War and profit

Based on a detailed study conducted by Brown University, it has been reported that since 2001, the US spent $14 trillion on war, mainly in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The bulk of this money – $1.2 trillion – has gone to giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing but a great deal has also been spent on smaller contractors hired to complete various projects, with US taxpayers paying for this amount. We can see what the results of this spending have been in Afghanistan, leaving behind a bankrupt country where no development and no change in the lives of people can be seen. The somewhat bizarre efforts made to change lives simply did not work. For example, the US, at a cost of $6 million, imported nine goats from Italy in order to try and improve Afghanistan’s cashmere market, but the project never took off and does not appear to have helped Afghanistan at all.

The Biden administration under its Special Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction has ordered an inquiry into the $150 billion allocated for ‘reconstruction and development’ in Afghanistan to discover what happened to this money. The amount is basically obscene. Just think what could have been achieved if it had been used to improve the situation of countries around the world and better the quality of life of their people by setting up investments, offering jobs, providing information and infrastructure as well as other long-term goals, which could allow the countries to move forward. Instead, defence giants and small contractors to whom projects were outsourced have been the chief beneficiaries of this huge amount of money. The US has decided to look into the spending and determine why so much of the projects it had set up were outsourced, in many cases to very small businessmen who then build empires based on this money which seems to have poured in without any checks and balances.

Certainly, we need to know more about the pattern of spending and why war was given so much preference, over building peace and over improving the situation of people in countries that the US targeted. Certainly in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the lives of people have worsened after US intervention rather than improving in any fashion, and this has come at the cost of money going out from US taxpayers to those who have profited from the war-hungry military-industrial complex.