Note: US Marines board a transport aircraft headed to Kandahar, Afghanistan, as British and US forces withdraw from a complex in Helmand province in 2014. Photo: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images
From the nineteenth century's regime-change operation to the modern post-9/11 ‘war on terror, the US became entangled in numerous conflicts to establish its political and economic influences worldwide. History depicts America first stepping into regime-change operations in 1898 by favoring Woodrow Wilson’s policy, “teach them to elect a good man.” However, these involvements culminated in the Cold war era while the U.S. was desperately starving to bring targeted nations under Democracy. During this time, regime change got the upper hand, overtly or covertly, that the U.S. attempted 60-plus operations to replace the target nation's leadership and policies in favor of its interests; in most cases, it was successful in bringing down its objectives into reality. But the 21 century’s warfare is not as synoptic as it was forty years ago, immensely denaturalized and differentiated in the context of assessing the actual cost and benefits of wars.
War is costly and is invariably devastating since it directly engages with the consumption of human lives. Following that pattern, the post-9/11 wars are deemed to be so devastating that they have caused the deaths of as many humans as has never happened since the Second World War. According to the Brown University poll, at least 800,000 people have been killed in these quagmires. In addition, a minimum of 310,00 civilian deaths have been confirmed since Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom began being executed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Inclusively for the US, the death number was never trivial as well.
Following the US Department of Defense, approximately 51,000 US service members have died or were wounded aggregately in this period of senseless wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Controversies derive: did this human cost satisfy any greater purpose or converge any moral standpoint compatible with America's values?
Indicting Saddam Hussein (former president of Iraq) of having secretly developed the Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD), the US, in conjunction with 48 other countries, just hastily dispatched troops to battle Iraq's dictator regime. Though months later, the fact was elicited even from the US officials that there was no such a clandestine program. It was merely arrant propaganda conducted by the CIA and some government officials. Unfortunately, this groundbreaking truth was inadequate to change America's unflinching attitude towards invasion. However, it was not an exceptional delineation of US foreign policy.
In place of combating a dictator or a few terrorist organizations, the US was seen to be keen on muddling along with the wars with the entire nation, which, in the aftermath, not only induced anticipated civil wars but accelerated the emergence of the deadliest terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS. Ironically, the U.S. currently considers these organizations as one of the biggest threats to both US national security and the Middle East. David Kilcullen, a former advisor to General David Petraeus and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, spoke to Channel4 news, “There, undoubtedly, would have been no Taliban and ISIS if we hadn't invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.” How imprudent is it that one induces to emerge a threat and subsequently battles and funding own money against it? How longer will citizens allow the government to drag the nation on the verge of the same traps?
The US has a history of getting backed by its citizens in terms of incumbent wars like the two world wars and the "war on terror." In October 2001, a poll conducted by CNN/Gallup/USA Today indicated that 88 percent of Americans backed military intervention in Afghanistan. However, since the new generations have been witnessing most of their wars winded up with almost no gains. Still, with huge losses and sufferings, Americans’ bellicosity has sharply decreased. Following another survey in 2019, it was revealed that this support rate had dropped to 41 percent. In this sense, Americans have now set the government off answering why their brothers and sisters are deployed to foreign soil and why congress is still pouring a significant share of their budget into these wasteful wars.
Furthermore, misleading information about recent warfare evolved suspicions on Military expenditure and accurate troops deployment, which have impacted large-scale subsiding of the public trust in the Government. Although, the US constitution depicts (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7) that citizens keep the right to know about receipts and expenditure of all public money from time to time. But this clause is primarily used in black and white, hardly implemented in terms of the economic costs of the latest wars.
The economic costs of the post-9/11 wars subsumed not only the expenditure incurred for operations, equipment, and military personnel but also the interest cost on this debt. The post-9/11 wars were executed altogether, predicating on the foreign debt of $2 trillion. Since 2001, these interest payments have been rising at such a rate that the $2 trillion debt during the initial stage of invasion in Afghanistan has already resulted in cumulative interest payments of $925 billion. Even if military interventions in the foreign states ceased immediately, the interest payment would still climb. It is estimated that the dollars America has already spent for reconstructions in Iraq and Afghanistan outran the investment of the Marshall plan launched to rebuild Europe after World War II.
As COVID-19 upsurges, it is as if new fuel has been added to the yellowed flame of the unemployment rate, which is currently edged up to 5.9%. The Pentagon says this annual average of 260 billion has opened almost 1.8 million defense-related jobs. However, Experts say that this exact amount of expenditure could have created about 2.5 million jobs in clean energy or could have supported 3.7 million jobs in health, nearly 4 million jobs in Education broadly, and close to 5 million jobs if proper spending was carried out for primary and secondary schooling. On average, the $260 billion could have created more than 3.8 million jobs. That concluded, almost 2 million jobs are just fading away as an opportunity cost of devastating wars.
Notwithstanding, Washington indeed has something to claim as credit, like its military engagement repulsed Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and toppled the dictators in Libya and Iraq, ensuring a safe ground for democracy and freedom of speech in the region. Yet, do these pyrrhic accomplishments legalize Washington's ground over its military interference? Whilst the defeated Afghan Al-Qaeda has generated other branches in African states, toppling Saddam begets another responsibility to topple the North Korean and Iranian regimes. Will the US relentlessly respond to all these external affairs in the future?
In the context of some crucial cases like Terrorism and Global security, the US must take part if the objectives and outcomes are apprehended and achievable and compatible with the global values. However, as the US has been confronting domestic issues like race, immigration, healthcare, abortion, and so on- policymakers must stop living in a fool's paradise by deploying troops and funding money in overseas wars. They- should instead be concerned about its domestic urgencies, including the post-COVID-19 future, which alone would eventually conserve the utility of various tools of American statecraft and support for democracy in the future.
References
Aftergood, Steven (2018), The Costs of War: Obstacles to Public Understanding. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2018/costs-war-obstacles-public-understanding
Berry, Wendell (2006), A-Citizens-Response-To-The-National-Security-Strategy. https://orionmagazine.org/article/a-citizens-response-to-the-national-security-strategy/
Hassan, Hassan (2018), The True Origins of ISIS: A secret biography suggests that Abu Ali al- Anbari defined the group’s radical approach more than any other person. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/
Savickas, Daniel J. (2016), Thrifty-authoritarians-us-regime-change-1945-present. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1572/2/thrifty-authoritarians-us-regime-change-1945-present
Stiglitz, J. E., & Bilmes, L. J. (2012). Estimating the costs of war: Methodological issues, with applications to Iraq and Afghanistan. In The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict (pp. 275-315). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195392777.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195392777-e-13?rskey=7QUbc3&result=2
Statement of Antony J.Blinken (March 3, 2021), A Foreign Policy of American People. https://www.state.gov/a-foreign-policy-for-the-american-people/
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