What Americans are watching in Afghanistan is the use of U.S. military personnel to cover their governing elite’s panicked but useless attempt to prevent the citizenry from at last understanding that neither Bush nor Obama nor Biden ever intended to win the Afghan war, or any of the interventionist wars they started,
They intended instead to create a forever war that allowed politicians and big business to systematically skim billions off the taxpayer funds that were used to keep our troops there and to supposedly build a new, democratic Afghanistan. They did not give a damn about how many of our soldier-children were killed, crippled, or mentally disturbed. The bastards’ — including many generals and admirals — only goal was to keep the trough filled and flowing into their bank accounts.
There was never an easier military or diplomatic problem for the United States than post-9/11 Afghanistan. The answer to the problem was clear. With, as always, Marines in the lead, send a quarter-million man ground force with more than abundant aerial support to conduct a c. 15-month campaign of retribution. The job could have been done by early 2003.
The targets should have been all the armed Islamist groups that had long been identified and located by U.S. intelligence, but, of course, had been long ignored by national governments under both parties. The military’s job should have been the annihilation of those groups, their arms caches and other war-making assets, their civilian supporters, and whatever infrastructure — damns, roads, airfields, electrical generation, etc. — existed in the country. In short, as was said about the Roman way of war, create a wasteland and call it peace. Then what? Pack up and go home, with the knowledge that the job might have to be repeated 20 years hence.
This is the only military approach that ever worked in Afghanistan since the time of Alexander the Great. It was used by Lord Roberts and the British army in 1878-1880 and the massive bloody-nose Roberts’ inflicted on the Afghans kept them quiet until 1919, nearly 30 years. Being ahistorical and greed-obsessed morons, U.S. politicians and generals probably never heard of Lord Roberts, and instead sought to build an Afghan democracy they knew would never exist, and they did this, not to win the war, but to keep swag flowing into their hands.
Trump somehow knew that the Afghan war would end in an obvious U.S. defeat if he did not quickly remove U.S. forces from the country. He made an agreement with the Taleban — an armed force that, with its allies, had won the war by 2005-o6 — which would allow the U.S. military to withdraw professionally without being chased out of the country, just as the Afghan mujahedin had let the Red Army withdraw with little trouble in 1989.
There was no confusion in the minds of either the Taleban or Trump, the former knew they had won, the latter new that U.S. flag officers and Obama and Bush had lost the war and had expended massive amounts of American wealth, an ocean of American blood, and that it mattered not a lick to U.S. interests who rules in Kabul, so long as it was the Islamist Afghans, the only men on earth who have defeated two superpowers and may, in the future, have to defeat China.
If the Marines can get our people out of Kabul before that house-of-cards fully collapses , all honor goes to those who have so often been miracle-workers. If they and the U.S. nationals they were sent to evacuate suffer severe casualties or cannot get out, there may not be enough rope in America to hang those who send them there so they could make yet another buck for their ill-gotten-gains-stuffed bank accounts.
