by Jack
Just before the war began over 15 years ago, the head of the president’s economic council, George Lindsey, estimated that war could cost US taxpayers as high as $200 billion. A month later Donald Rumsfeld said, the true cost would probably be closer to $50 billion.
Then we invaded and we’ve been writing checks ever since. In 2013 the Congressional Research Service put a hard number on the war costs, $1.6 trillion. But, the longer view, that includes disability payments, interest, service contracts, etc., means it will cost many times that amount.
As of today, it is costing US taxpayers over $3M to keep a single US soldier in Afghanistan for 1 year.
How much is Afghanistan worth? Well, the GDP was only $35B in 2013. What strategic importance is it then? That’s even less, it has no strategic value.
In terms of actual cost we would have been better off to have hired every Taliban in the country at $50,000 a year. Just a little something to think about before we go off trying to do nation building again.
Agreed.
You mean we spent in excess of 1.6 trillion dollars and the Taliban are not even going to adopt our transgender bathroom policies???
Jack, if we are not to intervene all over the globe who will make the world safe for transgender bathroom policies? We must intervene even if it bankrupts us. The liberal interventionists will have it no other way.
I heard the other day the Noble Peace Prize award committee is considering asking Obama to give his award back since he now holds the record for being the president with the most number of years at war and in conflicts.
When Bush was president the news would every night announce the soldiers who were killed, the number killed that day and the total since the wars and conflicts began by country; Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Since Obama took office the media has been as silent as a church service. We don’t get the names of those killed nor do we see their pictures and hear about the loved ones they left alone and grieving in their small towns and cities all across the country.
The cost has been a terrible burden for our country to bear for the past almost eight years, but so too have the lives, limbs and minds of those we no long hear about.
According to this article last undated 2014, 575 soldiers died under Bush’s command and 1657 under Obama’s.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/obamavsbush
This 2015 detailed report from Brown University is the latest information I could find. It covers cost and civilian casualties too.
US and Other International Military Forces :
“At the peak in May 2011, the US had 100,000 uniformed troops deployed in Afghanistan. Since then, the US has gradually turned military operations over to Afghan National Security Forces (the army, air force and police). In early 2015, the US had 9,800 uniformed troops deployed in Afghanistan, with the expectation that the number of troops would continue to decline in early 2016 to about 4,900 and to a much smaller “embassy presence” of about 1,000 by January 2017.40 On 24 March 2015, President Obama said the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan would continue, but at a slower pace; 9,800 troops would remain through 2015.
From 2001 to April 2015, there were 2,357 US military fatalities with Operation Enduring Freedom and more than 20,000 service members wounded, including more than 770 major limb amputations.41 The number of US military fatalities and major injuries peaked with the US presence in 2011.
The US has worked with more than 25 coalition partners, including NATO. Of these US partners, the United Kingdom deployed the largest total number from 2001 to its final withdrawal of uniformed troops in October 2014. The majority of allied fatalities have been service members in the militaries of four countries: the UK had 453 fatalities; Canada had 158 fatalities; and France and Germany had 86 and 54 fatalities respectively as of early 2015.42 Thousands of additional allied service members have been seriously wounded.43
US and allied military forces have been supplemented in Afghanistan and Pakistan by private contractors who do everything from providing security to driving trucks and cooking meals. Some of these contractors have been injured and killed. The US Department of Labor reports 1,582 deaths of contractors in Afghanistan, these numbers reported by contracting companies themselves; the actual number is estimated to be much higher at around 3,400.44″
http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2015/direct-war-death-toll-iraq-afghanistan-and-pakistan-2001
I rest my case.
Peggy you’re right. Since Obama took office the media has been virtually silent on Obama’s wars. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism from January 2014 tells the tale. More of interest here.
January 2015, CNS News, “Under Obama: 75% of Casualties in 13-Year Afghan War; 55 More in 2014”:
Too bad there wasn’t a “sentinal” force in Iraq. Too bad this administration opted to stir up hornets nest in Libya, Syria, Egypt.
