As the tenth anniversary of September 11th passes, one question that is likely crossing many people’s minds is: What has changed ten years on? As mundane and somewhat cliché as this question may be, it has many of us weighing the costs along with the benefits of America’s campaign against “terror.” Unfortunately, for a segment of the American population, the answer to this question never goes beyond the rallying cry of patriotic retaliation and the abstract safety of US homeland security and defense policies. But what has this campaign really accomplished, other than embroiling us in two wars that have cost the US an unprecedented amount of funds? Have the number of terrorist attacks and organizations declined? If they have, what exactly has it cost us?
It is difficult to measure the true cost of the War on Terrorism (WOT): the “collateral damage” of civilian lives lost, US foreign policy rhetoric of “us versus them,” US torture campaigns, the bigotry against Muslims, Arabs, and other people who simply appear suspicious (and suspicious by whose standards?). These consequences of the WOT, as well as the sense of security and vengeance felt by many Americans since 9/11, are not emphasized within the mainstream discourse and are rarely, if ever, disseminated via the US news media. More important, there is little effort to measure them beyond anecdotal observation, and as difficult at it is to do so, the lack of effort speaks volumes. However, even based on the figures that ARE collected, it is difficult to reconcile the WOT as a sustainable and effective solution to much of anything, particularly quelling international disdain for the way the US handles its relations with the nonwestern world.
In FY2000, the US defense spending base budget was $295 billion.[1] By 2010, the base budget had reached $527.9, according to the Department of Defense’s (DOD) FY2012 Budget Request. The requested amounts for the DOD’s base budget for FY2011 and FY2012 are $548.9 billion and $553.1 billion, respectively. These figures do not even include the supplemental funding for the WOT (which has been rebranded “Overseas Contingency Operations” or OCO). If the WOT/OCO costs are included, the FY2010 defense budget total comes to $691.0 billion, the FY2011 budget request to $708.2 billion, and the FY2012 request to $670.9 billion.
These figures overshadow the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) budget by billions of dollars. In FY2010 DHS’s gross discretionary funds totaled a mere $45,838,594 and the FY2011 continuing resolution gross discretionary is $45,990,939. This is a significantly disproportionate amount of spending on preemptive international war campaigns. This is not to say that homeland security is as effective an approach as leaders would often make us believe, but no matter how you frame or what you call the “War on Terrorism,” it is eating to our national budget at an alarming rate, having reached nearly $1.1 trillion by FY2010. Some estimates put the total cost of the WOT closer to $3 trillion. The increase in the DOD’s base budget is also now almost twice as much as it was pre 9/11.
Trends in Spending on the WOT- Estimated War Funding in Billions (Only Iraq, Only Afghanistan, & All GWOT/OCO Operations)[2]:.jpg)
Over $1 trillion later, what has changed significantly in the “international terror scene?” Not much for the better. Before 9/11, in 2000, there were twenty-nine Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and fifteen “Other” terrorist organizations worldwide, according to the State Department. The number of FTOs since 2000 has steadily grown to forty-seven in 2010, and “Other” organizations are no longer included in the DOS Country Reports as of 2007. In 2000 in Iraq, there were three FTOs; in Afghanistan, there were four. As of 2008, the number had jumped to five in Iraq and seven in Afghanistan. As the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan grew in dollars spent, so too did the number of terrorist organizations in both those countries, as well as worldwide.
The number of terrorist incidents has also climbed since 9/11 and the onset of the WOT. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of measuring terrorist activity is something that has plagued the field of terrorism studies for some time: the lack of consistency in defining “terrorism.” The term has become embedded in our national lexicon and foreign policy rhetoric since 9/11 and the onset of the WOT. There are over two hundred definitions of the term and little agreement about exactly what terrorism entails. As Richard Jackson points out in "An Argument for Terrorism," not only is there a malaise within academia, but the definitional quagmire carries implications in the way the WOT is “fought.” With so many definitions, how is it possible to determine exactly who we are fighting and what we are fighting against? Assessing the effectiveness of the WOT is complicated with such inconsistency and vagueness. This incongruence between not only the varying definitions of, but also approaches to, studying terrorism (government, think tanks, academia), is highly problematic as we enter the eleventh year of the WOT.
This discrepancy in definition has contributed to the often-drastic variance in figures and information that can be pulled from terrorist incident databases. From what information is available, however, the situation still looks stagnant, if not altogether bleak. The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) from the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) is a comprehensive and “methodologically open” resource for tracking terrorist incidents. As with most databases, however, there is no option to track state-sponsored terrorist acts, which points to a whole other problematic aspect of assessing the costs and benefits of the WOT. It also does not contain data past 2010. START’s GTD indicates that in the nine years before the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and what was the official start of the WOT (6 October 1992 – 6 October 2001), there were 19,077 terrorist incidents. In the following nine years, from the beginning of OEF on 7 October 2001 to 7 October 2010, there were 24,519 terrorist incidents.
During this same time period, Afghanistan went from sixty-two terrorist incidents in the nine years leading up to the WOT to 2,358 incidents in the nine years after the onset of the WOT. That’s a 3,803 percent increase, according to a definition of terrorism that does not even include crimes perpetrated by the state. The figures for Iraq are even more astonishing. Between 6 October 1992 and 6 October 2001, there were 111 incidents; in the following nine years, there were 6,003, or a 5,408 percent increase. If this is an effective campaign, one can only fear what ineffectiveness would look like.
In a society that craves quantification and empirical “truth,” we are relying on emotional evidence for justifying the WOT. Numbers serve us well when they tell the story we want to hear. Those affected by the attacks on 9/11 don’t want to hear that the War on Terrorism is a failure, and political leaders would cower at the thought of retracting their patriotic proclamations of revenge against those that tarnished America’s unbreakable image. But it is still unclear how to react to something as unprecedented as 9/11. If waging war isn’t the answer, then what is?
The “War on Terrorism” is more than simply an offensive; it is a phrase, a policy campaign, and a doctrine that permeates perceptions and consequent actions in regard to what “just war” is, and what “terrorism” constitutes. The terms and policies that dominate the discourse on the WOT are constructed from the Western rules of the game, but in the end these overseas contingencies have done little tangible or measurable good, even for the rule makers. This does not even begin to include the repercussions not recorded in databases and by government agencies. The figures we do have tell us that we are getting very little in return for the insurmountable costs of the WOT, some costs that we might not fully realize until decades from now. So ten years after 9/11, it is strikingly clear, yet still incredibly foggy, exactly where we stand amidst the War on Terrorism.
Notes
[2] Amy Belasco, “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” RL33110, September 28, 2009, Congressional Research Service, 10. Figures may not add due to rounding.