OVER TWO DECADES, US’S GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR HAS TAKEN NEARLY 1 MILLION LIVES AND COST $8 TRILLION

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 US-LED COALITION TROOPS AND THEIR ALLIES

interCept

MURTAzA HUSSAIN

ThE Us-LED global war on terror has killed nearly 1 million people globally and cost more than $8 trillion 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 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 million 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 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 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.

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 de- partments 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 “upperbound” 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 in Afghanistan, which killed over a dozen U.s. service members and around 170 Afghans, 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.”

What does the Kremlin really think about Afghanistan?

THE KEY QUESTION NOW IS WHETHER MOSCOW IS EQUIPPED TO DEAL WITH A COMBUSTIBLE SITUATION ALONG ITS SOUTHERN FLANK THAT IS UNFOLDING FAR MORE QUICKLY THAN ANYONE MIGHT HAVE EXPECTED

Is Russia poised to fill the vacuum created by the chaotic U.s. departure from Afghanistan and enhance its clout in neighboring Central Asia? Don’t be so sure. Even though Moscow has publicly cheered the removal of U.s. and NATO troops from the region, Russian officials are sober-minded enough to appreciate the downsides of their departure.

The key question now is whether Moscow is equipped to deal with a combustible situation along its southern flank that is unfolding far more quickly than anyone might have expected. While Russian officials routinely assert that Moscow is rightfully the region’s chief security provider, it remains unclear whether Russia is up to that task, let alone whether it has the desire to do the job effectively.

Russia’s greatest asset and biggest advantage in a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan are low expectations. The Kremlin’s main goal will be to try to ensure that the Taliban prevents extremists from causing problems in neighboring Tajikistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Moscow will be prepared to absorb a few spillover cases of extremism—when Russian policymakers deem it in their interests, they have shown a willingness to claim that a terrorist attack either didn’t occur at all or wasn’t even a terrorist attack in the first place.

Russian leaders will face a much stickier challenge if the self-proclaimed Islamic state or other organized extremist groups begin once again to target Central Asia or Russia itself from Afghanistan. This is precisely the scenario that Russian policymakers have worried about and tried to avoid since 2001—and it is the reason why, until 2015, Russia played a quiet but significant role in supplying the U.s.-led coalition in Afghanistan by way of the so-called Northern Distribution Network, which allowed NATO to transport equipment and supplies through Russian territory.

Beyond purely defensive goals, the Russians want and expect little from Afghanistan. Their long-term task will be to maintain Moscow’s influence in Central Asia as the reemergence of the Taliban and religious fundamentalism potentially shake up the region’s balance of power and security dynamics. Russia is likely to find a healthy demand for the security assistance that it claims as its strong suit. To this end, the Russian military has already held joint training exercises multilaterally via the Collective security Treaty Organization (CsTO), a Russian-led military alliance of former soviet states, and bilaterally in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and even the ever-elusive Uzbekistan, which traditionally has resisted Russia’s Eurasian integration agenda.

NOT SUCH A HELPFUL FRIEND: Yet Russia’s track record as a security provider for CsTO allies and regional partners is surprisingly thin. Unlike the U.s. military, which has spent the past two decades working by, with, and through foreign partners on counterterrorism missions, the Russian military operates in a totally different fashion. Recent history across the former soviet space from Ukraine to Central Asia highlights that Moscow often is an unreliable, unpredictable, or ineffective partner. Russia stayed on the sidelines of the 2020 war and subsequent 2021 border confrontation between Azerbaijan and Moscow’s CsTO ally Armenia. When the government of Kyrgyzstan asked for help quelling ethnic riots in 2010, Moscow had no appetite for intervening. similar intercommunal violence persisted for days along the Kyrgyz-Tajik border in the spring of 2021, even as Russia’s minister of defense visited the Tajik capital for a meeting with counterparts from CsTO members. As if to underscore the ineffectiveness of that body, which Moscow created to reassert influence over its former internal empire, both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the opposing sides of that brief border war, are CsTO members.

Other players including China and Turkey are likely to be more active and influential than Russia will be in both Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia. Financially, Russia can’t compete with China in parts of Central Asia that need to develop local economies and create jobs—an essential task for the region’s long-term stability. Moscow will also want to stay on good terms with Pakistan, the Taliban’s main sponsor, without alienating India. Moscow almost certainly reckons, based on its experience in syria and elsewhere, that such balancing acts are manageable. But they are a far cry from the level of control the Kremlin enjoyed in Central Asia before the soviet collapse.

DESPITE ALL APPEARANCES, RUSSIA IS WORRIED: The bombast and gloating of Russian propaganda over the humiliation of the United states in Afghanistan are just that: bravado directed primarily at a domestic audience. At the official level, Moscow has no illusions about the threats resulting from the fall of former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and the government he led. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister sergei Lavrov, Defense Minister sergei shoigu, and other officials place little stock in Taliban assurances that Russian interests in Afghanistan will be protected. Instead, they point to the threat from uncontrolled weapons transfers to the Taliban, the threat of extremists among Afghan refugees crossing into Central Asia, and concerns about the drug trade. The majority of the opium and heroin consumed in Russia comes from Afghanistan through Central Asia, creating a large public health problem.

In at least one respect, the Kremlin and its media propagandists reinforce each other’s messages: if security threats to Central Asia or Russia arise out of the Taliban takeover, they will be the fault of the United states. By preassigning blame, the Kremlin is trying to give itself an excuse should it have to resort to cross-border strikes inside Afghanistan itself.

As one Russian expert in the post-soviet states has suggested, Russian officials’ repeated denials that they intend to send troops to Afghanistan or resort to using force in the country raise suspicions that precisely such a possibility—with all the unwelcome comparisons to the soviets’ past misadventure in Afghanistan—weighs heavily on their minds. Moscow has its own sad and humiliating history in the country, and the Russian people have not forgotten it.

Paul Stronski is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Russia and Eurasia Program, where his research focuses on the relationship between Russia and neighbouring countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus.