20 Years Later: The True Costs of our Post-9/11 Wars

[Music] hello i am congresswoman barbara lee and i represent california's beautiful 13th congressional district thank you to the costs of war project for inviting me to join you for this very important conversation today yes we are all focused on afghanistan just last week we lost 13 united states service members and many afghan allies and children as a result of a terrorist attack it's heartbreaking and my prayers and condolences are with their loved ones and all of those impacted it's crucial that we continue our evacuation efforts and provide humanitarian support to the people of afghanistan it is also critical that we understand how we got to this point as well as the true financial and human costs of the past 20 years of war now three days after 9 11 when congress voted to authorize military force in response of course you know i could not vote for this i voted no because i fear the consequences of giving the president any president open-ended power to use military force anywhere against anyone or any nation those consequences have been devastating trillions of dollars and almost one million people killed directly as a result of the post-9 11 wars i would like to acknowledge the important work costs of war is doing to document the unacknowledged costs of our post-9 11 wars and how important this research is in our fight to end forever wars this includes my bill to cut 350 billion dollars from the pentagon's budget in order to reinvest in human needs which your research cites thank you again to the researchers advocates and everyone here today for all of your very great work keep up the fight let's fight for peace and justice and security um i'm murtaza hussain i'm a national security reporter for the intercept and i'm your moderator for this event this morning i've been reported for about eight nine years for the intercept and much of my focus of coverage has been on the cost of wars on the ground in the human impact political impact uh devastation to communities uh impacts on veterans in the united states and this event are coming nearly 20 years after 9 11 and the beginning of the post-9 11 forever war conflicts is an attempt to recap and gain some sort of accounting of the overall costs both economic and human of these conflicts this live stream is hosted by the cost of war project housed at brown university's watson institute and boston university party center the project was launched over 10 years ago by group scholars and experts to document the unacknowledged costs of the post-9 11 wars in afghanistan iraq and elsewhere this event is to present and discuss the project's updated estimates of the true budgetary and human costs of the post-911 wars and grapple with the broader impact of the past 20 years of war for those listening and watching i encourage you to hit retweet and share if you're on facebook or twitter please spread this event widely it's what uh coming live and uh available for people to comment and uh make uh give questions later on i think it's very very important and i'm glad we're doing this event today that's obviously reaching a turning point in the 911 wars not just the 20 years after the attacks initially and the events that came after but of course there are great uh grave events taking place in afghanistan today which really put a exclamation point on exactly how dismal these conflicts were how terrible the impacts have been on afghans and americans and iraqis and others who suffered through them and finally how little we've actually gotten in exchange for the massive cost we've laid out both economically and in terms of loss of life both america and otherwise since these wars began and i want to shift then to uh dr nita crawford who will give a presentation on the updated estimates on the 20 years of cost of war brown university's cost of war project has done previous reports giving their status updates on how much the divorce cost so far how many people have been killed so far directly by violence but now 20 years nearly to the date of 9 11 we have updated figures which uh dr crawford is ready to present right now thank you mutaza i appreciate your work anniversaries recall beginnings a year from now we will likely be recalling the fall of afghanistan and the evacuation of 123 000 people as ralph ellison wrote the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead he was perhaps echoing t.s eliot's phrase what we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning the end is where we start from on 9 11 the beginning and in the days and weeks after about 3 000 people were killed and many thousands more were injured as a direct consequence of the al-qaeda attack many still suffer from the smoke they inhaled when they rushed to help and the trauma that they experienced as the witnesses and family members of those who were harmed blood and treasure it often seems easier to focus on one or two facts sometimes in isolation as a stand-in for the whole like those figures of speech what poets call synecdoche where an aspect of a thing a part is used to represent the entirety of something much more complex so presidents say blood and treasure that the cost of war is the amount of money that congress authorized the pentagon or the number of u.s soldiers who died become a stand-in for the human toll the blood and treasure but words fail us in grief numbers mystify rather than edify when they become very large no single number or set of numbers can convey the reality of 9 11 or the events that follow the world we have made the paths we chose the processes we put in place the things we did not do because we were at war but we can say a few things after 20 years that can help us see through the fog of war of preparing for war of the aftermath of war to understand its far-reaching costs and consequences when congress passed the authorization for the use of military force on the 18th of september 2001 just a few days after the al-qaeda attack the world trade center was still burning and the world was uncertain about the death toll many americans were afraid and angry fellow citizens were suddenly suspect because of their accents their faith and their scars many wanted revenge and were convinced that the best way to prevent a future attack was to go abroad and get them before they got us we were also convinced that we needed better security in the homeland to screen every airline passenger and inspect every container that entered the country to increase electronic surveillance and convinced that we even needed to restrict our speech lest it seem unpatriotic the cost of war project which began publishing reports more than a decade dozens of experts who have contributed analyses many papers that have given us focused snapshots on the paths we took and their consequences these scholars and experts have shown us that global war the global war on terror has been truly global as we can see from the map produced by dr stephanie savelle of the cost of war project the work she did with others found that there were counter-terror operations and more in dozens of countries involving combat military exercises training and assistance the project is releasing information today part of a two years long effort to mark the 20 years of war since 9 11. today we're updating our estimate of the long-term cost of the post-9 11 wars in terms of lives lost money already spent and what the us is likely to spend in the future but the wars are more than locations on a map and numbers the war on terror has taken a great toll in human life afghanistan and iraq are the major war zones of course but hundreds of thousands have been killed in pakistan syria yemen and other places where the us has been fighting for example all told about 176 000 people have been killed in afghanistan since 2001 by all parties and another 67 000 pac in pakistan in related fighting in afghanistan civilians are about a quarter of those killed in pakistan more than a third of those killed have been civilians the war in iraq has taken more than 275 000 lives and since late 2014 the war in syria has killed almost as many people in iraq about two-thirds of those who are killed are civilians but these numbers are estimates counting civilians killed in such large numbers it is both difficult and controversial the people in the war zones often say that those killed were counted as militants but they were actually children and family members moreover while our reports focused on the civilians killed by bombs bullets fire and shrapnel we've not been tracking indirect death that is the people who die because they lack safe access to drinking water medical care or food because the war has made the farming that they need to do to live much more difficult or even impossible we don't count indirect death because is because it is too difficult to estimate costs also include the count of afghan and iraqi military and police and militants killed and injured but those are sometimes themselves fudged or even omitted because people don't want to admit how many people were killed on their