The United States is projected to spend a total of 811 billion U.S. dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report published in the Washington Post on Thursday.

The cost of the Iraqi war will reach 320 billion dollars after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, but the total cost is likely to more than double before the war ends, the report cited Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates as saying.

The analysis, distributed to some members of Congress this week, provides the most official estimate yet of the war.

Once the war spending bill is passed, military and diplomatic costs will have reached 101.8 billion dollars this fiscal year, up from 87.3 billion dollars in 2005, 77.3 billion dollars in 2004 and 51 billion dollars in 2003, the year the Iraqi war commenced, according to the report.

Even if a gradual troop withdrawal begins this year, war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to rise by an additional 371 billion dollars during the phaseout, the Washington Post reported.

When factoring in the war costs in Afghanistan, the total of 811 billion dollars for both wars would have far exceeded the inflation-adjusted cost of 549 billion dollars for the Vietnam War, the report said.

Of the total war spending, the CRS analysis found that 4 billion dollars could not be tracked, and could not identify 2.5 billion dollars diverted from other spending authorizations in 2001 and 2002 to prepare for the invasion.

The discovery, the report said, helped inflate the CRS cost estimate, which also included expenditure on foreign aid and diplomacy, higher than estimates from independent analysts.

Source: Xinhua