Tag Archives: Afghanistan war disaster

Rabobank: US Liberal-Neocon Imperialist Nation Building Is Over, by Michael Every

Posted on August 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

We can only hope the headline is true. From Michael Every at Rabobank via zerohedge.com:

America and Markets Firstest

I told you yesterday there was a good chance that US equities would ignore the debacle of the collapse of a key US client state, and so they did. Of course it was always 50-50, but the fact that markets could shrug off what is happening in Afghanistan is as damning of their lack of vision as it is of everyone responsible for the debacle inside the Beltway.

Apparently there are still tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans and US visa holders trapped in Kabul at a time where holding such papers makes one a target, and any outside the capital are considered no longer reachable. Twitter is already filled with tales of deadly reprisals against those who worked with the US, and shocking videos of people clinging to the outside of planes rather than celebrating, as Yanis Varoufakis put it, “the day liberal-neocon imperialism was defeated once and for all.” By Islamic fundamentalism. But Yanis, do recall that the US invasion was triggered by Afghanistan hosting Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11; which was a legacy of the CIA-funded Mujahedeen; which was a legacy of the Soviet invasion and *Soviet* imperialism.

Varoufakis also offers solidarity to terrified Afghan women, and helpfully tweets “Hang in there sisters!” For what, exactly – ‘The Revolution’? The Taliban’s official spokesman, who has a Twitter blue checkmark, will be able to respond even if the women, and a former US president, cannot. Furthermore, a female CNN journalist, dressed very differently to last week, states on live TV of Taliban fighters behind her: “They’re just shouting ‘Death to America!’ but they seem friendly at the same time. It’s utterly bizarre.” And she’s right. Indeed, Western intersectional thinkers might struggle to square how some Afghans would rather die than embrace their “friendly” liberation from despised Western social power-structures; if they had any more mental flexibility than those who always say “because markets”. Now there is a dialectic for you, and goodness only knows what the ultimate synthesis is.

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What If Afghanistan is More Than Just a Failed War?

Posted on August 16, 2021 | 1 comment

Afghanistan has a lot of lessons for anyone who wants to draw them, and it will reverberate for decades. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

The U.S. Empire is in freefall. Good. Afghanistan has reverted to nativist control as expected. The ‘goat-herders’ there remain unconquered. The speed of the Taliban’s takeover doesn’t surprise me because the groundwork for it has been in process for years.

Only the U.S. State Department under both Mike Pompeo and now Antony Blinken opposed this. If you’re angry this morning you can thank Russian diplomats who started this process in December 2016 by opening up the dialogue between the Taliban and the Asian powers with Pakistan leading the talks.

I can’t say I’m shedding any tears here except for all the losses on both sides. War is never righteous.

So, while I’m happy to see this end I am also sad to also see this end for what it is, a planned act of geopolitical vandalism by the Biden Obama Administration to ensure a complete collapse of the U.S. political system.

We are being liquidated by The Davos Crowd at the precise moment when their Great Reset is at its most vulnerable.

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Security Afghan Lesson For Uncle Sam’s Running Dogs, by Finian Cunningham,

Posted on August 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Afghanistan is the latest in a long line of nations that have learned the hard way not to trust the U.S., especially about matters of life and death. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

Afghanistan is the most glaring proof of the American treachery. It’s a cautionary tale for others who incredibly still seem trusting in hitching their wagon to a U.S. alliance.

U.S. President Joe Biden said this week that he has “no regrets” about pulling American forces out of Afghanistan as the Taliban militants look set to over-run the entire Central Asian country. The lesson here is: anyone acting as a running dog for Washington does so at the peril of ultimate U.S. betrayal.

The U.S.-backed puppet regime in Kabul has done Washington’s bidding for nearly two decades. After 20 years of futile war at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives and trillions of dollars, Uncle Sam has decided to pack up, get out and leave the Afghans to their miserable fate. As the Taliban take over one provincial capital after another, the U.S. intelligence agencies are warning that the Kabul regime could fall within a month. And callously, Biden this week told the Afghans they have to do their own fighting.