The peaceniks can;t stand on a platform of peace anymore. If they’re going to try to fake it they should at least go in with a plan to defeat the enemy instead of flying by the seat of their pants.
America should not go to war without the full support of the people AND the media and a bold plan for defeating the enemy and securing the peace.
Our nation is divided. Some believe, foolishly IMHO, that we can avoid war. Would that it were true. I’m sick of wasting lives for no return. I’m sick of hypocrites on the left who imagine they can create Utopia by the sheer “magnificence” of a “leader” like Obama. I’m sick of a media that undermines a president with a plan to weaken the will of the people and then covers for a man without a plan who creates even bigger problems through ineptitude and narcissism.
Sure wish America could magically end these wars. Unfortunately we need to clean up the mess. A stronger leader would help. A leader that offers a better alternative to war to young men would help. Whether we have such a person on the horizon is yet to be seen.
Too bad this administration tied the hands of our soldiers with it’s rules of engagements, which as reported was the cause for so many of our soldiers being killed and wounded.
Also, the increased use of private contractors being used in place of soldiers doesn’t add to the body and wounded count. They’re like under the table labor, off the books and not reported. Just like the contractors in Benghazi who died and survived they’d worked together many times before. They were all prior soldiers our military had trained, and our gov’t was willing to pay a private company for so it could say, “We have no combat boots on the ground.”
But have the geniuses who rule us left enough cash in the bank and gas in the tank for the upcoming war with the Rooskies and the Chinese?
I guess we will find out how wonderful the F-35 is. It better be pretty damn good because with it’s cost the Rooskies and Chinese could probably put up 50 of their top line planes for the cost of one F-35.
I just read the best summary of the Obama war years in, of all things, the Washington Post! Find the full article by Marc Thiessen here:
Goodness. They have yet to top the twin towers tally. For all the noise, you’d think the death toll was twenty, a hundred times this. And, of course, most of them are not Americans, or even Europeans. Mostly they’re Muslims.
So why can’t we let the Muslims curtail the spread?
Some pundit has proposed that, counting everything, our “war” in the Middle East is coming up on 38 years. That’s depressing. But you just go on ahead playing pawn to our military industrial complex … and … Vote for Hillary!!
I wasn’t kidding about the depressing. Maybe I’ll vote for Trump. He is the proverbial loose cannon. He might take them on without even realizing it!
But then they would have him killed.
“So why can’t we let the Muslims curtail the spread?”
Good idea…have we got twenty or thirty years or…did you have an Iranian nuke (final solution) in mind?
Good men like Zuhdi Jasser are working on reforms but that could take some time.
Trump seems tot have something for everyone…that’s why he’ll win.
“Trump seems to have something for everyone.”
Really? What does he have for Muslims, POWS, women, or the physically disabled, other than mockery and contempt?
“…that’s why he’ll win.”
Delusional.
You can’t do sardonic with these folk. It doesn’t really work. But I do it anyway.
The Iranians have nukes? Uh, no.
The Iranians are in league with ISIS? Uh, no.
Oh, heavens, she’s making with the paranoid fantasies again.
The Iranians are very close to having a nuke Libby, you know that…hence “have we got twenty or thirty years or…did you have an Iranian nuke (final solution) in mind?
“The Iranians are in league with ISIS?”
Says who?
They DO sponsor terrorism, though. And now they have all that lovely money that Obama released to them! The centrifuges are spinning as we speak.
“Oh, heavens, she’s making with the paranoid fantasies again. ”
Libbyspeak for, “I’m losing the argument.”
I am arguing that to let yourself be manipulated into perpetual warfare for profit (but not yours) is not a good idea. You counter this position with a non-existent nuclear threat. That is weak.
You could have countered with Pakistan, which does have nukes and is harboring the Taliban. But Pakistan is no existential threat to us, and the Pakistan-Afghanistan has very little to do with Islamism anyway.
Now, it should be dawning on you that this is more complicated than you thought, and positively too complicated for a simpleton like Trump to deal with. The profiteers will have him in their pocket. This is not what you want, trust me.