As the US marked the end of the war in Afghanistan, President Biden zeroed in on a critical question: “What have we lost as a consequence in terms of opportunities?” The president noted that we have spent $300 million a day in Afghanistan for 20 years.
It’s a shocking figure, but it’s only part of the cost of the wide-ranging militarization the US has undertaken around the world and in our own country since 9/11.
Twenty years after 9/11, our thoroughly milita-rized foreign and domestic policies have come at a cost of $21 trillion over the last two decades, ac-cording to new research my coauthors and I pub-lished at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Those costs have included the wars, ballooning Pentagon budgets, and our massive global military presence. They also include punitive immigration and border enforcement and the reorientation of the FBI, DEA, and other law enforcement agencies around counterterrorism with newly expanded powers.
This spending has done massive damage in its own right. US militarized spending since 9/11 has caused 900,000 deaths from the global war on terror and led to 5 million deportations from this country.
It has put $1.8 billion worth of military equipment on city streets, singled out Black and Latinx people to be put behind bars for primarily nonviolent crimes, and fueled FBI programs that targeted people based on nothing more than their race, ethnicity or religion. And that’s just for starters.—Agencies
