The Cost of Escalation

Sphere: Related Content The Obama Administration has continued the Bush Administration’s foreign policy, and we are paying for it.

President Obama announced that he was escalating the war in Afghanistan, and that along with the new strategy there are going to be 30,000 new troops at a cost of $30 billion for the military this year. Remember when former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that the entire cost of the war in Iraq was going to be $50 billion? Maybe someone on the White House speach writing staff left out a zero.

The National Priorities Project estimates that the war in Afghanistan has cost over $234 billion. There is also the human cost. According to iCasualties.org, to date 936 United States service members have died in Afghanistan, and twice as many have died this year than in any other of the nine year war. Not to mention the difficult to count thousands of civilians that have died in Afghanistan.

So how much is this war costing? It cost $1 million per service member: $57,077.60 per minute per service member. Of course that is according to the official number. How else could this money be spent?

According to Jo Comerford, Executive Director of the National Priorities Project:

United States already accounts for 45% of total global military spending, the $30 billion surge cost alone would place us in the top-ten for global military spending, sandwiched between Italy and Saudi Arabia. Spent instead on “soft security” measures within Afghanistan, $30 billion could easily build, furnish and equip enough schools for the entire nation.

According to Jeremy Scahill’s reporting at the blog Rebel Reports, the Obama Administration has also privatized the war in Afghanistan even more than the Bush Administration. Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan increased 40% between June and September of this year, and private security contractors working for the DOD in Afghanistan doubled from 5,000 to 10,000.

So how many contractors are in Afghanistan? If you include the 104,000 DOD contractors, the 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors, then the total number of contractors in Afghanistan stands at 121,000. That number is only going to increase as the escalation of the war in Afghanistan continues. How much is this privatization of the war in Afghanistan costing?

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

The cost that America is going to pay in continuing the war in Afghanistan is enormous.

$30 billion isn’t even the real cost of Obama’s surge. It’s just a minimum, through-the-basement estimate. If you were to throw in all the bases being built, private contractors hired, extra civilians sent in, and the staggering costs of training a larger Afghan army and police force (a key goal of the surge), the figure would surely be startlingly higher. In fact, total Afghanistan War spending for 2010 is now expected to exceed $102.9 billion, doubling last year's Afghan spending. Thought of another way, it breaks down to $12 million per hour in taxpayer dollars for one year. That’s equal to total annual U.S. spending on all veteran's benefits, from hospital stays to education.