By 2030, the US will have spent as much on interest as on the fighting itself, a debt today's under-25s will help pay off."
Twenty-five years have passed since 19 al-Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial aeroplanes and slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people.
What followed was a series of US-led wars that reshaped Washington’s foreign policy for a generation, in which every year since 2001, US forces have bombed a country somewhere in the world, devastating the lives of millions.
“Everything changed,” Omar*, an Iraqi student at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, told Al Jazeera. The war was launched on the false pretence that Iraq harboured weapons of mass destruction.
Less than a month after 9/11, the US invaded Afghanistan, launching what President George W Bush called the “War on Terror” - a series of seemingly endless wars and military campaigns spanning Afghanistan, Iraq and countries across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.
According to the Cost of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that US-led wars since 2001 have directly or indirectly killed an estimated 4.5 to 4.7 million people - including approximately 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths from disease, malnutrition and health complications.... READ MORE
The long-term costs have also been enormous. The Costs of War Project estimates that caring for post-9/11 veterans in the United States could cost $2.2 trillion to $2.5 trillion by 2050, much of it still unpaid. Many veterans continue to face a mental-health crisis.
“Four times as many US service members and veterans died by suicide as were killed in combat during the post-9/11 wars,” Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War Project, told Al Jazeera