Counting the Cost – The US “War on Terror”

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The Cost of the “War on Terror”
by Manlio Dinucci

What is the economic cost of the “war on terror” that the US launched ten years ago? The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University (New York) has worked it out [1]. The invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Irak in 2003 together with the successive extension of military operations in Pakistan entailed an estimated cost of 4 trillion dollars.

In order to have an idea of what it represents, one need only think that it is the equivalent of three centuries of Afghanistan’s GNP and one and a half in that of Iraq’s.

The Institute’s team of over twenty researchers focused above all on direct military spending, constituted by the sums allocated for the war added by Congress to the Pentagon budget: 2 trillion dollars. That amount was not available in the public coffers. It was thus borrowed from banks and international organisations, which compelled the federal government to pay outrageously high interest (with taxpayer money): some 200 billion dollars in ten years. An additional 74 billion dollars were spent, under the guise of extraordinary aid, to back the puppet regimes brought to power in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, the “war against terrorism” ran up a bill of some 400 billion dollars, spent on strengthening “homeland security”. To these expenses must be added the costs for assistance to the wounded and disabled by war: running at 32 billion dollars so far. This is only the tip of the iceberg: the veterans claiming compensation for injuries and disabilities are more than one million. It has been estimated that, in 30-40 years, their cost will jump from 600 billion to 1 trillion dollars. …more