Tag: afganistan

How much have US wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan cost?

The decades-long military involvement of the United States in the Middle East expanded once again this week after its warplanes bombed at least three of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

According to a briefing by US General Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, seven B-2 stealth bombers, each valued at approximately $2.1bn, dropped at least 14 bunker-buster bombs worth millions on Fordow and Natanz.

In total, more than 125 US aircraft participated in the mission, including bombers, fighters, tankers, surveillance aircraft, and support crews, all costing hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy and operate.

The US spends more on its military than any other country in the world, more than the next nine countries combined, spending about three times more than China and nearly seven times more than Russia.

In 2024, the US spent $997bn on its military, accounting for 37 percent of all global military spending, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

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Shame: Afghanistan withdrawal politics miss the point of everything

On the three-year anniversary of the last U.S. soldier leaving Afghanistan, and with a presidential election looming, Afghanistan has briefly resurfaced in American discourse.

With a narrow focus on one month out of 238, and 13 deaths out of 2,219 American lives lost in Afghanistan, our leaders will once again miss the point. The spotlight will be on U.S. politics — not Afghanistan, not veterans, not Gold Star families, and certainly not Afghans. The goal is deflection, not reflection.

The harsh reality is that after 20 years our battlefield successes amounted to little. When the Trump administration entered negotiations with the Taliban, both Washington and our longtime Taliban adversaries shared the same goal: America out. President Biden soon decided to follow suit, leading to a haphazardly managed withdrawal—just another chapter in a poorly executed war strategy.

Lawmakers will fixate on the final moments because facing two decades of failure doesn’t suit them.

There are important questions that should be asked in regards to Washington’s failures in Afghanistan. Did we choose the wrong partners at the start? Was our distraction in Iraq fatal? Could we have negotiated with the Taliban sooner, or withdrawn in winter when the Taliban’s conquest of cities would have been harder? What if Bagram air base had been the final exit point, not Kabul? Why did we negotiate with the Taliban, offering them legitimacy and concessions, instead of simply leaving?

Why, after 20 years, did we fail to “know our enemy” or appreciate the intricacies of Afghanistan’s tribes and cultures? More importantly, could we have ever understood?

Some will call it a lost cause from the start — a view I understand, despite its simplicity. Others will misread the lessons to craft new intervention strategies, hoping to change history once again, albeit with better timing and execution.

Conducting after-action reviews of major U.S. military missions is both necessary and a duty. The Afghanistan War Commission and SIGAR are taking this seriously, with their findings available in public reports. Veteran journalists and analysts are also publishing books that tackle the toughest questions of our twenty-year war. However, these reports and books are unlikely to be read by those who cynically exploit our Afghan failures and the blood of U.S. soldiers for their own agendas. Whether these lessons are applied to future conflicts remains to be seen.

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