4 Trillion Dollars? New Report Shows the Hidden Costs of War

By Rae Gomes, AlterNet
Posted on June 29, 2011, Printed on June 30, 2011

President Obama cited the $1 trillion cost of the war in Afghanistan as a reason to bring some of the troops home, but that figure grossly underestimates the actual costs of war, which may already be as high 4 trillion dollars.

A new report just published by Brown University\'s Watson Institute for International Studies measures the categories of cost to make the point that the pay out is miniscule, if there\'s any at all. The report uses September 11 as a paradigm for cost and return: "Nineteen hijackers plus other al Qaeda plotters spent an estimated $400,000 to $500,000 on the plane attacks that killed 2,995 people and caused $50 billion to $100 billion in economic damages. What followed were three wars in which $50 billion amounts to a rounding error. For every person killed on September 11, another 73 have been killed since." Catherine Lutz, co-director of the study and head of the anthropology department at Brown said "We decided we needed to do this kind of rigorous assessment of what it cost to make those choices to go to war," she said. "Politicians, we assumed, were not going to do that kind of assessment."