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Quantifying The “Staggering Costs” Of US Military Equipment Left Behind In Afghanistan | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on August 24, 2021

You get your people and your stuff out first. Shouldn’t be that tough for a superpower.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/quantifying-staggering-costs-us-military-equipment-left-behind-afghanistan

Tyler Durden's Photoby Tyler Durden

Authored by Adam Andrzejewski via Forbes.com,

The U.S. provided an estimated $83 billion worth of training and equipment to Afghan security forces since 2001. This year, alone, the U.S. military aid to Afghan forces was $3 billion.

Putting price tags on American military equipment still in Afghanistan isn’t an easy task. In the fog of war – or withdrawal – Afghanistan has always been a black box with little sunshine.

Not helping transparency, the Biden Administration is now hiding key audits on Afghan military equipment. This week, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reposted two key reports on the U.S. war chest of military gear in Afghanistan that had disappeared from federal websites.

#1. Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of U.S. provided military gear in Afghanistan (August 2017): reposted report (dead link: report).

#2. Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) audit of $174 million in lost ScanEagle drones (July 2020): reposted report (dead link: report).

U.S. taxpayers paid for these audits and the U.S.-provided equipment and should be able to follow the money.

After publication, the GAO spokesman responded to our request for comment, “the State Department requested we temporarily remove and review reports on Afghanistan to protect recipients of US assistance that may be identified through our reports and thus subject to retribution.” However, these reports only have numbers and no recipient information.

Furthermore, unless noted, when estimating “acquisition value,” our source is the Department Logistics Agency (DLA) and their comprehensive databases of military equipment.

The U.S. provided an estimated $83 billion worth of training and equipment to Afghan security forces since 2001. This year, alone, the U.S. military aid to Afghan forces was $3 billion.

Putting price tags on American military equipment still in Afghanistan isn’t an easy task. In the fog of war – or withdrawal – Afghanistan has always been a black box with little sunshine.

Not helping transparency, the Biden Administration is now hiding key audits on Afghan military equipment. This week, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reposted two key reports on the U.S. war chest of military gear in Afghanistan that had disappeared from federal websites.

#1. Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of U.S. provided military gear in Afghanistan (August 2017): reposted report (dead link: report).

#2. Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) audit of $174 million in lost ScanEagle drones (July 2020): reposted report (dead link: report).

U.S. taxpayers paid for these audits and the U.S.-provided equipment and should be able to follow the money.

After publication, the GAO spokesman responded to our request for comment, “the State Department requested we temporarily remove and review reports on Afghanistan to protect recipients of US assistance that may be identified through our reports and thus subject to retribution.” However, these reports only have numbers and no recipient information.

Furthermore, unless noted, when estimating “acquisition value,” our source is the Department Logistics Agency (DLA) and their comprehensive databases of military equipment.

See the rest here

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Despair in the Empire of Graveyards – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 22, 2021

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/08/fred-reed/despair-in-the-empire-of-graveyards/

Fred Reed

Forty-six years ago in a previous comedy I was in Saigon, recently having been evacuated from Phnom Penh in an Air America—CIA—Caribou carrying, in addition to me, several ARVN junior officers and perhaps a dozen BUFEs (Big Ugly Fucking Elephants, the ceramic pachyderms much beloved of GIs). America had already embarked on its currently standard policy of forcing small countries into wars and then leaving them in the lurch. In Cambodia this led to the reign of Pol Pot, the ghastly torture operation at Toul Sleng, and a million or so dead. In the unending fight for democracy, casualties are inevitable.

At the time Saigon was tense because Ban Me Thuot had fallen and the NVA roared down Route One toward Saigon. To anyone with the brains of a doorknob, the American adventure in Vietnam was coming to an end, but the embassy was studiedly unconcerned. Embassies do not have the brains of a doorknob, but are keenly aware of public relations. Acknowledging the inescapable is not their way. As usual, Washington would rather lie than breathe, and did. As in Cambodia, so in Nam, and so later in Afghanistan.

