Tag Archives: Afghanistan

Doug Casey on the “Graveyard of Empires”

Posted on June 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

A lot of blood and treasure has been expended by countries and empires for a country that Doug Casey calls one of the planet’s most valueless regions. From Casey at internationalman.com:

International Man: After almost 20 years, the US government announced it is officially leaving Afghanistan and is pulling its troops out of the country soon.

What’s your take on this? Did the US government accomplish anything?

Doug Casey: The US presence in Afghanistan for 20 years is clinically insane. The place has long been acknowledged as one of the planet’s most isolated, backward, and valueless regions. Its inhabitants belong to disparate groups which are mutually antagonistic. Afghanistan isn’t even a real country. It’s a region.

How stupid are US leaders that—on top of those points—they could learn nothing from the total failure of earlier British and Soviet invasions? Or our own experience in Vietnam?

In Vietnam, a primitive country the US invaded on the pretext of propping up a very corrupt and unpopular government, war hawks said, “We can’t withdraw because it would show that the commies beat us. We have a huge commitment. It’s too hard.” People like myself countered, “It’s not hard at all. Cut your losses. You simply put the soldiers on the boats, you put the boats in reverse, and leave.”

Of course, by the time the US left Vietnam, it was a chaotic emergency evacuation with people being kicked off helicopters from the top of the US Embassy. A desperate run for cover. But that’s the proper fate for invaders, no matter where they’re from. It’s sad in the case of the US, which betrayed its founding principles, however.

Who benefited from the US invasion of Afghanistan?

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Were the Wars Wise? Were They Worth It? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on June 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

Very little about US warmaking since World War II can be considered wise or worthwhile. From Patrick J. Buchanan at lewrockwell.com:

Through the long Memorial Day weekend, anyone who read the newspapers or watched television could not miss or be unmoved by it: Story after story after story of the fallen, of those who had given the “last full measure of devotion” to their country.

Heart-rending is an apt description of those stories; and searing are the videos of those who survived and returned home without arms or legs.

But the stories could not help but bring questions to mind.

While the service and sacrifice were always honorable and often heroic, never to be forgotten, were the wars these soldiers were sent to fight and die in wise? Were they necessary?

What became of the causes for which these Americans were sent to fight in the new century, with thousands to die and tens of thousands to come home with permanent wounds?

And what became of the causes for which they were sent to fight?

The longest war of this new century, the longest in our history, the defining “endless war” or “forever war” was Afghanistan.

In 2001, we sent an army halfway around the world to exact retribution on al-Qaida for 9/11, an attack that rivaled Pearl Harbor in the numbers of dead and wounded Americans.

Because al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden had been given sanctuary by the Taliban in Kabul, who refused to give him up, we invaded, overthrew that Islamist regime and cleansed Tora Bora of al-Qaida.

Mission accomplished. But then the mission changed.

In control of a land that had seen off British and Soviet imperialists, we hubristically set about establishing a democracy and sent hundreds of thousands of Americans to hold off the rebel resistance for two decades while we went about nation-building.

We did not succeed. All U.S. troops are to be gone by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. And the Taliban we ousted has never been closer to recapturing power in Kabul.

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An Empire in Love with Its Afghan Cemetery, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on May 9, 2021 | Leave a comment

By now the brighter lights in the US government know why Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires. From Pepe Escobar at unz.com:

One cannot but feel mildly amused at the theatrical spectacle of the US troop pullout from Afghanistan, its completion day now postponed for maximum PR impact to 9/11, 2021.

Nearly two decades and a staggering US$2 trillion after this Forever War was launched by a now immensely indebted empire, the debacle can certainly be interpreted as a warped version of Mission Accomplished.

“They make a desert and call it peace,” said Tacitus – but in all of the vastness of the Pentagon there sits not a single flack who could imagine getting away with baldfacedly spinning the Afghan wasteland as peaceful.

Even the UN bureaucratic machinery has not been able to properly account for Afghan civilian deaths; at best they settled for 100,000 in only ten years. Add to that toll countless “collateral” deaths provoked by the massive social and economic consequences of the war.

Training and weaponizing the – largely inefficient – 300,000-plus Afghan Army cost $87 billion. “Economic aid and reconstruction” cost $54 billion: literally invisible hospitals and schools dot the Afghan landscape. A local chapter of the “war on drugs” cost $10 billion – at least with (inverted) tangible results: Afghanistan now generates 80% of the world’s opium.

All these embarrassing facts disappear under the shadow play of 2,500 “official” departing troops. What really matters is who’s staying: by no means just a few out of some 17,000 “contractors,” over 6,000 of whom are American citizens.

“Contractor” is a lovely euphemism for a bunch of mercenaries who, perfectly in tune with a shadow privatization drive, will now mingle with Special Forces teams and covert intel ops to conduct a still lethal variation of hybrid war.

Of course this development won’t replicate those David Bowie-style Golden Years in the immediate post-9/11 era. Ten years ago, following the Obama-Petraeus surge, no fewer than 90,000 contractors were dancing to the Hindu Kush groove, lavishly compensated by the Pentagon and dabbling in everything from construction, transportation and maintenance to “enhanced interrogation services.”

