Saturday 21st of December 2024
Home » Blogs » John Richardson's blog

the cost of dreams .....

the cost of dreams .....

The total cost to America of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the related military operations in Pakistan, is set to exceed $4 trillion - more than three times the sum so far authorised by Congress in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

Click HERE to view graphic (101 kb)

Related articles

Two reporters held hostage in Afghanistan are freed

Police search Kabul hotel rubble for bomb victims

Search the news archive for more stories

This staggering sum emerges from a new study by academics at the Ivy-league Brown University that reveals the $1.3 trillion officially appropriated on Capitol Hill is the tip of a spending iceberg. If other Pentagon outlays, interest payments on money borrowed to finance the wars, and the $400bn estimated to have been spent on the domestic "war on  terror", the total cost is already somewhere between $2.3 and $2.7 trillion.

And even though the wars are now winding down, add in future military spending and above all the cost of looking after veterans, disabled and otherwise and the total bill will be somewhere between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion.

The report by Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies is not the first time such astronomical figures have been cited; a 2008 study co-authored by the Harvard economist Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, a former Nobel economics laureate, reckoned the wars would end up costing over $3 trillion. The difference is that America's financial position has worsened considerably in the meantime, with a brutal recession and a federal budget deficit running at some $1.5 trillion annually, while healthcare and social security spending is set to soar as the population ages and the baby boomer generation enters retirement.

Unlike most of America's previous conflicts moreover, Iraq and Afghanistan have been financed almost entirely by borrowed money that sooner or later must be repaid.

The human misery is commensurate. The report concludes that in all, between 225,000 and 258,000 people have died as a result of the wars. Of that total, US soldiers killed on the battlefield represent a small fraction, some 6,100. The civilian death toll in Iraq is put at 125,000 (rather less than some other estimates) and at up to 14,000 in Afghanistan. For Pakistan, no reliable calculation can be made. Even these figures however only scratch the surface of the suffering, in terms of people injured and maimed, or those who have died from malnutrition or lack of treatment. "When the fighting stops, the indirect dying continues," Neta Crawford, a co-director of the Brown study, said. Not least, the wars may have created some 7.8 million refugees, roughly equal to the population of Scotland and Wales.

What America achieved by such outlays is also more than questionable. Two brutal regimes, those of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, have been overturned while al-Qa'ida, the terrorist group that carried out 9/11, by all accounts has been largely destroyed - but in neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is democracy exactly flourishing, while the biggest winner from the Iraq war has been America's arch-foe Iran.

Osama bin Laden and his henchmen probably spent the pittance of just $500,000 on organising the September 2001 attacks, which killed 3,000 people and directly cost the US economy an estimated $50bn to $100bn. In 2003, President George W Bush proclaimed that the Iraq war would cost $50bn to $60bn. Governments that go to war invariably underestimate the cost - but rarely on such an epic scale.

If the Brown study is correct, the wars that flowed from 9/11 will not only have been the longest in US history. At $4 trillion and counting, their combined cost is approaching that of the Second World War, put at some $4.1 trillion in today's prices by the Congressional Budget Office.

war on terror set to surpass cost of second world war

the case for politicians to lead from the front .....

This was the Prime Minister last week, immediately after Obama's announcement, backing his decision for withdrawal: "Australia shares President Obama's assessment that progress is being made and that the transition strategy is on track."

When journalists had the temerity to ask how this withdrawal would affect Oruzgan, the province where 1500 Australians are stationed, and whether US numbers there would decrease, she twice repeated: "You should not be concerned about the support for our troops from the American personnel that we work with."

In other words, the US might be significantly altering its policies on Afghanistan, there might be big debates going on in the international community about what this means for that deeply troubled country, but Australians should just accept our Prime Minister at her word: none of this should concern us.

However, lest we do find comfort in Gillard's patronising assurances, recall that this was her only last October, during the parliamentary "debate" on Afghanistan. Australia would be "engaged" in Afghanistan for at least a decade, she told us in language more bellicose than any of Australia's allies. Why? "If the insurgency in Afghanistan were to succeed, if the international community were to withdraw, then Afghanistan could once again become a safe haven for terrorists," she said. "The propaganda victory for terrorists worldwide would be enormous."