Apparently a genius at State realized that a lot of gringo expats lived in Nam—the number six thousand comes to mind, but may be wrong—and that six thousand hostages taken when Saigon fell would be bad PR. So the embassy in Kabul—Saigon, I meant to say, Saigon—quietly announced that expats could fly out on military aircraft from Ton Son Nhut. They didn’t, or at least many didn’t. The NVA continued its rush toward Saigon.

The expats didn’t fly out because they had Vietnamese wives and families and were not going to leave them, period. These wives may not have had the trappings of pieces of paper and stamps and maybe snippets of ribbon. These things do not seem important in Asian war zones. But the expats regarded them as wives. Period. The family went, or nobody did. Period.

The embassy didn’t understand this because embassies are staffed by people from Princeton with names like Derek who wear pink shirts and don’t know where they are. The ambassador is usually a political appointee being rewarded for campaign contributions and probably doesn’t speak the language as few gringos spikka da Pushto or Vietnamese or Farsi or Khmer. For example, nobody at all in the embassy in Cambodia spoke Khmer. The rank and file of State are better suited to a high-end Rotarian barbecue than a Third World city teeming with strange people in funny clothes eating God knows what horrible things in winding frightening alleys. And so the State people could not understand why an American would marry one “of them,” as in the embassy I once heard a gringa put it. It was a good question. Why would a man marry a pretty, sleek, smart, self-reliant woman who wanted family and children? It was a great mystery.

The Taliban—NVA, I mean–NVA kept coming closer. A PR disaster loomed.

Meanwhile the PR apparatus insisted that the sky wasn’t really falling even as it did and no, no, no the US had not gotten its sit-down royally kicked by a ratpack of rice-propelled paddy maggots, as GIs described the opposition. Many in government seemed to believe this. This was an early instance, to be repeated in another part of Asia, of inventing a fairyland world and then trying to move into it.

Finally State faced reality, a novel concept. It allowed quietly that expats and their families could fly out, military. It was getting late, but better than nothing.

The comedic value of this goat rope grew, becoming more amusing by the hour. I was trying to get a young Vietnamese woman out as she had worked for the embassy and we suspected things might not go well with her under the NVA. Call her Linda. Linda and I took the bus to Tan Son Nhut. The Viet gate guards gave her a hard time, envying her for getting out while they could not, but we got in. I was going to tell the State people that we were married but that while I was in Can Tho, by then in VC hands, see, the marriage papers had slipped from my carrying case. This was obvious bullshit, but I guessed that if I made a huge issue of it they would bend rather than get in a megillah with a reporter, no matter how unimportant.

We found ourselves in a long line of expats with their families leading to the door of a Quonset hut, inside of which a State official was checking papers. Some of the expats had around them what appeared to be small villages of in-laws, brothers of wives, sisters, everything but the family dog. An official with a bull horn told us to write down all their names and the relationships on clipboards being passed around. Tran Thi Tuyet Lan, sister, for example.

Then a genius at the embassy or Foggy Bottom realized that something resembling a third of Viet Nam was about to come out, listed as in-laws. Policy changed, at least in Washington which was as usual blankly ignorant of reality on the ground. At Tan Son Nhut this meant telling men that they had to leave parts of their families behind, which they weren’t going to do. This would not look good above the fold in the Washington Post. Dozens of Americans taken captive because the State Department would not let their families out.” All was confusion because the US had spent years telling itself that the disaster couldn’t happen. What to do?

See the rest here

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The Oligarchic Empire Is Actually Simple And Easy To Understand – by Caitlin Johnstone – Caitlin’s Newsletter

Posted by M. C. on August 21, 2021

Yeah, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about war. It will just confuse you, because it’s far too complicated to understand. These important matters should be left to men like John Bolton, who are consistently wrong about every foreign policy issue.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-oligarchic-empire-is-actually

Caitlin Johnstone

If you’re like me and spend entirely too much time on Political Twitter you may have recently observed a bunch of people saying you shouldn’t post your opinion about the Afghanistan situation unless you’re an expert who has studied the nation’s dynamics in depth. Like an empire invading a nation and murdering a bunch of people for decades is some super complicated and esoteric matter that you need a PhD to have an opinion about.

You see fairly simple abuses framed as highly complicated issues all the time by people who defend those abuses. War. Israeli apartheid. My abusive ex used to go around telling people what happened between us was more complicated than I was making it sound. 

