EDITORIAL
War Has Costs
—Monetary and Human

Nov 30, 2025

An Afghan national, brought to the U.S. by the CIA, carried out a deadly attack on two National Guards stationed in Washington, D.C.

Does it seem irrational? Maybe. But there is a deadly logic which produced this event: the logic of imperialist wars to control other countries and their resources.

For 20 years, the U.S. carried out a war against Afghanistan. In that same period, it was also involved in an eight-year war against Iraq.

The U.S. invaded both of those countries supposedly in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

And yet neither Iraq nor Afghanistan was involved in 9–11. Nor were any of their citizens. The terrorists who took down the World Trade Center came from Saudi Arabia—as did Osama bin Laden, the supposed mastermind of the attack.

From 1979 to 1989, the Soviet Union was embroiled in a war in Afghanistan, attempting to prop up a government which had been an ally. The U.S. intervened in this war, just as it is intervening today in the war in Ukraine, by providing funds, weapons and intelligence to the insurgents who were tying up the Soviet Union in an unending war. The Middle East has been beset by wars ever since 1908, when the first big reserves of oil were discovered in the region. World War I—which pitted the Ottoman Empire, Turkey and Germany against Britain, France and the U.S.—was carried out to decide which powers would control the oil. The Ottoman Empire was replaced by British and U.S. imperialism. Ever since, wars have sprung up over the question: which countries will control the oil?

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, no matter how they started, trace back to this ultimate cause.

Afghanistan didn’t even have any oil. But after 9–11, U.S. imperialism had to show it was still in control of the whole vast oil region. For 20 years, the U.S. bled Afghanistan, Iraq for eight years. The U.S. population also paid wars’ cost.

The war in Afghanistan has cost the U.S. over two trillion dollars. The war in Iraq cost over three trillion.

This is money not spent on education, nor on workplace training, nor on public transit, nor on housing, nor on dams, levies and other flood protection, nor on roads and bridge repair. Does the U.S. pretend it cannot find enough doctors or skilled workers? No, it doesn’t train them. Instead it funnels money into war. This is the indirect human cost of such wars.

But there is a terrible direct human cost. In Afghanistan and Iraq, over 300,000 civilians were killed by the U.S. or allied forces. Nearly 200,000 local police or military were killed in the two wars. Almost 7,000 U.S. troops were killed, as were 8,000 private miliary contractors hired by the U.S.

Almost two million U.S. troops were deployed to these two wars, including almost one million who filed for disability as the result of permanent injuries suffered. Over 650,000 troops have suffered some kind of PTSD. Over 80,000 U.S. troops who served in these wars killed themselves after returning home.

The Afghan national who shot the National Guard troops had served in a U.S. organized paramilitary squad in Afghanistan—what the U.S. called a “Zero Unit,” recruited, trained and overseen by the CIA.

They were “death squads,” attacking Afghans who led different ethnic groups in the civil war that bestrode the country after the U.S. kicked out its functioning government. Night raids, “disappearances,” attacks on medical facilities, midnight executions were all part of the job. After the war, the CIA brought many such squads here.

Did such actions weigh on the assassin? Maybe. But whatever created the attack in D.C., it’s another cost of these wars. The larger issue is the functioning of imperialism, which brings such wars into existence—and will continue to do so until imperialism is torn up and thrown away.