Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Nita Crawford.
She is the chair of the political science department at Boston University and worked on this project for the Watson Institute at Brown University.
The Cost of War Project.
And two very important ones here, one on the body count and another on the financial costs of the war on terrorism so far in this century.
Very important work.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Nita?
I'm good.
Happy to be here.
Good deal.
Very happy to have you here.
So let's talk about the fatalities first.
All told, between 480,000 and 500,000, 507,000, it says, people have been killed in the United States post 9-11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And it says here this tally of the counts and estimates from direct deaths caused by war violence does not include the more than 500,000 deaths from the war in Syria.
But it also doesn't include what we would call the excess death rate of the people who have died just from the deprivation, economic and medical and etc. like that in the war.
We're talking, am I right?
We're talking just about violent deaths in the wars.
That's correct.
Bombs, bullets, fire caused by bombing.
That kind of thing.
Yes.
And now, just to be clear, you're not saying all directly at the hands of U.S. forces.
You're talking about just who have died in the violent conflict.
So that would include Shiite militias versus al-Qaeda during Iraq War II, that kind of thing.
That includes U.S. military, U.S. civilian casualties, U.S. contractors, other countries' militaries, and police, and of course, civilians.
So everybody that we can figure out who's been in a war zone has been killed directly.
And just to be clear, including fighters on either side too, right?
That's right.
Okay.
And so, well, you want to take us through some of the charts and graphs?
Actually, before you get to the numbers, can you talk a little bit about your methodology in tabulating all this stuff?
Sure.
Let me just paint a picture of what happens in war.
As you know, people use lots of force.
Sometimes that force can be, you know, like a knife, very accurate, and sometimes it's inaccurate.
Now, when it's inaccurate, let's say you drop a large bomb, you could kill a lot of people and not know that you've killed them.
So there's inherently some fuzziness here.
It's not like the close-in killing.
You don't really know.
So all of these numbers are estimates based on the best reporting that I could find.
So the best reporting comes from sources like the United Nations in Afghanistan, which investigates incidents of killing of civilians.
So that's where I get my civilian numbers for Afghanistan.
In 2008, they began to go to the places where civilians were killed to try to find out who, that is, men, women, children, how many, and how the people were killed in incidents of violence, really, by bombs or IEDs, something like that.
Then there's other sources, such as Iraq Body Count for Iraq, which used publicly available data from those countries, including press reports, moral reports, and so on, hospital records, if that's necessary.
They try to have multiple sources.
So does the UN, by the way.
And then there are journalistic accounts.
There are public records, for instance, of police and armed forces who were killed and injured.
So we try to use as many sources as possible.
And I look at the quality of the work, how detailed the explanations are, what their citations are, and so on.
I'm trying to get an assessment of the credibility of the sources.
And this work on understanding how many people have been killed and injured in these conflicts has gotten better and better over the last few decades.
I would say that prior to the 9-11 wars, this was really an area that social scientists and demographers didn't have enough resources to investigate.
And those resources have grown.
Lots of NGOs work in this area.
Clearly, we need to know more, but it's gotten a lot better.
So my job in understanding this, I've been following these wars since they began, has gotten easier in some respects.
And I'll talk to you about, if you want, the ways it's gotten harder.
Sure.
Well, you could do that, but also, I'm not sure, I don't think you mentioned, I mean, it sounds like you're talking about direct reports as best as possible.
So does this include any survey data at all?
There is survey data that you can get from, let's say, Johns Hopkins.
People have done door-to-door surveys and selected random areas in Iraq.
I don't use that data.
I think it's the best of its kind, that work.
But I'm looking for the closest I can to reports that include the entire war zone.
Unfortunately, that data, by those people who do those surveys, has been discredited, I think, largely for political reasons.
And it's basically something where if I use that data, people will discount it, oh, you've used the Johns Hopkins numbers.
I actually think their work is very good, but I don't use it because I'm trying to actually just give you the facts and stay away from the politics on these matters.
Which is smart, because...
Let me just finish.
Okay.
But with the Johns Hopkins work and other survey work, there is another survey work as well, and they're also counting indirect deaths.
I'm trying to, as best I can, get it direct deaths.
Well, and that's important, because if you're using survey data of any kind, even if they had what we would consider to be lowball numbers or something like that, it always raises questions, regardless of what the answers are.
Even if they did the most meticulous study in the world, it raises questions about just how much extrapolating is going on here and this kind of thing.
So I think it's very wise for you to do it in this way.
And also, in effect, that means that, of course, necessarily, your numbers are very conservative, because many of these deaths...
Oh, I have extremely conservative numbers.
There's no doubt about that.
Right.
I think that...
Which is always the best to...
There's a large margin of error here.