side and they may not know how many killed were on the other side in a measure of our concern we do know a very precise number of how many american military have been killed in the post-9 11 war zones the pentagon updated their figures yesterday to 2 325 people killed in afghanistan since the war zone in the in that war zone since the war began 130 people have been killed in other war zones related to that another 4598 have been killed in operations in iraq the analysis of jason davidson for the project shows that u.s allies canada and the uk suffered a higher percentage of fatalities than the us did in afghanistan the numbers would kill would be much higher but the pentagon has made enormous strides with battlefield medicine more than 50 000 service members have been wounded in the post-9 11 wars but because of advances in battlefield medicine survivability has increased to more than 90 percent on the other hand the work of ben suit for the project shows that pentagon and va the va have done much less well at county soldiers and veteran suicides suit found that 30 000 active duty and veterans have taken their lives post-9 11 war veterans but there's not just blood the work of david vine and his colleagues have shown that many millions have been displaced pushed out of their homes by war refugees inside their own countries or outside them moving from afghanistan and pakistan to iran europe the united states moving from iraq to syria from syria to lebanon fleeing somalia and libya hoping to find peace and safety if we focus now on treasure it is possible to estimate that what the federal government has or is likely to spend through fy 2022 and the future costs of care for veterans not including the cost for state and local governments of homeland security for the moment the costs break out into pentagon war spending for the counter-terror wars related dod spending driven by war that is increases to the pentagon's base budget there's homeland security spending related to counterterrorism spending by the state department and usaid and the cost of veterans care to date and then of course there's the future costs of veterans care medical care and disability and finally there's interest on the borrowing that occurred because the us never raised taxes or encouraged people to buy war bonds in large numbers thus while the u.s was in budget surplus in two thousand war one i'm sorry in 2001 we've gone into budget deficit since then transparency on these numbers waxes and wanes the dod has never passed an audit for some years homeland security spending on counterterrorism has not been explained clearly by the office of management and budget or by dhs one notable trend however has been the growth in the entire pentagon budget while war spending has increased and decreased the base military budget has grown in nearly every year of the last 20 every year but one this includes spending that was in part driven by war for instance the large pay increases given to troops in the immediate aftermath of 9 11 the increased cost of their health care over the last 20 years which have gone up about 20 percent bonuses for enlistment and reenlistment and the purchase of new weapons and the maintenance of bases as well that might not otherwise have been bought or maintained these are enormous costs nearly six trillion already spent and then there's future spending for veterans professor linda bilmus is here and i'll let her explain why i care for veterans in coming years but that is not all the work of heidi peltier for the project shows that military spending is not as productive as other forms of spending for every million dollars spent on the military it could have provided many more jobs in health care education and construction further peltier shows that large chunks of military spending now go to contractors who make high profits and don't always at least according to the special inspectors of afghanistan and iraq reconstruction do high quality work sometimes the things that they promise are are not even built finally there is an enormous environmental toll the wars have led to deforestation as people on the mur on the move search for food have devastated wildlife and the wars have increased u.s military greenhouse gas emissions those emissions were declining at the end of the cold war and declined significantly then as you can see from this chart i don't know if you can actually see from the chart but the uptick in the middle is the increase following the onset of the post-9 11 wars and the emissions track u.s operations in the war zones so they go up and down depending on what's going on in the war zones so those emissions are larger in any one year than many countries pentagon emissions for example last year were about the size of the entire missions of the country of denmark one of the united states allies in afghanistan these emissions will be in the atmosphere for many years long after these wars have ended and the last veterans and survivors of these wars have died the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead you're muted oh apologies uh thank you dr crawford the very sobering statistics and framing with this event in this report uh just to add dr crawford is the author of accountability for killing moral responsibility for collateral damage in america's post 9 11 wars it's an excellent book i highly recommend checking it out and i really appreciate uh dr crawford and others in the crossovers project as a reporter trying to put some context and uh give some sort of big picture perspective of events that as reporters and even as people trying to experience these conflicts and document them they seem so massive and the scope of them is so profound that it's very difficult to get that large perspective so reports like this and studies like this and events like this which touch upon other aspects of the climate impact and the impact of migration forced migration to violence uh they provide some way of uh putting a frame on events which are just so large and so uh daunting that uh it's impossible for any individual to do otherwise so with that uh you know we will get into a panel discussion we have several excellent panelists and for those listening or watching on the live stream i encourage you to tweet or email questions for dr crawford another panelist and they'll be answered later in the live stream so our first panelist is dr linda domes who teaches public policy and public finance at the harvard kennedy school and is the former assistant secretary and cfo of the us department of commerce she is the united states member of the united nations committee of experts and is co-chair of economic economist for peace and security in 2008 she co-authored the three trillion dollar war with nobel laureate joseph stiglitz and she's written extensively about the cost of caring for war veterans dr maher mahalal is a researcher and writer on institutionalized islamophobia and author of the forthcoming book innocent until muslim islamophobia the war on terror and the muslim experience since 9 11. she's also co-director of justice for muslims collective where she focuses on political consciousness and narrative shifting and finally catherine lutz is co-founder and co-director of class of war and the author of homefront a military city in the american 20th century and the basis of empire so to begin with i want to ask a question for linda we just heard these massive numbers and dr crawford's presentation their numbers that are so enormous whether the death tolls or the economic figures tabulated for the cost of the post-9 11 conflicts they're very difficult to wrap our heads around we're talking about trillions of dollars money which exceeds the annual gdp of the united states in a given year and put over 20 years of expenditure and all the government effort and as dr craft mentioned the opportunity cost as well too which is incalculable of this money spent you know dr bills i want to ask you how do we put these numbers in context and further you know given your own area especially in research you know there are long-term costs which are attributed today but not yet incurred for the cost of uh caring for veterans created by these wars can you tell us how do we make these numbers real and how do we put them how do we put them in a context which lets us appreciate how much has been expensed economically upon these on these wars uh so thank you murtaza um i'm linda bilms and i'm going to make a couple of points about the issues facing american veterans but first um let me just call attention to the magnitude to the scale of this number uh dr crawford said that the cost as tracked by the excellent cost of war project is now eight trillion dollars but it's easy to forget the scale because of the fact that that a trillion dollars is uh in the english language rhymes with million and billion so i usually explain to my students ways to visualize a trillion dollars and one way to visualize just the scale of that number is that if you had a a one thousand dollar bill a million um dollars would be four point three inches high