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The True Meaning of the Afghan “Withdrawal”, by Alfred McCoy

Posted on May 7, 2021 | 1 comment

You cannot understand the U.S. presence in Afghanistan without understanding the drug trade. Alfred McCoy, who wrote the magnificent The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade, is the perfect man to explain this story behind the story in Afghanistan. From McCoy at tomdispatch.com:

The True Meaning of the Afghan “Withdrawal”

Will the Nightmare of Saigon’s Fall Return in Kabul?

Many of us have had a recurring nightmare. You know the one. In a fog between sleeping and waking, you’re trying desperately to escape from something awful, some looming threat, but you feel paralyzed. Then, with great relief, you suddenly wake up, covered in sweat. The next night, or the next week, though, that same dream returns.

For politicians of Joe Biden’s generation that recurring nightmare was Saigon, 1975. Communist tanks ripping through the streets as friendly forces flee. Thousands of terrified Vietnamese allies pounding at the U.S. Embassy’s gates. Helicopters plucking Americans and Vietnamese from rooftops and disgorging them on Navy ships. Sailors on those ships, now filled with refugees, shoving those million-dollar helicopters into the sea. The greatest power on Earth sent into the most dismal of defeats.

Back then, everyone in official Washington tried to avoid that nightmare. The White House had already negotiated a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese in 1973 to provide a “decent interval” between Washington’s withdrawal and the fall of the South Vietnamese capital. As defeat loomed in April 1975, Congress refused to fund any more fighting. A first-term senator then, Biden himself said, “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” Yet it happened anyway. Within weeks, Saigon fell and some 135,000 Vietnamese fled, producing scenes of desperation seared into the conscience of a generation.

Now, as president, by ordering a five-month withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by this September 11th, Biden seems eager to avoid the return of an Afghan version of that very nightmare. Yet that “decent interval” between America’s retreat and the Taliban’s future triumph could well prove indecently short.

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Will Special Interests Allow America’s ‘Longest War’ to Finally End? by Ron Paul

Posted on May 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

Special interests is a nice way of saying the defense and intelligence contractors and their bought and paid for bureaucrats, lobbyists, and politicians who have been on the Afghanistan gravy train for the last twenty years. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitutute.org:

Even if “won,” endless wars like our 20 year assault on Afghanistan would not benefit our actual national interest in the slightest. So why do these wars continue endlessly? Because they are so profitable to powerful and well-connected special interests. In fact, the worst news possible for the Beltway military contractor/think tank complex would be that the United States actually won a war. That would signal the end of the welfare-for-the-rich gravy train.

In contrast to the end of declared wars, like World War II when the entire country rejoiced at the return home of soldiers where they belonged, an end to any of Washington’s global military deployments would result in wailing and gnashing of the teeth among the military-industrial complex which gets rich from other people’s misery and sacrifice.

Would a single American feel less safe if we brought home our thousands of troops currently bombing and shooting at Africans?

As Orwell famously said, “the war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” Nowhere is this more true than among those whose living depends on the US military machine constantly bombing people overseas.

How many Americans, if asked, could answer the question, “why have we been bombing Afghanistan for an entire generation?” The Taliban never attacked the United States and Osama bin Laden, who temporarily called Afghanistan his home, is long dead and gone. The longest war in US history has dragged on because…it has just dragged on.

So why did we stay? As neocons like Max Boot tell it, we are still bombing and killing Afghans so that Afghan girls can go to school. It’s a pretty flimsy and cynical explanation. My guess is that if asked, most Afghan girls would prefer to not have their country bombed.

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The Stupidity of Fighting a War to Prove a Dead Man Wrong, by Daniel Lanson

Posted on April 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

Osama bin Laden said the US didn’t have staying power. Boy, we sure proved him wrong! From Daniel Lanson at daniellanson.substack.com:

Bret Stephens thinks that U.S. forces should stay in Afghanistan indefinitely to spite Bin Laden’s ghost:

But what was the American interest in staying in Afghanistan beyond the fall of the Taliban? It wasn’t, centrally, to kill Osama bin Laden, who was just one in a succession of terrorist masterminds. It was to prove Bin Laden wrong about America’s long-term commitments, especially overseas.

Like any other justification for waging war to achieve intangible goals, Stephens’ argument is deeply flawed. Because a fanatic on the other side of the world made a claim about our “staying power,” we have to stay to “prove him wrong” even though he has been dead for years and has already been proven wrong. This is the opposite of sound and rational foreign policy. It is a foreign policy motivated by spite. While there might be some visceral satisfaction in trying to “prove him wrong,” this is not a legitimate reason to keep troops in harm’s way in a foreign country for years on end. No one should be asked to risk his life to demonstrate American resolve for the sake of vexing a dead man.

