Recent Posts

• What have we learned from Iraq?
• Five Painful Lessons from the Iraq War
• Defense Dept is now the ONLY federal government agency to flunk its audit
• Ten Years in Afghanistan
• New Op-ed in Los Angeles Times by Bilmes and Stiglitz
• Recent commentary by the authors on the costs of 9/11
• Rising US death toll in Afghanistan: lessons from history
• Gloomy reports detail huge fraud, waste and corruption in contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan
• NY Times looks at rising cost of veterans care
• Brown University study estimates cost of wars at $3.7 Trillion since 2001
• Congress considers legislation that would require estimates of the true cost of war
• Stiglitz Bilmes new book chapter in the Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict
• Wars are one of the main reasons why the US debt is so high
• Reprint: Washington Post article on the true cost of war
• British withdraw from Iraq

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US response to 9/11 contributed to causes of current debt crisis

Linda Bilmes writes in the Christian Science Monitor that the costs of military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq account for well over one-quarter of the increase in US national debt since 2001. Financing wars and defense build-ups in this way is an historical aberration. Americans have typically paid for wars through higher taxes.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0908/US-response-to-9-11-contributed-to-causes-of-current-debt-crisis

The Price of Lost Chances

David Sanger of  The New York Times puts a stark price tag on the cost of reacting — and overreacting — to the Sept. 11 attacks. The New York Times provides an interactive graphic showing war costs, based on the work of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/cost-graphic.html

Other articles:

Posted:  Anthony Gregory writes about the cost of the wars in the Huffington Post:  9/9/11 08:29 PM ET http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-gregory/post-9-11-defense-spending_b_956346.html

August 2011 has been the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the conflict began nearly 10 years ago, with 66 US troops dead this month.  This includes the deadliest attack on US forces since the beginning of the conflict, when 30 US service members, including 17 Navy SEALS, were killed when Taliban forces shot down their helicopter.

It is worth recalling that Afghanistan has proved intractable for millennia.  Reviewing Peter Tomsen’s excellent new book, “The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers” , Jonas Blank writes in Foreign Policy Magazine:

” [Tomsen]  summarizes 3000 years of Afghan history, during which the Greeks, the Romans, the White and the Black Huns, the Mongols, the Moguls, the Persians, and the Turkmens all tried to dominate the land.  Every campaign eventually came to naught, either because the invader paid insufficient attention to local culture or because he sought to impose centralized control on ferociously independent tribes and clans.  The pattern was basically the same each time: a brutally competent conqueror sweeps through Afghanistan, wreaking enough carnage to terrify all his enemies into submission, but he soon finds himself mired in a swamp of tribal customs and feuds that he does not begin to comprehend. When he loses enough in men and gold, he retreats — not infrequently with fewer limbs than he had when he arrived”.

The escalating carnage of the past few months, which has included attacks on senior government officials, NATO troops, Afghan police and security forces, and civilians,  should raise serious questions about the US strategy in the country.   The surge in U.S. deaths comes as NATO is drawing down and handing over security control to national forces, and some 10,000 U.S. troops are scheduled to depart by year’s end.  But  U.S. military personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through the end of 2014. To date, the US “surge” in Afghanistan does not appear to have reduced violence or assisted in securing the country.   If we leave 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan for the next three years, what can we hope to achieve?  Or do we risk falling into the same quagmire that has ensnared empires for the past 3000 years?

The latest reports from those studying ongoing US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are gloomy in every respect.

Stuart Bowen, Special Inspector General for Iraq,  characterizes Iraq as “less safe than one year ago”. As Mr. Bowen points out,  June was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in more than two years.  Attacks on civilians and government military and police installations have also increased, including a number of deadly suicide attacks. Read Mr. Bowen’s comments: http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/07/30/iraq.us.report/index.html#

Meanwhile, the Pentagon confirms that that much of the money from the $2 billion US contract for transportation is being diverted to the Taliban.  Afghanistan trucking contractors are paying tens of millions of dollars annually to local warlords across Afghanistan in exchange for guarding their supply convoys.  Read more:  http://newsfeedresearcher.com/data/articles_n31/military-contracts-afghanistan.html

Also this week, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, issued an audit showing that an insurance program for injured contract workers in Afghanistan potentially lost tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars due to faulty billing methods.  The audit blames the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for failing to exercise strong oversight of its Defense Base Act workers compensation insurance program in Afghanistan, which led to higher insurance costs than necessary.  See: http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/PressRelease/PressRelease_20July2011_Audit11-15.pdf

FINALLY,  A bipartisan Congressional panel is expected to report that the U.S. has wasted or misspent $34 billion contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a draft report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq, which was established in 2008 to investigate the overall cost of a decade of battlefield contracting in America’s two big wars.  The report will be issued in the next few weeks. See: http://www.wartimecontracting.gov/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/us/28veterans.html

The Watson Institute at Brown University, funded by the Eisenhower Institute, has published a wide-ranging new study of Iraq and Afghanistan war costs that was compiled by some 20 academic contributors and led by Professors Catherine Lutz (Brown) and Neta Crawford (Boston University).  Contributors include Andrew Bacevich (BU) , Winslow Wheeler (Center on Defense Information), Anita Dancs (National Priorities Project), Ryan Edwards (Queens College, NYU) and many others.  Linda Bilmes wrote the section of the report that estimates the costs attributable to veterans medical care and disability benefits.

The study focused particularly on war costs that have occurred (or been incurred but not yet paid) during the past decade since September 11, 2011.  It features important new work on the casualties and costs to defense contractors, and the social impact on military families.   The section by Winslow Wheeler analyzes the increases in the defense base budget over the past decade.  Portions of the report focus on costs to Iraq and to the region.   The website includes a range of charts and tables.    The study covers overlapping, but somewhat different ground, from the Stiglitz-Bilmes study.

SEE: http://costsofwar.org/

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