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Comment by benmarks | Hacker News Reader

"The final total is unknown, but experts project another trillion dollars in costs over the next 40 years as wounded and disabled veterans age and need more services."

Add to this the unquantifiable lost opportunity from dead civilians, dead soldiers...

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Actuarially speaking, the 2,372 American deaths in Afghanistan at 7 million per individual roughly cost about $17 billion dollars. A drop in the bucket compared to $3 trillion dollars.

It's hard to see dollar figures and realize we are watching the productive lives of half a million people being spent so easily. Then again, we don't know the economic benefits we gained from the Afghanistan war so it's hard to balance the sheet.

Maybe it netted us some benefit with regards to world trade we aren't seeing? Or maybe it only hurt us in that regard and $3 trillion is just the beginning?

Then again this is just economics without considering the ethics of such "peacekeeping missions".

> Actuarially speaking, the 2,372 American deaths

So what about the Afghan civilians?

That there is no obvious gain for the country at large means the gain is either so subtle as to be imperceptible, or that the people who gained don't want it known that they did.

The economic cost in lives for Afghanistan is either incredibly high, or incredibly low, depending on how you look at it. Afghanistan is ridiculously poor. We spent $3 trillion dollars, invading a country that has a GDP of $2 billion. Life is cheap in such countries, both economically and figuratively. Pre war Afghanistan had a pre-war per capita GDP of $112 or about $10,000 lifetime earnings per person. At 250,000 Afghan lives lost this is about $2.5 billion in lost productive effort by a mixture of insurgents and civilians who are hard to separate out.

Post war Afghanistan has a Per Capita GDP of $600. Economically speaking Afghanistan is about 5 times better off. Whether that means they are actually better off is a matter of opinion. Is that worth the lives of a quarter million of your citizens? Is it better to be an independent but poor country? Or to be a country dependent on aid from a richer nation that invaded you?

> Then again, we don't know the economic benefits we gained from the Afghanistan war so it's hard to balance the sheet.

Oh, but we do. All the 5000 sq ft McMansion houses in and around the DC area (NoVA & Potomac mostly), built and owned by employees of defense contractors, and the inheritance that their kids will get in a few decades.

And some trickle down of course, in areas where those people choose to spend their money, restaurants and hotels.

Very true, I'm sure that was a MAJOR part of the decision to go to war, but I was referring to ancillary national benefits like:

1) Increased military presence allowing us to extend our economic power to the region.

2) Increased perception of our willingness to engage in war, reducing other nations willingness to increase tariffs on the USA or argue with our own.

3) Stronger hold on oil producing regions, reducing OPEC and Iranian influence on energy production.

4) Intimidation of nations willing to engage in war on our military and economic allies.

5) Etc...

What about the non-American deaths?

I fully agree with your emphasis about the deaths of non-Americans in the Afghanistan civil war with the Taliban. The US should never have attempted nation-building there, as it was guaranteed to fail (short of a 40-50 year occupation at hyper scale, a million soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars per year in cost; even that might not have been enough).

The problem is, there is something dramatically worse than the US presence in Afghanistan and it's waiting in the wings. What do you think will happen to the people of Afghanistan when the Taliban regain control after the US leaves?

The civilian deaths in Afghanistan are almost exclusively the result of the US attempting to keep the Taliban at bay, trying to keep them from de facto enslaving the entire population under an extreme theocracy and revoking all human rights.

There are few groups more draconian, backwards, or more oppressive on this planet than the Taliban. They will rule Afganistan again in the near future, they'll reclaim all of the country rapidly. The only thing holding them back from mass-torturing the entire country again has been the US. There is nobody else willing to risk so much to try to stop the Taliban, nobody else will lift a finger to do anything about it as the US leaves.

Calculating economic costs should be done with respect to each nation. I would estimate Afghanistan suffered about $2.5 billion in losses from deaths of civilians and insurgents. However their GDP increased by 5x covering those losses in a month or two. From an economic standpoint losing the war was the best thing to happen to Afghanistan. From the perspective of its citizens and culture though I think you would have to ask them.

As long as the US does not pay monetarily for non-American deaths, as cruel as it sounds they are not relevant to the US's budget.

In my opinion, the US does more to prevent civilian deaths than any other superpower. The evidence is in the fact that an insurgency, using civilians as cover for their operations, and engaging in covert warfare are being routinely defeated by American forces. Of the people killed, only about 3.8% are non-combatants. I don't know how accurate that reporting is, but if true that is amazing. To compare, World War II saw something closer to a ratio of 2:1 civilian to soldier deaths.

[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...

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