Costs of War and Conflicts

Bharat Dogra

Generally the most widespread single indicator of costs of war that has been commonly used refers to the number of people who die in a war or conflict directly due to the violence of the conflict including shooting, bomb-blasts etc. However it is increasingly realised that wars also increase the possibilities of hunger, displacement, homelessness, collapse of water and sanitation facilities as well as other essential infra-structure, denial of medical care, the spread of disease, mental stress and suicides. All this also results in a large number of deaths.

While deaths caused by violence like shooting and bombs is referred to as deaths caused directly by war, the other deaths are referred to as deaths caused indirectly by wars and conflicts. The indirectly caused deaths can be very high in the context of civil wars. However, even in other wars these have been found to be generally much higher than directly caused deaths.

This concept of indirectly caused deaths received a lot of attention in Iraq where a very large number of deaths of children were reported due to indirect causes. Another factor that was highlighted here was that use of depleted uranium weapons leaves behind high risks of very serious diseases like cancer and this continues to cause high levels of distress many years or even decades after the actual fighting has stopped. In other conflicts the use of landmines (example Angola), cluster bombs (as in Laos) and chemical warfare and herbicides (as in Vietnam) have left behind very long-term destructive impacts (not to mention the widely known and most horrible long-term impacts of atom bombs suffered in the two Japanese locations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

More recently it is the comprehensive estimates prepared by Brown University regarding the costs of the USA’s War on Terror which have drawn a lot of attention to the concept of indirect costs. In these estimates during the roughly two decades of the War of Terror 2001-21 it was estimated that 0.9 million or 9 lakh people were directly killed. However the estimates of indirect deaths were nearly four times of this. If one adds directly and indirectly caused deaths then as many as 4.5 million deaths were caused, mostly in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan etc. but each and every affected country was not covered.

In the case of the ongoing Gaza conflict somewhat similar assumptions have been used to find out the number of indirectly caused deaths. In Gaza the latest estimate is that nearly 38,000 people have died directly in the violence. However this does not include those people who were buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings and hence could not be identified or counted. Roughly their number has been estimated to be about 10,000.

If these numbers are counted then the number increases to about 48000 directly caused deaths by violence. However, if it is assumed that 4 indirect deaths are caused per directly caused death, as in the case of Brown University’s estimates for the War on Terror, then the number of indirectly caused deaths is about 192,000 and the number of total deaths in the Gaza conflict up to July 14 2024 is about 240,000. This amounts to about 10 percent of the entire population which is a very high estimate for a very small region like Gaza within a period of about just 9 months of conflict. The reason for this is that the living conditions of Gaza have been ruined on such a colossal scale by relentless bombing that survival is indeed becoming very difficult.

In fact, indirectly caused deaths can easily be an even higher multiple of directly caused deaths in several conflicts. Various estimates indicate that these can range from three times to even higher than ten times. Chances of these higher estimates are higher in conflict zones like Gaza where living conditions have been so badly destroyed that most essential infrastructure has collapsed.

The indirect and even direct deaths have been even more difficult to estimate for the Ukraine conflict as very different statistics have been emerging from various sources. Still, as the number of directly caused deaths is at least 200,000 (likely to be more) and as there has been massive destruction of basic living conditions over vast areas what one can conservatively estimate is that indirectly caused deaths here too are multiple of four or about 800,000 and hence the overall mortality of this conflict has crossed about one million.

Then one must not forget the large number of people, soldiers as well as civilians, who are very seriously injured or disabled in wars and have to live with these injuries and disabilities for a long time.

The Global Peace Index (GPI) ranks 163 independent states and territories according to their level of peacefulness, covering 99.7 percent of the world’s population. Produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), the GPI has been frequently mentioned as the world’s leading measure of global war and peace.

One of the most significant findings of this report is that many of the conditions that precede major conflicts are higher now than they have been since the end of the Second World War.

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 8, Aug 18 - 24, 2024