The £ cost of war

Britain's military operations since the end of the cold war have cost £34.7bn and a further £30bn may have to be spent on long-term veteran care, according to an authoritative study by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). If the material cost of British deaths and injuries in subsequent compensation payments is included, the cost to Britain of military conflicts since 1990 could total as much as £42bn – excluding the cost of caring for veterans.

The bulk of the money has been spent on interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan judged to have been "strategic failures", which accounted for 84% of the total cost of British military interventions since 1990. The RUSI study concludes that "there is no longer any serious disagreement" that Britain's role in the Iraq war served to channel and increase the radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK, "Far from reducing international terrorism … the 2003 invasion [of Iraq] had the effect of promoting it. The rise of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was a reaction to this invasion, and to the consequent marginalisation of Iraq's Sunni population (including de-Ba'athification and army disbandment). Today, AQAP and other radical jihadist groups stretching across the Iraqi-Syrian border, pose new terrorist threats to the UK and its allies that might not have existed, at least in this form, had Saddam remained in power."

The study says that, although Saddam Hussein was one of the most brutal dictators of the late 20th century, responsible for successive atrocities against his own people and wars of aggression against his neighbours, by 2002 "the scale of these misdeeds had been much reduced, not least because of the containment measures put in place after 1991"

In Afghanistan, Taliban foot soldiers confronting British troops in Helmand were primarily recruited locally, "motivated much more by opposition to foreign intervention than by global jihadism". The study notes that opium cultivation is higher today than it was before the British arrived. Britain was assigned special responsibility for countering narcotics in Afghanistan on Blair's initiative in 2001.

The operations in Bosnia and Kosovo during the late 1990s and early 2000s, which cost £1.5bn and £1.1bn respectively. The enforcement of a no-fly zone over Libya during the 2011 revolution, cost Britain £238m.