settled around the north west of africa, we've got disturbed weather in this central mediterranean, so that's dropping down some rain. vigorous winds through libya, those wind gusts will exceed 60 kilometers per hour. and for a central african most of the action west. stuff can shasta around the gulf of guinea, and finally that rain and wind has swept away from durban. so a mix of sending cloud for you on saturday. see you soon. the this convening is taking place during a critical time for the global economy. we're going to hear from a slate of leaders and business and government. you'll speak to why we need to strengthen our trading ties and vicious range transitional plans. enclose the skills gap so many companies are struggling with the

us. what's the so called war on terra in the wake of 911 invasions of afghanistan and iraq, to lots of life instability spread across many parts of amenities. so what happens to this is inside store the down, welcome to the program. i'm this dogs here. ok. how often us president george w bush launched what he labeled the will on terra in 2001 the people in countries like afghanistan and iraq. he is a violent death and destruction and political instability which the father thousands also detained and illegally taken to other countries. many tortured was subjected to brutal treatment and held for years without trial. resistance grew and pushed us and they. so as i've got us down 2 years ago,

a new investigation from the top us university says moving 4500000 people died directly or indirectly from the so called war and tara will be discussing its legacy with the reports of the end, our guest and just a few minutes, but 1st this report from alexandra bias on how it all began. it's been more than 2 decades since the 911 attacks followed by 2, denise eating and costly wars. in november, 2001. the us led an international coalition to invade afghanistan, accusing the taliban of harbouring all kinds of fighters. it launched a huge bombing campaign and a ground operation. tens of thousands of people were killed and millions more, displaced. in 2003, the us attacked rock part of its so called war on terror, accusing its leader of stock piling, weapons of mass destruction,

side of hussein. and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him. were plunged the country into sectarian violence and toppled saddam hussein. the weapons of mass destruction were never found. major combat operations any rack of ended in the battle of a rack. the united states and our allies have prevailed. george bush's declaration of victory was made before the worst of violence in a rock was yet to come. the legacy of both invasions brought disastrous consequences for people in the region. but the so called war on terror was never declared over and it inflicted to not healed a new study by the cost of your project at brown university estimates the post

$911.00 wars and their ongoing impact have led to more than $4500000.00 and the scope of the report includes conflicts in places like pockets on syria, somalia, and deanna. there are no official statistics for the numbers who died in the so called war on terror, but the report says there are more indirect dest then come back fatalities. indirect deaths are blamed on things like the breakdown of economic, environmental and psychological conditions. more than 20 years since the war in afghanistan, the tao that are back in power after a hasty us and nato withdrawal almost 2 years ago. international donors have frozen, asked on bank reserves, and its health system is on the brink of collapse. the report asked in a place like afghanistan, can any death today be considered unrelated to the us war? and what long lasting impact would continue to have on these countries?

alexandra buyers for inside story. the. well, that's not bringing a guess in new york, stephanie saddle, the co director of the costs of one on a nonpartisan research project based at the watson institute international and public affairs at brown university and an officer of the report. and man, just uh, in the united kingdom ruba ali, how so many a post structural research, fellow lancaster university and also co found the rocky women academics network. and. and just as the maryland michael are having a senior fellow and director research and find policy at the brookings institution . very well welcome to all of your and thanks for joining us today on inside story stuff. this is your report. i so i'll start with you moving 4500000 desktop to really start claim number. it's obviously something very difficult to quantify. how did you get to that number? yeah, this system thing that the cost of work project has been working on for years.

