If you want to visualise the financial cost of the war on terror since 11 September 2001, imagine $2 trillion when a dollar is put on top of a dollar reaching far into outer space. Stephanie Savell The first $1 trillion would be 67 miles high, further than the distance to outer space from the planet's surface and a lot further than US billionaire Elon Musk travelled in his space rocket a few months ago. Such shocking images are what Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Cost of War Project and an anthropologist at Brown University in the US, and her colleagues are trying to get through to Americans and the international community about the cost of the war on terror. US President Joe Biden in a speech to announce the end of the war in Afghanistan cited the figures reached by the Cost of War Project, and not the figures of the US department of defence, when explaining his decision to withdraw US troops from the country. "More than $2 trillion has been spent on the war in Afghanistan, and Brown University researchers have estimated that this means more than $300 million was spent daily for 20 years," he said. In an exclusive interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Savell said that the two figures of $2 trillion and $300 million were taken by Biden from their Project's assessments of the cost of the war and not from official Pentagon figures that put the cost of the war in Afghanistan at $1 trillion, or about 50 per cent lower than the Cost of War researchers. Savell said that the mention of the $2 trillion figure in an official speech by the US president was a "great victory" for the project's work, explaining that the goal from the beginning was to change the public debate in the US and not to accept the official figures as there is a "bigger story" that needs to be told. This relates not only to the heavy financial cost of the war, but also to its grave human cost. As a direct result of the post-9/11 wars, about one million people have been killed and another 38 million people displaced. The countries that have suffered the most have been Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen, but this suffering is impossible to convert into definite numbers in terms of its human and material costs. Estimates will certainly be less than the real numbers. Counting the number of people who have died as a result of rockets, bombs, bullets, car bombs and sectarian violence, says Savell, does not include all the after-effects of the war. In Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, people have lost their communities, their jobs and their means of earning a living, beginning waves of mass displacement. Because wars often involve the bombing of infrastructure such as sewage systems, water treatment facilities, hospitals, roads and bridges, such systems in Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan have been largely destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, not due to missile strikes or car bombs, but rather because of polluted water and a lack of food or healthcare. The UN has estimated that for every direct death post-9/11, at least three people have died indirectly as a result of the war. In other words, the most realistic number of victims of the war on terror is about 2,787,000 people.
President Biden has cited your work in the Cost of War Project to support his argument for ending the US military presence in Afghanistan. How do you feel about that, taking into account the fact that Biden in the past supported the wars in Iraq, Syria and Libya? President Biden quoted us because the Pentagon estimates that the war in Afghanistan has cost close to $1 trillion. We say that we have to take a broader view if we are going to talk about even just the economic costs of the war. We have to think about the fact that there are other expenses in a war, like medical care for US veterans when they come back home. There's interest on borrowing because the wars have been paid for through borrowing and debt. You have to think about the fact that there are homeland security costs for preventing and countering terrorism on United States soil. Also, you have to think about the fact that the war on terror has increased the Pentagon's annual budget to $700 billion a year. Biden said there's a research group at Brown University that says that the cost of the Afghanistan war is $2 trillion (we say the cost is $2.3 trillion actually). We are very glad that Biden quoted our figure because it is a signal that these wars have cost more than just what the defence department said. Yes, Biden has a very mixed track record with his support of the wars to begin with, but he is absolutely making the right decision to end the US engagement in Afghanistan. Obviously, the transition period is coming with some heavy cost itself, but it is a first step, and there's so much more that needs to be done to truly end US military violence in Afghanistan and different parts of the world. So, we see this as a first step, and there's still so much more work to be done to hold the government accountable.
How did the idea come about to take this comprehensive approach when looking at the real cost of war? The Cost of War Project was initiated by Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford, both of whom remain co-directors of the project. I am the third co-director since 2016. The project was founded 10 years ago to bridge the gap in media coverage, especially US media coverage, of wars. There is very limited and very poor discussion in the US media about the true cost of the wars, and we wanted to provide a broader view. The goal of the project is to prompt the American public as well as decision-makers to ask big and difficult questions about whether these high costs of war are worth paying and what other options are available.
In the report there are devastating figures regarding human casualties, the number of displaced people, and the scale of the US counterterrorism operations. How did you and your team conclude these figures? That's right – we estimate the human cost at more than 900,000 people, most of them civilians, and the displaced people at around 38 million, while US counterterrorism activities are taking place in over some 85 countries. At the beginning of the project, I said to myself, well, here are maybe seven or eight countries. But the map expanded and expanded. I think it's like an octopus, like tentacles stretching all over the world. The activities range from active warfare against extremists and militants to training and assistance. I was the lead researcher behind that particular report on 85 countries. And what we did was my research team put together a combination of US government sources and investigative journalism. The US government is not always completely transparent about counterterrorism activities. And so oftentimes the only way that information comes to light is when something terrible happens, like a US service member is killed, and then a reporter will go to investigate. For example, in Kenya in 2020 there was a firefight between members of Al-Shabaab at a US military base at the Manda Bay Airfield, and there was a US service member who was killed alongside the two US contractors who were killed. The US media found out and reported on it. That is the kind of way that we put together various pieces of information. In the vast majority of the 85 countries, in 79 of them, the US is doing training and assistance in counterterrorism, so helping other countries' security forces to fight terrorism in their countries. But oftentimes this is not the innocuous help that it may sound like at first, because often the US is providing funding and equipment and military training for countries who are using counterterrorism as an excuse or justification for cracking down on political opponents or other kinds of insurgents, and so it's become a way that intensifies different kinds of conflicts around the world rather than helping [to end them]. It hurts rather than helps. Our military approach to the problem of counterterrorism is incredibly counterproductive because US violence and other countries' government violence against groups of their own people inevitably leads to backlash and retaliation and anger and resentment, and that's been one of the biggest recruiting devices for a lot of militant groups around the world.
