--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp. Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not. Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained? Absolute truth.
--:-- [Sound effects: Music plays]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp. The one is not me, guys. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash explain. That's BetterHelp.com slash explained.
--:-- [Sound effects: Music continues]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A week ago today, President Biden addressed the nation. Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. In his speech, he talked about the costs of war. There's nothing low-grade or low-risk or low-cost about any war. It's time to end the war in Afghanistan. And in explaining some of the costs, he cited the work of one particular group.
--:-- [Sound effects: Music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After more than $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan, the cost that researchers at Brown University estimated would be over $300 million a day for 20 years in Afghanistan, for two decades. So the two actually comes from us. Stephanie Savell is the co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I asked her how it felt to hear the president cite her work on how much this war cost over the estimates of, you know, his own government.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: It's crazy. So the Pentagon, the Department of Defense says $1 trillion. The Afghanistan war has cost $1 trillion. We say it's $2 because you have to think about, like, these wars have caught, you know, veterans care and interest. And these wars have not just been fought abroad. They've been there's been a domestic component as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you're saying the Pentagon doesn't do that. And the Pentagon doesn't do that. And nor does any other government agency. Like, like that's why Biden is using our number to talk about how much the war on terror has cost in Afghanistan. And, you know, we feel like that's a big win on our end for that two trillion to even be included in the public discourse at all.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: That's our goal, is let's really, let's push the envelope and let's not accept what the government figures are at face value because there's a bigger story to tell. There's a broader sense of cost that we need to talk about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the show today, with Stephanie's help, we're going to try and assess the true costs of 9-11 and the war on terror in terms of treasure, but also in terms of lives lost.
--:-- [Sound effects: Music plays]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts. I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Stephanie, we all know about 3,000 people died in the attacks on September 11, 2001, But how many people have died because of everything that's followed? It's a shocking number, actually. It's 929,000 people have died as a result of the U.S. post-9-11 wars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is part of the same war zone. It's also in Iraq, a portion of the Syrian conflict that has to do with the U.S. kind of hunting down ISIS in Syria. and Yemen and a few other war zones.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: 929,000 people have died directly through bombs and bullets, airstrikes, things like that. And you come to this number by doing your own data collection. Is that right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This was compiled by my colleagues, Nita Crawford and Catherine Lutz. They look at different data sources. So the DOD puts out a certain number of U.S. service members killed. Media reports will give further clarifying details. They use sources from the UN, like UNAMA, civilian casualty figures.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: So it's really about kind of compiling a bunch of different numbers from different data sources and using the right dates for the beginning of U.S. involvement and things like that. There's a lot of kind of thought and calculation that goes into each data point that makes up the total.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And your process is different from that of DOD, the Department of Defense. They don't end up with the same number, close to a million lives lost in the United States as a war on terror?
--:-- Stephanie Savell: There's a huge political incentive for the Pentagon to minimize the civilian casualty count. So a lot of times what they do is they'll put a death in the category, oh, that was a militant. That was what they would say as an extremist or a terrorist, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we include all of those militants in our total count, the 929,000, A, because every life matters and every death is tragic for the family members of the people who lose them. And B, a lot of the people that the U.S. categorizes as militants are actually civilians.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: And the perfect example of this is in Somalia. Tonight, the U.S. striking a terror target, an unmanned drone hitting al-Shabaab militants in Somalia, the Pentagon estimating eight militants killed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The U.S. has been engaged in airstrikes in Somalia for a decade at least, trying to fight this group named al-Shabaab in Somalia. And of all of those hundreds of airstrikes, the U.S. acknowledged one in which there have been civilian casualties.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: And so Amnesty International has done, you know, a bunch of reporting and talking to people and figuring out exactly, kind of documenting the stories of civilians who were killed by U.S. airstrikes. And the Pentagon is simply saying that that isn't happening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And why? It's because, you know, once the civilian casualty count starts rising, there's a lot more political pressure on the U.S. government to stop what it's doing. And so that's kind of a red flag kind of a thing.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: So the incentive is to minimize it. And when people think of the war on terror in the United States, they think about Afghanistan, they think about Iraq. How many countries is this war taking place in or has it taken place in over the past 20 years?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I put together a map that shows in 2018 to 2020 that the U.S. has conducted counterterror activities and operations in, get this, 85 countries. 85
