US wars in Middle East ‘total loss’

A former Pentagon official says the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were “a total loss,” adding the massive costs and great loss of lives were not worth what Washington claims it has achieved from those conflicts.

“Either the Afghan or the Iraqi war just was not worth what the United States got out of it,” Michael Maloof told Press TV on Saturday. “It was not worth that price,” he added.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost American taxpayers between $4 trillion to $6 trillion in the long run, according to a study earlier this year by the Harvard University.

Additionally, more than one million Iraqis and Afghans have been killed as the result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of those countries, according to some estimates.

After initially invading Afghanistan, the US made a “very serious strategic error in going into Iraq and that diverted attention and allowed the Taliban to rebuild its capabilities to the point now where it is stronger than it has ever been,” Maloof said.

“When I was in the Pentagon, I was one of those who suggested alternatives, particularly to the Iraqi war and that was absolutely ignored.”

The average cost of each American soldier on the ground in Afghanistan is set to nearly double to $2.1 million in 2014, at a time when the US military as a whole is facing a contracting budget, according to a new analysis of the Pentagon’s war budget.

For the past five years the US government spent an average of $1.3 million to maintain each soldier in the occupied country.

But the costs keep soaring, and according to Pentagon officials, that is a reflection of the added cost of shipping troops and military equipment back home.

“We are going to be leaving tens of billions of equipment back there because it is going be more expensive to bring it back than it is to just leave it there or destroy it,” Maloof said.

“It is a total loss.”

AHT/HJ