Reading the news media, it’s easy to get the impression that America’s 20-year adventure in Afghanistan is ending in Vietnam-style ignominy, with reports of provincial capitals falling to the Taliban and ominous predictions that women’s rights are headed back to the dark ages. I’d like to suggest the opposite, that the war was a smashing success for the US.
Let’s start with the justification for war. As far as I know, there have only been two major attacks on the US in the past 200 years, Pearl Harbor and 9/11. These two attacks were similar in terms of both the number of American fatalities and the extensive property damage. You might argue that Pearl Harbor was an act of war by a foreign state, whereas 9/11 was a criminal assault by a non-governmental actor. But Al Qaeda was not operating in isolation, as the Taliban government provided then with sanctuary within Afghanistan.
This is from the US intelligence report on 9/11:
The transition to the new Bush administration in late 2000 and early 2001 took place with the Cole issue still pending. President George W. Bush and his chief advisers accepted that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the Cole, but did not like the options available for a response.
Bin Ladin’s inference may well have been that attacks, at least at the level of the Cole, were risk free.
The Bush administration began developing a new strategy with the stated goal of eliminating the al Qaeda threat within three to five years.
Notice the importance of deterrence. Bin Ladin launched 9/11 because he (wrongly) inferred from our previous responses to terrorist attacks that he could get away with it. (Note that 9/11 actually caused more damage than Bin Ladin anticipated.) Thus one can argue that even a Taliban that was cooperative post-9/11 should have been attacked, as a deterrent to future governments in other countries harboring Al Qaeda-like enemies of the US.
But in the end this was a moot point, as the Taliban did not cooperate and thus we were forced to invade. And the war was a major success:
1. The Taliban government was quickly toppled.
2. Al Qaeda was put on the run, weakening its capability.
3. Later on, a successful attack on Al Qaeda was launched from Afghanistan, killing Bin Ladin at his hideout in Pakistan.
4. For the next 20 years, the Taliban was denied power in Afghanistan.
If the Taliban takes power again next week, does that mean the war was a failure? Of course not. Consider the analogy of someone who serves 20 years in prison for 2nd degree murder. One critic might carp that the last 15 years was a waste of taxpayer money, as even 5 years in prison is plenty of deterrence. Another critic might claim that the sentence was ineffective, as the murderer is now out and free to murder again. Both views are wrong—as 20 years is a reasonable deterrence for 2nd degree murder. Any specific figure is arbitrary, but you must choose some sort of sentence.
The war was a success, as Al Qaeda was badly damaged and the Taliban was severely punished. But that’s not all, the broader goals of the war were also achieved.
Younger readers might not understand how pessimistic Americans were back in late 2001. There were mysterious attacks with anthrax powder sent through the mail. Another major airliner crashed in NYC a few months later (non-terrorist as it turned out). I recall talking to highly intelligent people who told me that we’d now have to just live with frequent terrorist attacks, as our society is too exposed to prevent them. And it is true that we’d have no way of stopping terrorists from killing huge crowds of Americans. Our “security theatre” is mostly an annoying joke. We are very exposed.
But my friends were wrong. We’ve been almost free of terrorism since 2001. It’s not just that flying didn’t become more dangerous; it became far safer than before 9/11. The war in Afghanistan deterred future terrorist organizations (such as ISIS) from directly attacking the US homeland. Those groups may use suicide attackers, but the organizations themselves are not suicidal.
Why is the war not viewed as a smashing success?
1. The world is messy, and most news is bad news.
2. The war was not carried out in a 100% optimal manner (which is always true of wars.)
3. Average people mix it up with the Iraq War, which was truly disastrous.
4. A mix of elite liberal internationalists and neoconservatives had fantasies of turning Afghanistan into a central Asian Switzerland, where women could walk around in miniskirts. But this was never a realistic objective.
Because of the so-called “time inconsistency problem“, it is hard to maintain effective policies of deterrence over a period of decades. The public gets tired of fighting. So perhaps you need need some sort of fantasy of a higher objective than just beating up on the Taliban for 20 years, denying them power for 20 years, and then walking away. Just as our punishment of criminals is often linked to imaginary concepts like “rehabilitation”, or “giving them what the deserve”. (What does “deserve” even mean? To utilitarians like me it’s a meaningless concept.)