--:-- Stephanie Savell: I went into it thinking okay this is going to be pretty straightforward We going to have you know Afghanistan Pakistan Iraq Syria maybe a couple of others people might not know as much about, like Libya, Yemen, Somalia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And those certainly are the kind of places where we've been the most aggressive and had the most kind of active targeting of, you know, militants, so airstrikes and raids on compounds and things like that.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: The Pentagon announcing a short time ago that both manned and unmanned drone aircraft conducted a series of airstrikes in Libya against ISIS targets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then there's this whole other kind of, I think of it as kind of an octopus, like tentacles stretching all across the world of activity. And that ranges from everything from, you know, military exercises with other countries.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: There are currently 4,500 U.S. military personnel here in Jordan engaging in these exercises. They're running through scenarios for everything from a chemical attack to a terrorist attack. To kind of, you know, display a show of force, to deter militants.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's the biggest category, which is training and assistance. Three weeks after the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian girls, U.S. military advisors are on the ground, being joined by FBI and other personnel.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: You know, it sounds kind of innocuous, like we're helping other countries. We're helping them do counterterrorism better. And in a lot of places, what really happens is we are helping authoritarian regimes, giving them the latest excuse to crack down on political opponents by calling them terrorists and exacerbating a lot of local conflicts that are happening through this kind of war on terror narrative and approach and all the funding and the equipment and the weapons that prop it up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is the reason that most Americans might think of the war on terror as two wars started by President George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan and not say something that's fitting into an umbrella of something like 85 countries because we're only seeing U.S. service members dying in larger numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years?
--:-- Stephanie Savell: I think one of the big myths about war in general, like a kind of a failure that Americans have in understanding what war really means, is this kind of focus on the fact that it's U.S. soldiers who are the ones who are dying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what does war really, really mean? It's civilians in the war zones who are dying and not only dying, but kind of suffering and living with trauma for the rest of their lives.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: It's 38 million people displaced. It's women in the war zones who are having miscarriages and babies with birth defects because of environmental contamination. It's people with such trauma at losing both their husband and their male children that they become addicted to drugs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, it's just these kind of countless ripple effects and horrifying stories. That's what war is. 7,052 U.S. service members have died in these post-9-11 wars, and that includes the 13 who died in the blast at the Kabul airport.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: In comparison, 387,000 civilians have died in these wars. So it's just kind of an astronomically different scale of death when you look at the civilians abroad compared to the U.S. service members.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that that number in itself just really begs us to ask these kinds of questions that the Cost of War Project tries to push. Like, was this worth it? I mean, how can the answer be yes?
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Those 7,000 service members I mentioned who died, four times as many more have actually died by suicide than in combat in the post-9-11 wars. Over 30,000 service members and veterans of these wars have taken their own lives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It symbolizes a much wider problem that we have amongst that group of people of just kind of the trauma that they are facing as a result of war, the multiple deployments that they've had, the kind of moral injuries of war.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: There are so many reasons why our veterans today are having more kind of mental health problems than in any previous generation of vets. So that's a really important thing to note as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there a chance that even your number that's approaching 1 million could be an undercount?
