Tuesday, August 11, 2009
If the United States follows through on the commitments required to meet President Barack Obama’s long-term plan for stabilizing Afghanistan, the government will end up spending even more money to tame it than has already been allocated to fight the war in Iraq. This assessment was forged by The Washington Post after reviewing estimates in a recent study by the Congressional Research Service that examined all costs born by the U.S. government since the war on terrorism began in 2001.
To date, the cost of fighting in Iraq has totaled $642 billion, while defense expenditures for Afghanistan have come out to $223 billion. But with military operations winding down in the former, and still growing in the latter, it is quite possible the final price tag for rooting out the Taliban and al Qaeda, and carrying out “nation building” programs, will surpass the cost of the Iraq war. For instance, aid expenditures alone for Afghanistan are running in excess of $9 billion a year, and one former Pentagon official estimated the U.S. will have to spend $4 billion annually for the next decade just to finance the Afghan army.
Nervousness over the potential cost of “winning” the war in Afghanistan is already setting in among some lawmakers in the House. A recent report by the House Appropriations Committee included language that said lawmakers are “concerned about the prospects for an open-ended U.S. commitment to bring stability to a country that has a decades-long history of successfully rebuffing foreign military intervention and attempts to influence internal politics.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Analysts Expect Long-Term, Costly U.S. Campaign in Afghanistan (by Walter Pincus, Washington Post)
The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 (by Amy Belasco, Congressional Research Service) (PDF)
Comments