Before he became Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018 John Bolton faced a contentious interview on Fox News where he was criticized for his role in Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he responded that “the point I think you need to understand is, life is complicated in the Middle East. When you say ‘the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a mistake,’ it’s simplistic.”

Bolton is now among the “experts” on Afghanistan doing mainstream media tours on CNN and NPR explaining to the public that the decision to end the 20-year military occupation was a mistake.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NPFc9YN7LIE?start=323&rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Yeah, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about war. It will just confuse you, because it’s far too complicated to understand. These important matters should be left to men like John Bolton, who are consistently wrong about every foreign policy issue.

This carefully promoted idea serves only the powerful, and entirely too many people buy into it. You’ll even see dedicated leftists shying away from commentary on western imperialism in favor of domestic policy because they don’t feel confident talking about something they’ve been trained to believe is very difficult and complex.

Which is silly, because war is actually the easiest aspect of the oligarchic empire to understand. Murdering people with military explosives for power and profit is plainly wrong. You don’t need to be an Ivy League university graduate to understand this, and given the track record of Ivy League university graduates on this matter it’s probably better if you are not. A globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States orchestrates murder at mass scale to ensure perpetual domination of the planet. It really is that simple.

Now, you can spend the rest of your life studying the details of precisely how this is the case, but they’re just that: details about how this dynamic is taking place. You can learn all about the various ways the oligarchic empire advances its geostrategic agendas using wars, proxy conflicts, coups, sanctions, special ops, cold war brinkmanship and the so-called “war on terror”, but you will only be discovering further details about this simple overarching truth.Nathan Bernhardt @jonbernhardtthe politico reporters snapping off tweets about how “if you haven’t really studied afghanistan, please, you don’t have to tweet about it” are the exact same people who will sell you the next warAugust 17th 2021440 Retweets3,094 Likes

And the same is true of the other aspects of the status quo power structure: they’re meant to look complicated, but what you actually need to know about them to orient yourself in our world is fairly simple. 

The systems of capitalism are very complex by design, and a tremendous amount of thievery happens in those mysterious knowledge gaps on financial and economic matters where only the cleverest manipulators understand what’s going on. But the basics of our problem are quite simple: money rewards and uplifts sociopathy. The more willing you are to do whatever it takes to become wealthy, the wealthier you will be. Those who rise to the top are those who are sufficiently lacking in human empathy to step on whoever they need to step on to get ahead.

As a result we’ve had many generations of wealthy sociopaths using their fortunes and clout to influence governmental, media, financial and economic systems in a way that advantages them more and more with each passing year. This is why we are ruled by sociopaths who understand that money is power and power is relative, which means the less money everyone else has the more power they get to have over everyone else. They’ve been widening the wealth gap further and further over the years, a trend they seek to continue with the so-called “Great Reset” you’ve been hearing so much about lately.

You can spend the rest of your life learning to follow the money, studying the dynamics of currency, banking and economics, but what you’ll be learning is more and more details about the way the dynamic I just described is taking place. 

Sociopaths rise to the top, the most powerful of whom understand that things like money, governments and the lines drawn between nations are all collective narrative constructs which can be altered in whatever way benefits them and ignored whenever it’s convenient. For this reason controlling the stories the public tell themselves about what’s going on in their world is of paramount importance, which is why so much wealth gets poured into buying up media and media influence in the form of advertising, funding think tanks and NGOs, and buying up politicians with campaign contributions and corporate lobbying.Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ @caitozSociety Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix. Life in our society is like the movie The Matrix, except instead of AI keeping us asleep in an illusory world, it’s psychopathic oligarchs. And instead of code, it’s narrative. Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in th…caitlinjohnstone.substack.comJuly 13th 2021184 Retweets466 Likes

These powerful sociopaths tend to form loose alliances with each other and with the heads of government agencies as often as possible since it’s always easier to move with power than against it. So what you get is an alliance of depraved oligarchs with no loyalty to any nation using powerful governments as tools to bomb, bully and plunder the rest of the world for their own power and profit, and using mass-scale media psyops to keep the public from rising up and stopping them.

