Cost of Afghanistan war proves to be painful, too
A tallying of the financial costs is not the only lens — or the most important one — for viewing our nation-building project in Afghanistan and its aftermath. While a Smart Money approach is not the only way to analyze it, it’s certainly a valid means of doing so.
What was the financial cost of the Afghanistan war? Government and academic reports shed some light on that.
Special inspectors general are set up by Congress to track large financial expenditures. Their mission is to reduce waste, fraud and abuse. This month, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released “Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction.”
The 140-page report tallies a cost of $148 billion for 20 years of Afghanistan reconstruction. It also quotes Department of Defense expenditures of $837 billion for war-making. The combined price tag of nearly $1 trillion to utterly break then attempt to rebuild Afghanistan is horrifying. One of the many lessons the report highlights is that the U.S. frequently spent money as quickly as possible in efforts to declare short-term success without a plan for the long term — and the consequences be damned. The result was unsustainable infrastructure, corruption and very little to show for massive expenditures. The world has just witnessed the ineffectiveness of the $83 billion spent to build the Afghan armed forces, for example.
Of course, this simple accounting very likely undercounts the cost of the Afghanistan conflict in financial terms. Another
report published this month adds to the warmaking and nation-building cost total by estimating the next three decades’ worth of human services costs for U.S. veterans who served there.
Linda Bilmes is a Harvard professor who estimates the future costs of conflicts. In this month’s report, she updates the expected costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Bilmes writes: “The majority of the costs associated with caring for post-9/11 veterans has not yet been paid and will continue to accrue long into the future.”
The total bill for veterans care will be between $2.2 trillion and $2.5 trillion over the next 30 years, she says. Bilmes combines costs for both Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, but we could use these combined estimates to intuit that, at the very least, another trillion will be owed for the Afghanistan conflict.
Forty percent of veterans since 9/11 have qualified for some form of disability. Of those, nearly 60 percent have a disability rating of 60 percent or more, meaning future expenses for care will be high compared to previous wars and will continue climbing in the future.
The same report estimates Veterans Administration disability payments alone — not counting medical costs or general VA administrative costs — will add up to between $1.2 and $1.5 trillion by 2050. The medical costs will total about $900 billion.
The price paid in human terms — pain and suffering — is obviously even higher. But I don’t have a good way of measuring or expressing that except to acknowledge it.
Images from the lightning-fast takeover by the Taliban were horrible for many reasons. One was that we can’t be fooled into thinking the high price paid by soldiers and taxpayers actually got us, or the Afghan people, good results. We paid and paid and paid, and got nothing. Now, we will keep paying for decades.
The Biden administration requested an additional $3 billion in the coming year for further Afghanistan reconstruction despite the troop withdrawal. The swift Taliban takeover presumably puts that request in doubt.
When it began, and even as it continued past the one-decade mark, Afghanistan was supposedly “the good war” compared with Iraq, which was launched on false pretenses. The Taliban were clearly bad. They gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden. We had good democratic and humanitarian intentions for rebuilding the country. The stunning reversal this month exposed our inability to remake a country in an image that pleases us. History will look at the result and force a tough reconsideration of a “good war.”
After spending our blood and treasure in overseas multidecade military engagements — with a side helping of humanitarian assistance — can we not learn from the past?
In 1776, two foundational documents of the United States were published: the Declaration of Independence by Virginian Thomas Jefferson and “The Wealth of Nations” by Scotsman Adam Smith. A third book published that same year, “The History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire” by Englishman Edward Gibbon, instilled in people on both sides of the Atlantic the true idea that empires are fragile.
Gibbon taught that wars at the barbarian fringe of the empire depleted the Roman treasury, hollowing out the core of the successful society upon which the empire was built. Please note: I am not calling the Afghan people barbarians, I am making a historical analogue with Gibbon’s original thesis, which referenced barbarians.
Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” expanded on Gibbon, tracing the life cycle of empires from economic rise to ultimate financial ruin through excessive military expenditure in the name of maintaining the imperial peace.
Recent events will give future historians plenty of evidence for the continuity of this view.
In 2001, U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee offered the sole dissenting vote in Congress on going to war in Afghanistan. For a wide variety of reasons — including financial — let’s hope for more courage from more leaders when the next overseas military adventure beckons.