Nonetheless, if these fantasies of rehabilitation and just deserts help us to do things to deter murder (such as long prison sentences), then perhaps they have some value.
READER COMMENTS
Christophe Biocca
Aug 12 2021 at 12:00pm
If your 20-years-leads-to-effective-deterrence theory is true, then we should expect the Taliban, once they’re back in power, to no longer fund or tolerate the presence of terrorist groups (at least not NATO-targeting terrorist groups). This seems like a good prediction for a Caplan-style bet.
Or he figured he could trade lives and treasury at an extremely favorable ratio. If you model him as someone who put negative weight on utility experienced by the people in countries he considers as enemies, this makes sense and is not dissuaded in the least by retaliation, if the latter is extremely expensive for us.
How much safety really comes from invading Afghanistan vs. cockpit doors that lock and passengers that no longer assume a hijacking is a way to acquire hostages?
Scott Sumner
Aug 12 2021 at 11:31pm
“How much safety really comes from invading Afghanistan vs. cockpit doors that lock and passengers that no longer assume a hijacking is a way to acquire hostages?”
That’s of trivial importance. I could give you a dozen other ways to easily commit mass murder here. But I won’t, as I don’t want to give them any ideas.
Christophe Biocca
Aug 13 2021 at 7:29am
If you’ve lowered the stakes from ~3000 dead to mere “mass murder”, then you no longer can claim 20 years of safety as evidence (Orlando nightclub shootings, Beltway snipers, Fort Hood, NYC truck attack), especially since the residual is much higher than the trend-line was before 9/11.
The reason I brought up plane hijacking as the example for which specific countermeasures get credit is because turning 5 guys with box-cutters into an intermediate-range cruise missile is a huge force amplifier, one that neither Islamic terrorists nor anyone other kind of terrorists have been able to match before or since.
To make the 1865 combat deaths in Afghanistan worth it (even further reduced by only considering the ~1650 combat deaths after 2006), you basically have to assume the Afghanistan long-term occupation stopped another 9/11 either now or in the coming years.
ssumner
Aug 14 2021 at 9:15am
“Orlando nightclub shootings, Beltway snipers, Fort Hood, NYC truck attack)”
I don’t recall those being done by an organized Middle East terrorist group.
As for your calculations on deaths, that applies equally well to WWII. So I’d reframe my post this way: The Afghanistan war was just as justified as the US decision to enter WWII.
Christophe Biocca
Aug 18 2021 at 10:58am
So the fact that terrorist attacks continue to happen (at an elevated clip compared to before we went to Afghanistan) without the need for material support from some established group (the new hotness in terrorism being self-affiliation by lone wolves) turns into evidence that staying in Afghanistan for 20 years was a good idea? That’s backwards. We know Al-Qaeda/ISIS/whoever just needs to upload the occasional call to arms to keep terrorist attacks going forever, so why do we think they need training bases anymore?
As for WW2, the obvious difference is that Japan wasn’t just going to stop with just one random attack. Even if they never took the mainland they’d be targeting Hawaii (which already had ~1/2 million residents in the 1940 census) at a minimum, which would severely harm the US’s reach and ability to defend the mainland. Plus the FDR admin was already looking for an excuse to enter the war, treating Pearl Harbor as the single cause is silly.
Scott Sumner
Aug 18 2021 at 4:30pm
“As for WW2, the obvious difference is that Japan wasn’t just going to stop with just one random attack.”
Actually, Japan was far more likely to stop at that point than was Al Qaeda.
N D
Aug 14 2021 at 2:43am
Wouldn’t work as a bet, alas. The parameters are just too vague. Who’s sufficiently terrorist enough? And how much is toleration?
Christophe Biocca
Aug 18 2021 at 10:40am
I’d write it up as “A group openly operating in Afghanistan will claim responsibility for an attack, on the soil of any NATO member, that claims more than 50 lives, in the next 20 years.”
That still leaves “openly operating” part a bit vague but ideally you’d get agreement on which groups are operating in Afghanistan each year, before a terrorist attack even happens, so that there’s little to fight over at that point.
