US war in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $4 million every hour: Study
A new study has revealed that the US-led war in Afghanistan is costing American taxpayers $4 million per hour despite the withdrawal of most American troops from the country at the end of last year.
Nearly $715 billion has been spent on the US invasion of Afghanistan since 2001, including $35 billion in fiscal year 2015, according to figures from the National Priorities Project (NPP), a non-governmental organization that does research on the federal budget and US military spending.
The $715 billion cost for the Afghan war is deceptive, according to NPP, because it does not include a full accounting of all the costs of the war, including future spending on medical care for wounded soldiers and veterans.
Furthermore, the budget does not include interest payments on national debt resulting from war spending.
The cost of deploying just one soldier to Afghanistan is approximately $1 million a year, far higher than the $390,000 congressional researchers estimated in 2006.
The initial budget for the US-led war in Afghanistan was over $20 billion for 2001 and 2002. The budget declined to $14 billion over the next two years as spending was shifted to the war in Iraq.
Spending on the Afghan war took a back seat to Iraq war spending before ballooning to more than $100 billion in 2010 when the cost of the Iraq war began to decline.
Spending in Afghanistan continued to top $100 billion annually until 2013, when it began falling by increments of $10 billion, finally reaching the current budget of $35 billion.
The Afghan and Iraq wars have become “the most expensive wars in the US history,” Harvard economist Linda Bilmes calculated in 2013.
Former US president George W. Bush, who was in the White House between 2001 and 2009, has been accused of war crimes for ordering the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretexts.
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