Rahmat Gul/AP Photo
A U.S. soldier in the Tagab district of Kapisa province, north of Kabul, Afghanistan, September 2007
The U.S. is finally out of Afghanistan and nearly out of Iraq. The endgame in Afghanistan was chaotic and sloppy, probably inevitably so, given the short time frame, the absence of any civilian withdrawal planning before the Biden White House came into office on January 20, and the delays in confirming administration nominees at the State Department.
The look-back starts now. Not so much about whether the policy of staying or going was right or whether withdrawal ensures a new safe haven in Afghanistan for terrorist groups. The look-back needs to answer the question of what have been the costs of the global war on terror unleashed by the United States after 9/11.
And the costs are enormous. They are budgetary and fiscal. They are human, both at home and abroad. They are political, in the perhaps irreversible damage they have done to our political systems and institutions here at home. The global effort has had a serious impact on accelerating the decline of U.S. credibility and power in the international system. And the costs are to our own sense of whether we are a moral country.
In other words, the costs this country has paid for its diversion into counterterrorism since 2001 have been monumental. The only benefit: There has not been a significant foreign terrorist attack on the U.S. since 9/11. The few that have occurred have been fairly solo and small in impact, compared to the significant attacks by homegrown terrorists, largely from the burgeoning right-wing terrorist organizations rising in this country, culminating in the insurrection and assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. There is no other measurable benefit from the war.
The costs this country has paid for its diversion into counterterrorism since 2001 have been monumental.
A small gain, at a major price. The budgetary and fiscal costs have been the focus of analysis. Because the federal government does not try to estimate the total budgetary costs of the war on terrorist organizations, it has fallen to other outside organizations to make the effort. For a time, Amy Belasco of the Congressional Research Service tried to calculate the costs, reporting them regularly to Congress. CRS stopped producing these reports several years ago.
Taking up the slack, an outside research group, the Costs of War Project at Brown University, has produced regular reports, using public data from a variety of sources. The latest estimate from the project says the costs from 2001 to 2022 have been and will be $8 trillion. This includes $3.2 trillion in Defense and State Department spending directly related to the wars, $1.1 trillion in Homeland Security spending related to counterterrorism, $465 billion in medical and disability spending for returning veterans through 2022, and $1.1 trillion in debt servicing to cover federal borrowing related to the war, making it $5.84 trillion already spent.
The Brown study estimates that future medical and disability spending for veterans, benefits which must be spent, will add $2.2 trillion to this total by 2050.
That’s the fiscal cost. And it carries opportunity costs. What might we have done with those funds had they been appropriated for climate change, reforming the immigration system, infrastructure, education, or our chaotic health system? Or even what might have happened if we did not spend the funds at all, with lower federal deficits as a result. The economic payoff of the alternatives would have been much greater.
Some people stop there; money is money; contractors benefited, wage-earners who worked for them benefited. Full stop. Move on.
Not so fast. The costs of this war go much deeper. Start with the human costs. The Brown project estimates that across all counterterror operations, 800,000 people have paid with their lives. That includes more than 7,000 Americans in uniform. It includes a very conservative estimate of 335,000 civilian lives in the countries where U.S. forces have been operation—completely innocent lives. It includes 5,000 contractor employees of the U.S. military and assistance agencies, whose families receive no benefits. It includes an estimated 73,000 Afghan police and military.
It does not include the millions who have fled violence, losing their homes and livelihoods. Streaming into neighboring countries, causing further suffering and disruption. It does not include the death toll, largely in Europe (Madrid, Paris, London) from terrorist attacks in the tit-for-tat nature of the war. It does not include the tens of thousands who left the U.S. military with physical and emotional scars—limbs lost, PTSD, brain injuries, loss of sight or hearing. An estimated 1.8 million veterans are eligible for disability payments courtesy of the war.
The trail of human costs runs from American families who lost parents or siblings to the fight, or live with disability at home for the rest of their lives, to the Iraqi and Afghan families who suffer the same fate with far less support around them.
A pattern of persistent lying by officials in government is the dry rot that undermines public credibility in government statements and programs more widely.
