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Report says Iraq, Afghanistan wars will cost us $4 trillion.
How much will our wars cost? Report says $4 trillion By Liz Goodwin | The Lookout – Wed, Jun 29, 2011 A new report out of Brown University estimates that the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq--together with the counterinsurgency efforts in Pakistan--will, all told, cost $4 trillion and leave 225,000 dead, both civilians and soldiers. The group of economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists involved in the project estimated that the cost of caring for the veterans injured in the wars will reach $1 trillion in 30 or 40 years. In estimating the $4 trillion total, they did not take into account the $5.3 billion in reconstruction spending the government has promised Afghanistan, state and local contributions to veteran care, interest payments on war debt, or the costs of Medicare for veterans when they reach 65. The Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, has assessed the federal price tag for the wars at $1.8 trillion through 2021. The report says that is a gross underestimate, predicting that the government has already paid $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion. More than 6,000 U.S. troops and 2,300 contractors have died since the wars began after Sept. 11. A staggering 550,000 disability claims have been filed with the VA as of 2010. Meanwhile, 137,000 civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq have died in the conflict. (Injuries among U.S. contractors have also not yet been made public, further complicating the calculations of cost.) Nearly 8 million people have been displaced. Check out Reuters' factbox breaking down the costs and casualties here. Perhaps the most sobering conclusion of the researchers is that it's unclear whether the human and economic costs are worth it. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are now dead, and the Taliban is marginalized, but Iraq and Afghanistan are far from being stable democracies. Meanwhile, the half a percentage point a year in GDP growth the war has fueled has been offset by the enormous increase in the national deficit, the report says. "We decided we needed to do this kind of rigorous assessment of what it cost to make those choices to go to war," study co-director Catherine Lutz told Reuters. "Politicians, we assumed, were not going to do that kind of assessment." The researchers recommend that the U.S. government be more transparent in disclosing the costs of its wars to taxpayers, by including the costs of future health care for veterans, the cost of paying interest on debt taken out to fund the wars, and estimating how much state and local governments take on in war costs. You can see their recommendations here.
Factbox: Highlights of "Costs of War" research By Daniel Trotta | Reuters – Wed, Jun 29, 2011 NEW YORK (Reuters) - Major findings from the "Costs of War" study on the financial and human costs of U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001 by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. FINANCIAL TOLL: * Congressional war appropriations to Pentagon since 2001: $1.3 trillionFuture spending requests: * 2012 Pentagon war spending: $118 billionESTIMATED TOTAL: $3.7 trillion to $4.4 trillion ADDITIONAL interest payments to 2020: $1 trillion CONSERVATIVE DEATH TOLL ESTIMATES BY WAR ZONE: Afghanistan: 33,877CONSERVATIVE DEATH TOLL ESTIMATES BY CATEGORY: U.S. military: 6,051(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
However one judges the US waging of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, at the very least, we should know what each of those wars has been like. We should know who has been killed, what kinds of wounds have been suffered, and what kinds of economic costs and consequences have been incurred. Those costs have been consistently minimized, misunderstood, or hidden from public view. While there are those who would argue that the role of the citizenry should be simple assent once the nation is at war, a wide variety of goals – from enhanced democracy to enhanced human security – require more specific knowledge about these and any wars. In addition, the US public should know what the decision to go to war in each of these cases has wrought. Because information facilitates democratic deliberation and effective decision-making, the U.S. should increase transparency by: * recording all deaths and injuries in the war zones; this includes the deaths of US troops (not just those medically evacuated) and contractors (whetherU.S.citizens or not), civilians in the war zones, enemy combatants, and prisoners. Records should be completed promptly and systematically and made public on a regular basis;Transparency and accountability for war budgets and costs must include not only what has been spent, but the amounts that the U.S.will be obliged to spend by virtue of the fact of going to war. The U.S. should make comprehensive estimates of the budgetary costs of these wars by * including the future obligations to veterans;Finally, the research reported here is only a beginning: an independent non-partisan commission should make a thorough assessment of the human, financial, and social costs of the wars of the last decade for the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the United States and other countries directly affected by the wars. |