And that’s it, really. So simple it can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Don’t let elitists use the illusion of complexity to cow you out of talking about what’s going on in your world. You can see what’s going on well enough to begin speaking out, and the more you learn the more detailed the picture will become. 

Speak. You are infinitely more qualified to comment on the way power is moving in the world than the people who’ve been consistently wrong about everything throughout their entire careers yet remain widely platformed by the oligarchic media. If John Bolton gets a voice, so do you.

____________________________

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US Middle East/Afghanistan Meddling Began Way Before 9/11. How Much Of An Improvement Have You Seen?

Posted by M. C. on August 20, 2021

However, it was not the first time that “Iraqgate”–as the scandal of US military and political support for Hussein in the ’80s has been dubbed–has raised its embarrassing head in the corporate media, only to be quickly buried again.

How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons

On August 18, 2002, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined, “Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas”. Quoting anonymous US “senior military officers”, the NYT “revealed” that in the 1980s, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided “critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war”. The story made a brief splash in the international media, then died.

While the August 18 NYT article added new details about the extent of US military collaboration with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran, it omitted the most outrageous aspect of the scandal: not only did Ronald Reagan’s Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iraq’s Kurdish minority, but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Nor did the NYT dwell on the extreme cynicism and hypocrisy of President George Bush II’s administration’s citing of those same terrible atrocities–which were disregarded at the time by Washington–and those same weapons programs–which no longer exist, having been dismantled and destroyed in the decade following the 1991 Gulf War–to justify a massive new war against the people of Iraq.

A reader of the NYT article (or the tens of thousands of other articles written after the war drive against Iraq began in earnest soon after September 11, 2001) would have looked in vain for the fact that many of the US politicians and ruling class pundits who demanded war against Hussein–in particular, the one of the most bellicose of the Bush administration’s “hawks”, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld–were up to their ears in Washington’s efforts to cultivate, promote and excuse Hussein in the past.

See the rest here

NORM DIXON writes for Australia’s Green Left Weekly.

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‘Kabul Has Fallen – But Don’t Blame Biden’ – Ron Paul’s 16 August Column

Posted by M. C. on August 18, 2021

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/kabul-115602?e=ff526b933a

Ron Paul

Kabul Has Fallen – But Don’t Blame Biden

Aug 16 – This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away.

The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan?

The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building.

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war?

So who is to blame for the scenes from Afghanistan this weekend? There is plenty to go around.

Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood that there was no point to the US occupation. There were some efforts by some Members to end the war, but most, on a bipartisan basis, just went along to get along.

The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.

The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.

The mainstream media has uncritically repeated the propaganda of the military and political leaders about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the other pointless US interventions. Many of these outlets are owned by defense industry-connected companies. The corruption is deep.

American citizens must also share some blame. Until more Americans rise up and demand a pro-America, non-interventionist foreign policy they will continue to get fleeced by war profiteers.

Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but don’t expect it to be understood in Washington. War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide. But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the US global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future.

—

Read more great articles on the Ron Paul Institute website.
Subscribe to free updates from the Ron Paul Institute. Copyright © 2021 by Ron Paul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.

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Afghanistan Shenanigans – by Caitlin Johnstone – Caitlin’s Newsletter

Posted by M. C. on August 18, 2021

And this all comes just months after the Taliban renewed its earlier pledge to guarantee safety to a trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline, which many like journalist Whitney Webb have suggested was a major reason for the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/afghanistan-shenanigans

Things have been moving very rapidly as Taliban forces immediately closed in on Kabul after the end of the occupation. The US is frantically evacuating people, former Afghan officials are fleeing the country, and a transition to Taliban control is a done deal. 

It’s long been obvious to anyone paying attention that the Taliban would regain control of the country when occupying western powers withdrew, but I don’t think anyone would’ve put money on it happening this quickly. A few interesting questions have come up about this, like for example how hilarious would it be if after spending twenty years and trillions of dollars and thousands of human lives “fighting the Taliban”, the Taliban suddenly resumed power as a US puppet regime?