Alternatively write the bet up in a year, once we know which groups have come back in the wake of the Taliban regaining full control.
Brian Donohue
Aug 12 2021 at 12:15pm
A quick hit on Pakistan, kick out the Taliban, kill a bunch of bad guys, get out, monitor the situation.
Instead, we tried nation-building, something Bush explicitly campaigned against. And the early, heady days in Pakistan helped pave the way for Iraq, more nation-building, all of a piece. We brought these people sacred democracy and it was beautiful and there was purple paint on the thumbs, and hell, let’s give Libya and Syria a go as long as we’re in the neighborhood. Looks like sacred democracy will swept the Middle East and all our problems will be solved.
In 2001, as today, there were other extremely intelligent people who remembered the hundreds of annual terrorist attacks the nation endured in the late 60s and early 70s, and benefited from this perspective. 9/11 was horrific, but the chief danger was overreacting, which we did in spades and largely ineffectively.
Also, the impact of the Cole attack on Bin Laden’s thinking is unclear. Maybe it played a role, but Al Qaeda was busily bombing US embassies at the same time, and the WTC had previously been the target of a terrorist attack. Also, I don’t believe the goal was to “get away” with 9/11. I’m sure Bin Laden was happy with the result, even if it did result in his death eventually, so I don’t think this was much about lack of US response or deterrence. Maybe a little.
Anyway, good to see you adopting more of a realist approach to foreign policy.
robc
Aug 12 2021 at 1:30pm
This. If it had been a short war and not been distracted by Iraq, we could have achieved the goals and left behind a note: IF THE TALIBAN COMES BACK, SO DO WE.
We could quick strike the Taliban out of power 5 times in 20 years with far less loss of life and far fewer dollars spent.
OneEyedMan
Aug 14 2021 at 7:01pm
In Israel, this strategy is called “mowing the grass”. It is a bleak way to live, but might be better than the alternatives.
Juan Manuel Perez Porrua
Aug 12 2021 at 12:22pm
I think Scott Sumner is essentially correct, but you just have to ask at what cost?
Afghanistan is (materially) destroyed; hundreds of thousands are dead; a generation of Afghans have grown up knowing nothing but violence and destruction, if they’re still alive. Not to mention, the atrocities committed by the side that supposedly had the moral high ground.
Worst of all, the motive for having a war in Afghanistan (not the one in Iraq, which was unjustified on other grounds) is one that no person of good will can possibly approve: revenge. The achievement was deterrence, but the intention was revenge.
The war in Afghanistan truly is the moral nadir of the United States.
Fazal Majid
Aug 12 2021 at 1:24pm
Afghanistan was already destroyed. The US did build some infrastructure, including excellent roads that will benefit the Chinese expansion of Belt & Road, some dams and other things at tremendous cost due to the corruption of the Afghan puppet government, but I don’t think Afghanistan will be worse off than in 2000 once the Taliban retake power.
Seemingly they have already even taken the 10% of the country they didn’t control back in 2000, so the scourge of warlordism will be gone (the Taliban originally got their political capital by rescuing and returning to their families boys kidnapped by warlords to use as catamites, in another despicable Afghan tradition).
Scott Sumner
Aug 12 2021 at 11:34pm
Juan, You are not well informed about what happened in Afghanistan. It was already at war before we arrived. And the motive was not revenge.
Jon Murphy
Aug 13 2021 at 8:43am
I disagree. It seems to me that revenge is the natural response to any injury. When we seek restitution, it is to satisfy the desire for revenge.
Revenge unchecked is, of course, bad. But revenge in moderation seems to be to be the very foundation of justice.
Mark Brady
Aug 13 2021 at 1:07pm
The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definition of restitution: “The action of restoring or giving back something to its proper owner, or of making reparation to a person for loss or injury previously inflicted; restoration of a thing lost, taken, damaged, etc.”
Revenge is different. “The action of hurting, harming, or otherwise obtaining satisfaction from someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at his or her hands; satisfaction obtained by repaying an injury or wrong.”
I appreciate there is a gray area where the usage of the two words might overlap on some occasions, but most of the time each word means something different. E.g., if A’s car were accidentally to scrape B’s car, B would expect restitution but (we hope) that it wouldn’t be driven by revenge.
