Calculating The Costs Of The Afghanistan War In Lives, Dollars And Years | Talking Points Memo

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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1386441
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I’m betting we’ll still be counting after 50 or 100 years.

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The death gratuity figure must be off by a factor of 1000x. 245.5 million, right?

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The U.S. has paid US$100,000 in a “death gratuity” to the survivors of each of the service members killed in the Afghanistan war, totaling $245.5 billion .

Big error here, off by a thousand-fold. That should be $245.5 million.

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The US spent $$ trillions $$ over the past 20 years and Afghanistan is back to the 7th century as of August 31, 2021.

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Nation building is an expensive hobby.

Location! Location! Location!

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The final results tell it all: after warring for 20 years to “defeat global terrorism”, we now have what? 85 countries harboring terrorists. Also, the United States has a robust internal terrorist threat, albeit not the dreaded Moslems. Our terrorists are good ol’ American Protestants. (apparently non-practicing.)

An interesting addition would be how high the cost has been to the US’s NATO partners who took part in our doomed mission.

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Talking about those taken for a ride…

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A coalition of the willing to be punked.

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A third of the nation, and half of the children under 5, are unable to eat properly? No wonder the Taliban waltzed back into power, if people are starving they will go for change, even if it seems like it might not work, just on the chance that they can eat properly. That’s not a US failure, it’s the corrupt Afghan government at fault for not taking care of their kids…if they had just managed to do that simple thing I bet the Taliban would have had a much harder time getting back in power.

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45,000 Afghan casualties seems way too low. Other sources say 241,000 of which 71,000 were civilians.

Total new student loans originated from 2005 to 2018 was ~$1.65T. That would have been a better investment that this cluster.

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EXCELLENT journalism.
Thank you.