‘Unwinnable’, Increasingly Deadly Afghan War to Cost $18 Billion

by Barry Weisleder / November 2008

The Canadian cohort of the NATO military occupation of Afghanistan will cost up to $18 billion, according to Parliament’s new budget officer, Kevin Page, in a report released on October 9. To date, direct military costs alone total nearly $8 billion, Page estimates. By 2011, the year Ottawa pledges to bring Canada’s troops home, between $14 billion and $18 billion extra will have been spent when incremental military costs, aid, and veterans benefits are included.

Indeed, that could be a major cost under-estimate of a conflict that is increasingly deadly and evidently pointless. The war is the scene of an ever rising number of civilian deaths, territorial gains by the Taliban and other national resistence forces, and the assassination of Afghan government officials and foreign aid workers. The situation is deteriorating at such a pace that General Mark Carleton-Smith, commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, recently stated that a military victory over the Taliban was “neither feasible nor supportable”.

David Perry, a former deputy director of Dalhousie University’s Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, says the war will cost Canada more than $22 billion. His findings were discussed at a conference on maritime affairs attended by military leaders and analysts from Canada, the United States and several Asia-Pacific countries on September 17, according to the Ottawa Citizen.

In a separate interview, Mr. Perry said he was not surprised at the numbers he found. “We’re fighting a war on the other side of the world and that takes a lot of resources,” said Mr. Perry, currently in Ottawa. He projected the number of Canadian veterans in Afghanistan to be about 41,000 by 2010. That far exceeds the estimated 25,000 Canadian veterans from the Korean War.

Perry’s figures do not include the cost of ‘aid’ to Afghanistan, or the cost of the occupation for other federal departments, such as the RCMP and Foreign Affairs.

A majority of Canadians oppose the war and occupation of Afghanistan, which has cost the lives of nearly 100 Canadian soldiers and thousands of Afghan civilians. It is a military operation conducted for the sake of propping up a manifestly corrupt regime of war lords and drug exporters barricaded in Kabul. Conservative and Liberal politicians, who agreed to extend the war through 2011, were mostly able to keep the issue low-profile during the federal election campaign. But that didn’t stop NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer from lobbying member states in September for military commitments beyond 2011.

Some figures used in the Perry study came from the Department of National Defence. Other elements were estimated based on cost models of the U.S. military in the Iraq and Afghan wars. The breakdown of the Afghan expenses is as follows:

$7 billion for the cost of the war. This is an incremental sum from late 2001 to 2012. It includes everything from ammunition and fuel to the salaries of regular force military personnel.

$11 billion is the estimated bill for Veterans’ Affairs and DND for long-term health care of veterans and related benefits, including traumatic stress disorder among troops. Veterans’ Affairs Canada predicts an increase of 13,000 soldiers to its client base by 2010. Using U.S. estimates, between 10 to 25 per cent of returning veterans may experience mental health problems as a result of their overseas deployment. U.S. studies estimate that country’s long-term health care and disability costs for its Iraq and Afghan veterans to be between $350 billion to $650 billion.

$2 billion is for the purchase of mission-specific equipment. That includes everything from Leopard tanks, howitzers, six Chinook helicopters, countermine vehicles to aerial drones. Defence officials argue that such equipment will be used on future missions beyond Afghanistan – now that’s a comfort. The figure did not include the latest $95 million lease for additional aerial drones.

$2 billion is for the replacement of the military’s LAV-3 fleet. $405 million is for repair and overhaul costs. The study also shows that the previous Liberal government provided extra funding to the Defence Department to cover 85 per cent of the Afghan war costs, while the current Conservative government is funding only 29 per cent of the cost to DND, with the remainder coming out of DND’s existing budget. In other words, the Tories are providing more funding for the war, but less transparently.

In January, Canadian army commander Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie warned that the military was stretched to the breaking point and replacement stocks of equipment for Afghanistan have long been used up, either destroyed by the resistence or in the process of being repaired.

So, to use ‘military-speak’, this may be an ideal time to ‘cut our losses’ and ‘re-deploy forces’ from the widening counter-insurgency quagmire in Asia. More useful engagements, such as civilian rescue and natural disaster relief missions on Canada’s land and waterways, can easily be envisioned. And in the process of ending imperialist interventions abroad, a few billion dollars can be re-directed to progressive social purposes at home.

December 5 - 7, 2008 at Ryerson University in Toronto, the Canadian Peace Alliance biennial convention will take place. Its theme is “Canada’s new militarism: Building resistence at home and abroad”. The gathering will be an important opportunity, not only to discuss military conversion, but to plan united mass actions against the wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq, in concert with the U.S. anti-war movement which is heading towards unity for coordinated protests on March 21, 2009.