Trending Globally: After 20 Years, Measuring the True Costs of America’s Post-9/11 Wars

[Music] in 2017 stephanie savelle decided to make a map it was actually an idea that came up at one of our costs of war strategy meeting someone was like well we really should have a map of what we're talking about here stephanie is one of the three directors of the costs of war project which is housed at the watson institute its mission is to measure the true costs of america's post-9 11 wars not just financial but also human political and environmental it was founded by two professors dr catherine lutz and dr nita crawford they were both based at the watson institute and at the time it was 2011 was the 10-year mark of the post-9 11 wars its founders started the project because they noticed a gap in information and reporting that existed about america's wars post 9 11. there was very little questioning about the basic premise of you know should we even be waging this war to begin with you know what are our goals and are we accomplishing them and is there a better strategy for meeting our goals the project started as an effort to gather data often that's hidden from view which could help americans answer those questions stephanie joined the project in 2016 and that brings us back to that map which she started the following year the purpose of it was to identify all the countries where the u.s was engaged in counter-terrorism operations and i thought okay well maybe this map is gonna be like maybe seven countries or something like that and and i just imagine something very simple and i was like sure i can do that little did i know that i was kind of embarking on a research odyssey [Music] how could this become such an odyssey you might ask well first they ran up against a surprisingly complicated question how do you define military presence in the first place a military base troops actively fighting do you include countries where american drones flew overhead let's even take what might be considered the most straightforward definition u.s soldiers physically fighting and dying in another country even that was surprisingly tough to count it ended up being this incredibly tricky thing to figure out because the us military is not kind of advertising when that happens certainly not in places like you know niger i don't know if you remember but 2017 was the year that four sold u.s soldiers died in niger and the public and congress were like what are we doing in niger i would just get bogged down in these long meetings where we were like okay well there's this article that says there's troops on the ground in cameroon but there's no proof that they actually exchanged in gunfire we were kind of having to make a distinction between oh there's some military exercises on the border with russia we're not going to include those because we're focused on the counter-terrorism ones another example was um a case in libya where the u.s military was engaged in some kind of a fire fight with militant groups and the only the way that i found out about that incident was that there were some service medals that were awarded to some of the the service members who were involved in that fire fight that day and that was how i found that was just kind of an obscure reference that i was able to to trace what stephanie thought was going to be a quick project turned out to be almost as endless as the conflicts she was researching and the total number of countries so far on the map you ask we're conducting counter-terrorism operations in 85 countries now [Music] that last example stephanie mentioned about american deaths in libya really sums up how we've understood these wars stephanie only learned about these deaths because of medals that were given to veterans it's like we're supposed to celebrate our military without really asking them what they've been up to from the watson institute at brown university this is trending globally i'm sarah baldwin this fall marks 20 years of american military engagement following the events of 9 11. this year we're teaming up with the cost of war project for a series of episodes looking at some of the hidden costs these scholars have exposed on this episode we'll be talking with two people the first whom you've already heard from here is stephanie savelle i talked with her not just about her endless map project but also about the origins and motivations of the cost of war and why despite the us's recent withdrawal from afghanistan this project is far from over here's stephanie again since i've been leading the project i guess it's been five years now i've really been trying to connect our research to the public and kind of ramp up our ability to connect to journalists and editors to share our findings with civil society groups and with members of congress we really see ourselves as aligned with a broader peace movement and we work with a lot of civil society groups who are doing a lot of advocacy work before we go any further i wanted to ask you to clarify something in your work you do not use the phrase war on terror you say post-9 11 wars can you explain that using the term the war on terror is problematic for lots of different reasons one reason is that terrorism is a political term and so the people who are conducting a military operation have an incentive to name a certain group of people as terrorists because it justifies war and a military approach those same people you could call them insurgents or you could call them political opposition members or you could call them militants that's often the term i use so it's really a way of obscuring rather than