Some of these are far more expensive than others. The Afghan war in particular involved shipping in some very expensive oil products due to a very long and dangerous route. Every drop of gasoline had to be shipped across most of Pakistan and over two mountain passes. Convoys were often attacked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_logistics_in_the_Afghan_W...

The situation was unstable, as much of northeast Pakistan is only loosely under government control and there are quite a lot of anti-US militants there: https://www.rferl.org/a/NATO_Supply_Route_Imperiled_As_Pakis...

The intermittent engagement between US troops and cross-border Taliban resulted in the US bombing a Pakistani Army post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_NATO_attack_in_Pakistan

Not unreasonably, this upset the Pakistani Army: https://www.pri.org/stories/2011-12-02/pakistan-truckers-app... "The head of Pakistan's army Friday gave the go-ahead for his soldiers to return fire on US troops, if attacked"

The US backed down rather rapidly when it realized that going to war with Pakistan would result in the total stranding of their forces in Afghanistan. It has never been entirely clear whether some of the loosely controlled Pakistani intelligence services are supporting the Taliban or not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Services_Intelligence_ac...

To those reading this, while most/all of this true, the security situation in this region of Pakistan has improved greatly over the last ten years, due to several internal military campaigns by the Pakistan army. Last year, the northwestern part of Pakistan, which was previously its own territory had become stable enough to be incorporated into the nearest province (KPK). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khyber_Pakhtunkhwa

The same protection exists for major shipping routes the world over, not only oil. I'm not sure it is useful to include this in calculations of the subsidies to the fossil fuel sector any more than we would include it in calculating subsidies for tech firms building products in China and shipping them around the world.

I think in general it makes sense to try to account for externalities in everything. If you spend lots of money on things like protecting shipping routes and accounting for that in the product cost tips costs in favour of manufacturing closer, then that's important to understand.

Considering just how much US military presence is in the Middle East primarily for protecting energy assets, I think it is useful. It's disproportionate to the actual value produced compared to other shipping protection deployments.

How much of the oil used in US comes from middle east?

That's the crazy thing. Nowadays, it's not even very much (on the order of $30 billion in oil per year, much of which is refined and re-exported as gasoline, etc), but we have massive military investments in military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Djibouti, etc. There's no way this passes the cost vs benefit sniff test.

Unlike the mid-aughts, the US is very nearly a net exporter of oil and oil products: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...

What matters is mostly the global price.

It doesn't matter how much physically comes from there to here, it matters how much their production brings down the price of the global commodity.

Well, that's the key point about becoming a net exporter of oil, isn't it? If the global price of oil shoots up, the extra cost to consumers is easily offset by the increased revenue for domestic oil production. If that's not good enough for you, there's also the option of protectionist measures to keep the price of oil for consumers nearer what it was originally (which is less economically efficient but is no worse than where you were at first).

That's the main argument for being "energy independent."

I suppose this depends on the relative risk that said items have.

I would guess that for a pirate in East Africa some items would be more valuable than others. Is oil more valuable than say iPhones to them?

the war in iraq was exclusively about oil

I think most major wars in the last 100 years could be characterised as for either markets or energy.

And, its not like any other cargo ships use those protected routes, either.