Yeah.
And we're talking about huge numbers of dead people, so it's not like you're minimizing it in any way.
But it just means that your work then becomes eminently defensible, as opposed to, like you're saying, where people try to take these side angles against the Johns Hopkins studies, which, as you said, they're counting larger numbers.
They're casting a wider net in the first place, including excess death rate overall and that kind of thing, as opposed to just violent deaths in combat and conflict and collateral damage and so forth, like you're doing here.
Yeah, but let me be very clear.
Sure.
Their work is...
Essentially, if you're a demographer, it's the gold standard.
I don't want to dismiss their analysis, but I'm looking, as you say...
I'm sorry.
That's my dog.
I'm looking, as you say, at direct death in this work.
The other thing to say about their analysis is, of course, you need to understand what's happening with morbidity and mortality that is caused by the destruction of infrastructure.
You yourself mentioned it.
And we know that morbidity and mortality actually continue in war zones after wars end because of the destruction of infrastructure.
So that work is extremely important, and it points us to problems that will occur should these wars end in the foreseeable future.
We're looking at decades of reconstruction and then, of course, lots of morbidity and mortality that is related indirectly but definitely caused by the destruction of infrastructure.
Yeah, and we've seen it everywhere, where the means of the distribution of food resources, above all, become crippled, and so prices soar.
And the poorest people die first, and the youngest and oldest of them first, the most helpless of them, too.
Yeah.
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All right, so you really have us at almost 7,000 American military killed in the war so far, right?
That's right.
U.S. soldiers and sailors, and they're killed in the major war zones, but, of course, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria aren't the only war zones.
These are what are called overseas contingency operations that happen in about 80 other countries in the world.
So what you see when the Department of Defense reports these numbers is they're including people who, for instance, died in Africa in a war zone there, where the overseas contingency operations are occurring.
So those are all U.S. deaths of the military in the global war on terror that the Department of Defense is reporting.
And then speaking of conservative estimates, you have here, I notice, 38,000, almost 500 civilians killed in the war in Afghanistan in the past 17 years.
But, you know, we know going into it how poor reporting is in Afghanistan, especially people dying out in the countryside.
Well, there were years when nobody counted.
There were no estimates.
And those are the years after, let's say, 2003 to 2008 when the United Nations and then gradually NATO began to try to understand the consequences of the use of force there.
And then reporting has become better.
And I think the U.N. has done excellent work in keeping track.
I think that their numbers post-2008 are good.
I had to make some estimates by counting up the few sources there were, looking at media reports and so on.
And then I had to extrapolate for those years where the conflict was overshadowed by what was happening in Iraq, and reporters and so on turned to Iraq, and we sort of lost track of Afghanistan in a number of ways.
So, yeah, the numbers there are conservative.
And also keep in mind, I did this report in September and October of this year, but the U.N. numbers that I had only went to July.
So it's likely that there's 1,000 to 2,000 more people that the U.N. will have counted who've been killed, because the war in Afghanistan is actually, as you know, heated up.
And the United States controls, along with its allies there, including the Afghan government, much less territory.
Now, the most violent actors there, you know, aside from the Taliban, are militants who basically don't see any reason to take care of civilians.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
The Taliban have used terrorist tactics against civilians the whole time, basically.
Well, since 2005 or whatever, since the real beginning of the insurgency there again.
So, yeah, a lot of those civilian deaths are certainly from their side.
Plenty from collateral damage from American bombs and strikes and raids as well, of course.
But now, when you have 23,372 for Pakistan, that might sound high to people, but I'm guessing that must include the Pakistani army assaults on the Swat Valley in the early Obama years, right?
That's right.
That's not just the drone wars there.
That's real battles.
That's right.
This does include the couple thousand people who have been killed by U.S. drone strikes.
But most of these civilian deaths are either what the militants are doing to people in Pakistan, or a lot of them in any one year, most of the deaths are caused by the Pakistani military, and in particular the Frontier Corps, which the United States actually armed, trained, and financed.
We've supplied them with the know-how to engage in counterinsurgency, and they've done it.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, too, is even where just now I focus on those massive battles in the Swat Valley, there really has been a long-term pseudo, what they would call, I guess, a low-level campaign by the Pakistani military against the Tariqi Taliban in the federal tribal territories and all that kind of thing all along, really, is what you're talking about, right?
Well, since really 2002, in the early years of the Bush administration, essentially the Pakistani military and the U.S. were very tightly linked in the frontier area because the Taliban had fled there from Afghanistan.
But also it was really handy because this is essentially a region that the Pakistani military had a difficult time controlling by themselves.
So their entire military budget grew quite a bit in the early part of the war there, and it was essentially bolstered in large part by U.S. money.
