Is there a reputable estimate of how many lives this has cost so far?
There are some incidents to count prior to 9/11, like the bombing of the USS Cole and some embassies, Clinton’s missile strikes against suspected camps in Afghanistan. 9/11 itself, the war against the Taliban (to date), the war aqainst Iraq (to date), the Madrid bombings, the Bali bombing??, etc.
Casualties on both sides, civilian and military.
Of course, you do realize that the war in Iraq is not a part of the war against Al-Qaeda. Right? Sigh … please say “Right!” … .
If you’re interesting in casualty statistics for the war in Iraq, check here:
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/USfatalities.html
Sorry, I haven’t been able to find a similar comprehensive unified source for the war against Al Qaeda. Here is a site with U.S. combat casualtied in Afghanistan.
And here’s a very long document tallying civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/AfghanDailyCount.pdf
For the death tolls in the other Al Qaeda attacks you should be able to tally those yourself. The bulk of the dead are in the 9/11 attacks. Total for all AQ attacks in the last decade is ~3300 victims.
Maybe my OP title should more correctly be “the war against terror”.
Frankly, the Iraq war was sold to us as part of the 9/11 package deal. I do understand that there is no evidence whatsoever linking Iraq to 9/11.
There are even more obscure casualties, like the 7 innocent Pakistanis slaughtered by the Macedonian police, in an attempt to demonstrate Macedonia’s vigilance in the war on terror.
Once you start referring to the “war against terror”, things start getting really fuzzy. Should you count the 118 hostages killed in the Moscow theater raid? Or the numerous military and civilian casualties in Russia’s 1999 invasion of Chechnya? How about the ongoing bloodletting on both sides in Israel and the Palestinian territories? Or terrorist activities outside the Muslim world, like the Aum Shinrikyo attack on the the Tokyo subway?
(This is one reason many of us find “the war on terror” to be an unhelpful rhetorical construction. Not all terrorists are created equal, and lumping them all together tends to obscure their individual motivations and makes it harder to fight against them. The people who blew up the World Trade Center and the people who hung body parts from the bridge in Fallujah have very different agendas, even though in both cases terrorist tactics are being used.)
You might want to limit your OP to just actions directly by and against Al Qaeda. Otherwise I’m not sure you can get a comprehensive numer.