Dear CCI Friends,
I want to make a new site available to you. I’ve been watching it for several months now and find that much of their articles and researchers are quite good. They write toward the younger crowd but essentially give basic facts dressed up in today’s language and morality.
Let me know if The Conversation seems valuable to you. If so, subscribe yourself.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
The war lasted 7,262 days. It cost the lives of 2,455 U.S. service members and tens of thousands of civilians. And the price tag to American taxpayers of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan? Around $2.3 trillion.
These are some of the findings released today by the Costs of War Project, an initiative that pulls together the work of more than 50 scholars to provide as full an account of the human, economic and political costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as possible.
Neta Crawford, a foreign policy expert at Boston University and a co-director of the project, writes that while the figures on their own “can never give a complete picture of what happened and what it means, they can help put the Afghanistan war in perspective.”
Although the U.S. military’s involvement in that conflict is now officially over, some of the numbers Crawford cites in her article will continue to rise. For example, veterans returning to America with physical or mental scars will continue to need government-funded medical support, perhaps for many years to come.