And the legacy of costs goes beyond the fiscal and human. There is the political price we pay as a country. The Patriot Act opened the opportunity for an assault on Americans’ civil liberties, not just for our Islamic citizens, but for Americans more widely, whose communications were scrutinized, whose meetings were infiltrated, whose free expression was chilled. In an atmosphere of manipulated fear, much damage can be and has been done.
The war on terrorists had a role in the decline in the credibility of the government. As the Washington Post series on Afghanistan policymaking in Washington amply demonstrated, public officials were routinely advertising progress in the war while internally acknowledging that things were not going well. Journalist Craig Whitlock has amplified this message in his book on the Afghanistan Papers.
At the same time as the policymakers, including such figures as retired Gen. David Petraeus, were seeing light at the end of the tunnel, right in plain sight John Sopko and the staff of the Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) were amply demonstrating, on the public record, that the war in Afghanistan was going south, American policy was failing, the Afghan military was not up to it, and corruption was rampant in the Karzai and Ghani regimes. Apparently, nobody in the Obama administration was listening; they decided not to even focus on the corruption endemic in the Ghani government, corruption that was at the heart of the collapse in August 2021. Even the media gave SIGAR’s findings one day of attention and moved on.
A pattern of persistent lying by officials in government is the dry rot that undermines public credibility in government statements and programs more widely. Government as a lying enemy is a view now widespread in America. It re-enforces the agenda of the far right and Fox News that government cannot be trusted. It is fuel that lights the first flare-ups of right-wing activism, including the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
And the rot goes deeper. A plethora of surplus military equipment due to the withdrawal from Iraq and, eventually, Afghanistan, filtered out of the Pentagon under the notorious 1033 program, transferred to police departments across the country. The militarization of policing, of which this has been a critical part, exacerbated already sizable racial tensions in America as cops turned into soldiers. We now pay the price of the war culture that the war on terror set loose in America. It is a heavy price.
And the beat goes on. There has been a substantial foreign-policy price paid by the American decision to go after terrorist organizations. The invasion of Afghanistan, and especially that of Iraq, seriously destabilized a region that was already a powder keg waiting to explode. The decision to try “nation building” in both countries was a disaster. America cannot deliver “government in a box” to another culture and country. The effort to do so seriously distorted the mission of a military that cannot deliver governance, economic development, and social change, let alone security in an occupied country. It distorted the mission of too many USAID and State Department personnel, who lacked the resources and ability to deliver the same. And it tolerated a corruption that many outside the U.S. see as intolerable.
Failure in both missions had, naturally, a deeply negative impact on the world’s view of U.S. competence and judgment. While some NATO allies went along, there were continuing doubts about the mission and the likely outcome right up to the end. America ended up looking like an inept, interventionist bully, the worst possible combination, while stimulating more terrorists with its efforts to defeat terrorism.
Meanwhile, as America “intervened,” power was rebalancing in the region and throughout the globe. The tectonic shift in power relations is by now clear; it has been going on for some time. Washington’s attention was not focused on the inevitable rise of China, the ability of Putin to play a weak hand well, and the major rebalancing going on in the Middle East. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel became the regional power brokers as America’s missions failed.
Failure in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Syria demonstrates that the U.S. is no longer “exceptional,” no longer the “indispensable nation,” and must learn to play in a new global sandbox where power is redistributed. America is not ready for this change, not even now, as witnessed by the president’s commitment to pursue terrorists around the globe. He is doubling down on failure, for which U.S. foreign policy and credibility will pay the price.
Finally, there is the moral price. An interventionist bully has no moral standing. For decades now, the foreign-policy elite has parroted the prominent international relations scholar Joe Nye’s assertion that America’s soft power—its culture, values, business acumen, products, movies, citizen exchanges—was a key ingredient to its international standing, power, and presumed leadership. Collateral damage from drone attacks undermines that message. Ineffectual policy undermines the message. Lying undermines the message. The disintegration of civility, internal conflict, racist attacks, continuing economic inequality, the erosion of American democracy all eradicate the validity of that message.
Not all these failures and defects are the result of the war against terrorists. But that war has contributed to the erosion of values once thought to be part of America’s standing in the world. The moral compass, if it ever existed, is spinning aimlessly.
The price of the war on terror has been high; the benefits virtually nil. A reassessment of ourselves, our nation, and our role must go deeper than anyone has yet contemplated.