I mean, what’s going on here?M.S 🪁🌲🌳🌴🚴🚉🏙 @ShaykShackTaliban spox speaking with BBC world rn. Says Afghanistan will be open for business with US and the US companies can keep on working on their public sector contractsAugust 15th 202163 Retweets251 Likes

And here?Frud Bezhan فرود بيژن @FrudBezhanAli Ahmad Jilali, U.S.-based academic and ex-Afghan interior minister, likely to be named as head of new interim government in #Kabul, three diplomatic sources told @ReutersAugust 15th 202165 Retweets117 Likes

And here?Shashank Joshi @shashjInteresting guy to serve as interim president in Taliban-dominated government. Attended @BritishArmy staff college in 1966-67. Director of Dari/Pashto services at @VOANews for many years. Later Afghan interior min & ambassador to Germany. Now at @NDU_EDU, funded by the Pentagon. Frud Bezhan فرود بيژن @FrudBezhanAli Ahmad Jilali, U.S.-based academic and ex-Afghan interior minister, likely to be named as head of new interim government in #Kabul, three diplomatic sources told @ReutersAugust 15th 202120 Retweets41 Likes

I’m not the first person to speculate about this:Louis Allday @Louis_AlldayWhat feels possible is that we are seeing what’s essentially an arranged transition and the Taliban will take power and then work with/subordinate to the US and likely be utilised in its regional plans towards Iran and China in some way.August 15th 2021110 Retweets362 Likes

And this all comes just months after the Taliban renewed its earlier pledge to guarantee safety to a trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline, which many like journalist Whitney Webb have suggested was a major reason for the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place.Björn Müller @Bjoern__MTaliban vows to guarantee safety of trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline | Eurasianet Taliban vows to guarantee safety of trans-Afghanistan gas pipelineThe Taliban has vowed to guarantee the safety of a planned trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline, which could make Turkmenistan’s dream of reaching buyers in Pakistan and India a reality.eurasianet.orgFebruary 7th 202112 Retweets14 Likes

So who knows what’s going on, but it wouldn’t be surprising if shenanigans were afoot in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile this all has a lot of people outing themselves as believers in benevolent imperialism, with many westerners across the political spectrum arguing that the US needs to continue its military occupation in perpetuity to protect women’s rights.Marianne Williamson @marwilliamsonExactly right. Borzou Daragahi 🖊🗒 @borzou“Yes, the US and the west should stop endless wars of imperial conquest. But it’s unconscionable to throw 38 million Afghans to feral wolves and squander hard-fought social and educational advances women and minorities have made over the last two decades.” https://t.co/jDasrpD2TKAugust 15th 202116 Retweets87 Likes

It is now suddenly the wokest of feminisms to want an empire whose interventionism is literally always disastrous to re-invade Afghanistan and occupy their land for generations and keep murdering anyone who tries to fight back in order to force them all to espouse our white liberal values.

Exactly zero of the shitlibs demanding troops stay to prevent Taliban rule at gunpoint would fight the Taliban themselves. Exactly zero of them would even be willing kill Taliban forces sitting miles away safely piloting a drone. This is a game to them. A complete abstraction. I mean, can you picture Marianne Williamson charging at Taliban forces firing an M4 carbine? I can’t.

If the US empire hadn’t manufactured consent for the invasion by aggressive narrative management about Taliban oppression westerners would give zero fucks about women in Afghanistan, just like they give zero fucks about women in all the other oppressive patriarchal nations. This is all just people who don’t think much about the consequences of US warmongering having an emotional reaction to their sudden realization that US warmongering has consequences.

Maybe, just maybe, it was dumb to believe the invasion of Afghanistan ever had anything to do with helping women in the first place? The US military is the very last institution on earth who’d ever actually do anything in the interests of humanitarianism and the very last institution you’d ever want to.Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ @caitoz”OH MY GOD think of the people of Afghanistan!! We’ve got to DO SOMETHING!!” I mean I guess we could all open our wealthy nations to all the refugees who want to leave. “Oh. Oh no. Haha! No. I just meant dropping bombs on them or something, I’m not a lunatic.”August 15th 2021416 Retweets1,339 Likes

No matter what exactly is happening in Afghanistan, everything you’re seeing there today is the fault of the US-centralized oligarchic empire. Every little bit of it. Not just starting with the insane 2001 invasion which cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives but long before it, when US government agencies backed the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in the eighties and actively radicalized them. This entire mess is the result of a bunch of imperialists deciding that the entire planet needs to be dominated by a single power structure and that it’s fine to play with human lives like chess pieces in order to make that happen.

