War on terror to cost US a whopping $8 trillion

In the two decades after the Twin Tower bombings of 9/11, the war against terror may make the US government poorer by more than $8 trillion or about three times of India’s current GDP. And that may be a conservative estimate, reports senior journalist Sanjib Kr Baruah.

New Delhi: In the past 20 years post 9/11, according to very conservative estimates, the US wars against terror in various theatres across the world including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and Africa may have cost the US exchequer a whopping $8 trillion in current dollars, a new study by Brown University, released on Wednesday, has concluded.

The US spend would be about Rs 5,84,00,000 crore or about three times of India’s current GDP.

This is a much higher figure than what US President Joe Biden had in mind on August 16, 2021 as the US began a hasty and chaotic exit from Afghanistan. He had said: “We spent over a trillion dollars.” Obviously, the good President may have had in mind just what the US Department of Defense (DOD) had spent on the Afghanistan war, leaving out other major costs, including the huge costs of caring for the post-9/11 war veterans.

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Since 2010, the Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs has led an effort called ‘Costs of War Project’ to estimate the costs incurred in the counter terror wars post 9/11 involving over 50 scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners, and physicians.

Besides fostering democratic discussion of these wars and aiding public policy formulation, ‘Costs of War Project’ aims to illustrate “the wars’ costs in human lives among all categories of persons affected by them, both in the US and in the warzones”.

“This includes the estimated direct and indirect costs of spending in the United States post-9/11 war zones, homeland security efforts for counterterrorism, and interest payments on war borrowing,” the report said.

The amount includes the costs for medical care and disability payments, for veterans of the post 9/11 wars, which is Iikely to exceed $2.2 trillion in federal spending besides including future obligations.

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The study said: “While the Iraq war was the most intense through most of the last 20 years (with spending peaking in 2008), the spending for Afghanistan, where spending peaked in 2011, has surpassed Iraq War spending. The DOD and State Department total appropriated for Afghanistan and Pakistan through FY2021 was about $1 trillion.”

“In its May 2021 budget request, the Biden administration has requested $8.9 billon for FY2022. The total spent for Iraq and Syria through FY2021 is $886 billion with $5.4 billion requested by the Biden administration for FY2022.”

Among these ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’ (OCO), the longest war so far, had been in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It had two names—“Operation Enduring Freedom” designated the first phase of war in Afghanistan from October, 2001 before being termed “Operation Freedom’s Sentinel” in January, 2015. The war in Iraq was designated “Operation Iraqi Freedom” from March, 2003 to August, 2010, when it became “Operation New Dawn.” The fight against the ISIS in Syria and Iraq was designated “Operation Inherent Resolve” in August, 2014.

The report also points out “certain fuzziness” of the use of the OCO money.

It says: “The lack of clarity includes but extends beyond the budget. Some numbers simply disappear.”

“The DOD has sometimes not clearly reported the number of personnel deployed in the war zones and the larger theater of operations. In 2017, the DOD stopped reporting the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq… Another loss of transparency occurred when the DOD stopped reporting its air strikes and weapons releases in Afghanistan after February 2020.”

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“In 2017, the DOD classified previously unclassified information about the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF),” it adds, a fact particularly significant when questions are being raised about the spending on the ANDSF, which capitulated shockingly before the swiftly advancing Taliban forces.

In 2020, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) had reported to the US Congress: “Every time we find something that looks like it’s going negative, it gets classified… Most of the [methods] of measuring success are now classified.”

SIGAR is the US government's leading oversight authority on the Afghanistan reconstruction process.

The report cautions that the report on the budgetary impact of the counter terror wars is “not the full story of the costs and consequences of the post-9/11 wars”.

But it says: “Included in these numbers is an acknowledgement of death: behind the decimal point of estimated total costs, $704 million has been spent on death gratuities for the survivors of the 7,040 men and women in the military who were killed in the war zones. And there is also money the US has provided in compensation to the civilians injured and killed in these wars.”

The total cost has also not included the massive airlift effort in Afghanistan undertaken from August 14-31, 2021 that flew more than 122,000 people out of Kabul.