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?
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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The only real reason for invading Afghanistan and Irak was to surround Iran.
Mission accomplished.
This is what freaks me out the most about what’s happening now. Per usual, Americans shout “Save us government!” which almost always makes the problems worse. In the case of 9/11, you had 3000 citizens dead and their response caused 5000+ dead soldiers, thousands more maimed and fucked up, countless citizens on the other side dead-was it all worth it??? I don’t think most Americans even realize we still have this many troops abroad. It’s out of sight out of mind I guess-old news.
In the current crisis, most of these extreme measures seems to be just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. They seem to think by keeping us all under house arrest, the virus will just go away. It’s here to stay and extending these lock downs just kicks the can down the road. But we both know it’s what the Feds do best-bread an circuses has become UBI, fearmongering and bailouts.
We should all be concerned how quickly and decisively the Feds can suspend basic rights indefinitely. Not to mention the sharp rise of censorship for any dissenting views. I’m also disappointed in how readily people bend over and take it, and even show pride in it while shaming those who don’t. It’s all very classic totalitarianism and it’s happened many times throughout history, never with pretty results.
You’re wise to bail from this shit show soon Caleb. Hope you’re well-appreciate all the great content during this mess.
That, and containing the vast natural resources Afghanistan has, plus those pipelines they always wanted.
Yup. Based on some of the news and new numbers coming out in the last few days, I think it’s more than likely that in several years we will look back at this time and see that far more economic and health damage (including deaths) was actually caused rather than prevented. We’ll see if I’m right.
I agree with most of your post, but I disagree that we invaded “for no reason.” The reasons ought to be known by everybody by now.
Afghanistan produces 93% of the world’s non-pharmaceutical opiates, to the tune of many billions of dollars per year. Who banks that profit? The same international deep state that made the decision to invade. The same people who run the central banks and the NGOs. Much of the “$1 trillion effort” spent “in Afghanistan” was also siphoned away to the international deep state. They have many very expensive projects, from buying the world’s top politicians to funding color revolutions, so they need that money.
You are right (as usual) that “voting for and supporting certain people who you think are going to change things is a waste of your time and energy.” The international deep state reaping the drug profit and the graft profit is the same group of people who made all the decisions about the US war in Afghanistan. Mere presidents and vote-getters do not get to make those decisions. People like Obama and Merkel and Macron and May are mere middle-managers and order-takers.
One exception is President and former CIA head George H. W. Bush, who was not merely a bought-off politician; he was one of the top international deep state decision makers. Where did the Bush family get their fortune from? From drug smuggling, as is well known. (Laundered through oil and other businesses.) There was a period of decades during which G. H. W. Bush was probably the world’s most powerful and profitable drug smuggler. Smuggling of drugs, guns, and people is probably still the CIA’s top priority as an organization. (It surprises me that there’s anybody left since the Oliver North scandal who doesn’t know this.)
The war in Afghanistan has been 100% successful. The poppies are still growing, the graft is still flowing, the international deep state is flush with cash. It all makes perfect sense when you understand the goals of the project, which have been achieved almost flawlessly. The only real misstep has been their inability to justify it to the public. While you can and should disagree with their evil goals, I would think that you, the consummate businessman, would be impressed by the near-perfect multi-decade execution, in the face of immense opposition, of one of the biggest, brashest, and (literally) baddest business near-monopolies in human history: the world opiate trade.
It is not my position that we invaded Afghanistan for “no reason.” It is that we invaded and got thousands of people killed for reasons that only benefit the elites and no one else.
Correct. For the elites. It was an utter loss, failure, and insult to literally everyone else.
I recently read Smedley D. Butler’s War Is A Racket. Funny how shit never changes.
Ah, sorry. Then I agree with you completely.
First thing I thought when I read that paragraph was a big NOPE. Glad we’re on the same page!
On a related note, I don’t know if you saw this, but the US Army went on Twitter a few months ago to ask users what the Army had done for them. Based on the tone, it was obvious they were trying to find some inspirational war hero stories, but that’s not what they got. Most users replied with stories about PTSD, veteran suicide, the lack of healthcare veterans receive, etc. It was glorious (the US Army being dragged on Twitter, that is).
IIRC, this was around the time where it looked like Trump was going to start a war with Iran to win the election.
From what I’ve observed, Millennials and Gen Z are especially jaded by the endless and pointless wars. Even 9/11 isn’t memorialized to the extent it used to be, because they know all too well how it was used to justify invading Iraq and finding Weapons of Mass Destruction. It’s not that they don’t think it’s awful, they just hate the jingoism it spawned in this country.
I’m pretty confident that when Tantrum Trump wins re-election (The Democrats destroyed themselves REAL bad this year, no chance for any of their candidates), that there will be a draft.
Especially since the pandemic has “prevented people who were willing to fight for our country to travel overseas and fight for our country.”
Just watch. After the pandemic clears the US is gonna be more war sick than EVER. Trump will make Neocon Dubya look like Comrade Bernie (who himself might institute a draft if HE was elected in 2020 because the forces around him would pressure him to do it).
Either way, there is probably going to be a draft sometime between 2021 and 2024. They may actually raise the age from 18 to 25 to 18 to 45 too, would not surprise me at all.
This war is never going to end lol, no one wants it to end. Even the Comrade Bernie nuthuggers who are “anti-war” still support it. They begrudgingly say that “it has to be done.”