These bastards are going to keep murdering people around the world while robbing and oppressing their own citizenry at home until their fingers can be pried off of the world’s steering wheel for good. Only then will we ever have a chance at creating a healthy world.

____________________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. 

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Like It or Not, Taliban Is Afghanistan’s True Independence Movement – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 18, 2021

We have to stop drinking our own Kool-Aid over Afghanistan, stop believing our own western and communist propaganda and try to accept that what we are so far seeing is the liberation of this war-ravaged land from four decades of first Soviet, then US occupation.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/08/eric-margolis/like-it-or-not-taliban-is-afghanistans-true-independence-movement/

By Eric S. Margolis

“Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,
With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?
And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?”

‘The Battle of Naseby’ by Thomas Macaulay

After 20 years of B-52 carpet bombing of Afghanistan, murderous drone strikes, 350,000 puppet soldiers, 20,000 mercenaries, nearly two trillion dollars in US spending, destruction of countless Afghan villages, the killing up to one million Afghans, spreading the opium trade around southeast Asia and Europe, abetting wide scale torture…. after all this the US-run Afghan’s puppet `president’ and his drug-dealing cronies have fled embattled Kabul like thieves in the night.

Taliban – more accurately the Islamic Movement of Afghanistan – has been slandered by almost every western news outlet and wrongly called a terrorist movement linked to the late Osama bin Laden.  Heavily-propagandized Americans, Canadians and British have been inundated by this torrent of government lies against Afghanistan’s Pashtun (Pathan) people.

I was in Afghanistan with the newly created Taliban in the early 1990’s.  I walked from Pashtun village to village and had tea with the local chiefs, known as ‘maliks.’  The Pashtun treated me as an honored guest and welcome visitor.  These rough mountain warriors were the descendants of the fighters who had defeated four British invasions the previous century.  My book ‘War at the Top of the World’ examines the beginning of our Afghan War.

The fathers of these Pashtun fighters were the men who formed the anti-Soviet ‘mujahidin’ (holy warriors) that defeated the mighty Soviet Red Army with the secret help of US, British and most of all Pakistani intelligence.  Everyone in south Asia knew better than to mess with the Pashtun Afghans, including their blood enemies, Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara.

An old Hindu prayer goes, ‘Beware of the fang of the cobra, the claw of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Pathan (Pashtun)’

Taliban had just been created when I was visiting the usually off-limits frontier Tribal Territories on the Pakistan-Afghan frontier and the Khyber Pass leading into Afghanistan.  After the hurried Soviet pullout, Afghanistan fell into civil war or anarchy.  Armed gangs attacked caravans and raped many Afghan women, mostly in the Pashtun region.  In Islam, rape is a grave, intolerable crime.

As chaos spread, a one-eyed village preacher, Mullah Omar, a maimed veteran of the anti-Soviet struggle, organized a group of his young religious students, known as ‘Talibs,’ to protect the local village women and defend the caravans.  As the late Benazir Bhutto told me, she ordered Pakistan’s   Home ministry to arm the Talibs.

At that time, the Afghan Communists were waging a war to keep control of the countryside and, most important, the nation’s lush opium fields, which financed the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and Communist Party.  Once Taliban defeated the Tajik-Communist alliance, opium production in Afghanistan fell by over 90%.  Until then, Afghanistan was the world’s leading producer and exporter of opium.  This narcotic was then exported with full Communist approval to the Soviet Union/Russia, Iran, Central Asia an onward to northern Europe.  Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks, many Communist dominated, ran most of the drug trade.

Taliban crushed the Afghan drug trade and ended some of the attacks on women.  But its members were mostly rough-hewn mountaineers of the very old school.  They often treated women badly, as was the custom, but certainly far less brutally compared to the often-murderous way girls and women were mistreated or murdered in India, a US ally, or by US air raids on Afghan towns and villages.

Afghanistan’s urban education system was heavily infiltrated by the Afghan Communist Party which used female education as a way of infiltrating government.  A major reason for Taliban’s hostility to female education was that it was viewed as a communist plot.