actually, i've been back built on the work of colleagues of mine at the cost of we're project for a long time. my colleagues need a crawford has generated and regularly updated estimate of what direct jobs. so these are people who are killed through the weapons of war through fire. the actual combat of war that now is up 2906002937000. and that's the range that she estimates of the direct us. so my report builds on that it uses a ratio from the geneva declaration, secretary at that con day wars. and there was an estimate of about 4 in direct dest for every direct us a dog in very deeply, to research across many fields, including epidemiology and public health research. and basically,

this is the best latest information that's out there. i daily, an ideal scenario. there would be teams of researchers on the grounds, local researchers doing access mortality studies going, you know, house house to house, doing a certain surveys of, you know, who's died in the past x number of years to get a better, more precise figure. but in the absence of those studies, and those are really hard to do in war zones, there's an uh, you know, absence of, of birth and death, certificates. and, and all of those sorts of basic census data. this kind of ratio is the, is the best that's out there. so that was how we generated the 4.5 to a 1000000. think what the so called war on terra itself is a bit of a nebulous concept. can i ask stephanie how you chose the complex that you've included? yes, absolutely. this is something also drawing on this cost of we're project framing. so this is a, you know, over 60 scholars at this point from around the world. what we've done is we've said,

you know, the us counterterrorism has played a role, not just enough can a stand pakistan and then rack. and those were, you know, the us led wars in those places, but also a very significant role in syria. yeah, i'm in somalia, libya and other places increasing the the footprint of the us work, so called war on terror i, it continues. and um, so this is really a framing that tries to look very comprehensively at. you know, of course these conflicts are incredibly complex. we're not saying that the us is the only responsible party. we're merely point, the fact that there's been an intensification of the violence as a result of us counterterrorism efforts. and this report is really an attempt to come to terms and grapple with that sense of responsibility. show reba. i understand you were born in the spread. but here it's in watching with people in

a rock on the ground that in many years that any of these numbers surprise, you know, the numbers are not surprising. there that i anything. and i am tempted to think that the numbers may be even higher than the use may be of further lack of a veteran. conservative may be, or just like stephanie said that, you know, there are many debts that are unrecorded. there are many missing people for on recorded. i am currently working on a project on enforce disappearance as an iraq. so that's another issue that has been a tremendously problematic aspect of life. but many iraqis have had to endure since 2003. so the number is make sense and i assume that there are much more, especially in countries. it's one song and serial. now with its own conflicts going on. michael, trying to, i know that, and you previously said that the so called war on terra for all of its failures has

had a number of limited successes, accidental as some of them may actually be without success, as you've described. i understand has been specifically around preventing attacks on american soil. this is then the trade off, right? 4.5000000 debts. first of all, i want to congratulate stephanie and her colleagues at the watson center. they've done very good work over the years at reminding us that we have to take a broader perspective and understanding the consequences of war. and i generally agree with most of the methodologies we can talk about some specifics in a minute. but let me make that point 2nd, you're correct, argued or to, to summarize the readings that i've done to say that when we think about a 22 year campaign against, you know, solid is, and, or however you'd like to describe the broader outside of unrelated movements around the world, the united states had its western allies have generally been fairly fortunate in

that the number of subsequent attacks on american or even european soil has been quite modest compared to the fear as we all had after $911.00. and of course, there have been some attacks, most notably, some of the ice us attacks in europe in the middle part of the last decade. but generally speaking, if you want to do a plus minus cost benefit assessment of the so called war on terror, which may not be a good term, but you know, is often still employed. then i think we have to say that western countries have done pretty well of protecting themselves, certainly from anything like the catastrophic tara we saw on 911 and then even in spain, in 2004 or london in 2005, some of the other attacks or the in bali to indonesia in 2002. but you can very well and stephanie does very well. uh, as well as our colleagues in london to remind people the end of the course in the bottom, at least, people in the mail, reminding me that these words have had huge human consequences ads that war itself

because it breaks down society because it breaks down health care it impedes proper nutrition, it impedes economic growth. it therefore contributes to a lot of indirect depths that wind up our number in direct combat dash. and stephanie's right is to remind people, it's roughly this 4 to one ratio. that's a very crude and rough number. it's a, it's an average across many different countries, many different complex, but the general message is correct. that war leads to far more indirect consequences than we even see directly on our tv screens. and that's a tragedy of conflict. it should make anyone wary of war the, the one last thing i'll say however, is that bearing in mind that the rock of saddam hussein was hardly a peaceful place. bearing in mind that the afghanistan of the tall yvonne was hardly a successful country and is hardly successful today that these excess debts that

