The US Spent $2 Trillion in Afghanistan!

Since 2001, the US has spent $2.26 trillion in Afghanistan, the Costs of War Project at Brown University calculates. The biggest chunk – nearly $1 trillion – was consumed by the Overseas Contingency Operations budget for the Department of Defence. The second biggest line item – $530bn – is the estimated interest payments on the money the US government borrowed to fund the war.

The illicit economy, meanwhile, has boomed. After US forces drove the Taliban from power in 2001, Afghanistan cemented its place as the leading global supplier of opium and heroin.

Since 2001, the US has appropriated more than $144bn to Afghan reconstruction. Much of that money went to private contractors and NGOs the US government tasked with implementing programmes and projects to build Afghanistan’s security forces, improve governance, aid economic and social development and combat illicit drugs.

The most critical failure of those reconstruction efforts – and the most expensive – was the $88.3bn spent training and equipping the Afghan army from May 2002 to March 2021.

American companies account for almost 60 percent of total arms sales by the world’s 100 largest defence contractors.

Many of them have been cashing in on huge checks from the Pentagon’s war budget for years, with a majority of the near $5 trillion spent on the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq transferred to military contractors, whose workers outnumbered soldiers in Afghanistan three to one.

In addition to giants like Lockheed Martin, DynCorp, Academi (formerly Blackwater), Black & Veatch – and oil companies like ExxonMobil which shipped the fuel on which the army runs – are just some to have profited immensely from Washington’s lucrative contracts.

An investigation by the watchdog Project on Government Oversight found that between 2008-2018 around 380 high-ranking officials and officers had become government lobbyists, defence contractor consultants, or board members and executives within two years of leaving the military.

An investigation by the watchdog Project on Government Oversight found that between 2008-2018 around 380 high-ranking officials and officers had become government lobbyists, defence contractor consultants, or board members and executives within two years of leaving the military.

If the money spent on war was used for infrastructure, R&D, the homeless and the poor, America would be great again! But the sheer waste of lives and equipment is to enrich certain U.S. companies engaged in this madness called war!

References:

The US spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan – and for what? Patricia Sabga, Aljazeera, 16 August 2023

Ask not what the war cost the US, but who profited from the war, https://www.trtworld.com