and a billion dollars would be 358 feet high which is about the height of the statue of liberty and a trillion dollars is 67 miles high that that's well into actual outer space that's a lot further than elon musk went in his rocket last month and um another way to just think about what can we buy for a trillion dollars is to look at the infrastructure bill that the um senate just passed last month and this infrastructure bill had a price tag of one trillion dollars and that one trillion can pay for fixing america's roads bridges tunnels airports electrical grid for cleaning up toxic waste dumps bringing high-speed internet to rural areas and other things so if we just pause for a minute that's just one trillion dollars and think about the fact that we have spent eight trillion dollars in these wars and think about the opportunity cost of this um sum of money it is a very staggering number and very sobering to really think about the cost of these wars and that's just the budgetary cost now um let me make three points about veterans issues um and my father was a a world war ii veteran my father-in-law was also a world war ii veteran and so this has been a personal um issue for me to track these costs for many years and it's important to understand that that um while the fighting for the u.s and afghanistan may be over but the cost of taking care of those who fought is just beginning so there is always a tale of cost after the fighting ends um in a war the peak year for paying disability benefits for world war one veterans was in 1969. the peak year for world war ii veterans benefits was in the 1980s and we are just now approaching the peak of paying benefits and health care for vietnam veterans so this is always a long tail but this time around the cost will be much higher i have conservatively estimated it will be at least 2.2 trillion dollars and this is due to higher survival rates among those are injured better and more expensive medical care better outreach and communication to let veterans know what they are entitled to efforts positive efforts by the department of veterans affairs to deliver more care in the community to expand programs for women veterans for mental health care and for homelessness suicide prevention and a wide range of things but consequently there are already 1.8 million post 911 veterans who have already been awarded lifetime disability benefits and in most cases medical care and there are hundreds of thousands of others who still have claims pending or haven't filed yet or who are are still in the military and have not been discharged yet so i estimate that the the cost of providing veterans benefits and ba programs to deliver them and medical care will cost from two to 2.2 trillion to 2.5 trillion and most of that cost is still ahead of us and that is a conservative number which is not counting the claims that may result from exposure to burn pits and the contractors who were injured and who will be showing up on the roles of medicare and medicaid and other government subsidized health care program and not including the long-term economic costs so my second point is that the number of those who have been directly injured in the afghanistan and iraq theaters bears almost no relationship to the number who are entitled to long-term disability benefits um even though we've heard that there are some 57 000 americans who have been um wounded in these conflicts there are the the number of troops who have returned home with physical conditions like partial hearing loss or severe back problems or respiratory disorders or gastrointestinal disorders circulatory disorders mental health conditions that require long-term medical treatment and that are eligible for disability benefits is a much much much larger number so um the 1.8 million recent veterans who qualify for disability benefits we can sort of understand that when we look at the size of the department of veterans affairs budget which has grown in inflation-adjusted dollars from 61 billion dollars in 2001 to nearly 250 um billion dollars today even at a time when the total number of veterans in the country has declined from 26 million to 18 million and these numbers really reflect the strain of these wars on those who have served the troops who supported the efforts in afghanistan in iraq and surrounding areas were on average deployed more frequently and exposed to more combat than in previous wars and according to a survey by the pew research 57 of those who served in combat saw someone being killed uh or seriously wounded right in their unit my um third point is that the cost of these veterans is still ahead of us but we still have no clear plan for how to fund this commitment to veterans now in previous wars we we had the tail but we went into this tale with a different situation because in previous u.s wars as we have heard and this is pretty much all previous u.s wars the war of 1812 the spanish-american war the civil war world war one world war ii korea vietnam we raised taxes to help defray the upfront costs and we raised taxes to high levels the korean war top marginal rates were raised to 92 percent and during vietnam top marginal rates were raised to 77 but this time we cut taxes three times in 2001 2003 and 2017 so nearly all americans pay much lower taxes now than we did before the wars and that means we still have to pay interest on the debt as well as paying the long term costs of veterans care what we should have done and i have testified on this on many occasions uh is to set aside funding for taking care of veterans at the same time that we appropriated money for these wars but at this point having not done this we do run the risk uh of reneging on some of our promises and shortchanging those who fought in these wars one of the potential solutions that i have proposed is to establish a veterans trust fund similar to social security and medicare that would provide funding to pay claims as they are due and although all tax dollars are are fungible to some extent a trust fund would require the government to keep track of what is owed and create an awareness of the full costs of war and the funding challenge ahead thank you thank you linda um so the economic costs of course are staggering and there are human implications every dollar a dollar not spent on health care for a dollar not spending infrastructure uh it's very difficult to calculate so your ability to push the perspective like that is uh it's quite sobering i want to turn now to maha and talk secondly about uh the second component of the cost of wars projects recent updates about the cost of post 9 11 wars the human impacts and the report issued indicates that figure which is a massive amount of people killed these wars of nearly a million itself is conservative and only talks about the direct people directly killed by violence uh not including the indirect impact of the wars people being denied medical service or dying to migration or a lack of health care or lack of food and so forth uh ma i want to ask you how do we think about the actual stories of these people who are killed by 900 000 people directly killed and many many more indirectly killed or wounded or losing family members or forced to lose their livelihoods or homes can you tell us a bit about how we think about the stories of these people and how we can uh put a human face to uh a number which uh signifies just an incredible amount of suffering yes absolutely thank you so much marteza for moderating this panel and thank you to the cost of war for having me um you know i think the first thing that beer is mentioning is how the war on terror has been framed in the first place right um and the framing is important to contextualize the deaths both on the side of the americans as well as um in afghanistan iraq somalia and so forth all of the countries that have been targeted by state violence in the form of militarism so by way of the framing i want to um start with a quote by donald rumsfeld who said in december of 2001 quote we did not start this war so understand responsibility for every single casualty in this war whether they're innocent afghans or innocent americans rests at the feet of al-qaeda and the taliban and so why is this quote important this quote is important because it's assigning blame to all the people who have died in u.s wars including civilians including um afghans iraqis pakistanis syrians right at this point to the people themselves and when the us does not take responsibility for the deaths that they have caused then there's of course no accountability and when you think about the different numbers right so when the 13 american service members died or were killed a week ago or so there were many articles that talked about the headlines were just that the american service members had died and if you clicked on the article it would say and 200 others some would you know go out of their way to write afghans but the headline was really about the 12 13 american service members who died so when we look at these numbers we know there's already a great disparity in the number