Jon Murphy
Aug 13 2021 at 10:30pm
Not really, no. Both definitions talk about making one whole from an injury. It’s merely a question of amount, which is my original point.
Juan Manuel Perez Porrua Perez
Aug 16 2021 at 3:36am
Casualties from the 2001-09-11 terrorist attacks: 2977. Round it up to 3000.
Casualties from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria: 801,000.
This means that the “restitution” paid for every death in the 2001 terrorist attack was 267 other lives.
Scott Sumner
Aug 18 2021 at 4:31pm
Juan, The same argument applies to our war with Japan, indeed even more so.
TSB
Aug 15 2021 at 7:11pm
Not to mention, the atrocities committed by the side that supposedly had the moral high ground.
I am genuinely uncertain which side you mean.
Floccina
Aug 12 2021 at 1:22pm
The think that the US military could have drive Al Cada out and been out of there in 6 months or less and that would have been sufficient deterrence.
I agree this that our punishment of criminals is often linked to imaginary concepts like “rehabilitation”, or “giving them what the deserve” and that is a costly mistake. Though normal people’s sense of justice does demand some giving them what they deserve.
Scott Sumner
Aug 12 2021 at 11:36pm
It was important to also punish the Taliban, as they were just as fault as Al Qaeda.
Joshua S
Aug 12 2021 at 3:17pm
The war in Afghanistan cost roughly $1 trillion in direct funding, and 2000+ US troops killed and 10 time that number wounded. This doesn’t even include all the domestic spending on the DHS, TSA, and various other things that also had dubious ROI. I can easily image much better uses for the money and lives that would have been an investment with greater returns and far less suffering. I’m sure you can too, even if would just be more tax refunds.
Was the war a deterrent to terrorists? Maybe, but I don’t the case is that clear. Depending on which data you use, there is evidence that terrorism around the world has increased significantly since 2001. US deaths from foreign terrorists remains exceedingly rare, so either they would have continued to be rare without this war, or we’ve simply managed to shift the terrorism to other countries (if not increase it dramatically). Maybe you find that comforting if you’re a US citizen, but as an economist that seems like a terrible tradeoff. Sure, one terrorist group was disempowered, but we’ve probably sown the seeds for a dozen others. It’s the nature of terrorism that it defies direct action: destroy one group and another pops up; fortify airports and planes and they just pick another target. You can’t defeat every group and defend every target, at least not in the type of free society most of us want to live in.
In addition, while these groups now know we may respond “strongly” with war, that’s in fact a goal of many of them, whether it’s for the purpose of killing more US citizens, making them feel powerful (by elevating them to a group worthy of warring against), recruiting more war-afflicted people to their ranks, or hastening whatever their personal eschaton is.
Personally I think both wars were a tragic waste of money, lives, and time, and has more likely than not increased the risk of terrorism and ill will toward the US. We could have been safer and more prosperous by much cheaper means. Instead we destroyed a huge amount of capital and lost opportunities for better investment, not to mention the trauma caused to countless people and families.
Scott Sumner
Aug 12 2021 at 11:40pm
I don’t deny that we spent far too much money, but the rest of your comment is unpersuasive. One could just as well argue that WWII was a mistake because the Pearl Harbor attack only killed a few thousand Americans and the Japanese had no intention of invading the US mainland. Is that your argument?
TGGP
Aug 13 2021 at 10:47am
Japan was a government with an actual military that could face other militaries (including ours) in open battle. We defeated their military, the government unconditionally surrendered, and became an ally rather than a threat from then on. al Qaeda was not the military of Afghanistan, they were just useful allies for the Taliban against rivals like the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance was able to operate in Afghanistan even under the Taliban because the central government has limited control over all the territory & armed groups. That means even replacing said central government wouldn’t ensure that no such groups would be around.
Bob Murphy
Aug 13 2021 at 11:32pm
Scott wrote: “One could just as well argue that WWII was a mistake because the Pearl Harbor attack only killed a few thousand Americans and the Japanese had no intention of invading the US mainland. Is that your argument?”
