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Would it shock you to find definitive proof that the longest war in American history was a complete farce, remains so to this day, but will probably keep going forever anyway?
-By Caleb Jones
It shouldn’t.
People my age and older remember when Americans spent almost a decade in the 1980s making fun of the Russians for being stupid enough to invade Afghanistan. It was a complete cluster fuck and international embarrassment for Russia. We called it “Russia’s Vietnam.” They even made an entire Rambo movie about it.
Apparently we Americans are even dumber than the Russians, since not only did we invade Afghanistan also, but we stayed there over a decade longer than they did. And we don’t even have a real reason for staying. And we’re still there. And we’re going to remain there. Probably forever.
A telltale sign of a collapsing empire in chaos is when it starts invading countries for no reason and then stays there indefinitely for no reason. Indeed, when Idiot Bush invaded Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction and then didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction is when I started to realize that America was set on the fundamentally wrong path.
Oh, and by the way, we’re still in Iraq too. If you’re an American, your tax dollars are going to pay for 5,200 troops we have stationed in Iraq (that we know of). The Iraqis don’t even want us there and asked us to leave last month. Tantrum Trump, ever as corporatist and pro-war as Obama and Bush were, said we're not going to leave until Iraq reimburses us for an air base we built there. Which, of course, will never happen.
Thanks, Tantrum Trump. Great idea. Let’s just spend billions of our tax dollars by leaving those troops there forever. (Why the fuck are we paying for airbases to be built in Iraq anyway?)
Back to one of our other eight useless wars. Unlike with Iraq, I actually supported our troops going into Afghanistan to get Osama Bin Laden back in 2001, but I wanted them to get in there, kill or capture whoever needed to be dealt with, and then leave. I didn’t want troops sitting around there for six months, which at the time really upset me. I certainly didn’t want them there for 18 years. It’s been 18 years folks. And they’re still there.
And Trump isn’t going to pull them out.
It was recently reported here that a treasure trove of government documents revealed that the generals in charge had no idea what the hell we were doing in Afghanistan and still don’t. And everyone lied to you about it.
Here are some quotes:
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”
“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction... 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added.
This is what they hid from you. This is what they knew was going on when they went on TV and told you that everything was going great in Afghanistan and how they were “making progress” all those years.
In the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe. “They thought I was going to come to them with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live,” an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special Forces team told government interviewers in 2017. “It took several conversations for them to understand that I did not have that information in my hands. At first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys, where are they?’
Yup. A cluster fuck that you and I are paying for.
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
They lied to you. Bush. Obama. Trump.
And they’re still lying to you.
And most of you still defend one or more of these people.
Why?
Really think about that... Why?
The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.
This is the main issue and the entire main point of this article. People sometimes ask why I talk about politics when I know politics can’t solve any major problems in the Collapsing West. I answer that question here. I’m trying to demonstrate to the few of you rational enough to process this that voting for and supporting certain people who you think are going to change things is a waste of your time and energy. Time and energy that could instead be spent making your life better.
Both Pussy Barack and Tantrum Trump were fanatically supported by their irrational sycophants because these people seriously thought that these two corrupt, corporatist shitheads would actually end the wars. In both cases, I knew these two guys would not do that and I was right. In both cases, not only did they not end any wars, but they actually increased them. As I’ve been reporting on this blog for many years, Obama took Bush’s two wars and made them seven, and Trump took Obama’s seven and made them eight. Now all of you Obama and Trump supporters look like idiots.
Have Americans learned? Nope. Look at all the excited supporters for Comrade Bernie.
Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.
“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”
$1 trillion of your money spent. 2,300 Americans dead. 20,589 maimed. Countless civilians in Afghanistan also dead.
All for some US corporations to secure some natural resources. Your corporatist government at work.
If you’ve voted for Democrats or Republicans in any major US elections in the last few years, I hope you’re proud.
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