Just learned from a Spanish crime series & confirmed that Spain deployed 29,861 troops to Afghanistan from January 2002 till October 2015. It’s hard to get a straight accounting from the US Pentagon about US troop strength (there still isn’t one from the Vietnam War), but there have been at least 88,000 US soldiers deployed to Afghanistan, not counting mercenaries, special forces, CIA operatives, private contractors. There were of course thousands of troops deployed from other countries without any honest accounting or reporting about the impact on those countries. There would be a whole other accounting for deployment to Iraq.
Consider the social & political impact on a small country like Spain of having nearly 30,000 soldiers dealing with PTSD & all the other physical & psychological traumas derived from war. What our governments have done to the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya is simply too evil to imagine. Some who harbor delusions about a US humanitarian bombing campaign in Syria accuse principled antiwar activists of having a knee-jerk, unthinking opposition to war. On the contrary, our absolute hatred for war is rooted in knowledge of those wars, experience with US government lies, & a furious commitment to treating other human beings as we would have them treat us. There are many who will go to the grave with that commitment. No human being is alien to us.