Today, Explained - The cost of 9/11

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

The Department of Defense tracks how much US wars cost, but last week President Biden cited instead accounting from the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Its co-director, Stephanie Savell, explains why. Today’s show was produced by Victoria Chamberlin with help from Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The longest war in American history. In his speech, he talked about the costs of war. And in explaining some of the costs, he cited the work of one particular group. 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 Savelle is the co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. 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. It's crazy. So the Pentagon,

the Department of Defense says one trillion. The Afghanistan war has cost one trillion. We say it's two because you have to think about like these wars have, 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. 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, 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 $2 trillion to even be included in the public discourse at all.

Like, 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. 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. 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, 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. That's in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is part of the U.S. post-911 wars. 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.

929,000 people have died directly through, you know, bombs and bullets, airstrikes, things like that. And you come to this number by doing your own data collection, is that right? 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. 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.

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' war on terror? 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. Eighty-five. I went into it thinking, okay, this is going to be pretty straightforward. We're 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. 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. The Pentagon announcing a short time ago that both manned and unmanned drone aircraft conducted a series of airstrikes in Libya against ISIS targets. 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 military exercises with other countries. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. 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-911 wars, and that includes the 13 who died in the blast at the Kabul airport. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. It seems like the more you consider the repercussions of these wars, the more people you realize have actually been affected. And unfortunately, the more people you realize have

died. Is there a chance that even your number that's approaching 1 million could be an undercount? Oh, it absolutely is an undercount. That's just the number of people who have died directly, as I said, by bombs and bullets. That's kind of the shorthand way of explaining it. But think about all the reverberating effects, all the ripple effects of war. 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. 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. 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. 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 and just so many ways in which people are dying and ill because of these wars that we just can't possibly count. 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. 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. 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's safer. To a future that's 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. The war in Afghanistan is ending, at least in terms of soldiers on the ground,

but is the war on terror ending? No. 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 Biden, like Trump before him, wants to get credit, wants to be acknowledged for ending the forever war. 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. 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. military bases. U.S. is doing training and assistance all over the place.

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. 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? But this is actually just very much part of the U.S. approach to Africa today. So there's that answer to your question. 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. 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. 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. More with Stephanie when we return. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, Thank you. your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the aura frame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody.

You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. 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? 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. How do you even explain how massive that is? It's something we can't even grasp. I mean, how do you calculate it? 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, 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, 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. 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. Which is a little ironic considering that the real adversary that President Biden now wants to pivot to is China. The world is changing. We're engaged in a serious to is China. 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. We have to shore up America's competitive to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century.

The way that the war has been paid for, it's predicted to rising levels of social inequality in this country as well. Compared to past wars, if you look at World War II, there were war bonds. And in the Korean War, it was entirely paid for through raising taxes. 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. 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. 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. 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's assessment.

Of course, it's very convenient for him to use a more critical assessment as he tries to end this war. Is it only when it's politically expedient that our leaders actually acknowledge the costs of these kinds of conflicts? the massive amount of annual funding we give to the Pentagon, which is $800 billion a year at this point. 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. 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. 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. There are defense contractors who are heavily invested in maintaining all this war money and this war funding. There's a revolving door between Congress and some of these defense contracting companies. The weapons manufacturers and military bases are very strategically located in so many districts and states throughout the United States. So lots of members of Congress have an incentive

to kind of protect those industries in their home districts. 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? We have a paper coming out soon that asks that question, who has profited from the post 9-11 wars? And the answer is these defense contracting companies. And these are Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman. Those are the top five. And to give you just one example, Lockheed Martin made $75 billion in 2020 in Pentagon contracts. 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. Before 9-11, we were in, the budget was in surplus. And since 9-11, we've gone into deficit spending as a country. And what do you find when you share these numbers with people, not, you know, in your publishing, but just on an individual level when you talk to people about these numbers. 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. 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. 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.

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 3000 American lives. How dare you question it? 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? You know, and, but to counteract that, we have people like high up people in the US military writing and being like, keep pushing the envelope. The American public needs to know about this stuff. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. Thank you.

Good night. And God bless America. 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 costsofwar. One more time, that's watson.brown.edu slash costsofwar. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. It's Today Explained. Our episode today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain

with help from Hadi Mawaddi. I'm sorry. Thank you. you