She also said we "must stand firmly by" the US, and that there was "a new international strategy in place - focused on counterinsurgency". The obvious question for Gillard then is, what has changed in nine months? When is she going to explain what impact America's apparent loss of faith in the counterinsurgency strategy will have on Afghanistan? Is Obama's announcement an "enormous" propaganda victory for terrorists? Or has the Prime Minister been less than straight with us about why we are in Afghanistan?

Contrast Gillard's rhetoric with that of Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who is withdrawing all combat troops from Afghanistan. In a farewell visit last month to Kandahar, where Canadian troops have been based, he told soldiers Afghanistan "does not represent a geostrategic risk to the world. It is no longer a source of global terrorism".

Australians want out of Afghanistan; a Lowy Institute poll this week found 59 per cent are opposed to our continued involvement. Yet we continue to be fed the same tired lines from our political leaders about how dreadful it would be to pull out. And all the while the rest of the world is talking - and has been for some time - about leaving Afghanistan, about negotiating with the Taliban so they can accelerate that exit, and about how the original objectives for going to war there have now been met. It's time Australia heard some plain talking from its leaders.

Gillard Is A Chorus Of One On Afghanistan

cost of war

A study has been unveiled by Brown University scholars tallying up the cost of American wars since 2001. The study found the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have expense almost $4 trillion and have ended in over 250,000 fatalities. I read this here: Wars cost American taxpayers almost $4 trillion in past decade

liar, liar .....

Mr Speaker, a national government has no more important task than defending the nation, its people and their interests. That is why we take so seriously any decision to go to war. The war in Afghanistan is no different.

Today I will answer five questions Australians are asking about the war:

- why Australia is involved in Afghanistan;

- what the international community is seeking to achieve and how;

- what Australia's contribution is to this international effort - our mission;

- what progress is being made;

- and finally, what the future is of our commitment in Afghanistan.

 

The gross hypocrisy of our poll-driven politicians, including 'Big Red' & the 'Mad Monk', in supporting our ongoing involvement in Afghanistan as being in our 'national interest' is sickening.

According to Wikileaks, international public opinion is largely opposed to the war in Afghanistan. A 47-nation global survey of public opinion conducted in June 2007 by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found considerable opposition to the U.S. and NATO military operations in Afghanistan. In only 2 out of the 47 countries was there a majority that favoured keeping military troops in Afghanistan - Israel (59%) and Kenya (60%).[1] On the other hand, in 41 of the 47 countries pluralities want U.S. and NATO military troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible.[1] In 32 out of 47 countries clear majorities want U.S. and NATO military troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. Majorities in 7 out of 12 NATO member countries want troops withdrawn as soon as possible.[1][2][3]

The 25-nation Pew Global Attitudes survey in June 2009 continued to find that the war in Afghanistan is unpopular in most nations[10] and that most publics want American and NATO troops out of Afghanistan.[11] The 2009 global survey reported that majorities or pluralities in 18 out of 25 countries want U.S. and NATO to remove their military troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible.[10] (Changes from 2008 included Tanzania, South Africa, and Australia having been replaced by Israel, Kenya, the Palestinian Territories, and Canada in the survey, and shifts in opinions in India and Nigeria.) In only 4 out of 25 countries was there a majority that favoured keeping U.S. and NATO military troops in Afghanistan - the U.S. (57%), Israel (59%), Kenya (56%), and Nigeria (52%).[10] Despite American calls for NATO allies to send more troops to Afghanistan, there was majority or plurality opposition to such action in every one of the NATO countries surveyed: Germany (63% opposition), France (62%), Poland (57%), Canada (55%), Britain (51%), Spain (50%), and Turkey (49%).[12]

In Europe, poll after poll in France, Germany, Britain, and other countries show that the European public want their troops to be pulled out and less money spent on the war in Afghanistan.[8][13][14][15]

In spite of her claims to the contrary, Big Red has not offered a single plausible argument in support of Australia's continued involvement in Afghanistan. Our politicians are so comfortable with the principle of supporting the US, that I believe that they not only are acting contrary to our national interest, but simply don't care..