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Oh, it absolutely is an undercount. That's just the number of people who have died directly, as I said, by bombs and bullets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's kind of the shorthand way of explaining it. But think about all the reverberating effects, all the ripple effects of war.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: As I said, 38 million people have been displaced by the post-9-11 wars, and this kind of the broad umbrella of wars that I'm talking about, including in Syria and Yemen and other places, they lose their jobs, they lose their communities, they don't have a way of earning a living anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So think about the displacement, think about the fact that in war, oftentimes it's a tactic of war to bomb infrastructure like sewage systems.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: So you think about like one of the major causes of death right now in Iraq amongst children is just childhood diarrhea. The sewage systems are broken down. The water treatment facilities are broken down. And the healthcare systems have been decimated in Iraq and Afghanistan by the wars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So healthcare workers have had to flee the country. People are unable to get to hospitals and clinics because there's IEDs on the roads.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: And just so many ways in which people are dying and ill because of these wars that we just can't possibly count.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the UN has estimated that for every direct death in a conflict, there are at least three times as many more people who have died indirectly.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: So multiply that 929,000 by three, and you're starting to approach the low end of the possible range of the additional amount of people who've been killed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As we close 20 years of war and strife and pain and sacrifice, it's time to look to the future, not the past, to a future that safer to a future that more secure to a future that honors those who served and all those who gave what President Lincoln called their last full measure of devotion
--:-- Stephanie Savell: The war in Afghanistan is ending, at least in terms of soldiers on the ground, but is the war on terror ending? No.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that's one of the biggest misleading things that we hear in the media these days is that this is the end of the forever war. And, you know, Biden, like Trump before him, wants to get credit, wants to be acknowledged for ending the forever war.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: These wars are hugely unpopular, especially among the younger generations. But the fact of the matter is that counterterrorism has become the latest justification for U.S. militarism in so many places.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's the 85 countries that I talked about, where, I mean, if you look at what's happening in Africa, for example. There are U.S. military bases. U.S. is doing training and assistance all over the place.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: We are dropping drone strikes on Somalia. We engaged in combat just last year at a base in Kenya. There were raids that we were participating in. The U.S. troops were participating in in Mali and Niger.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 2017, you might remember there were that news about the four U.S. service member deaths in Niger and, you know, Congress was freaking out and the U.S. public was like, what are we doing in Niger?
--:-- Stephanie Savell: But this is actually just very much part of the U.S. approach to Africa today. So there's that answer to your question.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then in Afghanistan itself, you know, the CIA is training and equipping militia groups to continue fighting ISIS in Afghanistan. There are all of these defense contracting companies that are still on the ground.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: So there are lots of shadowy ways that this war is continuing. And I think that we really need to hold our government accountable for these kinds of activities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We can't just let this go under the radar screen and just kind of say, oh, well, the forever war is over. And now we don't really have to think about it anymore because we absolutely do.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: More with Stephanie when we return.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you. And Chime gets that, says Chime. Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts.
--:-- [Sound effects: Music plays]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So when you set up direct deposit through Chime, they say you get access to fee-free features, such as free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Chime says with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft, up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Plus, they say you don't need to worry about monthly fees or maintenance fees. You can work on your financial goals through Chime today.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: You can open an account in two minutes at chime.com slash explained. That's chime.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancor Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission of payment file. Fees apply at out-of-network ATMs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bank ranking and number of ATMs according to U.S. News and World Report 2023. Chime checking account required.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Stephanie, we've been talking about the costs of 9-11 and the war on terror in terms of life, but what about in terms of treasure? How much has the war on terror cost the United States so far?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's cost us $8 trillion in both spent funds and funds that we've committed to care for vets over the next 30 years or so until 2050. $8 trillion.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: How do you even explain how massive that is. It's something we can't even grasp. I mean, how do you calculate it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, you can't just look at what the Pentagon calls the war. It's the war budget. It's the overseas contingency operations. That's a certain figure.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: But you have to kind of go bigger and deeper. So you have to also think about the money that we spend on veterans care, as I mentioned.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The fact that these have been credit card wars and paid for largely through borrowing, and we owe interest on debt. And so we include that interest as a line in the calculation.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: To China? Well, partially, yeah. There are more foreign lenders than ever before in the history of the U.S. and how it's paid for wars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which is a little ironic considering that the real adversary that President Biden now wants to pivot to is China.