Today’s Taliban is a younger generation of mountain people, better educated and less narrow-minded than their rustic elders.  I was invited by its leadership to attend peace talks in Doha.  Meanwhile, one hopes that American right-wingers do not get the US to stage new military operations against Afghanistan to prolong this 20-year conflict.  Let the Afghans sort out their own messy ethnic issues without interference by their neighbors.  A new coalition government that includes non-Taliban leaders like former president Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar should be encouraged and supported.  War criminals like Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum should be prosecuted.

We have to stop drinking our own Kool-Aid over Afghanistan, stop believing our own western and communist propaganda and try to accept that what we are so far seeing is the liberation of this war-ravaged land from four decades of first Soviet, then US occupation.

Eric S. Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.

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Wisdom from Rothbard | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on August 17, 2021

https://mises.org/power-market/wisdom-rothbard

David Gordon

The collapse of the American-backed state in Afghanistan brings home the wisdom of Murray Rothbard’s essay “The Death of a State,” written in July 1975. The lessons that Rothbard drew from the fall of South Vietnam apply equally to the present crisis. Among these were the importance of guerilla warfare, the dependence of all states on majority support, and the blow to US imperialism with its false doctrine that “the United States has the moral duty, and the permanent power, to install, prop up, and rule governments and peoples throughout the world. We are being forced into a policy of ‘neo-isolationism,’ unfortunately not through the adoption of moral principle, but through the concrete realization that imperialism is no longer realistically viable.” We should follow Rothbard’s advice and end all American overseas military commitments.

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Who Lost America’s Longest War? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 14, 2021

How many other U.S. allies field paper armies, which will collapse, if they do not have the Americans there to do the heavy lifting?

Is what we have on offer — one man-one vote democracy — truly appealing in a part of the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?

The Taliban’s God is Allah. The golden calf we had on offer was democracy. In the Hindu Kush, their god has proven stronger.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/08/patrick-j-buchanan/who-lost-americas-longest-war/

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In April, President Joe Biden told the nation he would have all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack ever on the continental United States.

Given the turn of events of the past week, that 20th anniversary may be celebrated by a triumphant Taliban, now on the cusp of victory over the Americans and their Afghan allies, with gruesome public executions of their surrendered and captured enemies.

Sept. 11, 2021, could see U.S. Marines and diplomats fleeing Kabul to escape the retribution of the Taliban whom we ousted in 2001.

Consider. From Friday, a week ago, to today, the Taliban have overrun 10 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals.

Mazar-e-Sharif in the north is now surrounded. Kandahar and Herat, second and third largest cities, are under siege. The Kandahar-Kabul road has been cut. The defense minister escaped assassination in the capital. The government’s media director did not. The Taliban now control half of the 400 regions of Afghanistan and two-thirds of its territory.

Some Afghan soldiers have fought bravely. Others have retreated into their bases, surrendered, or fled into neighboring countries such as Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan. An entire Afghan army corps with its U.S. weapons, equipment and vehicles was surrendered in Kunduz city.

U.S. military say the fall of Kabul could come within 90 days, with some saying privately the regime could fall to the Taliban within a month.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has summarized the situation:

“The complete, utter failure of the Afghan national army, absent our hand-holding, to defend their country is a blistering indictment of a failed 20-year strategy predicated on the belief that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars could create an effective democratic central government in a nation that has never had one.”

The reality of that grim assessment raises many questions.

Who is responsible for the colossal U.S. failure in Afghanistan? Who is responsible for America’s impending defeat in her longest war?

Over the last 20 years, the U.S. lost 2,500 troops with 20,000 wounded and invested $1 trillion to create an Afghan army, only to see that army crumble and disintegrate as soon as we departed.

Wednesday, Biden conceded that truth:

“Look, we spent over $1 trillion over 20 years; we trained and equipped … over 300,000 Afghan forces. Afghan leaders have to come together. They’ve got to fight for themselves.”

We are facing in Afghanistan a wipeout of the investment of a generation to convert Afghanistan into a democracy with the ability to hold the allegiance of its people and to defend itself.

Why did we fail?