we're talking about often would have been occurring even without the us led intervention. so i know stephanie is quick to underscore that she's not simply blaming the united states or has brought her war on terror for all of these casualties. but i do want to underscore that when we think about excess steps, having looked at again a rock under saddam and his quarter century, a terrible rule or the taliban in afghanistan with the kind of health care systems and oppression of women's rights and limitations on economic progress that they imposed, it's not as if these places would have had peaceful unhappy futures if they have been left on their own trajectories of the last one. i would say, however, is that lived the strikes me as a place that probably would have done better without us. that probably would have truly been despite and all the market off. these limitations and, and of his own barbaric acts at times against his own people lived. it was a somebody function and country during his rule. and it's been worse since our 2011

intervention. so again, we have to bear down case side case. i agree with the overall thrust that i want to bring rebate in hand because it looked very much like she wanted to respond to that . michael. i think the key point i want to michael inside the west has been capable of attaching itself. that's the keywords itself. because since 2003, not just iraq in the sound of the entire middle east and parts of south west asia have been unprotected and have been violated over and over in various ways, whether it's murder or rape or torture, or continued legacy and reverberations of this violence that continues and very various forms to this day. and children are born from new to sun rock with congenital birth defects, because of why phosphorus use and depleted uranium in your ok. those are,

you know what, those are like less. phosphorus is a legal use, sorry, it's a legal chemical. it um the fuse and warfare out the west has certainly protected itself, but it has violated and try to reach them again. i have to emphasize the word violate of both of them is a good example of violation of a country's dignity of a country is a people's commodity in rockies. have been degree that of the humanized, over and over. and i cannot speak only about iraq. obama is have been degraded into the human ask. oh, my god, mike, the mike, chris, refugees from the reach of who i've talked to the west, which are now said for, but they are a good once again to humanize them, degraded at the orders and are treated as lesser beings. we have seen this house on, over and over, and i will go back to the terms and force disappearances because when someone is

possibly disappearing, we don't know if they're still alive for their dad has cause it has been a credit that since 2003 in iraq, over 1000000 people have been forcibly disappeared, so many of them couldn't be still the couldn't be still alive, many of them could, could be done. so that's another number that could be added to this record. so the emphasis on the i do want to get into the very, very pervasive legacy here of the complex that we're talking about in just a moment. but before we get there, i do want to just ask stephanie about this, make sure that we keep talking about this one to, for the rich to indirect. that's the ratio. that's the calculation by the geneva declaration, secretaries and you and body. right? but that's that measure of $1.00 to $4.00 as michael so i said varies usually. so, and well developed country is you might have fewer indirect tests to direct tests, but in very vulnerable pull populations much huge and numbers in terms of, in terms of that ratio. so really valuable populations at more risk, stephanie,

that's right, that's what i found when i dug into it. there were, when i 1st started this project, there was some that that is an issue of some debate. but what i found was that was exactly that kind of the more impoverished population is to begin with, the worst the fact the war is going to have. and, and that really makes sense when you think about things like, for people who are displaced forcibly by violence. actually there's a correlation of indirect task, but not with refugees necessarily because once people get outside their countries border, sometimes they have more access to the very minimum of food and health care, for example, but primarily for internally displaced people. i the peas, they're is a significant correlation between higher rates of indirect death caused by war. and i and people who are forcibly displaced within their countries borders. and these