of civilians killed versus the number of americans killed but there's something else that's going on which is that these deaths are weighted right so american deaths are weighted more highly than the deaths of afghans iraqis and so on and so forth so when you just see the numbers we we know that there's this discrepancy but we also know that 13 american service members will be the story even if for example a thousand afghans were killed a million afghans were killed because in these wars muslims have been totally dehumanized and so it doesn't matter when they're killed by the u.s and if it did matter right there would be a different approach but there hasn't been and you know the thing that i think is also very important is that the war on terror is much more than its militarism and warfare in countries abroad right the war on terror has become so invisibleized that it's hard to see what its impacts really are and how seamlessly and invisibly it has become part of the ways that we live right so to me the war on terror is about immigration restrictions it's about federal terrorism prosecutions it's about surveillance it's about detention and torture so if we're thinking about the cost of war the number would be much higher if we were looking at the totality of the war and terror and how it's been manifested implemented and executed in all of these different ways and something i think is also very important is when we talk about the lives of muslims and civilian casualties most of the time the concern is about if we cause too many civilian casualties will this create hate in the community in the groups that are being targeted will this lead them to become anti-american and therefore will there be some sort of so revenge other words the concern is not actually about civilian deaths it's about civilians being killed and the possibility that their deaths will create more violence so again when we look at these numbers it's really important to contextualize this yesterday biden you know said that the war the war in afghanistan is over it has ended right our endless war in afghanistan has ended and my question is for whom did the war end did the war end for the afghans has the war ended for iraqis what does it mean to end the war americans and the u.s can go back to living a relatively normal life meanwhile we know in the countries that the united states has targeted there is the aftermath of war and there will continue to be consequences far after whenever the united states decides the war is over the war in order for a war to actually be over it has to be over for both sides but the united states has never cared about the people it's targeting so to them they can just extract themselves the country can just extract itself from the conflict and say the war has ended i don't think the war has ended for those in the countries the united states has targeted and when we think about the money right we're talking about the cost of war numerically right what could this money be used for right we could talk about infrastructure needs we could talk about other social services in the united states we could also talk about reparations for indigenous communities for the descendants of enslaved africans there are many ways this money could have been used and can still be used but again this requires us to understand what the war on terror has been about all of this time and to me when i look at the cost of the war that um dr crawford talked about in terms of eight trillion dollars to me that is eight million eight trillion dollars that have been dedicated to the murder of muslims and i see no other way to make this sound any better or different united states has prioritized the murder of muslims through the money that they have allocated to these wars we talk about what will happen to the veterans when they come back right obviously that's important to address but what about the scores of people that are left behind in afghanistan in iraq after a drone attack in somalia what about them do they get any care do they get any compensation absolutely not so what would be the cost of war if that was actually a priority for the united states and in that light and subsequent to that what does it mean to win the war what does winning actually mean is there a threshold of injustice that can be on the that's on the path to justice what is that threshold do you win a war by killing millions of people is that how you win a war and what does that say about the us's priorities what i think i'll end with is a quote from a 13 year old pakistani boy at a congressional hearing in 2013 whose family was targeted by drone strikes and obviously pakistan has been continuously targeted by drone strikes in the course of the war on terror so in the congressional hearing the young boy named zubair said quote i no longer love blue skies in fact i now prefer gray skies the drones do not fly when the skies are gray this is the cost of war that a young boy 13 years old can never look at the sky in the same way that people who haven't been bombarded with violence can and this is to me one of the things that has been totally neglected this again is not ending the war right it's ending the war for americans and exiting and extracting the us from the aftermath of the wars in afghanistan iraq syria et cetera so the last thing i i would say just to you know close off my remarks is really just that we have to understand the narrative and the framing of this war and terror as i've said several times in order to really understand what the consequences are and i think the last thing i'm sorry to say this is um you know yesterday biden gave a speech right about the war ending and he talked about how all of these afghans had been helped by the united states and no other country could have done what the united states had done of course what was excluded from his remarks is that the united states launched an illegal war on afghanistan in the first place so to close i think we just really need to capture sort of what is what is at the root of this war why is it okay for this many muslim civilians to die and why do we continue to prioritize american lives over the lives that have been lost in other countries because of the us's rampant state violence thank you thank you uh you know the past few weeks is very interesting because of course the 20-year anniversary of 9 11 is coming up and it's a big milestone it's a time to pause for reflection so i was expecting as a journalist to see coverage of that vein reflecting upon these events and i expected some level of public interest but because the 20-year anniversary happened to coincide with these unbelievable events in afghanistan where the u.s black government suddenly collapsed and taliban took over the country which seemed to underline the futility of the past uh two decades of war there and all the terrible human and economic costs that was inflicted so you know there's been a lot more public interest in the wars generally a lot more uh for the time being at least a lot more focus upon uh reflect reflecting on what this all meant and uh what exactly we got for this or what exactly inflicted on people in afghanistan or ourselves as a result of ways in the conflicts so my next question for kathy i want to ask you specifically as one of the co-directors of this project watching the recent coverage from afghanistan what have what stuck out to you notably about this moment and uh what it says about how we've gotten to this point in the you know what the sum total of the efforts and losses over the past 20 years thanks for that question mitaza um i think unless we have a new way of telling the story about what the united states does when it goes to war we're going to find ourselves in another afghanistan the people of another country are going to find themselves um under the bombs of of a military campaign so i think it's really really important to understand what the media narrative that's emerging in these last few weeks has been and and it's really quite similar to the narrative that's been going on for the whole 20 years of the of the war on terror and again here i'm not talking about the the brave and and brilliant journalists who many of whom have actually lost their lives covering the war for years but i'm talking about the television news corporations who have been miniaturizing or ignoring that journalistic work but those narratives that we find in broadcast news um tv internet and news where most people get their news we we really have to question and push back on those some of these narratives first of all the problem has been that they've ignored the war um the war has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful and that's not a formula for a story that many americans want to see so for long stretches of the last 20 years there was no coverage in a recent study the three networks were found to have given an average of just 24 minutes each over the last five years on average to coverage of the war in afghanistan and we should also note that the pentagon has increasingly controlled coverage