Whatever happened to lofty American vows of “nation-building”? Or “fighting terrorism”, “defending democracy”, “protecting women’s rights”?

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Strange Days Ahead, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on August 16, 2021 | 2 comments

Two years after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, it collapsed. Does the same fate await the US? From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Left: The Fall of Kabul, 2021 — Right: The Fall of Saigon, 1975

“If American Airlines were in charge, they would’ve blamed all the cancellations on weather and then given everyone’s checked luggage to the Taliban.”
– Sean Davis, Editor, The Federalist, on the action in the Kabul airport.

I guess we had to find out the hard way that Afghanistan is not like Nebraska. Let others be cruel about it (and there’s plenty of that right now, elsewhere). The last ostensible hegemon who tried occupying the place before us was the Soviet Union, which discovered painfully that Afghanistan was not much like its Kemerovo Oblast, either, and shortly after it withdrew its troops in 1989, the Soviet Union commenced to collapse — which prompts one to wonder: How much is the USA of 2021 like the Soviet Union of those years?

Well, we’ve become an ossified, administrative nomenklatura of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as they used to be, constitution-wise — e.g., the abolition of property rights via the CDC’s rent moratorium… the prolonged jailing in solitary confinement of January 6 political prisoners… the introduction of internal “passports.” The USA is running on fumes economically as the Soviets were. Our dominant party leadership has aged into an embarrassing gerontocracy. Is it our turn to collapse?

Kind of looks like it. The days ahead are liable to be a rough ride. Surely China has taken the measure of our Woke military and is weighing the seizure of Taiwan in our moment of signal weakness. No more computer chips for you, Uncle Sam! Do we come to Taiwan’s defense with guns blazing, or perhaps nukes? And what if that doesn’t work out so well? I’ll tell you what: a major geopolitical reordering of things, leaving us… where? Unable to enforce our will around the world as has been the case for eighty years. Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken!

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Blame Biden for Losing Afghanistan? by Jacob G. Hornsberger

Posted on August 16, 2021 | 2 comments

The U.S. government went in search of monsters to destroy and it found them. It didn’t however, destroy them. Afghanistan was lost the day the U.S. military invaded, and it only took them twenty years to figure it out. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

It is becoming increasingly clear that the strategy of interventionist dead-enders is to blame President Biden for losing Afghanistan to the Taliban. If only he had kept U.S. troops there a bit longer or even indefinitely, their argument goes, the crooked and corrupt U.S.-installed Afghan puppet regime could have won the war and finally brought “enduring freedom” to Afghanistan.

Never mind that the U.S. national-security establishment had twenty long years to achieve its goal of bringing a model society to Afghanistan.

Never mind that U.S. officials sacrificed the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Afghans in their quest to bring “democracy” and “enduring freedom” to Afghanistan.

Never mind that U.S. officials spent around a trillion dollars in U.S. taxpayer money on their intervention, much of it ending up in the personal pockets of their crooked and corrupt Afghan puppets.

Never mind that the Trump administration entered into an agreement with the Taliban to exit the country last May. Given that Biden unilaterally broke the agreement by extending the U.S. exit to September, the dead-enders argue, he should have just broken it even more by extending the exit date another several months or perhaps even indefinitely into the future.

The defeat of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, after 20 long years of massive death and destruction, provides the American people with an opportunity to engage in some serious soul-searching as to where we are as a nation and we should go from here.

On the one hand, things can proceed in a business-as-usual fashion, with no fundamental changes, simply saying that the Afghanistan intervention was a “mistake” that we need to put behind us and move on.

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Watch: 100s Of US Citizens Scramble Aboard C-17 As Taliban Ready To Declare “Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan”, by Tyler Durden

Posted on August 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

Well, that didn’t take long. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Update (1310ET): The situation in Kabul (well all of Afghanistan) has gone from bad to worst case scenario as a Taliban official says they will soon declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the presidential palace in Kabul, the Associated Press reported, after reports of the insurgents entering the premises and taking control of it

As this is unfolding, 100s of US citizens are scrambling aboard C-17s as the Biden admin evacuates the country…

We give the last word for this latest update to FT op-ed writer Gideon Rachman who presciently notes:

If Donald Trump were presiding over the debacle in Afghanistan, the US foreign policy establishment would be loudly condemning the irresponsibility and immorality of American strategy. Since it is Joe Biden in the White House there is instead, largely, an embarrassed silence.

