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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://theintercept.com/2021/09/01/war-on-terror-deaths-cost/">theintercept.com</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Over Two Decades, U.S.’s Global War on Terror Has Taken Nearly 1 Million Lives and Cost $8 Trillion</h1>
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<div class="gmail-PostByline-names"><a class="gmail-PostByline-link" rel="author" href="https://theintercept.com/staff/murtaza-hussain/"><span>Murtaza Hussain</span></a><span class="gmail-PostByline-date"><span> - August 31 2021</span></span>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><u>The U.S.-led</u> global war on terror has <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll">killed nearly 1 million people</a> globally and <a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/BudgetaryCosts">cost more than $8 trillion</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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.”</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>The Costs of War Project’s latest estimates hold that 897,000 to 929,000 people have been killed during the wars.</p></blockquote><div><p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf">1 </a><a href="https://www.psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf">million</a>
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.</p></div><div><p>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 <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-obama-men-killed-by-drones-are-presumed-to-be-terrorists/257749/">confessed practice</a> of labeling any “military-age males” killed in its operations as combatants unless proved otherwise.</p>
<p>Such practices have continued across multiple administrations. A recent <a href="https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-america-failed-afghan-drone-campaign-against-taliban">investigation</a> 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.”</p></div><div><p>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.”</p>
<h3>Economic Costs</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p></div><p><a href="https://theintercept.com/collections/the-911-wars/"><span><span><img alt="The 9/11 Wars" src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/08/911-wars-final-1-promo.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&fit=crop&w=440&h=220" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="429" height="215"></span></span><span><span>The 9/11 Wars</span></span></a></p><div><p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>“Millions of lives and trillions of dollars later, who has won?”</p></blockquote><div><p>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 <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-kabul-airport-explosion-11629976397">airport terrorist attack</a> in Afghanistan, which killed over <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/world/asia/kabul-afghanistan-airport-bombing.html">a dozen U.S. service members and around 170 Afghans</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p></div></div></div></div>
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