clarifying what's going on and it's used in service of the people in power to perpetrate violence the military in the and the u.s federal government keeps loads of statistics about everything so why do we need the cost of war to do that as well yes the government keeps loads of statistics um but those statistics sometimes are obfuscating rather than clarifying right so um you know the pentagon puts out a number of like this is how much the war has cost and it discourages people from asking well what about the other ways that this is going to affect our federal budget and our society for generations what the pentagon does is put out a number their number of one trillion is purely based on a certain category of budgetary spending it's a technical term for um overseas contingency operations oco funding and that's what they say that the war has cost and we say well wait a minute there are not just what the military has spent but there's also you know veterans care is a huge expense of these post-9 11 wars so is interest on borrowing to pay for these wars there is the ways that the war has inflated the pentagon's base budget so all the equipment the the pay for troops to return to the war zones again and again the ways that the pentagon has kind of beefed up its network of bases around the world all of these things have kind of been baked into the pentagon's base budget which is now at over 800 billion dollars a year which is this astronomical sum and what you can see if you look historically is that after a conflict that pentagon's base budget is not going to go down we have that that under a category called um increases to the pentagon's base budget because of the post-9 11 wars so all of those things go into our estimate that make it higher than uh what the pentagon says your group doesn't just count costs in dollars and cents and military spending including veterans care right i mean as astronomical as those are how else do you define and measure the costs of war we talk about costs and think about costs in a really broad sense just as you're saying so it's not just economic but also human social political environmental and i'll give you just a couple examples one of them is the ways that the post-9 11 wars have intensified police militarization in the united states so the the flow of equipment from the military to our police departments the flow of veterans into police departments who are hired as police um that has been an explicit uh strategy another example is the u.s military if it were a country it would be ranked somewhere around 40th in the amount of carbon emissions that it has so it's the single highest institutional carbon emitter in the world it's it's kind of ironic because the us military often talks about the security threats of climate change rising sea levels increasing conflict and that kind of thing but when you dig into what's been the actual military's carbon emissions it's a huge contributor to climate change how do service people and professionals in the military feel about your work are you like persona non grata it's interesting i'm always struck by if i give a public talk like if i talk on the radio or something like that i've often gotten emails afterwards from people in the military even top leaders being like thank you so much for pushing the envelope you guys need to keep getting this work out there this information needs to get out to the public there we really share with a lot of service members uh desire to lessen the chances that that service members will die in war um and so in a lot of ways we're actually on the same page remarkably with a lot of individuals do you think anyone imagined when this project started that in 2021 it would still be going on yeah it's really discouraging to think about it this way but there will always be a room for this project and if it's not the post-9 11 wars it's going to be the next form of u.s militarism the u.s unfortunately has a militarized status quo and it's very hard to think about um how that will change and yet we must continue fighting for that change something that i've drawn a lot of inspiration from is this author rebecca solnit she writes about the origins of the abolitionist movement in england back in the you know early days the 1700s um and and how this small group of activists was kind of fighting this huge beast of slavery and they were just considered you know extremist and radical and you know writing pamphlets and passing them out in the streets and that kind of thing and she locates the beginning of the end of slavery with those activists and sometimes i think about that because i think you know we're up against a similar kind of a enormous beast you know the military industrial complex all the lobbying that goes on all the the corporations that have a stake in this the ways that there are weapons manufacturers in almost you know every state you know they've kind of spread out so that they would be strategically located in a lot of congress people's districts um so there are so many ways that this way of being is entrenched and yet we can't not do anything we we have to work for a different way of life really in this country stephanie thank you so much for talking with us today it's been great to have you on the show yeah thanks so much for having me [Music] dollars and loss of life blood and treasure as it were might be the first two costs you think of when it comes to war but last year a group with the cost of war tallied another effect and media outlets across the world took notice it was a measure of human displacement and the number was almost unfathomable 37 million