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: The world is changing. We're engaged in a serious competition with China. We're dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia. We're confronted with cyber attacks and nuclear proliferation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have to shore up America's competitive to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: The way that the war has been paid for, it's predicted to rising levels of social inequality in this country as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Compared to past wars, if you look at like World War II, there were war bonds. And in the Korean war, it was entirely paid for through raising taxes.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: The combination today of tax cuts and war borrowing, not just from foreign lenders, but also kind of institutions within the U.S. and wealthy individuals, that's predicted to even higher rates of social inequality in the aftermath of the war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As the U.S. begins paying back this debt, that's going to make the rich richer. And the U.S. public just hasn't been contributing.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: I mean, that's one of the biggest reasons why there's such a disconnect, too, amongst the American public with these wars, is we haven't really felt them in our pocketbooks as much as we would have in prior wars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To his credit, President Biden is at least acknowledging a less convenient assessment of the costs of the war on terror which is to say your organization assessment.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Of course it very convenient for him to use a more critical assessment as he tries to end this war Is it only when it politically expedient that our leaders actually acknowledge the costs of these kinds of conflicts?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's definitely something to that. But I think that the status quo, I mean, look at Congress, the status quo is just to kind of throw money at the Pentagon.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Not only do they not, for the most part, question the massive amount of annual funding we give to the Pentagon, which is $800 billion a year at this point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But they oftentimes will give the Pentagon more than what the president asks for. So, you know, there's a real level of responsibility at the level of Congress that they're not doing enough to kind of question these costs and why.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex, we should take nothing for granted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: There are defense contractors who are heavily invested in maintaining all this war money and this war funding.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a revolving door between Congress and some of these defense contracting companies.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: The weapons manufacturers and military bases are very strategically located in so many districts and states throughout the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So lots of members of Congress have an incentive to kind of protect those industries in their home districts.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: This feels like probably a good time to acknowledge the fact that a lot of money was made in the war on terror too, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have a paper coming out soon that asks that question, who has profited from the post-9-11 wars?
--:-- Stephanie Savell: And the answer is these defense contracting companies. And these are Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman. Those are the top five.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And to give you just one example, Lockheed Martin made $75 billion in 2020 in Pentagon contracts.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: By comparison, the whole entire State Department budget for 2020, which also includes USAID, so all like U.S. development and State Department work, that was $44 billion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before 9-11, we were in, the budget was in surplus. And since 9-11, we've gone into deficit spending as a country.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: And what do you find when you share these numbers with people, not, you know, in your in your publishing, but just on an individual level, when you talk to people about these numbers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's so comfortable for us as Americans to just think, oh, that's happening to civilians over there in that part of the world.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: It enables us to check out a little bit in terms of our kind of moral compass and just kind of, well, you know, that sucks and not think too much about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what I hope is that with these numbers and with some of the stories that we tell, it gives people a way to realize that they have a personal stake.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Has anyone ever found out what you do for a living and been angry at you saying, you know, these are important wars, like we lost 3,000 American lives? How dare you question it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think there is that perspective, certainly, and kind of more of a dismissal. Like, who are you, young lady, to be talking about this? Like, what do you know about war?
--:-- Stephanie Savell: You know, and, but to counteract that, we have people like high up people in the U.S. military writing and being like, keep pushing the envelope. The American public needs to know about this stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nearly a million people have died directly. You know, 38 million people have been displaced from their homes. Eight trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money have been spent or obligated.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: And what have we gotten for all that? Are Americans safer now than we were on 9-11 when Al-Qaeda flew the planes into the Twin Towers?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are people around the rest of the world safer? Arguably, you could say that the U.S. post-9-11 wars have been a huge source of violence and death around the world.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: There are more, quote-unquote, terrorist groups now than there were on 9-11. There are more recruits to those groups. Arguably, this war on terror approach has been incredibly counterproductive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace America has stood down enemies before And we will do so this time None of us will ever forget this day Yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.
--:-- Stephanie Savell: Thank you. Good night. And God bless America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Stephanie Savell is an anthropologist of militarism, security, and civic engagement at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She's also the co-director of their Costs of War project. You can find the work at watson.brown.edu slash costs of war. One more time, that's watson.brown.edu slash costs of war.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. It's Today Explained. Our episode today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain with help from Hady Mawajdeh. two you Thank you.
