American wars of this century...War on Terror Campaigns Post-911

Today's author, Andrea Mazzarino, co-founded the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute. 

Since then, that remarkable project has put some numbers on this country's war on terror campaigns, ranging from 

• their cost to us (at least $8 trillion) to 
• the deaths they've caused (almost a million direct deaths, including more than 430,000 civilians, and as many as 3.8 million indirect ones), and 
• the number of refugees they've created (at least 38 million).

HUMAN COSTS The number of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere are estimated here. 

Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars — because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease. Posted March 2023. Updated August 2023.

Andrea Mazzarino, War's Cost Is Unfathomable February 27, 2024 Consider it strange that the cost in lives, in wounds, in illness -- the actual numbers or at least estimates when it comes to Israel's nightmarish campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas's horrifying October 7th assault -- are so much a part of the news these days. I mention this only because while you can now sit at home and read or hear about the estimated 29,000-plus dead Gazans, including more than 12,000 dead children, and the more than half a million Gazans facing "catastrophic hunger," when it came to our own country's devastating wars in response to al-Qaeda's nightmarish 9/11 attacks, you could read no such thing in our mainstream media. The numbers from what came to be known as the war on terror were largely unavailable, which meant that there was no way to truly take in the horror of what our country was doing in distant lands like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. Or at least that was true until, in 2010, today's author, Andrea Mazzarino, co-founded the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute. Since then, that remarkable project has put some numbers on this country's war on terror campaigns, ranging from their cost to us (at least $8 trillion) to the deaths they've caused (almost a million direct deaths, including more than 430,000 civilians, and as many as 3.8 million indirect ones), and the number of refugees they've created (at least 38 million). Still, I'm struck that, while we already have that estimated (and, all too sadly, ever-increasing) number of children slaughtered in Gaza, there's no known equivalent number for the American wars of this century. Were such figures available, they would undoubtedly be shocking. In that context, let TomDispatch regular Mazzarino compare American reactions to the present nightmare in Israel and Gaza to those about our own never-ending global wars. Tom The October 7th America Has Forgotten And the War Deaths We No Longer Protest (or Even Think About) By Andrea Mazzarino We Americans have been at war now since October 7th, 2001. That was when our military first launched air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to al-Qaeda's September 11th terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. That's 22 years and counting. The "war on terror" that began then would forever change what it meant to be an Arab-American here at home, while ending the lives of more than 400,000 civilians -- and still counting! -- in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In the days after those September 11th attacks, the U.S. would enjoy the goodwill and support of countries around the world. Only in March 2003, with our invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, would much of the world begin to regard us as aggressors. Does that sound like any other armed conflict you’ve heard about recently? What it brings to my mind is, of course, Israel’s response to the October 7th terror assault by the Islamic militant group Hamas on its border areas, which my country and much of the rest of the world roundly condemned. Click here to read more of this dispatch.