The huge price tag reflects the cost of fast response with little thought of the future

In 2004, when he was arguably still capable of initiating another devastating attack on the United States, Osama bin Laden released a video gloating about his plan of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

As usual, bin Laden’s vow was overblown — but, as it turned out, not entirely crazed. A survey by the New York Times puts a stark price tag on the cost of reacting — and overreacting — to the defining event of the past decade. America’s bill for fighting a 21st-century “asymmetric war” comes to at least $3.3 trillion. Put another way, for every dollar al-Qaida spent to pull off the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the cost to the United States was an astonishing $6.6 million.

Today, al-Qaida in Pakistan is crippled, and bin Laden is dead. But the $3.3 trillion figure suggests that the unanticipated costs of how we managed a grim decade — money already spent or committed in the future — amount to a little more than one-fifth of America’s current national debt.

Some of those were unavoidable, direct costs of responding to the attack. Some, like the Iraq war, were expenditures of choice. But there is also the more difficult, less quantifiable question of what we paid in “opportunity costs.”

Less than a trillion dollars of the $3.3 trillion was for direct responses — including toppling the Taliban. But what if at least some of the remaining $2 trillion-plus had been spent on other, longer-range threats to American national security? Rebuilding a broken education system? Finding more imaginative ways to compete with China? Reducing the national debt? Or delivering on promises, by President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton alike, for “Marshall plans” to rebuild societies at risk of letting the next al-Qaida flourish?

“We’re Americans,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, who served briefly as President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, said recently when asked how the costs rose, then spiraled out of control. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.”

The cost debate has begun, but only recently, after a huge federal deficit and a national weariness with a decade of war created a reaction so powerful that some fear the nation will retreat into isolationism.

“From today’s perspective, we suffered a trauma and then a post-traumatic stress disorder that we tried to cure by throwing endless money at the problem,” said David Rothkopf, who wrote a history of the National Security Council, where many of the decisions were made. “There are expenditures of necessity and expenditures of choice, and it has taken us a full decade to recognize that some of the choices were fundamentally wrong. Only now have we hit the pivot point.”

The trade-offs — not guns versus butter but short-term security versus long-term — were not apparent in the early days when 9/11 seemed like the new Pearl Harbor. It was more than a year before anyone talked about whether America’s whatever-it-takes approach risked granting bin Laden his obvious wish of wreaking huge economic havoc, and by then the United States was headed to Iraq.

As the response turned into the broader, ill-defined “Global War on Terror,” the debate over opportunity costs was labeled almost unpatriotic. The director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Lindsey, was forced to resign after suggesting in 2002 that a war with Iraq could cost $100 billion to $200 billion. Mitch Daniels, then head of the Office of Management and Budget, was sent to offer a counter-estimate of $50 billion to $60 billion. The actual number, according to the Congressional Research Service, is $800 billion and climbing.

Afghanistan, by contrast, has been a bargain, at about half the cost — less than the long-term price tag, $589 billion by one estimate, of caring for both wars’ veterans.

No president enters a war with the faintest idea of what it will cost, of course. But at least two-thirds of the 9/11 response can be traced to a few lines in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, which declared the nation had to preempt any credible, emerging threat. For years, there was no talk of a “minimal deterrent,” proportionate response or balancing defense against other priorities.

Today, it seems unimaginable not to. Indeed, perhaps the biggest single change in the national security strategy of the U.S. since Obama came to office is the constant whir of that calculation. When Obama announced the “surge” in Afghanistan, he slipped a few paragraphs into his speech to make clear that the days of open-ended war were over.

But the real model for a new approach — one that avoids $3.3 trillion price tags — was evident in Libya. To Obama, this was the test of the thesis that there is an alternative approach to bringing about regime change. While Obama decided to intervene in Libya, he insisted that there be no ground troops, that NATO allies take the lead and that the U.S. offer only “unique capabilities.” Even with those restrictions, U.S. operations cost more than $1 billion.

Whether he is right or wrong, Libya was an example of what countries with real restraints — fiscal, political and strategic — have to do. Because even a hyperpower, as the French called the United States just before 9/11, cannot absorb more than one bill for $3.3 trillion.

© 2011 The New York Times Company