people that's as many people as live in canada that's david vine one of the authors of the paper he's a professor of anthropology at american university and the author of the united states of war a global history of america's endless conflicts from columbus to the islamic state our producer dan richards spoke with david about what this number means for america and the world and what it still misses when it comes to understanding the human costs of mass displacement [Music] david vine thank you so much for talking with us on trending globally thank you i'm really excited to talk to you i was wondering if you could just describe what are the different types of displacement because it doesn't just mean one thing and you have a few different definitions you use in these descriptions yeah when we talk about displacement we're talking about first and foremost people who have been forced to flee war we're not just talking about any kind of displacement or or migration we're talking about people fleeing for their lives and in that total that we've now actually updated uh we've documented 38 million people at least who have been displaced 38 million people who've been forced to flee their homes by the eight most violent wars the us military has been waging since 2001 and that includes both refugees people have been forced to flee outside their home countries and internally displaced people so in afghanistan for example we have documented 5.9 at least 5.9 million people who have fled their homes and that includes 2.1 million refugees and 3.9 million internally displaced people and and surely the total exceeds 6 million now just in the past few weeks since we updated our figures and so in afghanistan for example there are more people as you say internally displaced meaning they're fleeing their homes but they're not leaving the country that they're in but that that in afghanistan that's a larger number than people who are leaving the country i think that's something i hadn't really thought about did that surprise you at all the the level of internal displacement internal displacement is is always a a major issue uh and and has been worldwide i think that the thing we can learn from the the relative numbers of refugees and internally displaced people is that of course people don't want to flee their homes and generally when they do they're seeking safety as close as possible to home but frequently they realize as many in afghanistan now realize with the taliban coming to power that they have to escape afghanistan completely but frequently people travel shorter distances and it's frequently the most privileged displaced people who are able to become refugees because they have the finances to cross a border or to make a longer distance migration that would require the funds to support yourself over long distances another thing that really stood out to me in your research was the number of countries that have been affected in this way and you know i think maybe to many americans it could be surprising that it's not just the one two or three countries we often think of as having u.s military engagements with over the last 20 years yeah very very few people in the united states know how broadly the us military has been fighting since 2001. the global war on terror began in afghanistan in october 2001 but quickly spread literally around the world so that u.s combat troops have been engaged in some form of war combat in at least 25 countries in the past 20 years so we focused on the eight most violent wars that the united states has been engaged in since 2001 so that's afghanistan and the overlapping war in pakistan that's also iraq of course the war that began in 2003 and where u.s troops are still engaged in fighting and it also includes yemen somalia the philippines syria libya but as you noted us troops are engaged in many more countries where we were unable to document the full scale of displacement so the 38 million figure is conservative in a couple respects so we in all our assumptions and all our methodologies we were as careful as possible uh in in our documentation the actual total number of people displaced in these eight most violent wars may actually reach 49 to as much as 60 million which would put it on par with the displacement scene during world war ii to give people some sense of perspective 38 million people that's as many people as live in canada that's as many people as live in california it is incomprehensible almost it is and that's why in our report and in our writing we really encourage people to try to connect with the experience of just one displaced person that it does become impossible really to comprehend what it means to have 38 million people displaced so instead i think it's much easier and important for each of us to reflect on what it would feel like if if we were forced to flee our homes tonight we should we should grapple with that experience of fear of trauma if i had to flee my home tonight where the heck would i go and that's those are the decisions that that the displaced in afghanistan pakistan iraq syria yemen somalia of the philippines and beyond that's the kind of thinking they've been engaged in and they've been forced to to grapple with and then forced to find some safety what got you first interested in in trying to tally these numbers i think first and foremost it was because no one had done it no one had bothered to document and calculate how many people have been displaced by the post-9 11 wars the cost of war project has been amazing in documenting how many people have been killed by the post-9 11 wars as well as the