Reason Three: We have spent a fortune in blood & treasure.
We have spent a fortune in blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Even a modest American presence would help protect the enormous investment we have made.
As none other than Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, said months before the Taliban takeover of Kabul, “All those who have invested in the Afghan peace process should resist the temptation for setting unrealistic timelines. A hasty international withdrawal from Afghanistan would be unwise. We should also guard against regional spoilers who are not invested in peace and see instability in Afghanistan as advantageous for their own geopolitical ends. Like the United States, we do not want the blood and treasure we have shed in the war against terrorism to be in vain.”
John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) for the Obama and Trump administrations, put it this way in January 2019:
“Afghanistan is our nation’s longest war. Our investment there is unprecedented. To date, the U.S. has provided over $132 billion for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, a number that does not include the significantly higher cost of war-fighting, which the Pentagon estimates to have cost as much as $800 billion. Adjusting for inflation, we have spent more on Afghanistan’s reconstruction than we spent on the entire Marshall Plan to rebuild western Europe after World War II.” (an August 2021 SIGAR report puts this dollar figure at $145 billion)
The Costs of War project located at the Watson Institute of International Affairs at Brown University has a team of fifty scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners, and physicians who began their work in 2010.
< Note: The Costs of War project explains that their numbers “differ substantially from the Pentagon’s estimates of the costs of the post-9/11 wars because it includes not only war appropriations made to the Department of Defense — spending in the war zones of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in other places the government designates as sites of ‘overseas contingency operations’ — but also includes spending across the federal government that is a consequence of these wars. Specifically, this is war-related spending by the Department of State, past and obligated spending for war veterans’ care, interest on the debt incurred to pay for the wars, and the prevention of and response to terrorism by the Department of Homeland Security.” >
The Costs of War project says this regarding the financial costs:
“Through Fiscal Year 2020, the United States federal government has spent or obligated $6.4 trillion dollars on the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This figure includes direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care.
This total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the U.S. economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.
The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing. This borrowing has raised the U.S. budget deficit, increased the national debt, and had other macroeconomic effects, such as raising consumer interest rates. Unless the U.S. immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments. We estimate that interest payments could total over $8 trillion by the 2050s.
Spending on the wars has involved opportunity costs for the U.S. economy. Although military spending does produce jobs, spending in other areas such as health care could produce more jobs. Additionally, while investment in military infrastructure grew, investment in other, nonmilitary, public infrastructure such as roads and schools did not grow at the same rate.
Finally, federal war costs exclude billions of dollars of state, municipal, and private war costs across the country — dollars spent on services for returned veterans and their families, in addition to local homeland security efforts.”