And in addition, we gave them the military equipment to engage in the suppression or the search and destroy operations that they engaged in.
And those are gifts, so they're not counted.
They're surplus material.
We can value how much, let's say, a tank or an airplane is or some munitions are, but a large part of this is sort of off the books.
And I actually haven't done the valuation of all that free stuff, but it's clear that the Pakistani military was largely enabled in their attempts to root out militants by the United States support.
Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, learn from the greats.
Click through from the link in the right hand margin at scotthorton.org.
So I'll get a kickback.
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All right, let's talk about these Iraq numbers.
182,272 to 204,575.
That's right.
Those are civilians.
Yeah, right, right.
Those don't include fighters.
You have here another 35,000 to 40,000 fighters.
Geez, I thought it would have been higher than that.
Well, let's talk a little bit about both the soldier numbers and the militant numbers, because here's where things get really fuzzy.
For many years, the Afghan military and police and the Iraqi military and police have been fighting.
They engage in a lot of recruitment of people.
Sometimes they have a hard time maintaining their numbers because they're under attack.
So we actually don't know how many of them have been killed or injured with a great deal of consistency over time because they stopped reporting, especially in Afghanistan.
They stopped reporting the numbers of soldiers and police killed because then it's harder to recruit.
So they're trying to maintain a decent-sized armed force to maintain order.
But if they tell us the truth about the rate of casualties, then people don't want to join.
So in recent years, especially in Afghanistan, it's been difficult to get a sense of the national police and armed forces deaths.
Now, in the case of both Iraq and Afghanistan, it's also been hard to know how many militants have been killed.
Early in the war in Iraq, I think there was a good sense, but then we actually don't know how many of the civilians killed were militants or of the militants killed were civilians.
So there's a fuzziness there.
So that's why we're counting total number of people killed, and we have them in rough categories.
But there is some potential slippage in terms of is a militant killed actually a civilian or is the civilian killed actually a militant.
Now, under international law, you're supposed to make sure that you're giving the benefit of the doubt to an unarmed person that they're a civilian.
And you're not to kill an unarmed person just because you feel threatened by them.
So, on the other hand, when a building is bombed and you're sort of counting the number of people killed, sometimes the U.S. or, say, the Iraqi military would say, well, those were militants.
So that's why it's difficult.
You're right.
Well, and, of course, again, so many of these deaths never got reported by anyone in the first place.
And, you know, in the chaos of Iraq War II, if you think about 2005 through 07 and this kind of time period where there were thousands of people killed every month, you know, two, three thousand people a month killed for about two and a half years or so.
I mean, it's just chaos all over the place and in many different cities at the same time and plus out in the countryside and God knows what.
And so, you know, we'll never really know.
We may never really know.
That's true.
For all of this, we may never really know down to the individual.
We will know down to the individual how many U.S. soldiers were killed.
Right.
That we will know.
And we'll know the numbers of the United States allies, British, German, Italian, who've been killed in these conflicts.
But you're right.
There are lots of people we'll never know the real numbers for.
Yeah.
And now you say, too, at the beginning, as I read there, that this doesn't include Syria.
And for that matter, it doesn't look like it includes the war in Yemen or the war in Libya either, which I'm not putting that on you.
I'm saying you can only bite off and chew so much at a time here, I guess.
But we're talking more hundreds of thousands of people killed in those conflicts as well.
Well, at least in Yemen, it looks like 10,000 civilians or so have been killed since the United States started helping.
Wow.
Those numbers are about three and a half years old now.
Well, there are many people who are displaced and injured.
Right.
I think it's difficult to know.
I mean, these are heavily bombed areas.
They're essentially no-go zones in the same way that parts of Pakistan are no-go zones.
Yeah.
For instance, in parts of Pakistan, you can't get the media in.
In parts of Yemen, you can still get media in, but it's often well after the fact of something happening.
Well, you know, there are still good reporters inside Yemen.
And I'm not sure if you're aware of this group, Akled Data.
I talked with their guy, Andrea Carboni, and they had recently put out a study putting the civilian deaths, or no, I guess total violent deaths, at 60,000.
And then they came out with an update where they had gone back through the information from the very first year of the war that they hadn't really had together yet before.
And they raised their number to 85,000 last week.
And, you know, reporters that I've talked to in Yemen have their own numbers where they've been saying it's in the very high tens of thousands for at least a year now.
Yeah, I don't know much about that.
I haven't studied it.
And one of the reasons why I don't report on things I haven't studied is I really want to know.
Right.
Oh, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's why I haven't looked at it.
Yeah, no, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to sound like I was being critical of your work there, Anita.
I was just saying, overall, from the audience's perspective, that this is just a slice of it.