post 911 wars have seen millions of people displaced. um so, so if it's really about, you know, lack of access to some of the most basic fundamental things that one needs to sustain health and life like clean drinking water, access to, you know, proper sewage treatment, access to food. just basically food hospitals, get bomb. people don't have access to doctors, people don't have access to, that's the nation's, all of these things get disrupted by war. and that's really what this paper was trying to point to is change. there are these pathways of reverberating affects that are talked about enough and, and that need to be, you know, included in a frame of the cost of war. of course, the one thing leads to another. i was surprised and reading the report, how little things like say broken traffic lights on the stage and the roads can lead to quite so many debts when you talk about the infrastructure damage left off

to will. once you think about it, it seems obvious, but i don't think about something which people necessarily calculates as part of the, the cost of all 2010 to 2013 or so. there were as many, if not more dots from traffic fatalities, as from the conflict itself because of the state of the traffic systems in iraq. most definitely one of your other findings was that when it comes to interact, that's that young children. very young children suffer the most amount nutrition disease, perhaps that's not a surprise, but also women. now re, but i'm wondering if, if that resonates with the experiences of the people that you work with. um i, if i may revisit the point that was made earlier about ask your question and that's ok. there was a comparison made up between iraq during, for those resume and drops today. the comparison has been made many times by various people over the past few years, claiming that your rock is

a much different place today. and it was during this of the comparison. it cannot be made from various reasons because they used to be a dictatorship. and now it's not to dictate to shift by one party or one person that is under torture. envision run by a number of political parties that are working together towards are processing the people. so it's not, you know, like, and so don's time one could claim that it was a stable country, and this was a claim that many have made to defend the by discharging him. but also at the same time, we have very many armed groups going around around the country, killing and can nothing people we have had. i the sure no 2 and 3. and i need to emphasize that over 2000 is the, do you want me to go missing because of this invasion when the us onto,

to iraq does all the us, the sort of the rocky army and the boy the borders became for us which invite to tears caused them to iraq, so the invasion is directly related to too many of the problems that your office aside, his experience, the certainly the specific a rock experience but in a number of other countries as well with there's been a number of other groups that have arisen within the space and the, and to westman sentiments that all of this has created. now i know that the bottom administration has been very vocal about wanting to move away from this counter terrorism. small strategy, so to speak. michael, i'm curious about what the feeling is like in washington these days because it does feel like by them doesn't talk about the whole board on terra anymore. the rest of it because that and he going that way. but at the same time, we are still seeing as strikes. guantanamo remains open. what 21 years later is the so called war on terra. now, a war and secrecy, 1st of all, um,

let me just quickly respond to it. ruby just powerfully said, and i take her overall point very profoundly that it's hard to say the invasion of a rock did any not good. but it is also important to bear in mind that iraq, under saddam hussein was a terrible place. and perhaps a 1000000 people died in the around a rock or know that was over before the us invasion, of course. but with saddam hussein still in power and his son is waiting in the ways to succeed him. it's hard to really know or believe it or rock was headed in a baseball or prosperous direction or even a safe place for its own people. so i would, i would just keep that in mind. i'm not defending the invasion and i'm certainly not defending the way it was done. i do take her points on that in terms of whether we now want it to get away from this. yeah, i think you're largely right. and it's partly because there's not much to brag about right for all the reasons we've been discussing. these words have not turned out well, and the middle east is not in a better shape. it's not clear that it would have been in any better shape if we

had stayed out. so, you know, the middle east is a place where the united states and its allies remain challenged to find any policy that really contributes. and that positive benefit and sort of relative neglect seems to be perhaps therefore the overall approach we settle on where we do just enough to help keep our friends like the king of jordan and countries like all mine and morocco and his real stable and safe. and we look for the least bad way to handle a ron and for the lease lease, sort of owner as way, lease demanding way to handle terrorism. whatever the threats appear to be great enough that we have to go in and do something for our own. well being, but otherwise just proud of our and an 8 hour regional partners as they handle the bulk of the job and it's a job, it's clearly not yet done and stabilizing. this part of the world is clearly not yet done. so the policy, sorry, michael, you say handling the job? the bulk of the job but also taking the bulk of the human cost to no doubt.

