Did Osama Bin Laden achieve his objectives by effectively bankrupting the U.S. and drawing America into two costly land wars in Asia? So argues the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. Reason Magazine’s Radley Balko goes further, saying of Osama, “he won.”
As Klein puts it,
[In Afghanistan], Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful — not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the Communist super-state’s collapse a few years later. . .in October 2004 bin Laden said that just as the Arab fighters and Afghan mujaheddin had destroyed Russia economically, al Qaeda was now doing the same to the United States, ‘continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy’. . . .
The price tag on the Iraq War alone will surpass $3 trillion. Afghanistan likely amounts to another trillion or two. Add in the build-up in homeland security spending since 9/11 and you’re looking at another trillion. And don’t forget the indirect costs of all this turmoil: The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center. . .That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008. Then there’s the post-9/11 slowdown in the economy, the time wasted in airports, [and] the rise in oil prices as a result of the Iraq War.”
Radley Balko is blunter, saying of Osama, “he won“:
We have also fundamentally altered who we are. . . . We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured. In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.”
It sounds strange to claim that a dead man “won” (and I am still weighing Klein and Balko’s arguments, not endorsing them). Still, Kamikaze pilots in World War II were considered victorious if they managed to sink an aircraft carrier in death. The economy is a lot bigger than an aircraft carrier.
The fight against terrorism was made much more costly by blunders such as wasteful and pointless airport screening procedures that cost the economy billions; the needless administration of Miranda warnings to foreign terrorists in Afghanistan; and the destruction of countless poppy farms in Afghanistan, which helped destabilize Afghanistan, by resulting in widespread support for the Taliban among farmers who lost their livelihood (at its peak, poppy production was 60 percent of Afghanistan’s economy, reflecting the lack of irrigation and transportation networks needed for other forms of agriculture in that isolated, arid land left in ruins by years of civil war).
