LONDON, March 10: At more than £3bn the expected cost of British military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq this year has almost doubled, according to the Commons defence committee.

The hefty increase in the war budget of 94 per cent to reach 3.297bn against last year’s total of £1.698bn is being viewed here as worrying. The rising bill is attributed to new urgently-required equipment, depreciation costs of armoured vehicles and other over-used military kit and the award of a £2,500 operational bonus for all troops.

For the campaign in Afghanistan where troop numbers have risen sharply since 2006, the cost in 2006/2007 was £742m and the forecast for 2007/2008 is also more than £1.6bn, a rise of 122 per cent.

The Liberal Democrats’ defence spokesman, Nick Harvey, said the Afghanistan operation could have been much better ‘resourced’ “if the government, supported by the Conservatives, had not been so keen to support the illegal war in Iraq.”

The Guardian newspaper quoted Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist for the World Bank and a Nobel laureate, recently estimating that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be somewhere between $5 trillion (£2.5 trillion) and $7 trillion for the US alone. Another estimated $6 trillion would be spent by other countries, he said.