absolutely, you're correct. and when i say handling the job, i should be clear and fair that it's not just handling. i'll kind of, i got an ice is also just trying to stabilize their very countries. and you mentioned, and stephanie wrote about yemen, for example, that's not necessarily a war that i blame the united states for being a primary cause of but it's sort of it's, it's a word that should break all of our hearts as we continue to see this extremely impoverished country which has a lot of killing going on, but even more so a complete inability to rebuild the kind of health and doing education, sanitation capabilities that are needed to keep people alive in general as. and so there's a lot to do, not just counter terrorism, and you're right, the costs are being born primarily by the police and the region. well, i want to take a look at how the country, well, the us and all these countries can potentially move forward. but specifically in the us, when it comes to accountability and responsibility back in 2001,

congress passed the resolution, the authorization for the use of military force against those responsible for 911. but i believe the list of groups and individuals covered by that is still classified, so the public doesn't even know who america is actually fighting. and i know stephanie, you've been very expensive in your report, and this isn't about allocating blame. but you do is talk about a sense of moral responsibility. what do you envision that looking like? that's right. and 1st of all, i just wanted to kind of respond to, to michael's point to, you know, the pentagon and the us government is talking a lot about shifting strategic focus from counterterrorism to great power competition. but that doesn't match the actual footprint of the us countered hair arthritis, which is still in over $85.00 countries around the world. and what, what i think we need to do is talk last about strategy and, and kind of shifts that can be made. and really more about the,

the big picture for questioning and big picture, critical thinking about us militarism in u. s. foreign policy, which is, you know, it is, this does the us really have a role to play in these kinds of, of, you know, conflicts and, and oftentimes i think even things that sound as innocuous as us security assistance. so i've, i've done research on the ground in west africa and you know, they're, they're kind of funding and training and so forth for local forces that the us has done as of arguably intensified the, the violence if anything, these are incredibly complex conflicts. so i think we need to really kind of rethink things that are really basic level um and, and part of that is starting to a conversation about reparations and about reconstruction about the, the imperative of humanitarian assistance. right? this, you know, given this kind of the magnitude, the scale,

the scope of that and suffering that have been cause, what then is a moral response. and then you know, individual ends as a society, as a government, you know as a our, our military what, what 2nd i'm, i'm going to interrupt you that i'm sorry because i do want to hit find the from reba on your idea there of reparations and reconstruction an aide very briefly, but would that be enough? no. uh, resolutions are not enough. in fact, they would open the door to reparations. the claims from many countries around the world against the us, for its various violations. and we also need to address what u. s. foreign policy means when it uses the word allies to present or from so for example, the care and to our allies. i'm friends. and you know, today's iraq is safe for them about this error. but today's iraq, he politicians use the same methods as about the strategy and so they're just as

crow as the dogs are using was the friends and the carriage. you are just as violent as the blockbusters. and they actually enjoyed canceled, shut down at some point. so the question is, how do you define and i want, how do you do you define from and what kind of interventions are okay, and what are not, i would argue that all interventions are wrong at this point. that you all should have one that's less than some of the wrong experience from the stand experience. and i think we need to respect the agency or the people and these countries and their ability to fight terrorism. and what they do require assist type the word against terrorism. then we can all of, you know, other countries come off for the truck. nations is one way to go. although i know like i said, it's not going to happen. uh, not as our lifetime. well, so much of this rebate, i do say this is about trust and agency here, and it does feel like there is

a conversation about intervention isn't and whether or not that's a good idea going on in washington dc. we'll be following that hit on al jazeera, but we'll have to leave out discussion that for today. thank you to all of our guest stephanie estoppel, michael or helen and ruba ali hoss any and thank you to for watching. you can see this program again, any time by visiting our website. that's also is there a dot com for the discussion to go to a facebook page that's a facebook dot com forward slash 8 inside story. remember, you can always run the conversation to on twitter. handle is as a inside story for me and so as a whole team here into our home by the the,

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