Afghan conflict costing $45b a year, says Pentagon

BEIJING: Details of the cost of war in Afghanistan revealed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee make an interesting reading.

A Pentagon official told lawmakers the conflict is now costing $45 billion a year. It is a disturbingly exorbitant cost as witnessed by the comments of several senators during a hearing.

Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts said that two months of Afghan spending could fund an opioid center in every county in America, according to an article placed at China.org.cn, a Chinese online news website, on Sunday.

The interesting part is related to mind-boggling difference between the amount spent on Afghan and American security forces, and providing logistics, compared to the economic assistance being given to the Afghan government.

It was revealed that $5 billion goes to the Afghan forces and $13 billion for around 16,000 American troops stationed in the country, while a paltry sum of $780 million is for economic assistance.

The remainder of the $45 billion outlay is for logistics support. The Committee was also told that the current cost of war is much less than when over 100,000 American servicemen were waging a war on terror in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan.

Then, the bill hit $100 billion a year. That then leads to the question of the total cost of the Afghan war since 2001. Various factors used to calculate the cost tend to change the net expenditures.

However, different estimates show American taxpayers have paid between $1 trillion to $2 trillion for this obscure war. If we add in the war in Iraq, the total figure is close to $5 trillion. However, again, these are not the final figures as various experts use different baselines in making their calculations. America is still very rich by any standards.

Otherwise, how could it funnel huge sums of money into such senseless conflicts? In case of Iraq, at least the administration has the saving grace of officially ending the war and pulling out troops.

Unfortunately, there is no end in sight for the Afghan war, which still rages on in its 17th year. It has been termed as the longest running war in American history (even beyond Vietnam). The figures for the Afghan or Iraq wars, it should be stressed, are just the cost suffered by the United States. Imagine the human and material cost for Afghanistan, Iraq, Nato allies and the neighbors of these two countries.