Anmol on Terrorism

Anmol on Terrorism

In recent times the world has been plagued by terrorism, as there appears to be a bomb blast, or a mad man with a machine gun, every day, somewhere in the world. We still feel the effects of certain terrorist acts, and their repercussions, such as 9/11. Nations spend billions of dollars, even declare war over these acts, which makes you to ask, is it worth it? This article might make me appear like someone who doesn’t value human lives, which isn’t true, I value all human lives, however, I believe that the value of life is consistent, and not determined by cause of death.

9/11 was the single most deadly day due to terrorism, with the death of nearly 3,000 people. Soon after, the US declared war on Afghanistan, which was then run by the Taliban, with no objections, within the US, or internationally. They quickly deposed of the Taliban government, leaving it powerless, and forcing its remnants to hide in the mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unfortunately, all the leader of the movement had escaped, so the Western coalition decided to stay in the country, to try to eradicate the entire Taliban. Right now, 10 years later the American government is still there, although, in their favor, they’ve captured most of the senior leadership of both Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In the following argument, I’ll assume that the war in Iraq wouldn’t have happened without 9/11, and the sensationalism it creates. The financial costs to the US, due to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been 3.2-4 trillion dollars. 6,500 US troops have perished, as well. For now, we’ll only look at whether or not the wars were beneficial to the US, and look at whether or not the US could’ve conducted the wars in a better manner. We can analyze the costs to Iraq and Afghanistan later.

Excluding 9/11, the average number of global deaths due to terrorism from 1995-2005 had been about 2 people per day. Including 9/11, about 3 people per day. Let’s assume that with superficial US intervention in both Iraq and Afghanistan i.e., if they withdrew after one year, the number of deaths would’ve been 3 times as much, an extremely liberal estimate. That would’ve been an extra 6 lives per day, for 10 years, or an additional 22,000 lives. That sounds like a lot at a superficial level, but if you subtract NATO troop losses, it amounts to an additional 15,000 lives. So, the value of each life amounts to 3 trillion/15,000, or about $200 million per life. They say you can’t put a value on human life, but various organizations have effectively done so in other ways. There are various other costs, such as the time and resources wasted by TSA searches, and other such utilization of resources, but we can ignore them, because the bias is still obviously prevalent without them.

We also need to include the fact that the above statistic referred to global death, and not deaths in the US. There have been at most 2 possible plots which could’ve developed into another 9/11 in the US, and assuming both succeeded, they would have led to a loss of 6,000 lives, still less than the number of US troops who have perished.

Firstly, diseases like Tuberculosis can be prevented for significantly less. The cost of the vaccination amounts to $200/year/life. Assuming Terrorism leads to a loss of 50 years, on average, the US is paying about $4,000,000/year/life. Yet, a trillion dollars has been spent preventing terrorism, and a significant, but relatively small amount has been spent preventing Tb. This is only one example, but when something is 20,000 times more cost effective than something else, the other thing can generally be disregarded.

An argument for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that they helped the people in those nations. The people were helped by regime change, which would’ve happened regardless of whether or not the US engaged in “nation building”. The two wars have led to, according to some estimates, over a million civilian deaths. Although no one can deny the benefits of losing a tyrant as a leader, beyond a certain point, foreign intervention begins to be harmful to a country.

Other “great thinkers” claim that the US is only in those two countries because of oil. To those who endorse this views, I have two responses. The first one being that the amount the US has spent on military conflicts in the middle east is greater than the total value of oil it has extracted. The second is that China has extracted more oil from the middle East than the US. Enough said.

My arguments about Afghanistan and Iraq were more of a case study, than anything else. My main problem with terrorism is the opportunity cost, i.e. the resources wasted on terrorism that could’ve been spent elsewhere. Due to media coverage, etc. the average person spends more than 100 hours a year worrying about terrorism. If they earned a wage of $20/hour, they could’ve earned $2000 in that time, and saved 10 children, which seems more valuable than panicking about Al-Qaeda. As covered earlier, the money spent on terrorism can be better spent in an infinite number of other ways.

The main reason why terrorism flourishes is because of media sensationalism, more than anything. Media sensationalism leads to other mis-valuations, for example, a statistic which often shocks people is that there are twice as many deaths due to suicides than there are due to murder. Only 3% of all deaths in the 20th century (including wars, famines, etc.) have been due to non-natural causes, as opposed to 15% in the centuries before that. The world is getting less violent, yet we cover violence more. We can balance all violent deaths by increasing human life span by 1.5 years, which can be done by marginal medical improvements, or eating healthy, and taking occasional walks. If the US spent 5% of their defense budget on actual prevention of death, they would save significantly more lives than the rest of the defense budget does. The same can be said for any other country.

Fear of terrorism has been shown to be far more deadly than terrorism itself. The trillions dollars spent preventing terrorism, and rights given up in the name of prevention of terrorism seem to be doing more harm than good. Terrorism only flourishes because of media bias, and because politicians aren’t rewarded for crises prevented, but penalized for crises which occur. Obama won’t get re-elected if he points out that average life span in the US increased by two years in his term. A small reduction in life expectancy isn’t seen as significant, although it's more statistically significant than un-natural death. If you look at it, terrorism's objective is to gain attention, and due to our fear of terrorism, they gain that attention, and hence get political clout. Fear of terrorism leads to terrorism. My message isn’t that terrorism related deaths are unimportant, it’s that non-terrorism deaths are important as well.