Revealed: True toll of America's wars in cash and lives

Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the US treasury, a major American study claimed yesterday - now, and in the future.

In both the US and Britain, the rising financial cost of the "war on terror" is hitting home as budgets grow ever tighter across the board.

The final war bill for the US will be at least $3.7trn (2.3trn) and could hit $4.4trn (2.7trn), according to the research project, Costs of War, released yesterday by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

In the ten years since US troops went into Afghanistan to hunt down al-Qaeda and its leaders, spending so far has run close to $2.7trn.

Future costs include long-term obligations to thousands of wounded veterans, and projected war spending from 2012 through 2020, the study says. Their estimates do not even include at least $1trn more in interest payments.

As for the human toll, it estimates that for every one of the 2,995 people killed on 9/11, 73 have been killed since as a result of US military engagement. About 224,000 to 258,000 people have died directly from warfare, including 125,000 civilians in Iraq.

Last week, Mr Obama ordered the US military to withdraw 10,000 military personnel from Afghanistan by the end of the year and another 23,000 by the summer of 2012. The "draw down" accounts for about a third of the current US presence of more than 110,000, and would leave 70,000 troops in place.

Britain currently has 9,500 troops in Afghanistan. Prime Minister David Cameron has said they will withdraw from combat roles by 2014, with a reduction of 400 within eight months.

Last year, UK government figures put the direct financial cost of fighting and reconstruction in both Iraq and Afghanistan at more than 20 billion. The final cost, including troops salaries and long-term care for the wounded, is likely to be far higher.

Britain's bill is much smaller than the US's, matching a troop deployment which is less than a tenth the size of the American contingent in Afghanistan, but domestic political pressures are similar. America's mayors have called on the White House to end the wars and bolster spending at home; London's former mayor Ken Livingstone has noted UK war spending could pay the bills for university fees ten times over.

This month, Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox said Britain's role in military action in Libya has already cost 260 million over six months, from maintaining warships off the Libyan coast to replacing expensive, high-tech missiles and bombs.

The Costs of War report notes that an estimated 365,000 have been wounded in wars since 9/11 and and 7.8 million people - just short of the populations of Scotland and Wales combined - have been displaced. It brought together more than 20 academics to uncover the expense of war in lives and monetary terms, challenging what it called opaque and sloppy accounting by the US Congress and Pentagon.

Their report underlines the extent to which war will continue to stretch the US budget, already on an unsustainable course due to an ageing population and rocketing healthcare costs. It also raises the question of what the US gained from its multi-trillion dollar investment.

Republican senator Bob Corker from Tennesse said: "I hope that when we look back, whenever this ends, something very good has come out of it."

The report notes that in the 11 September 2011 terrorist attacks, 19 hijackers plus other al-Qaeda plotters spent about half a million dollars to kill 2,995 people and cause $50bn to $100bn in damage. The subsequent costs make those figures look like small change.

Catherine Lutz, head of anthropology at Brown university and co-director of the study, said many people wanted to know the true cost.

She said: "We decided we needed to do this kind of rigorous assessment of what it cost to make those choices to go to war. Politicians, we assumed, were not going to do that kind of assessment."

The report arrives as the US Congress debates how to cut a US deficit projected at $1.4trn (871bn) this year, a tenth attributed to direct war spending.

Questions are also being asked as to what the US gained for its trillion-dollar expenditure. Many experts believe the results, in terms of strategic goals, are mixed.

Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are both dead, but Afghanistan and Iraq are far from stable democracies. Iran has gained influence in the Gulf and the Taleban, though ousted from government in Kabul, remain a viable military force in Afghanistan.

US intelligence analyst George Friedman said: "The US has been extremely successful in protecting the homeland.

"Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was capable of mounting very sophisticated, complex, operations on an intercontinental basis. That organisation with that capability has not only been substantially reduced, it seems to have been shattered."

The report claims that the administration of former president George W Bush was "shamelessly politically driven" in underestimating Iraq war costs before the 2003 invasion. Neta Crawford, the report's other co-director, said politicians throughout history have underestimated the costs of war, saying they will be shorter and less deadly than the reality.

In his speech last week on reducing troop levels, Mr Obama said: "Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war." The report suggest he had rounded down the cost by as much as $300bn.

Ms Crawford said: "I don't know what the president knows, but I wish it were a trillion. It would be better if it were a trillion."

Specific war spending over the past ten years, when expressed in 2011 dollars, comes to $1.3 trn (812bn), the Costs of War report found. But since the wars have been financed by deficit spending, interest must also be paid - $185bn (115bn) accumulated so far.

The Pentagon has received hundreds of millions of extra dollars beyond straightforward war funding, the study discovered. Homeland security spending, including vastly increased security at airports and government buildings, has totalled another $401bn so far that can be traced to 9/11. War-related foreign aid, another $74bn.

Then comes caring for US veterans of war. Nearly half of the 1.25 million US soldiers who have served in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan have used their status as veterans to make health or disability claims, costing $32.6bn (20.3bn) to date.

Britain has yet to see the same level of comprehensive accounting for wider war costs here. But as the number of British combat deaths in Afghanistan creeps towards 400, the figures for the badly wounded - "serious casualties in action"- is nearing 500.

In America, the costs of caring for injured servicemen and women is expected to soar over the next 40 years as veterans age. The report estimates the US obligations to the veterans will reach close to $1trn by 2050. So far, those numbers add up to a low estimate of $2.9trn and a moderate estimate of $3.6trn in costs to the US treasury.

Economist and report contributor Ryan Edwards said: "We feel a conservative measure of costs is plenty large to attract attention."

Those numbers leave out hundreds of billions in social costs not born by the US taxpayer but by veterans and their families: another $295bn to $400bn, increasing the range of costs to date to some $3.2trn to $4trn. That's a running total through fiscal 2011. Add another $453bn in war-related spending projected for 2012-2020 and the total grows to $3.668trn to $4.444trn.

If the financial costs are elusive, so too is the human toll. The report estimates between 224,475 and 257,655 have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, though those numbers give a false sense of precision. There are many sources of data on civilian deaths, most differing.

The civilian death toll in Iraq - 125,000 - and the number of Saddam's forces killed in the invasion - 10,000 - are loose estimates. The US military does not publish a thorough accounting.

"We don't do body counts," Tommy Franks, the US commander in Iraq, famously said after the fall of Saddam in 2003.In Afghanistan, the civilian death count ranges from 11,700 to 13,900. For Pakistan, where there is little access to the battlefield and the US fights mostly through aerial drone attacks. The study found it impossible to distinguish between civilian and insurgent deaths, but suggests they may be even higher than in Afghanistan.

The numbers only consider direct deaths - people killed by bombs or bullets. Estimates for indirect deaths in war vary so much that researchers considered them too arbitrary to report.

"When the fighting stops, the indirect dying continues. It's in fact worse than land mines. The healthcare system is still in bad shape. People are still suffering the effects of malnutrition and so on," Ms Crawford said.

Even where the US does do body counts for the military, the numbers may come up short of reality, said Ms Lutz, the study's co-director. Veterans are more likely to die in suicides and car accidents.

She added: "The rate of chaotic behaviour is high."