and expanded its demands for secrecy or its uh its um withholding of information the american public needs um but in any case after two decades of this kind of of um really uh ignoring the war uh the media have treated the last couple of weeks as if these long known facts about the war uh were just discovered surprises um my goodness local war violence corruption and profiteering uh blowback u.s assets going into the hands of the taliban so that's been disturbing to see second as as we've just heard the media is engaged in very selective empathy um particularly in the last few weeks there's been there's not been a focus on the minimum of 50 000 dead afghan civilians and the millions of afghan people who have been uprooted from their homes uh and pushed into other countries or into other areas of their country but on the u.s soldiers who've been under attack at the airport and the translators and and others who helped them and while that airport evacuation is certainly newsworthy and the u.s obligation um is clear um that focus has been quite obsessive um and when reference is made to afghans it's tended to be to afghan women and girls uh but again not as real humans in some ways but as uh figures in a failed savior narrative that's been a key ingredient in the kinds of rationales that have been offered up for the war through these 20 years in order to garner public support um so i think the the obsession on focusing on uh this last uh rescue narrative has been um related to the media and the pentagon's desire to have a positive story to tell and it's a story of american exceptionalism and triumphalism um that's a vigilantly protected story that's led even a defeat in war to be covered as a rescue operation or simply an overdue conclusion to the war um i think it's for this it's for the most part the media have not noted that the airport scenes involve the us government trying to solve a problem that it itself had created when it made war and occupation the answer to 9 11. i think in a related vein the media has long preferred to focus on the domestic political battles that this overseas war has created rather than on the war itself and this has allowed a set of quite privileged commentators to alpine on which party the democrats or the republicans will lose or gain power as a result of the withdrawal it provides an opportunity to create a victor in a lost war a politician or a party can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat again even as those words winning and losing victory and defeat are obviously myths as well critically the media have provided a platform for another group of privileged commentators foreign policy pundits who focus on a dehumanizing rhetoric of national security and geo strategy so they treat in talking on morning joe or fox news they talk about um this is this problem for the united states more than as a human problem for the afghans caught inside of it these constant refrains that we hear um are for are dehumanizing they are the afghanistan is the graveyard of empires rather than the graveyard of tens of thousands of people as our report has just shown people who've lived through personal and social catastrophe another refrain that we hear in the media is that the the intention of the war was to stop terrorists from finding safe harbor when in fact there are now more motivated fighters around the world intent on avenging the us and allied wars and occupations than there were on 9 11. unless we forget the man who planned the 9 11 attack was a saudi who was killed in pakistan 10 years ago dangerously i think this this kind of strategic talk has often repeated the baseless claim that there was not another 911 since the october 2001 invasion because the u.s sent its military to afghanistan and this is the recipe for endless war in just another place missing are the experts who would tell the public about research uh like the careful rant study which found that the use of terror tactics by groups historically has rarely been ended by military means rather it's been ended by addressing grievances by a simple erosion of public support or by public attention or policing on the ground uh when some attacks are threatened um there's been a failure to fact check this most serious claim of all that killing afghans by the thousands saved american lives instead we've heard from a steady rotation of the very opinion writers and talking heads from think tanks who championed and promoted the war through all of these years from governor government officials responsible for pulling the nation into and through it to the military brass who led us through repeated and deepening failure and so asking for advice or clear-eyed vision from these all-too-familiar faces to ask them what went wrong is like asking the doctor who keeps prescribing an array of wrong drugs for yet another prescription finally we've also seen the failure to report on the long tail of war as dr vilmas has just shown us so vividly talking about the war as over um as we've also seen you know it's not over for afghans by any means talking about the war is over is simply wrong the war continues in over 80 countries and this chapter in afghanistan will not be over even after the last afghan who remembers a family member who died in the war is dead or until the last u.s veteran with a war wound takes her last disability payment somewhere in early 2100 so i i really feel we have to be pushing back on these narrative frames uh in order that we understand that then the numbers and the the other analyses that the cost of war project has done for all of these 10 years can begin to uh make sense to people and to shape american foreign policy and domestic policy in ways that um pull us out of again not just afghanistan but endless war thanks kathy you know we have a few minutes before we push the audience q a and i had a few questions generally for the panelists and whoever wants to answer my own choice reporter but one thing that all strikes me is that these a lot of documentation of the impact of post-9 11 wars whether it's civilian casualties from airstrikes whether it's economic costs whether it's the total death tolls from the conflicts of the whole are delegated to non-governmental organizations whether they're by default academics or amnesty international human rights watch and now cost of war project at brown university so you know i'm very curious like can you tell me what about how does the us government tabulate these costs or does it tabulate them my impression is that there's not any centralized effort to keep track of death tolls or economic costs as a whole of the global war on terrorism and you know the pentagon has a gigantic budget as we know from reading this report and just generally one of the biggest budgets of any institution on earth and yet they don't seem to have any corresponding figures or not any publicized figures about what their own overall estimates are the cost of this is there a reason that uh it falls upon work like yours to do this and what is lost by the government's own unwillingness or inability to tabulate the death tolls and the economic costs of its uh of its operations and i'll leave that question to anyone in the panel that's answered so let me let me just uh answer you a little bit on that murtaza first of all the pentagon does have an accounting of what congress has allocated to overseas contingency operations and my numbers for spending agree with those numbers except where the pentagon has in recent years made some fuzzier categories called overseas contingency operation spending for the base so it gets a little murky there but they do have an accounting and they do have an accounting of taxpayer cost but their own numbers often don't agree with each other and so one part of the pentagon will say the cost spent so far is this and another uh we'll say cost spend is that and then but the larger question you're asking is why isn't the government have a larger analysis and that is the hope that we have that our work will spur the united states to tally the federal cost in a more comprehensive way each department talks about what it's what it's allocated to do but this has not been a comprehensive analysis in other respects so that's the point of the project got it you know one thing that strikes me is that regarding death tolls uh since the war on terror began in the u.s divisions of iraq and afghanistan began the us military has made a point of not tabulating [Music] or not releasing public figures upon people killed in these operations some of the only insights that had their own estimates that come from disclosures like wikileaks and so forth how do you this figure of nearly a million people which is documented report can you explain how how does this compare with you know what we the actual it's a very conservative figure we talk about the indirect that's the law how do we conceptualize other historical conflicts in vietnam or uh the korean war or world war ii in sense of how the actual impacts on people in the united states and uh abroad have been impacted by the conflicts