Did the U.S. generals, statesmen, politicians and journalists who went to Afghanistan during these last two decades, and came back to testify to our steady progress, delude themselves? Or did they deceive us?

How many U.S. generals knew what was going on but declined to risk their careers by telling Congress or the country that the Afghan army and regime we had stood up would likely collapse like a house of cards once the Americans departed and they had to face the Taliban alone?

Today, the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, is in Qatar threatening the Taliban that if they overrun the country and impose a victor’s peace, they risk being denied diplomatic recognition by the U.S. and its Western allies and a forfeiture of future foreign aid.

But to brand the Taliban terrorists and pariahs is not new to them. What they seek is something for which they have proven they are willing to die.

What is critical for them is to restore the Taliban to their previous dominance; to create an Islamic Emirate; to make themselves the moral, social and political arbiters of a more purely Islamic Afghanistan.

And to be rid of the outsiders and their alien values.

They want to be able to stand up and say to the Muslim world: “We have shown you how to do it. We fought America, the world superpower, for 20 years until we forced the Americans, tails between their legs, to get out of our land, and then put their puppets up against a wall.”

While our strategic defeat will leave Americans reluctant to attempt any such future imperial interventions, there needs to be an accounting.

The questions that need answering:

Was not the attempt to transplant Madisonian democracy into the soil of the Middle and Near East a fool’s errand from the beginning?

How many other U.S. allies field paper armies, which will collapse, if they do not have the Americans there to do the heavy lifting?

Is what we have on offer — one man-one vote democracy — truly appealing in a part of the world where democracy seems to have trouble, from the Maghreb to the Middle East to Central Asia, putting down any deep roots?

The Taliban’s God is Allah. The golden calf we had on offer was democracy. In the Hindu Kush, their god has proven stronger.

Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever See his website.

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Has the US begun its “great retreat”?, by The Saker – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on August 9, 2021

Because, objectively, the current US retreat on most fronts might be the “soft landing” (transition from Empire to “normal” country) many Trump voters were hoping for. Or it might not. If it is not, this might be a chaos-induced retreat, indicating that the US state is crumbling and has to urgently “simplify” things to try to survive,

https://www.unz.com/tsaker/has-the-us-begun-its-great-retreat/

The Saker

I have to begin this column by admitting that “Biden” (note: when in quotation marks, I refer to the “collective Biden”, not the clearly senile man) surprised me: it appears that my personal rule-of-thumb about US Presidents (each one is even worse than his predecessor) might not necessarily apply in “Biden’s” case. That is not to say that “Biden” won’t end up proving my rule of thumb as still applicable, just that what I am seeing right now is not what I feared or expected.

Initially, I felt my the rule still held. The total US faceplant in Alaska when Blinken apparently mistook the Chinese for woke-neutered serfs and quickly found out how mistaken he was.

But then there was the meeting with Putin which surprised many, including myself. Initially, most Russian observers joined one of two groups about the prospects for this summit:

  1. This summit will never happen, there is nothing to discuss, Biden is senile, his Admin is filled wall to wall with harcore russophobes and, besides, the (US) Americans are “not agreement capable” (недоговороспособные) anyway, so what is the point?
  2. If the summit takes place, it will be a comprehensive failure. At best a shouting match or exchange of insults.

Neither of these happened. Truth be told, we still do not really know what happened. All we have are some vague declarations of intent and worded pious intentions. And even those were minimalistic! In fact, after the summit most Russian observers, again, broke into two main camps:

  1. “Biden” threw in the towel and gave up. Russian won this round. Hurray!
  2. “Biden” only changed tactics, and now the new US posture might well become even more aggressive and hostile. Russia is about to see a major surge in anti-Russian provocations. Alarm!

I think that both of these grossly oversimplify a probably much more complex and nuanced reality. In other words, “Biden” surprised many, if not most, Russians. That is very interesting by itself (neither Bush, nor Obama nor Trump ever surprised the Russians – who knew the score about all of them – in any meaningful way).

My strictly personal guess is that there is some very serious infighting currently taking place inside the US ruling class. Furthermore, that serious infighting is not about core principles or even strategy – it is a dispute over tactics only.

See the rest here

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