by José Niño
Mises.org
Can America’s self-styled foreign policy experts be expected to learn from the failures of the latest misadventure in Afghanistan? If history is an indicator, there’s little reason to believe the foreign policy blob will learn the error of their ways.
The horrific events of 9/11 inevitably brought the US back to Afghanistan, but this time with a full-fledged military force. To say this military venture was a boondoggle would be an understatement. The financial costs of the US’s twenty-year Afghan conflict have been staggering, with estimates from Brown University’s Cost of War Project pointing to $2.3 trillion spent in this war effort. Over twenty-four hundred American service members lost their lives along with seventy-one thousand Afghan civilians during the war.