and i know you mentioned earlier that medical treatment has improved in the united states to agree more time medical treatment to agree that many people who were wounded in conflict actually survived but with grave injuries um can someone speak a bit about you know how uh how our efforts on people non-governmental organizations document this being uh different from the pentagon does and how does it fit historically into uh how bad this conflict has been in comparison to other conflicts let's take the pentagon counting of injured first uh and killed um the pentagon has a definition of combatant that is larger wider more inclusive than some non-governmental organizations and differs in some respects from the geneva convention understanding of a combatant or non-combatant so the pentagon disagrees often times with united nations counting or other organizations counting of casualties that are that they want to say are military combatants and then um our project takes a lot of different sources to try to get at people who haven't been counted for instance um categories of individuals who have sort of fallen off the radar okay and then in terms of um comparing conflicts in scale through history world war ii killed many many more millions of people than the post-9 11 [Music] vietnam killed several million people 50 000 service members were killed in vietnam and then there isn't there's no accounting of uh the exact toll of uh militants or insurgents or viet cong uh on the other side but we know that previous wars have been larger in terms of their direct impact but what is different about the the post-9 11 wars is um that they have uh they're not over and they they have destroyed significant quantities of infrastructure and meant this means that over time many more people will die or become ill through indirect causes loss of access to safe drinking water and so on and so the reverberating effects of these wars will be very long-lasting and they come in iraq and syria and afghanistan on top of previous conflicts we have some audience questions uh and this question which is very good i think uh the question i have mine is maha but anyone else wants to answer as well too i'm welcome it's from wagman muhammadi she asks what should today's american public school children learn about the war on terror you want me to answer this that question um you know um i actually had met a woman a while ago whose children were in the virginia public school system and she told me that every day in september they learned about the 9 11 attacks what happened in the aftermath et cetera et cetera and obviously there was a lot of bias towards muslims that the children were being taught so you know this is not so much about the war and terror but the ways that american history right has been totally rewritten to create and construct an image of the united states as one that is non-violent as one that values equality and equity as one that is democratic and spreads democracy is generous is benevolent etcetera etcetera so whether it's war and terror or other parts of u.s history it's about telling what that history really is there are now numerous books right that speak to an accurate account of indigenous history lack history arab history and so part of it again is being critical and giving students the information um in terms of how to think about this country's position in the world and what their role is as either americans citizens or non-citizens it doesn't matter if you're in this country and i think at this point especially because many people are now you know like the warranty has become so invisibleized in many ways that it's not often clear where is like what is it to younger students what does it mean now it's normal right to go to the airport you have to take off your shoes you have to go through the body scanner so how do we denormalize the things that have become so common and visible in the course of the warranty i think there's a lot of ways we can train young students right and get them to think critically and also provide these histories that are so important and so neglected especially when it comes to the war on terror in which the story has been constructed as the us is the ultimate victim and that nothing it does can ever be illegitimate it's always justified violence and that's categorically false um if i could just add something there is also a very important lesson um for any child who studies the wars in terms of public finance and that is that how you pay for a war actually determines how much attention it gets so we have borrowed i call these wars the credit card wars because we have borrowed many trillions of dollars to pay for the wars and the consequence at that we've been able to do that because of historically low interest rates but a key consequence of that is that as um professor lutz mentioned the wars have received almost no attention because people have not felt the pain apart from uh that is to say people in america apart from those serving the military have not felt the pain of these wars because we haven't paid for them yet we know sort of vaguely that there is a large credit card bill due but we have not felt the pain of these wars and many studies have shown that when people pay taxes they feel pain but if they don't they don't feel it so this has resulted in extremely low oversight over the spending spending far more than we needed to rampant profiteering among many of the contractors who have been involved in the war and minimal attention to the wars in congress and the lesson here is that if you don't think about how we pay uh then then it is easier for wars to continue for a long long time we have more audience questions coming in uh excellent ones but before we get the rest if i could just add for teachers who may be watching um and other and parents who want to think about how we should teach the wars uh to our children i think the costs of war project on our website uh have resources for teaching and we have a campus initiative uh but i think some of the the work um obviously is appropriate for uh people in high school the children in high school as well um but one of the things that we we do know is from those of us who teach the war is that we have to under uh underscore and and point out um as uh as dr uh paul just said the the myths of war that um people already um have been taught and and take take uh take on that notion that um war is natural that war is uh an american often american gift to the world rather than an assault and and so i think one one of the um important things that we can do as teachers is to is to first of all educate ourselves on what those myths are that are out there and then um again work to um do things like put out the the kinds of information that um uh dr gomez was just talking about um and and understand that the the ways that we fund this these wars the the the scale of that funding the the fact that pentagon the pentagon and military matters have now absorbed the great majority of the discretionary federal budget over the years and most people don't know that adults or children so i think it's really a very crucial task for the next number of years is for us to educate the public can i add one thing quickly that i should have mentioned um which is that when you're teaching about the war and terror in order to dismantle the violence and the construction of the united states is uh violence whether domestically abroad it's really important to center islamophobia um young students right are consistently and constantly given materials that have bias against many different groups and what is central to the war on terror is the targeting of muslims and there are many ways right that muslims get maligned and targeted not just in the media not just by the government but also in the form of textbooks and other materials that are used to to teach and again if we want to deconstruct and dismantle the warranty and people's support for the war and terror it is fundamental to address intentionally specifically and explicitly the role that islamophobia has played in it thanks ma um we have some more questions coming in from the audience but uh before we also have a some brief comments from senator jack reed and representative cecilini both representing rhode island where brown university is located good morning it is an honor to have the opportunity to speak with you today i want to thank doctors crawford lux illness and hilal for their hard work and commitment to this project and to brown university and the watson institute for hosting the course of war project in rhode island and providing researchers and scholars a venue to collaborate on this vitally important topic for the past decade we all understand that the most traumatic and meaningful cost of war is the loss of human life so i begin by recognizing the sacrifice of 13 marines and naval personnel last week along with many afghans this year the cost of wars report coincides with the declared end of our war in afghanistan for nearly 20 years america has devoted troops training and support to the country