One thing of note – which we are sure Fauci and Biden will quickly clamp down on – none of the evacuees appear to be wearing masks!!

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Hold the Generals Accountable This Time, by Ray McGovern

Posted on August 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Why is nobody ever held accountable for America’s losing wars? From Ray McGovern at antiwar.com:

If, after the horrors of this week in Afghanistan, the 4-Starry-eyed generals responsible for this 20-year March of Folly are not held accountable, there will be still worse to come. None were held accountable for the disasters of Vietnam or Iraq, and now the allegedly smart 4-Star Generals and Admirals are – get this – preparing for war with China and Russia.

“Civilian control” of the military is a fiction when the Departments of Defense and State are headed by windsock politicians like Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, not to mention President Barack Obama who lacked the spine to stand up to political generals like David Petraeus. This was clear as a bell 12 years ago, when on March 24, 2009, Obama announced his first surge of troops into Afghanistan.

He claimed his decision was the result of a “careful policy review” by military commanders and diplomats, the Afghan and Pakistan governments, NATO, and other international organizations. That he did not mention any intelligence input into this key decision for a slow surge in troops and trainers was not an oversight. There was no intelligence input – just as there was none before the benighted “surge” of U.S. troops into Iraq in 2007, during which an extra thousand GIs were killed.

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Afghanistan: Taliban Victories Explain the Wisdom of US Withdrawal, by Thomas Knapp

Posted on August 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

The US government could have ended the Afghanistan war many years ago with the same result we’re seeing now, and could have saved the American people a lot of blood and treasure. From Thomas Knapp at antiwar.com:

As I write this column, the Taliban are on a roll. They’ve taken 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals in a single week, including the country’s second and third largest cities (Kandahar and Herat), and Ghazni, which sits astride the main highway connecting Kandahar to the national capital of Kabul.

The US occupation’s puppet president, Ashraf Ghani, blames his government’s debacle in progress on the “abrupt” withdrawal of US forces. Apparently 20 years of the US doing his heavy lifting – contributing not just troops but money, training, and support for his own army – followed by 15 months’ notice of withdrawal, then a three-month extension of the withdrawal deadline, just didn’t give him time to prepare.

American hawks aren’t complaining about the “abruptness” of the withdrawal timeline. They’re appalled that the US would ever, under any circumstances, consider withdrawing at all. The fiction they’d have us subscribe to is that until and unless Afghanistan becomes a western-style “liberal democracy,” withdrawing means that the 2,500 Americans killed there will have “died for nothing.”

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20 Years Of War In Afghanistan Has Cost US Taxpayers Over $2.2 Trillion, by Tyler Durden

Posted on August 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

Afghanistan cost the US $2.2 trillion, including $88 billion to train the Afghan army that is folding like a cheap suit. That’s not to mention US and Afghan blood spilled, and the humiliation the US has suffered. Think anyone will be called to account for the disaster or made to pay a price for it? Not a chance. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Just a reminder that as the D.C. think tank pundit class of chicken-hawk keyboard warriors and armchair interventionistas who helped get the US into this unnecessary ‘forever war’ in the first place writhe in frustration and pain while beholding from afar the American Empire in rapid retreat in Afghanistan, the US has wasted literally trillions over years propping up a government that now appears to barely be putting up a fight.

“From its start in 2001 through April 2021, the war in Afghanistan has cost U.S. taxpayers approximately $2.261 trillion, according to estimates earlier this year from the Costs of War Project at Brown University,” Fox News reviews of the disturbingly high figures. All that as the US public now sits back and witnesses US-trained Afghan forces retreat “without a bullet being fired”…

And further as a number of veterans and independent analysts are now pointing out: “The Pentagon spent $88 billion dollars training the Afghan Army for 20 years It collapsed in 1 month.” It remains that “Not one general or politician will face consequences for this.”

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