The truth is that the U.S. has shown tremendous staying power in Afghanistan despite having no vital interests at stake there. The U.S. has wasted twenty years and trillions of dollars and lost thousands of lives in an unwinnable war. A less determined, more easily discouraged, much more rational government would have given up 18 years ago. The U.S. has already demonstrated a thousand times over that it does not give up easily, but so what? That determination long ago calcified into deranged stubbornness. The refusal to give up has become denial. Haunted by jihadist talking points, hawks would have us continue to bleed resources and risk lives in useless imperial policing without end.

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The United States Has Declared Defeat in Two More Wars, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on April 25, 2021 | 1 comment

The US military is pulling back from Afghanistan and Iraq after achieving none of its stated objectives in those two countries. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

President Biden announced last week that he planned to remove all combat troops from Afghanistan by September, which he says will mark the end of what is now a twenty-year war in the central Asian country.

A week earlier, the US and Iraq reaffirmed a deal to withdraw “any remaining combat forces” from Iraq, and to further wind down the US involvement there, which dates back to the 2003 invasion.

In both cases, of course, the stated plans to end military intervention have been framed in polite language designed to make it look like the US is leaving on its own terms—and also to allow the US regime some level of plausibility when it claims “mission accomplished.”

In reality, of course, both Iraq and Afghanistan are just two more wars that the United States has lost in a long list of botched military interventions dating back to Vietnam and Korea. Moreover, these withdrawals signal the US’s continued geopolitical decline in a world that is becoming multipolar and highly motivated to bring to a final end the US’s vanishing “unipolar moment.”

But what exactly do we mean by “lost” in this context? Well, by the standards of the objectives presented by the US regime itself when these wars began, these wars are complete failures.

For example, we were told Iraq and Afghanistan would become “democracies” where Western-style human rights are protected and valued. That was the humanitarian justification.

We were also told these countries would become reliable allies of the United States, sort of like Germany or Japan. That was the geopolitical justification.

The US has failed on both fronts.

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Biden isn’t ending the Afghanistan War, he’s privatizing it: Special Forces, Pentagon contractors, intelligence operatives will remain, by Jeremy Kuzmarov

Posted on April 17, 2021 | 1 comment

Even if Biden pulls troops out of Afghanistan, the usual supporting cast of special forces, contractors, and spooks will remain. From Jeremy Kuzmarov at thegrayzone.com:

Over 18,000 Pentagon contractors remain in Afghanistan, while official troops number 2,500. Joe Biden will withdraw this smaller group of soldiers while leaving behind US Special Forces, mercenaries, and intelligence operatives — privatizing and downscaling the war, but not ending it.

(This article was originally published at CovertAction Magazine.)

On April 14, President Joe Biden announced that he would end the U.S.’s longest war and withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Over 6,000 NATO troops will also be withdrawn by that time.

“War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” Biden said during his remarks from the White House Treaty Room, the same location from which President George W. Bush had announced the war was beginning in October 2001. “We were attacked. We went to war with clear goals. We achieved those objectives. Bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda is degraded in Afghanistan and it’s time to end the forever war.”

Biden’s claim that he is ending the forever war is misleading. As The New York Times reported, the United States would remain after the formal departure of U.S. troops with a “shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations Forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives.” Their mission will be to “find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic state threats, current and former American officials said.”

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World Australia Buries Afghan War Crimes, Toes U.S. Hostile Line on China, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on April 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

The issue of war crimes in Afghanistan renders the Australian government morally compromised in serving as America’s cheerleader, Finian Cunningham writes.

Nearly five months after publishing an explosive inquiry into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan committed by Australian special forces, it is becoming clear that the Canberra government has no intention of bringing any of the perpetrators to justice.

Last November, the long-awaited internal investigation known as the Brereton Report was published which found that dozens of Australian special forces had been involved in unlawful killings of Afghan villagers and detainees, including children. The report limited itself to 39 murder cases, suggesting that the real number of war crimes committed by Australian troops is much larger. They were deployed as part of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan along with several other NATO and non-NATO nations.

When the Brereton Report was released, there was a lot of handwringing and shame expressed by Australian public figures. However, an Office of Special Investigator set up by the Australian government for the purpose of bringing criminal prosecutions against military members appears to have been sidelined. Indeed Australia’s newly appointed defense minister Peter Dutton and his aides have recently begun a media campaign indicating that, as far as the Brereton Report goes, it will be of no consequence in terms of holding military members to account.

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Media Concern Trolling About Afghanistan Withdrawal Again, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on April 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

There will always be an excuse for interventionists not to quit intervening. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

“Concerns mount that US withdrawal from Afghanistan could risk progress on women’s rights,” blares a new headline from CNN.

“Concerns are mounting from bipartisan US lawmakers and Afghan women’s rights activists that the hard-won gains for women and civil society in Afghanistan could be lost if the United States makes a precipitous withdrawal from the country,” CNN tells us.

What follows is yet another concern-trolling empire blog about why US troops need to stay in Afghanistan, joining recent others geared toward the same end like this CNN report about how the US military will open itself up to “costly litigation” if it withdraws now because it signed defense industry contracts into 2023, and this one by The New York Times about a US intelligence report urgently warning that a withdrawal from Afghanistan could lead to the nation being controlled by the people who live there.

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