eventually making it our longest war over the course of the conflict i traveled to afghanistan 18 times and experienced firsthand the dedication and sacrifice of our service members and diplomats at the same time i saw the human economic and environmental course that were often misunderstood at home today 20 years later it is heartbreaking that the afghan state america invested so much blood and treasure in has failed and the taliban has retaken control now as ever it is important for organizations like the course of war and congress to examine the decisions that brought us here in the course that follow as chairman of the senate armed services committee i intend to hold hearings to get answers to these questions how was our understanding of the resilience of the afghan forces misjudged and what can we learn from afghanistan to conduct more effective and efficient counterterrorism operation of the future did our assessments square with the facts and data available the cost of wars report provides an important resource for the public to better understand the budget for the department of defense and the cost of his operations which can be difficult to wade through and understand i would note that the researchers include in their calculations the war-related spending in the budgets of the state department and the department of homeland security not just dod we all know that these agencies contribute a great deal to our overseas operations and our national security i want to particularly express my appreciation to the research team for considering the long-term cost of medical care and disability compensation for wounded warriors these brave and women continue to deserve the best care and we must be willing and ready to invest in it again i hope this report will help inform educate and serve as a resource for the public and for my colleagues as we consider these course going forward i applaud the team and look forward to their continued analysis of these important issues thank you hi i'm congressman david cicilline i want to thank the cost of war project for allowing me to join you all this morning while we watch the tragic events unfolding in afghanistan it is a clear reminder of the enormous human social and economic costs incurred from years of war so as we approach a significant milestone of our nation's involvement in the post-9 11 wars this is an important moment for us to reflect on the impact that nearly two decades of war have had on not just our country but the entire world estimates by the cost of war project show that more than 800 000 people have died from the conflicts in iraq afghanistan syria yemen and pakistan more than 335 thousand of whom were civilians hundreds of thousands more have been wounded many with disabilities that they will live with for the rest of their lives an estimated 38 million people have been forcibly displaced exacerbating human rights abuses poverty and instability around the world thanks to the costs of war project we can also now better understand the enormous financial costs of these conflicts as your new data shows the us government has spent or obligated nearly eight trillion dollars in the postal 911 wars that is money that could have sent generations to college rebuilt our nation's crumbling infrastructure and supported peace building missions all around the world yet instead we are left with generations traumatized by decades of violence the spread of uninhabitable war zones and further destabilization across the world we have lots of work ahead to confront the many challenges around the world i'd like to end by emphasizing the importance of the work that you do the costs of war project has been crucial in uncovering the real human economic and social costs of war which have allowed us to hold our political leaders accountable and further make the case for strong diplomacy in our nation's foreign policy i look forward to the vital work that is ahead of us thank you again for letting me join you today for this very timely event great uh we have another question that came from twitter also an excellent question for ken um i'll give this question to uh to linda uh ken's asking i'm wondering how you forecast interest payments given that rates have been near historic lows for the last 20 years those costs would skyrocket if rates even only revert to historical average uh let alone levels reaching the early 1980s and for those who are familiar with the reports a lot of the part of the cost is based on calculating the long-term uh you know cost of servicing the debt the massive debt that was taken out upon the wars uh linda can you speak a bit to how this cost may change if interest rates change in the future or goes back to something you know above zero and back to what they were historically uh thank you to the questioner that's a good question i think what's important to know about interest rates here is that the extraordinarily low interest rates of the um of since 2008 this is a a feature of the length of the wars not not not a bug it wouldn't have been possible without these um rates in my opinion um if right in 2001 we were paying about seven percent of the budget the place where sort of interest rates hit the national budget is in what percentage of the national budget goes to interest rates and we're paying about seven percent and in 2008 um even as the overall borrowings skyrocketed the united states um interest rates fell to a 60-year low and have basically stayed low throughout the period and this meant that by 2018 we were paying less in absolute terms in interest payments than we were at the beginning of the war purely because of interest rates so if interest rates had stayed at pre-2008 pre-financial crisis levels or at historical levels we would now be paying 15 or 16 of the budget in interest payments and that would be sufficient to call everybody's attention to the cost of the war but because we have been able to finance at historically low rates um that attention has not been drawn on because the percentage of the budget that goes to service the debt has stayed constant now the um issue around how much of the interest should be attributed to the cost of the war is one that of course requires some assumptions around future interest rates i think that the way the cost of war project has done it is we've looked at um but professor crawford can can speak to this is what has already been paid for money that we have already borrowed if we were to include the future the full future interest rates even assuming that interest rates stay low then the cost of the war would be much higher you know that i have a question building upon that too as well because i remember you've written a paper in the past referring to the wars as credit card wars and that phrase was very resonant and can you speak a bit about the political implications of wars or how they're you know easier to facilitate and continue or indefinitely when funded by debt as opposed to wars which in the past refunded by war bonds or increases in taxes and so forth uh my the perception i get is that uh forever wars need to be put on credit card because they're able more easily to invisibilize that sense but i'm curious your perspective and how the funding mechanism of conflict may change the nature and duration of it well um my forthcoming book the ghost budget looks at this issue but there have been a number of books by sarah krebs and uh rosella zielinski and others that have looked at the financing of wars i call them the credit card wars because we borrowed all the money for these wars which is the first time in u.s history that we have financed a u.s war this way but what um what that does it is is also related to how the president of the time appeals to the public and the need to go to the public about what is happening so looking back in history president roosevelt president truman president um uh johnson went to the country and said we have to raise taxes in order to prosecute these wars president truman said we're going to pay as we go we're not going to saddle our children the cost of these wars that really focused attention if you were paying 92 percent top marginal tax rates and higher tax rates across the board that really focus attention and if one looks back at the state of the union speeches and other presidential speeches and addresses during previous wars the presidents were always talking to people and to congress in their state of the union addresses and their budget transmission documents saying we're going to have to do this in order to pay for the wars but looking back over the last 20 years and four presidents that has virtually never been discussed so it just makes it so much easier for wars to be kind of out of sight out of mind and um we have been able to due to low interest rates borrow on what are effectively very low interest rate credit cards so we know that it's going up and up but at the same time the interest rate has been so low that we've been able to keep going i have a question from ahad bashir and this question is very interesting to me as well too because