by Matthew Rusling
WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) -- The war in Afghanistan could cost up to three times the amount estimated by the Obama administration, according to Linda Bilmes, who co-authored a book on the Iraq conflict with Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.
U.S. President Barack Obama has outlined a new strategy for Afghanistan -- deploying 30,000 additional troops in a bid to handover security to Afghan forces and begin to exit by July 2011.
While the administration tagged the price at 30 billion U.S. dollars, Bilmes said the Pentagon did not count in a number of long-term costs, from caring for wounded veterans over the next several decades to equipment degradation to replacements for military weaponry.
Other hidden costs include payments to surrounding countries for the use of their airspace and interest on trillions of dollars borrowed to finance the war.
Once those are added up, costs balloon substantially, said Bilmes in a recent interview with Xinhua.
"These are long-term costs that just don't show up because of the way the government does its accounting."
Unlike Iraq, an urbanized country with well developed infrastructure, Afghanistan is rough and mountainous and boasts virtually no infrastructure outside of Kabul, the capital.
There are few airstrips in the war-torn country, and U.S. forces must rely on helicopters to transport supplies to remote areas.
"This is a very expensive way to manage operations," said the Harvard professor.
The United States will also have to pay for the training of 100,000 additional Afghan troops and police -- at a price of around 10 billion dollars a year -- for the next 15 years, she said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said there is no chance that his country, being very poor, can afford to foot a bill of this magnitude, leaving the United States to pick up the tab, she said.
Another major cost will be caring for wounded U.S. veterans for the rest of their lives, she said.
"The costs for taking care of veterans -- and this is both providing medical care to them and their families and providing disability compensation -- is a significant one that goes on for decades."
In World War II, for example, the peak year for paying out disability benefits came in the 1990s, as medical care becomes more expensive when veterans become older.
"And for Vietnam we are nowhere near the peak year for paying out disability," she said.
The percentage of troops who served in Iraq and filed for disability compensation exceeds 40 percent. And about one third of recent veterans have sought treatment in government facilities, she said.
The United States will also incur a number of intangible costs, such as the amount of those killed in war would have contributed to the economy.
Would one soldier have become the next Bill Gates, establishing a company that employed thousands of workers and enriched its shareholders?
Or would the children of those killed in battle have contributed to science, music, economics or sports?
Pentagon accountants do not consider such questions when calculating the cost of U.S. wars, she said.
"The way the Pentagon calculates it, the economic value of the productivity of a life is the value of the death gratuity and the insurance payment to the veteran's family, which comes to a total of 500,000 dollars," she said.
"Another piece (of hidden costs) is things like the lost productivity of wives and mothers who leave the workforce to care for returning troops," she said.
"We've lost thousands of young people in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts," she said. The death toll now stands at more than 5,000 for the two wars combined.
"And to lose people at the average age of 23 -- the prime of a young male's life -- you lose a whole stream of productivity throughout their lifetime."
Bilmes also laid out a guns-verses-butter argument, with guns losing out.
"If we spend money on things like education and infrastructure development, that has a positive multiplier. If we spend money on munitions that end up in the ground and on training the Afghan police force, that money does not have a positive economic benefit for the United States," she said.
Obama to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, start pullout in July 2011
WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack says he will deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and start pullout of U.S. troops from that country in July 2011, according to excerpts released by the White House ahead of his address to the nation on Tuesday night.
The first batch of additional troops will arrive by Christmas and the overall buildup will be completed by next summer, a senior administration official told reporters at a conference call ahead of Obama's address, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Full story
