particularly in a hostile media landscape, and divisions within the PLP and Momentum itself.
The last pope to address the European parliament was John Paul II 26 years ago as Europe stood on the brink of seismic change, with communism collapsing the following year and ending the continent's division into two hostile blocs.