You said it is impossible to know the exact number of civilian casualties of the war on terror and the actual number of casualties could be much higher than your estimate of 929,000. In Scotland, the authorities have opened an investigation into the increasing numbers of young refugees from Somalia and Afghanistan who have committed suicide because of the difficulty of adapting to life in exile. Is this confirmation that it is difficult to count the number of civilian casualties? That's horrible. What a horrible story. There are so many human costs, so many tragic stories like that. It is the reverberating effects of the war; it will be felt for decades to come. People who live in war zones are really the ones who will bear the brunt of the US-led wars. That is where wars cause the most devastation, and unfortunately Americans are not always aware of that.
The US administration has implied that it will not now deploy soldiers on the ground and will use surgical strikes with drones in its fight against terrorism. Does that give you some relief? No, no relief at all. It is horrible. The doubling down on the drone strategy is awful because it is a way of minimising the effect on US service members, but its effect on civilians around the world is horrible. Drone strikes kill civilians, and as I said they are counterproductive because that kind of violence leads people to join militant groups. So, that's what I'm talking about when I say we need to continue to hold the US government accountable because it's not just drone strikes that is problematic; it's also all kinds of shadowy operations like Special Forces operations, training, arms sales and different mechanisms by which the US is going to continue the post 9 September wars where counterterrorism efforts are going to just take different shapes rather than end. In Afghanistan, the CIA is training and equipping militia groups to continue fighting Islamic State in Afghanistan. There are all of these defence contracting companies that are still on the ground. So, there are lots of shadowy ways in which this war is continuing.
In your work you talk about the lasting effect of the wars on inter-ethnic and sectarian relations and infrastructure like water, the sewage system, and hospitals in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. How has 20 years of war affected local communities in the Middle East? It is difficult to know. I think there are people pushing for things like truth commissions and reparations, but there's unfortunately been a lot of waste, fraud and abuse in those. I personally think that the US has a great responsibility to begin to address and repair some of the damage. But I am not the one in charge. I wish our politicians would take that responsibility on, but I'm not optimistic. One of America's big myths is focusing on the American soldiers who died during the wars, as if that's all the human cost, but what war really means is that civilians in conflict zones die or endure endless suffering and live with trauma for the rest of their lives. Women miscarry, children suffer from birth defects due to environmental pollution, women suffer the trauma of losing their husbands and their male children after becoming drug addicts or suffering from psychological problems. These are the myriad reverberating effects of war. During the post-9/11 wars, 387,000 civilians died. These are astronomical numbers. I think they really prompt us to ask the question that the Cost of War Project is trying to ask: is the war on terror worth it?
You talked about the huge increase in the Pentagon's budget due to the war on terror. Meanwhile, there is a lack of funding for infrastructure, health services and education. Do you think this has contributed to the rise of far-right ideas in American politics? In other words, do you think there is a relationship between the state of American democracy and military intervention? Absolutely, and I think that's such a good insight. Most Americans don't realise, but the state of being at war for the past 20 years has eroded the quality of American democracy, and it has prevented the US, as you are saying, from investing in domestic priorities that would improve the lives of people. Over 50 per cent of the US federal discretionary budget every year is spent on military related expenses, and it is growing. So, it's squeezing out federal spending on everything else. Also, there are things like increased surveillance and increased police militarisation because a lot of the war equipment and war veterans who have come home to police departments are by-products of the war on terror. I think the racialised logics of the post 9/11 wars in the form of discrimination against black and brown and Muslim people are also clear. So, the state of war is bad for Americans and for American democracy, and most people just aren't aware of that.
One of the aims of your work is to raise awareness among the American public about the cost of wars and the price of interventions. Do you notice any change in the American attitude to military interventions? What is encouraging to me is that amongst younger people in the US polling shows that they do not approve of aggressive US military interventions abroad or what people call the "forever wars". The majority of the American public is not in favour of war. So, our best hope, I think, is in educating people, and that is what we try to do and push people to think critically about US militarism. I hope that this younger generation can turn the tide on some of these things. I'm not very optimistic because I think that there are a lot of business interests in keeping the system the way it is. The defence contracting companies have a really big role to play in lobbying the US government, and there are a lot of, unfortunately, incentives for Congresspeople to maintain the status quo. But there is a very big peace movement in the United States, and there's a very big segment of the population that is against this kind of foreign policy. I really hope that we will be able to gain more influence in the years ahead. *A version of this article appears in print in the 16 September, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