I can’t speak for Joshua S. (to whom you wrote the above), but it’s definitely my argument. I think it was a horrible mistake for the US government to enter WW2.
ssumner
Aug 14 2021 at 9:17am
See my reply to Christophe above.
Aladdin
Aug 17 2021 at 2:17pm
And how many Afgan lives were saved? I understand it is common policy for most people on this site to ascribe 0 utility to the benefit towards the Afgan people of not having the taliban rule them … but I dont. And I think if you took that benefit into account it would have been worth it.
Alan Goldhammer
Aug 12 2021 at 5:22pm
I assume this post is satire.
David Seltzer
Aug 12 2021 at 7:29pm
Could be Alan, could be.
Philo
Aug 12 2021 at 7:33pm
I assume the contrary, though in favor of your view is the fact that he almost completely ignores the *cost* of the war (complained about by several commenters).
Mark Brady
Aug 13 2021 at 12:45pm
That’s being generous
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 12 2021 at 5:51pm
We could have achieved our anti terrorist goals far more effectively by just toppling the Taliban government (and leaving Iraq alone).
David Seltzer
Aug 12 2021 at 7:20pm
Broken window fallacy? Money is diverted from creating consumer goods and services to creating weapons, and money is further spent on repairing the damages from a war. I served in Southeast Asia, 1962 to 1964, USN, Operation Market Time.
David S
Aug 12 2021 at 8:07pm
I think the U.S. is leaving Afghanistan at precisely the right time. Now China gets the opportunity to be the new kid in town–either as heroic nation builders or avenging angels after the Taliban start hosting Uyghur freedom fighters. Invading and occupying Afghanistan is a rite of passage for any aspiring major empire.
The Taliban also has a marketing opportunity here. By branding themselves as an anti-woke and anti-science haven they can attract immigration and investment from the persecuted American Right. Will the peaceful, patriotic tourists from the January 6th event be welcome there and will it be cheaper than moving to Hungary? Gun laws are certainly in keeping with the Alex Jones set and women’s rights are consistent with most of the Bible Belt. Tucker Carlson should do a show from Kabul after it falls next week.
This post should have been on the Bad Blog.
David Seltzer
Aug 13 2021 at 5:51am
David, good point. Afghanistan is where empires go to die.
TGGP
Aug 13 2021 at 10:16am
It’s not the graveyard of empires, it’s the ESPN Zone.
BC
Aug 12 2021 at 9:28pm
Scott is actually (partially) correct, whether he intended to be satirical or not. There is no question that the US achieved its goal of preventing the Taliban from giving Al Qaeda safe harbor to train and attack us. And, until the recent withdrawal, we were continuing to do so. The Al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11 has been completely dismantled.
I don’t agree, though, that what increasingly looks like a premature withdrawal still counts as success. It appears that Biden was wrong when he went against the advice of military experts in thinking that the US could completely withdraw now without letting the Taliban retake control. I hope not, but it doesn’t look good. I also hope that Al Qaeda, or some successor organization, doesn’t reconstitute itself in the same way that ISIS emerged to fill the vacuum left in Iraq. It now appears that the premature withdrawal might have undone 20 years of gains in a few short weeks. I don’t like to second guess — decisions had to be made without the benefit of hindsight — but we should at least evaluate accurately what happened after the fact so that we can learn from our mistakes. Here, we need to learn about the risks of premature withdrawal.
Scott is correct that people mix up Afghanistan with Iraq, but it’s more than that. Some people just like simple stories, and some of them have gravitated to the simple story that all US interventions are mistakes doomed to complete failure. (Apparently, they have never heard of Grenada or Panama.) They don’t want to admit that the War in Afghanistan achieved anything useful, even as they have benefited from 20 years free of another 9/11 style attack, because then that would mean that we would need to try to understand the complex factors that determine whether an intervention is likely to be successful or not.
Mark Z
Aug 12 2021 at 11:52pm
If 20 years of gains can be undone in a matter of weeks, then they were paltry gains to begin with, and that only illustrates how little the US managed to accomplish at the enormous expense and time it sank into Afghanistan. It’s evidence that the US was nowhere near victory over the Taliban and it might have taken another 20 years to achieve it, in which case cutting its losses is probably the right thing to do.
