Afghanistan has always been a willing combatant in a handy forever war. That is why it was targeted. The British had the place for most of two centuries and used it to sharpen up their young officers and their soldiers. Thus it is unsurprising to see the Pentagon go do the same thing.
They got seriously started with 9/11 after a long thirty year hiatus after Vietnam which did the same thing.
What this makes clear is a complete lack of effective planning aimed at ending the war and piecemeal country building which might actually end the problem. Certainly the fact that the Afghan army is now effective in conjunction with NATO technical support is promising. It remains a around half manned however which makes offensive activity difficult.
What must be done, though is that the Pathans need to be identified as a national population occupying land in Pakistan and Southern Afghanistan. That can end the primary cause of the internal conflict. Getting Pakistan to also calve of land is equally difficult.
A Pentagon Paradise Built on Lies
by
The Pentagon cannot be pleased with the Washington Post today. That’s because the Post has
just disclosed a mountain of previously secret documentary evidence
within the military showing that the Pentagon has been intentionally
lying for years about the “progress” that it was making with its forever
war in Afghanistan. While the Pentagon has been publicly assuring the
American people that its war has been going swimmingly well, the truth
is that it’s been the exact opposite.
The documents consist of brutally candid
interviews with military insiders, who believed that their statements
would forever remain secret. After three years of refusing to comply
with the Freedom of Information Act, the Pentagon finally decided to
comply with an order of a U.S. district judge to turn over the documents
to the Post.
While the Pentagon is still refusing to
divulge the identities of most of the people who were interviewed, one
of the interviewees, Dougas Lute, a three-star army general who served
in Afghanistan, is quoted as saying:
We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing. What are we doing here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.
Another interviewee, Col. Bob Crowley, stated,
Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.
According to the Post,
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.” The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko’s agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Known as SIGAR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.
So, there you have it. A
one-trillion-dollar war built on intentional, deliberate, and knowing
lies, just like the Vietnam War was. More than 2,300 American soldiers
killed for nothing. Thousands more injured, mentally, spiritually, or
physically. Tens of thousands of Afghans killed, maimed, incarcerated,
or tortured. The entire country destroyed.
131024-M-FY706-201 U.S. Marine Sgt. Katie Maynard salutes as a casket is lowered during a funeral ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, Va., on Oct. 24. The ceremony was held for a group of six Marines who died in a CH-53 helicopter crash in Afghanistan on January 19, 2012. DoD photo by Cpl. Mondo Lescaud, U.S. Marine Corps. (Released)
And for what? For nothing! Those U.S.
soldiers killed and died for nothing, just as we at The Future of
Freedom Foundation were maintaining would happen even before the
invasion of Afghanistan started, when interventionists were accusing of
us “hating America.”
Moreover, just think about how they have
destroyed our freedom and privacy here at home, in the name of
protecting us from the “terrorists” who they have been generating with
their “war on terrorism” in both Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Americans have ended up with the loss of both freedom and security, with
a massive toll in terms of death and suffering, with a mountain of
federal debt, and with one great big pack of lies.
Most of the troops know the truth, just as most Americans know it. According to the Pew Research Center, “Nearly
18 years since the start of the war in Afghanistan and 16 years since
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, majorities of U.S. military veterans say
those wars were not worth fighting, according to a new Pew Research
Center survey of veterans. A parallel survey of American adults finds
that the public shares those sentiments.”
Will any Pentagon official go to jail for
lying to the American people on something so critically important as
war? Are you kidding? Did former Director of National Intelligence James
R. Clapper, Jr., go to jail for lying to Congress about the secret
surveillance that the NSA was carrying out as part of its much-vaunted
“war on terrorism”? Of course not. it’s only private citizens who lie to
federal officials who get sent to jail for lying. Since
national-security state officials are lying to protect “national
security,” they get a pass whenever they are caught lying to the
American people.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that
the Pentagon waged its war on Afghanistan without the constitutionally
required congressional declaration of war. That makes the Afghan war,
and all of the death and destruction that have come with it, illegal
under our form of government.
Despite eight years of having a free hand
to turn Afghanistan into a paradise, as those previously secret records
show, the Pentagon has succeeded in turning the country into one
gigantic hellhole of violence, official corruption, and opium
production.
How could it be otherwise? After
conquering the country, U.S. officials installed their ideal government,
one consisting of a national security state, a strong central
government with omnipotent powers, no civil liberties, no due process of
law, no trial by jury, no protection against unreasonable searches and
seizures, no bar against cruel and unusual punishments, massive public
works and other socialist programs, and a centrally managed economy.
What better prescription for disaster than that?
President Trump obviously didn’t fall for
the Pentagon’s lies. When he recently visited the troops during
Thanksgiving, he sneaked into the country in the dead of night and
stayed only three hours before quickly returning to Washington. Too bad
he didn’t bring the troops home with him and instead left them there to
continue killing and dying for nothing or, to be more precise, killing
and dying to sustain the Pentagon’s hellhole “paradise” of violence,
corruption, drug dealing, and lies.
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