financial costs and other dimensions of the the human damage inflicted by these wars and when we think about the effects of of war generally in the effects of the post-9 11 wars we have to place displacement at the the center of the analysis but we together realized that no one had bothered to to put together the numbers and that is i think you know part of the impetus for the entire project that the us government really has not informed the the us people what these wars have meant uh what these wars have meant for people in the united states and what they've meant for people in the war zones and i think we're seeing now with with the attention to afghans who've been trying to flee afghanistan we're seeing growing attention to the experience of of afghans and to the plight of refugees in particular which is encouraging to me because i think when the issue gets more attention people care people can relate to people who are fleeing for their lives and people want to support them of course there is a tremendous amount of islamophobia nancy muslim racism uh anti-immigrant anti-refugee forms of racism and discrimination but indeed this is something that we can and have overcome in the past how many refugees from afghanistan has the u.s committed to admitting into the united states thus far the biden administration prior to august had announced that it was only going to resettle a maximum of 62 500 refugees total from around the world in 2021 and 125 000 in 2022 125 000 202 although it then admitted actually they wouldn't even reach those targets so in the the last weeks of august the united states evacuated around 114 000 afghans from the kabul airport alone uh the u.s has admitted relatively small numbers of afghans up to this point um in fact i'm quite sure that the 114 thousand evacuated in the last days of august probably at very least doubled and perhaps tripled the number of afghan refugees that have been resettled in the united states since 2001. so i've been calling on the biden administration to announce a refugee cap of at least 300 000 a year for the next five years if not 10 years we can get stuck in the in the numbers the bottom line is the united states can and must resettle drastically larger numbers of afghan refugees and refugees from all the wars the united states has been engaged in let me just say one more thing you know some people may say that oh this is completely unrealistic to resettle a million afghan refugees or a million iraqi refugees again i just would underline that the united states has done this before the united states resettled more than a million vietnamese refugees and tens of thousands more lao and cambodian refugees after the end of the u.s war in vietnam and southeast asia and other countries have been doing this in little more than a year in 2015 and 2016 germany resettled accepted more than a million refugees from afghanistan syria and iraq and beyond canada on a per capita basis has resettled far more refugees than the united states has beyond admitting refugees into the united states what are other ways to try and make up for these you know these effects on people's lives i think war reparations have to be part of the the answer and war reparations as they have in other wars can take on many forms what i've been calling for is not just for the united states to resettle more than a million afghan refugees and again i think at least a million iraqi refugees as well but to also assist displaced afghans iraqis pakistanis yemenis and others where they are first and foremost often they're displaced locally or regionally and then to assist with the resettlement of refugees back in their home countries when conditions allow because again generally people want to return home when it is safe enough to go home but again i think we have to have a bigger conversation and go beyond conversation to take action we have to first and foremost put the human effects of our foreign policy choices first and i think they've been neglected uh for decades and that's part of why i think the class of war project is so important because it has put the human impacts of war first and i think we need to to grapple with the damage the human damage first and foremost that the u.s government the united states has has inflicted as a result of of our wars david vine thank you so much for talking with us on trending globally thank you again for having me on [Music] [Laughter] this episode was produced by dan richards our theme music is by henry bloomfield additional music by the blue dot sessions i'm sarah baldwin thanks again to stephanie savelle and david vine for talking with us we'll put links to all the research we discussed in the show notes if you like the show leave us a rating and review on apple podcasts it really helps other people find us and even better tell a friend who you think might like the show to subscribe you can learn more about the watson institute's other podcasts on our website we'll put a link to that in the show notes too we'll be back in two weeks with another episode of trending globally thanks for listening [Music]

Channel: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

Views: 1,899

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Watson Institute, Watson International Institute, Brown University, Brown u, Brown, Public Affairs, American military engagement, 9/11, Trending Globally, Costs of War project, financial, human, political, and environmental costs, Stephanie Savell, David Vine, displaced, Afghanistan, Iraq

Id: 2GsKUvgEDE4

Length: 26min 7sec (1567 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021