BC
Aug 13 2021 at 8:07am
That’s like saying the surge in crime from Defunding Police shows just how “paltry” the multi-decade decline in crime was. We must have been “nowhere near victory” in fighting crime so cutting our losses was probably the right thing to do.
Defunding Police led to the crime surge, unwinding decades of gains in about 1-2 years. Defunding Afghanistan led to the Taliban surge, unwinding decades of gains in a few short weeks.
Mark Z
Aug 13 2021 at 4:56pm
The war on crime will of course never be won, we’ll be paying for it forever. That may be fine, it may be worth it to have to forever pay for that measure of safety. Inasmuch as the war in Afghanistan is analogous, it isn’t, IMO, worth it to keep paying, forever, what we’ve been paying in blood and money for 20 years, to maintain the (not particularly good to begin with) status quo till kingdom come.
ssumner
Aug 14 2021 at 9:19am
“Defunding Police led to the crime surge”
I see no evidence for that claim. (And I don’t favor defunding the police)
Ahmed Fares
Aug 12 2021 at 10:56pm
A couple of quotes:
Zawahiri impressed upon bin Laden the importance of understanding the American mentality. The American mentality is a cowboy mentality—if you confront them with their identity theoretically and practically they will react in an extreme manner. In other words, America with all its resources and establishments will shrink into a cowboy when irritated successfully. They will then elevate you and this will satisfy the Muslim longing for a leader who can successfully challenge the West (Interview with Saad Al-Faqih, Jamestown Foundation, Spotlight on Terror)
Bin Laden described his strategy in exactly those terms: “All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al Qaeda,’ in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses.”
TGGP
Aug 13 2021 at 10:27am
Right, that intelligence report got it backward. Bin Laden WANTED an American overreaction so he could first defeat the “far enemy” of America and end their support of the “near enemy” of insufficiently Islamic governments in the Middle East (America ignoring attacks like 9/11 would not accomplish that). Julian Assange explicitly compared the strategy he was aiming at with Wikileaks to that: the U.S government would become more paranoid in response to leaks, eventually becoming paralyzed into ineffectiveness.
Vera
Aug 13 2021 at 12:59am
What evidence is there that countries are now less likely to cooperate with terrorists? This would be the proof of success according to this metric, no? Pakistan seems to be a counterexample but of course a trend still admits exceptions.
But more fundamentally, only one country has to harbor terrorists for there to be a significant terrorist threat. So wouldn’t deterrence need to be quite comprehensive for the war to be considered a success according to this metric? And then a single counterexample is compelling.
TGGP
Aug 13 2021 at 10:40am
One of the few foreign policy successes of the GWB administration was Libya. Qadaffi agreed to side with us and not support any terrorists, and to give up any WMD program. Then the “Arab spring” occurred and idiotic American officials we had to be on that side against existing governments, so they supported his overthrow, which did no favors for Libya (or Mali, which descended into civil war as a result).
John P Palmer
Aug 13 2021 at 9:16am
After I sent the link to several friends, a Canadian friend reminded me of the burning and sacking of Washington DC in 1814: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington
ssumner
Aug 14 2021 at 9:21am
Yes, but that was not in the past 200 years.
TGGP
Aug 13 2021 at 10:37am
The Ba’ath Party is even less likely to return to power in Iraq (which is politically dominated by the Shi’ite majority). It’s also not going to be making any WMDs (not that Saddam was either, and not that the anthrax came from any foreign terrorist). It was still a disaster because it had so many costs without actual benefits to the US, but under similar “logic” by which you conclude Afghanistan was a success, it looks better. The notion that it deterred attacks is also dubious: Afghanistan was not some military base containing aircraft carriers that could reach the U.S (as Japan was). We were mostly attacked by Saudi nationals (there was also one Egyptian) who formed a cell in Hamburg Germany before coming to the U.S. We have been attacked by ISIS since then, because they don’t need any Afghan “infrastructure” to carry out attacks. Sure, those attacks weren’t as large, but it would have been hard for al Qaeda to ever pull off something like that again once we knew passenger planes were that vulnerable even if we hadn’t invaded.
bb
Aug 13 2021 at 2:07pm
Scott,
I agree with 100% of this post. Nice work.
ssumner
Aug 14 2021 at 9:28am
Everyone: It’s interesting that when a policy is a smashing success in preventing future terrorism on the US mainland, people talk themselves into believing that terrorism was really never much of a threat. It is a threat if you don’t try to stop it, as we saw in 9/11.
