[News] Over Two Decades, U.S.’s Global War on Terror Has Taken Nearly 1 Million Lives and Cost $8 Trillion

[Anti-Imperialist News]

theintercept.com
<https://theintercept.com/2021/09/01/war-on-terror-deaths-cost/> Over Two
Decades, U.S.’s Global War on Terror Has Taken Nearly 1 Million Lives and
Cost $8 Trillion
Murtaza Hussain <https://theintercept.com/staff/murtaza-hussain/> - August
31 2021
------------------------------

*The U.S.-led* global war on terror has killed nearly 1 million people
<https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll> globally
and cost more than $8 trillion
<https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/BudgetaryCosts> since it
began two decades ago. These staggering figures come from a landmark report
issued Wednesday by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, an ongoing
research effort to document the economic and human impact of post-9/11
military operations.

The report — which looks at the tolls of wars waged in Iraq, Syria,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and other regions where the U.S. is
militarily engaged — is the latest in a series published by the Costs of
War Project and provides the most extensive public accounting to date of
the consequences of open-ended U.S. conflicts in the Middle East, Central
Asia, and Africa, referred to today as the “forever wars.”

“It’s critical we properly account for the vast and varied consequences of
the many U.S. wars and counterterror operations since 9/11, as we pause and
reflect on all of the lives lost,” said the project’s co-director, Neta
Crawford, in a press release accompanying the report. “Our accounting goes
beyond the Pentagon’s numbers because the costs of the reaction to 9/11
have rippled through the entire budget.”

The Costs of War Project’s latest estimates hold that 897,000 to 929,000
people have been killed during the wars.

The staggering economic costs of the war on terror pale in comparison to
the direct human impact, measured in people killed, wounded, and driven
from their homes. The Costs of War Project’s latest estimates hold that
897,000 to 929,000 people have been killed during the wars. Of those
killed, 387,000 are categorized as civilians, 207,000 as members of
national military and police forces, and a further 301,000 as opposition
fighters killed by U.S.-led coalition troops and their allies. The report
also found that around 15,000 U.S. military service members and contractors
have been killed in the wars, along with a similar number of allied Western
troops deployed to the conflicts and several hundred journalists and
humanitarian aid workers.

The question of how many people have lost their lives in the post-9/11
conflicts has been the subject of ongoing debate, though the numbers in all
cases have been extraordinarily high. Previous Costs of War studies have
put death toll figures in the hundreds of thousands, an estimate tallying
those directly killed by violence. According to a 2015 estimate from the
Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility, well over 1
<https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf>million
<https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf> have been
killed both indirectly and directly in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan alone. The difficulty of calculating death tolls is made harder by
the U.S. military’s own refusal to keep track of the number of people
killed in its operations, as well as the remoteness of the regions where
many of the conflicts take place.

Like its previous studies, the death toll calculated by the Costs of War
Project focuses only on deaths directly caused by violence during the
global war on terror and does not include “indirect deaths, namely those
caused by loss of access to food, water, and/or infrastructure, war-related
disease” that have resulted from the conflicts. The report’s footnotes also
state that “some of the people classified as opposition fighters may
actually have been civilians as well, since there are political incentives
to classify the dead as militants rather than civilians” — a caveat that
dovetails with the U.S. government’s own confessed practice
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-obama-men-killed-by-drones-are-presumed-to-be-terrorists/257749/>
of labeling any “military-age males” killed in its operations as combatants
unless proved otherwise.

Such practices have continued across multiple administrations. A recent
investigation
<https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-america-failed-afghan-drone-campaign-against-taliban>
from
the military-focused news site Connecting Vets included leaked video and
accounts from the 2019 drone campaign in Helmand province in Afghanistan.
The story included testimony from former drone operators who said that they
had been given the green light to kill anyone seen holding a walkie-talkie
or wearing a tactical vest in the province, which had poor security and
lacked reliable cell phone service. For some U.S. officials licensed to
authorize drone strikes, frustrated by their inability to achieve strategic
victory or even favorable negotiating terms with the Taliban, the “metric
for success was racking up a body count.”

The Costs of War Project report states that its findings about deaths in
the wars are conservative, leaving many still uncounted. Although nearly 1
million people can be said with confidence to have been killed since the
global war on terror began, even that staggering figure is, in the words of
Crawford, the project co-director, “likely a vast undercount of the true
toll these wars have taken on human life.”
Economic Costs

The economic costs tallied by the Costs of War report include $2.3 trillion
spent by the U.S. government on military operations in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, $2.1 trillion in Iraq and Syria, and $355 billion in Somalia and
other regions of Africa. An additional $1.1 trillion has been spent on
domestic security measures in the United States since 2001, bringing direct
expenditures from the war on terror at home and abroad to an astronomical
$5.8 trillion.

Even that, however, does not represent the full expenses imposed by the
wars. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers have returned from foreign war
zones maimed and traumatized, turning many into long-term dependents of the
federal government. The cost of providing disability and medical care for
these veterans is likely to exceed $2.2 trillion by 2050 from its current
post-9/11 total of $465 billion, bringing the total economic bill of the
wars to $8 trillion.

[image: The 9/11 Wars]The 9/11 Wars
<https://theintercept.com/collections/the-911-wars/>

The report compiles several different sources to give a total for how much
the post-9/11 wars have cost, including appropriations for war-related
expenses by the departments of Defense and State; increases to the Defense
Department’s baseline operating budget; interest payments spent on
borrowing; money obligated for future Veterans Affairs services; and
Department of Homeland Security spending for preventing and responding to
terrorist attacks. Even this thorough accounting does not give the full
picture of U.S. expenditures: The report’s total figure of $8 trillion does
not include money spent on war zone humanitarian assistance and economic
development, nor does it factor in future interest payments that will be
incurred on the massive deficit spending used to pay for the wars.

Many will find the astronomical financial cost of the global war on terror
galling, not just because of how relatively little it has produced in
return, but also because of the discrepancy between what the current price
tag of the wars has run and what U.S. officials initially claimed would be
required. The war in Iraq provides one sobering example. In September 2002,
Lawrence Lindsey, then-chief economic adviser under President George W.
Bush, estimated that the “upper-bound” expenses for the looming invasion
and occupation would run between $100 and $200 billion. Later that year,
Mitch Daniels, then-director of the Office of Management and Budget,
provided an even more humble estimate of the costs, saying that war in Iraq
would likely run U.S. taxpayers between $50 and $60 billion.

“Millions of lives and trillions of dollars later, who has won?”

In reality, the invasion and occupation of Iraq — just one of a number of
conflicts fought by the U.S. across the world since 9/11 — has wound up
costing trillions of dollars while destabilizing the Middle East and
breeding secondary conflicts that have continued to draw the U.S. in at
further expense and loss of life. Current events have grimly underlined how
the situation has grown out of control. The recent airport terrorist attack
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-kabul-airport-explosion-11629976397>
in Afghanistan, which killed over a dozen U.S. service members and around
170 Afghans
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/world/asia/kabul-afghanistan-airport-bombing.html>,
was claimed by a local branch of the Islamic State, a terrorist group that
did not exist at the start of the global war on terror and was birthed amid
the chaos created by the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

The conflicts appear to have no end in sight, even as the U.S. makes plans
to extricate itself from its 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

“What have we truly accomplished in 20 years of post 9/11 wars? Millions of
lives and trillions of dollars later, who has won? Who has lost, and at
what price?” said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War
Project. “Twenty years from now, we’ll still be reckoning with the high
societal costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars – long after U.S. forces
are gone.”
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20210901/28a9f51d/attachment.htm>