A big part of The Blob's argument for staying in Afghanistan indefinitely is that "we can afford it." As far as I can tell, and I am only being mildly facetious, this means that for a few tens of billions of dollars a year we can continue to bounce the rubble of a ruined country with bombs and help the now defunct Afghan army sustain tens of thousands of annual casualties.

From a forward-looking cost/benefit standpoint, this fails massively. And I have already said previously that sunk costs are irrelevant to determining future actions. But let's put money aside and just focus on the human costs of our post-9/11 interventions.

In 2012, political philosopher Michael Huemer gave an amazing TEDx talk on political irrationality, and basically made the point I will make below - so hat tip to him. An additional nine years of policy failure just underscores the point.

Here is a chart of how many people have died in our two principal post-9/11 wars relative to the deaths on 9/11 itself.

It is worth emphasizing that of all the things American's die of each year, both naturally and unnaturally, terrorism is one of the least likely culprits. Many multiples of 9/11 deaths happen every single year from other causes. Our policy interventions to protect people's health, prevent crime, and otherwise try to keep people alive suffer from their own issues and have mixed success. But I honestly believe that nothing compares to how completely inefficacious our policy interventions have been to protect people from terrorism. In fact, I am confident in saying that US policy intervention to solve terrorism has been the country's single greatest policy failure of the 21st century, and probably the 20th as well. Here are some numbers:

Here is a breakdown of all the principal groups of casualties in the two wars. Maybe you just care about the US citizens who put their lives down to solve terrorism for Americans. That is kind of gross, but ok: US Military deaths are about 2.5x the number of people killed on 9/11, and that grows to 5.4x when you factor in US contractors, civilians working for the Department of Defense, and allied forces. That does not include the national armies and police forces we stood up to fight with us following regime change.

A little over 16,400 people (5.5x 9/11) were murdered in the US in 2019. That is an absolute tragedy and deserves policy intervention. Now imagine the following scenario:

Our government goes on a crusade against murder, pronouncing it the greatest threat to America's long-term security (arguably true!). It sends out the police, maybe even the military, to go find and kill all the murderers so there are no more left to kill people. The message is clear - we will eradicate murder forever if we just find and kill the murderers and make sure their criminal organizations are disbanded. It seems so achievable if we just throw our national might at it. There will be no more murder, and then our mission will be accomplished. People seem to murder for a lot of reasons, but many murders are attributable to a certain ideology. If we kill or disarm just those murderers, then we will seemingly win the War on Murder. Sadly, in waging the War on Murder, we end up losing 88,560 US citizens and the conflict broadly ended up killing about 3 million other people who were just collateral damage, although a lot of the dead were also surely murderers, so don’t feel too bad. Neveryhess, after a while, some suggest this feels like a quagmire and there is a shaky suspicion that we might be undermining our desire for people to not get killed with this policy. After all, a lot of people died, it's been pretty chaotic, and it cost more than $10,000,000,000,000 so far, with no end in sight. Our leaders assure us to stand firm - we have killed a lot of the bad guys. Also, there have not been any murders in some time (except the ones our government is committing). We can keep this up indefinitely if we need to, but if we lose our resolve, then the murderers will come back and it will have all been for naught. We made a lot of mistakes along the way, they who were at the helm of policy acknowledge, but if we just course correct now then we have a good chance of murder eradication.

The above analogy seems totally absurd, and yet it's mostly consistent with the War on Terror in Afghanistan. I am not creative enough to figure out how to fit Iraq into this analogy, which is either a sign of just how bananas that idea was or my lack of creativity - you choose. The key difference though is that 16,000+ people are murdered every year, and 9/11 only happened once. And before 2001, terrorism killed almost no US citizens each year (the Oklahoma City bombing being one notable exception). Whatever we are doing to solve murder in America has generally been working and has made headway on a problem that is 5.5x worse than terrorism in 2001, yet happens every year. We could literally do nothing about terrorism and it would kill less people than thornier social problems, like murder, that have improved greatly over the recent decades (2020 notwithstanding). Yet it has cost us orders of magnitude more lives and dollars.

Again, the "we could have stayed forever with a few thousand troops and tens of billions of dollars a year in outlays" people are absolutely wrong on the merits under any basic cost/benefit framework. But a policy that has killed more than five times as many US citizens as the problem it was supposed to solve, and about 100x as many foreign civilians, would seem to be (as Huemer charitably puts it) "irrational." This would be abundantly clear in almost any other policy context, but the fog of war is truly thick. I remain incredibly impressed by our President's ability to ignore The Blob and see the light.