Which ones are you talking to? The ones I’ve interacted with all think it is “necessary.”
Funny story, one of the reasons I wanted to teach history was to argue this and make it part of my lesson plans. But then again, I also wanted to spend most of my lesson plans lionizing “Big L” Libertarians and Anarcho Capitalism, soooooo……….
I agree with all that, but the only real answer would be a bloody revolution so unless you have a few bazookas to give to your buddies, a few tanks in your backyard, and are willing to kill anyone who disagrees with you because you don’t know how much they will talk, you’ll be struck down immediately. As someone who studied them a lot in high school and college, revolutions and coups entail a MASSIVE sacrifice that many are not willing to undertake. Especially if they won’t be there to enjoy the fruits of their labor (which they usually don’t; most revolutionaries get killed by the same people who supported them).
But yes, I agree with you: The government can order the national guard to swoop down, lock us in our homes, cut off all communication, power, water, and leave us at the mercy of them with the snap of a finger if they see that the people are becoming a “threat to themselves” (the de-facto Totalitarian quote).
But it’s like this everywhere bruh.
This pandemic has shown me that Statism has won forever. It’s Brave New World part 2 out here combined with an endless Nuclear Winter.
So I’m just trying to do all I can with what little I’m given, doing all I can to move to a place where this isn’t as pronounced (to me, that’s Southeast Asia, where the elder statesmen are at least direct and predictable about their authoritarianism)
Afghanistan War was a complete waste of time, aside from possibly the very beginning of 9/11 and trying to get Bin Laden.. Especially the surge beginning in 2008
Aside from that Caleb.. I’m assuming if Justin Amash does announce that we’re gonna talk about it.
For the taxpayer this is bad. But Afghanistan, Iraq etc all have their purpose. Resources and surrounding Iran.
I dont believe that generals didnt know what they are doing. Keep necessary troops there with any BS excuse possible with as minimal damage as possible. Timeframe is surely unknown as the purpose is regime change in Iran and resources to be sucked as much as possible.
This is the logic. And if not for Usa there, the middle east would have been a Russian protectorate by now. It is a chess game between the superpowers.
Government then is like saying to the taxpayer: You have to pay your part to keep this empire an empire or else we will become a second class country.
Fine with me. I’d rather keep my money and not kills thousands of innocent people.
That is not what the government is saying but if it was it would be wrong. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and numerous other countries have absolutely zero empire and are first-class countries, often exceeding the USA in many ways. The myth that you need to control the world in order to have a wealthy country is blatantly false American Societal Programming stemming from the early Cold War in the 1950s.
Eh, not really. The Libertarian party and Libertarian movement has essentially been destroyed.
We are not disagreeing here, I’m stating how an SP government and its people think. In this department though we don’t have a sustainable empire in a lifetime(with how it should operate) as an example to see how it fairs in comparison. All empires in history worked on how to sustain the empire through the centuries, not the next 50 years. And this entailed attacking other countries, for lands and resources. Most far fetched and fell like what USA is doing now.
This is a big topic and wealth and prosperity of the people does not equate with security of the country. Though S. Korea and Singapore are strong militarily, they would not have achieved that without the USA. And without the USA, they would have had difficulty coping in terms of security.
“Obama took Bush’s two wars and made them seven”,
while getting the Nobel Peace Prize and an award for open government
which was given to him in a secret ceremony,
I don’t even have to make this stuff up LOL!!!!!!!!!!
We did not have to justify invading Iraq to find Weapons of Mass Destruction,
WE SOLD THEM THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION,
what we didn’t know was that they already used them all!
South Korea and Taiwan could be crushed like an ant without warning in a second
by most likely China or North Korea or a virus let loose by klutzy China
you really would not want to live in those countries.
You do have to remember that white people are only 11 percent of the world population
and are the least racist population on earth.
Everyone else in the whole world claims we robbed them or are holding them back,
Mathematically that is impossible,
so we do need a good military that gets lots of practice and bases all over the world give us survivability.
Even Iranians realize that we can turn their country into glass if we have to.
For those of you that don’t know sand plus intense heat (like say from a nuclear reaction) equals glass.
I know you hate Trump but he is really unique.
When he gets upset at a country his first threat is he will destroy their economy,
I have not heard that before.
Then he just took out their military leaders, awesome!
And then they have been licking and sucking their religious shrines
and the virus is doing a good job on them!
Well, “you” kinda did, but it shouldn’t matter to how one judges any individual white person today. That’s what I find insane about the present state of affairs in western countries: shaming people for what people who look like them did or are doing elsewhere. That’s batshit insane. Moreover, it’s primitive: there’s nothing inherently different about it from generic tribalism, blood feuds, etc. How few people are capable of really internalizing that guilt should be individual is extremely worrying.
@Antekirtt
Please explain in detail
how 11 percent of the population of earth
conquered 89 percent of the population of earth.
I wish you could post pictures and diagrams too.
Buzz, you should try your luck in non sequitur competitions.
My obsession with politics wouldn’t go away……….so I decided there was only one thing to do.
Make money on it:
https://www.predictit.com
100 percent legal as they got a no action letter from the CTC as they are using this as a research experiment on polling. (when you have money in the game, the idea is the polling is more accurate)
I’m up $500+ since I started and I’m starting to learn the game. Pretty much stick to the Tweet markets for now, but you can track tweets weekly at this website:
https://www.picount.com
I will make you a short video on it when I make time BD.