as we know during the obama administration before that it was disclosed that in its strikes airstrikes and drone strikes the us often characterized or by default characterized military may age males killed in certain areas as by default being combatants there was a story recently in the veterans uh veterans centric uh publication connecting vets but 2019 drone campaign in helmand province in afghanistan in which anyone with a even a walkie-talkie or suspected wearing a tactical vest even under their clones would be considered to be a legitimate targeted combatant even though they're unarmed and were killed under that program by drones so this phrase the military-aged males you know it's sort of distorts the calculations of civilian debts this question for anita i think most appropriately can you talk a bit about the way the us government has tried to minimize civilian casualty numbers by expanding the scope of who is considered a combatant throughout these conflicts well these are long wars and the way to understand them the treatment of civilians has changed over time but first i want to say that it is true that in the post-9 11 wars the united states has made an unprecedented effort to avoid killing civilians with air strikes including with drones that said civilians have been killed unintentionally and this sort of loose definition of a military-aged male means that people are classified as potential combatants who may not be another thing that we could think about is not just the air strikes but on the ground in fallujah for example in 2004 the united states told civilians to leave fallujah so that the us could take the battle there but it said that males who were 14 and older should remain again the assumption was that they're combatants so the obama administration in 2009 or 10 i'm not i don't exactly remember when decided uh not to to think so broadly about military-aged males and in its planned strikes was looking for something more discerning to tell who was a combatant and a non-combatant but i think that um [Music] the bias unconscious bias is to assume that a male who looks older and and is around a war zone co-located as they say where combatants are is a person who can be targeted and in terms of again the numbers counting civilian casualties um these uh calculations these estimates um these numbers are disputed for instance in afghanistan the united nations counts more civilians armed than the u.s acknowledges the same in iraq the same in syria and um this is because of exactly the question of who is a militant or an insurgent or a terrorist and who's defined as a civilian and what we're using in the cost of war project is the geneva convention understanding of non-combatant that is someone who poses no threat and that's what the united nations uses and most international organizations use we have many many good questions i wish we could ask them all we're almost out of time and uh we have one more uh video segment to get to but i want to ask one more question from shaylee gupta barnes of the cairo center and poor people's campaign she's asking does the end of the war on afghanistan indicate an end to the war on terror and what role can social movements play in ensuring that the broader militarization of our society is also dismantled deconstructed and offering a new paradigm uh i'll give this question to anyone who wants to answer it on the panel and we have about a few minutes left before we with the next segment somebody else wants i'd be happy to take that on uh just to start um i think everybody has probably something to contribute but i think one of the things that social movements can do is to uh pursue the the democratization of american foreign policy and american domestic policy in other words to push back on the power of the corporate interests who have such sway over what happens in um in congress and particularly military contractors who have made so many uh of those so many of the dollars that we're talking about those trillions of dollars that dr bill has tried to give you a sense of um are my money that flowed uh not into afghanistan but into the pockets of these defense contractors who are on the hill every day pushing for endless war so i think that's that the democratization in general of of our our political system is is a is project one that the anti-racism efforts that the poor people's campaign have been engaged in are ones that um as um maha was talking about really have to be connected to these wars um the the black lives matter brown lives matter movement is is one that has to say they they matter whether they're inside the united states or outside the united states um and um that will be a important part of the the campaign to to end endless war is linking those that the domestic needs uh both for anti-racism but also just anti-poverty um seeing all of those dollars that could have been spent in in in much more functional ways to to create more equality um in in across our country is is a is project number one uh let's close with uh i think ma uh has one brief comment to before we end the end our program yeah i just want to quickly add that again um the warranty is not over it's far from over it's not over in afghanistan it's not over in iraq um and again we have to ask the question of what does it mean for the war to be over and in that question we have to recognize that the united states has used state violence to target countries abroad and cause massive destruction and the money that the u.s has spent on the war is one thing we have to think about how many lives have been lost in this war and terror and you know when we're looking at these numbers i mean there's when you say for example again the 13 american service members died and many afghans or whatever it is right say the number say the number of afghans who died they're not in inconsequential deaths and we have to remember that if we're going to end the war on terror which again i don't know what that actually means we have to recognize that this country has conducted massive murder of muslim populations and you know the last thing i'll say is part of that is underscoring and focusing on dismantling islamophobia because it's part and parcel of the war on terror and lastly you know i just to the drones question i think it's a very important question because the bottom line is whether or not civilians were killed it didn't matter there's no accountability whatsoever obama could have restricted how that was uh how it was counted or made an effort right but that's not how yeah so the deaths have become inconsequential and in my mind the last thing i'll say is there's no it's not about unconscious bias to me this is about bias completely it's explicit islamophobia that drives the war on terror and we need to remember that thanks mom thank you all our panelists and thank you for the cost of war project for filling this event together and also putting this report together i think that 20 years after 9 11 it's no better time to reflect on the unbelievable incalculable in some sense cost but which can be tabulated in numbers which don't really give the whole human impact but uh you know the government has not made the effort to publicize or clarify the public the cost of his endeavors uh military endeavors in iraq advanced and elsewhere so efforts like this are really one of the only uh chances we have to help the public understand what's been lost after 20 years to conclude we have statements with from representative rokhana about the cost of war projects and the return of those now hi i'm congressman ro connor i want to thank the cost of war project for the extraordinary work you do in documenting the unacknowledged cost of wars we have been at war for almost 20 years after 9 11 in afghanistan in a war that had no clear mission and in iraq in a war that had no clear strategic purpose many people don't know the extraordinary toll these worst take not just the cost of deploying troops not just the cost in terms of human lives but the costs in terms of benefits and in terms of our obligations for decades to come my team and i rely on the cost of war to give us an accurate sense of how much money is draining is being drained because of these endless wars i read somewhere that had we not stayed in afghanistan for 20 years we would have had enough money to provide a free college education or vocational school for every american in this country thank you for what you're doing thank you for your service in helping us understand the true cost you are a resource to our office you

Channel: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

Views: 1,236

Rating: 4.7894735 out of 5

Keywords: Watson Institute, Watson International Institute, Brown University, Brown u, Brown, Public Affairs, September 11, 2001, post-9/11 wars, Neta Crawford, Murtaza Hussain, Catherine Lutz, Linda Bilmes, Costs of War Project, Maha Hilal, Justice for Muslims Collective, Senator Jack Reed, Barbara Lee, David Cicilline, Ro Khanna

Id: 2tPx9FT50EI

Length: 88min 58sec (5338 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021