Again, it’s amazingly easy for terrorists to kill hundreds of Americans at a time. There’s a reason they are not doing so.
Also note that people who add up the death toll from terrorism are not counting the loss of liberty here that results from our inevitable overreaction to even a modest amount of terrorism, say a few hundred deaths per year. We’d quickly become a police state. Look at how we are overreacting to Covid, for instance. Or how we overreacted to the shoe bomber.
Mark Z
Aug 15 2021 at 1:45pm
Hardly anyone died from terrorism during the 20+ years before 9/11. I don’t see why you’re so confident US foreign policy deterred terrorism. It seems as likely that 2001 was an anomaly rather than the start of a new trend which we expeditiously stopped in its tracks.
Even if the war were an effective deterrent, we probably wouldn’t know. If a disease afflicts about 1 person a century, and we decide to put a putative cure in the drinking water, if 50 years later no one has gotten the disease, that’s not sufficient to declare the putative cure a smashing success. We’re supposed to be Bayesian, right?
Ahmed Fares
Aug 14 2021 at 3:10pm
In light of Dr. Sumner’s comment above on the other costs of terrorism, an example of that cost:
[quote]
Driving fatalities after 9/11: a hidden cost of terrorism
Abstract
We show that the public’s response to terrorist threats can have unintended consequences that rival the attacks themselves in severity. Driving fatalities increased significantly after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, events that prompted many travellers to substitute road transportation for safer air transportation. After controlling for time trends, weather, road conditions and other factors, we find that travellers’ response to 9/11 resulted in 327 driving deaths per month in late 2001. Moreover, while the effect of 9/11 weakened over time, as many as 2300 driving deaths may be attributable to the attacks.
[end quote]
Note: I don’t have access to the full study quoted above as it is only for subscribers, but the abstract itself is quite informational.
source: https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/applec/v41y2009i14p1717-1729.html
Kailer
Aug 14 2021 at 9:04pm
counter, the us could have held the taliban off for another 20 years for a lot less than it cost for the last 20 years, but decided it wasn’t worth it. Maybe there’s option value, so it was worth seeing if a transition to a functioning state could happen, but now that we know that won’t work we should write off the sink cost.
Michael Sandifer
Aug 15 2021 at 12:54am
This is a very provocative opinion. I suspect it has at least some truth.
Warren Platts
Aug 15 2021 at 4:02pm
It’s done now… The airport has been at least partially overrun preventing any aircraft from taking off.
All Biden had to do was literally to do NOTHING. $50B per year is nothing. Not compared to the ridiculous $3 trillion “infrastructure” they are proposing. I am sick to my stomach.
Matthias
Aug 17 2021 at 4:54am
There are some good aspects to anything. But have you done a cost benefit analysis?
That was was terribly expensive in terms of both life and money. Perhaps we should have just bought everyone a puppy and would have gotten more QALY for less money?
Scott Sumner
Aug 18 2021 at 4:34pm
I suspect we spent far too much on the war, due to “mission creep”.
Carl
Aug 18 2021 at 3:51pm
I hope you’re right, but I worry that you’re misreading your own analogy. I see it more like we, the USA, were the police who raided a mafia controlled neighborhood where the mafia had been providing shelter to a gang of mass murderers. After smashing the gang of mass murderers we spent 20 years shooting it out with the mafia, resulting in hundreds of people from the neighborhood getting killed in the crossfire (many more people than were killed by the mass murderers), and got hundreds of others to inform against the mafia. We then welcomed the mafia back, leaving them our weapons and ammunition as a parting gift, although we did write them a sternly worded memo reminding them not to hurt any of the informants.
Even if the mafia decides it’s not in their interest to shelter any more adventuresome mass murderers how many people in the the surrounding areas are going to want help the police “clean up” their neighborhoods.
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