War and its Impact

The Cost of War and the Economic impact

Introduction

When a country engages itself in a war, it has to face different issues, when it comes to economic front and political front. The country has to bear significant economic cost due to indulging in a war. The countries sometimes also benefit from the situation, they get political and economic advantages, which may not be availed in other cases .

The 1990-91 Persian Gulf War played directly into US military advantages, resulting in a quick and lopsided victory for the US and its allies, the 2003 Afghanistan and Iraq War has been a completely different type of war. Incorporating the lessons of the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi and foreign fighters adopted techniques that avoided American military strengths and directly targeted the centre of gravity and central vulnerability of the American war machine: American popular opinion. In order to turn the American public against the war, insurgents and foreign fighters needed a tactic and a weapon that would allow them to inexpensively and effectively inflict a steady stream of casualties on US forces. America's enemies in Iraq found such a tactic and weapon in the Improvised Explosive Device (IED).

Nation's Debt

America is facing a huge problem of debt due to external trade and war against terrorism. The war has resulted in high cost and has also affected the economy of the country. In Janurary 2011, the foreign debt of America amounted to $4.45 trillion.

The Cost of War/Military Advances

A study of the "Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University has attempted to make a calculation of the actual cost of the now decade-old U.S. war in Afghanistan and the military action in Iraq. The study came to the hallucinatory figure of about 4000 billion dollars, ultimately to be paid by American taxpayers. The researchers at Brown University have the first known military spending added, ie the amount directly allocated by Congress to the Pentagon for the wars in the period from 2001 to 2011 ($ 1,311,000,000) plus the extra budget allocated to the Pentagon for the same period (652 billion dollars). American Treasury did not have sufficient funds to finance the wars and ultimately, it had to borrow money internally from Banks (Merrouche, 2011).

Wars in the Past Decade

Iraq and Afghanistan

On October 7, 2001 United States attacked Afghanistan and named it as a war on terrorism. This is the violent response of the world's most powerful country into a poor and backward people of Afghan. Afghanistan thus becomes a testing ground for the new American weapons, not forgetting that the U.S. thus shows that it is the most powerful country in the world in all aspects, military, economic, etc. The invasion was justified by the search for Osama Bin Laden and the cause of this invasion is that the group Al Qaeda launched a terrorist attack against the vital points of the heart of United States (Hensel, 2010)

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries and undermined the world, its population living in ...