There are a lot more wars than these.
Right.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I'm actually, I'm not worried about my numbers.
But what I want to, the point I want to make that's larger than, you know, the exact number of people killed in Yemen, it's that the United States itself does not have to be directly involved to be causally responsible for these deaths.
And we looked at the wars that the United States is engaged in.
In this case, in Yemen, in a civil conflict with lots of international actors intervening, the United States was not itself directly bombing.
So we did not count that.
And I think that if we had more resources, I would love to include Yemen and Libya and the 80 other countries where the United States has special operations forces and really look carefully at those conflicts.
But it would take a lot more resources than the Kosovo Project has.
But you raise an excellent point about the number of conflicts and the high death toll there.
Right.
And yeah, of course, you know, in Libya, America got it started and turned most of that war over to the Europeans.
And then, you know, at worst has backed these or those factions on the ground since then.
But these and those factions on the ground, plus others that America doesn't have anything to do with, they've been fighting and killing each other and have a lot of violence there.
So in the same way where America is pretty much the Yemen war couldn't be happening without American naval and air force and financial and diplomatic support in every way and all these things.
At some point, the responsibility really does end up in D.C.
We're the world empire and Saudi is the satellite.
And same thing with Haftar.
You know, his violence is his, but we're kind of on the hook for it in a way to there.
And now I'm so sorry because I'm almost out of time here.
And you have this whole other partner study here, five point nine trillion dollars spent and obligated.
So I don't have too much time to elaborate about that.
Maybe we can go a little bit over.
But can you just talk a little bit about how much of that is already spent?
How much of that is obligated and how much of that is veterans care into the indefinite future and so forth?
Right.
So what we have is most of the money is already spent.
OK.
And in this sense, about two trillion has already been spent or is in the FYI 2019 budget.
That is this fiscal year for just the DOD and State Department.
Then you add another 350 billion for that is already spent for medical and disability care for the post 9-11 war veterans.
And then there's increases to the Pentagon based budget.
There's homeland security spending that's related.
And then there's money to pay for the borrowing for these wars because the United States was in budget surplus before the wars began and then went into deficit spending.
And these wars have not been paid for by taxpayers, either by taxes or by people buying war bonds.
So essentially, we're paying interest on borrowing to pay for these wars and homeland security.
And then in terms of future costs, we estimate about a trillion dollars for the already in the pipeline and already in the system veterans who will get medical care and disability through 2059.
That's the future cost that we're talking about.
And then there's also going to be, depending on if we decide to pay for these wars a different way, the substantial, again, cost and interest.
Right.
That's the part that just gets me.
I mean, I don't know.
I remember watching Bugs Bunny when I was a kid and it was always war propaganda, buy war bonds to support the war.
But it was the responsibility was on people to pay the cost and to deal with the cost up front of the war, at least in a sense, at least part of it.
But now they just borrow all of it and inflate the rest and all of this kind of thing.
And so it makes the war seem free when, in fact, it's so destructive to our economy, as we see with the boom and bust cycle that is partly caused by that inflation and and all of the consequences.
But it seems like kind of hidden.
Right.
It's all somehow they take care of it.
Yeah, that's true.
But let me make one point about military spending, though.
It does promote some job growth.
There's a direct and indirect jobs per million dollars of military spending.
All right.
But just keep in mind that other sectors of the economy are much more productive.
So infrastructure, 10 jobs, clean energy, 10 jobs, health care, 14 jobs per million dollars, elementary and secondary education, 19 jobs per million dollars.
Now, when you talk billions like we're talking.
That's hundreds of thousands of jobs that could have been created by spending money in other ways or by not taxing people.
Right.
And that's really the thing is to write is for working class people or, you know, even middle class people who work their whole lives and pay income tax every year.
You know, from the time they're 15, 16 years old through their whole adult lives, that all of that, that they take and all of that, that what it would have been worth to you and me if we had been able to keep that money.
That's just the remainder on an interest payment to some bank that holds some bonds.
That's nothing.
It's it's the sense on the end on the right side of the decimal point.
That means nothing in the scheme of things.
Tears in an ocean, so to speak.
But so much of what we really work, you know, Monday through Wednesday to pay, you know, and get to keep the rest, unfortunately, you know.
Yes.
60 percent of the budget right now of the discretionary part is for the military.
Then if you add the other two largest departments, Homeland Security and veterans, those are the three large departments, the government.
Much of what we're we're involved in is paying for our security.
Thanks, Nina, very much for coming on the show and talking about this stuff with us.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks very much for your time.
Yeah, let's talk again some other time.
And you've probably heard Scott talk about the crowdsourcing effort on Reddit about his upcoming book.
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All right, y'all.
Thanks.
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Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
