Posted on 09/01/2021 7:49:22 AM PDT by Kaslin
PARIS -- Now that America's 20-year war in Afghanistan is ending, it's a good opportunity to assess what worked and what didn't.
First, to the success! (Try not to blink, because you might miss this part.)
The original mission of the post-9/11 military invasion was to overthrow the Taliban and neutralize al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. That mission was accomplished. Bravo to the brave men and women in uniform who succeeded based on the dictionary definition of the tasks initially outlined.
Except that the initial mission was itself misguided. Soldiers were following orders issued by people who were either incompetent, oblivious or corrupt. Those calling the shots knew that the 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudis, yet they continued to emphasize Saudi Arabia's ally status while bombing a country that was not Saudi Arabia. They knew that the Taliban didn't attack the U.S. homeland or have the capacity to do so, yet they led the American people to believe that these guys in flip-flops were capable of doing so by conflating them with al-Qaeda.
And speaking of al-Qaeda, its leader, Osama bin Laden, was designated as the figure onto which all public outrage crystallized, while American leaders omitted the inconvenient fact that bin Laden was trained in the early 1980s as the leader of pro-American proxy fighters in the CIA-led war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.
The question that should have been asked at the outset was why the U.S. was suddenly concerned about a terrorist that it had created, and why anyone should trust that going back into the same country and creating more assets to fight more scapegoats (the Taliban, in this case) wouldn't backfire again. Judging by the Taliban's shiny new American weapons, history has repeated itself.
So, yes, for our soldiers it was a job well done. It wasn't their performance that failed, but rather the poorly conceived mission and strategy designed by establishment cronies.
Which brings us to the failures.
The U.S. and its allies had 20 years to cut their losses and should have done so years ago. So why didn't they? Our leaders were clearly interested in sticking around until they could get a return on investment. That would have involved setting up a puppet government in Afghanistan and then securing guarantees of access to the country's unexplored mineral deposits, which American officials have assessed at $1 trillion. That includes one of the world's largest reserves of lithium, from which electric car batteries are made.
It was clearly taking longer than anticipated to shake those interests loose, particularly with many of the mining concessions having been awarded to China, which dragged its feet acting on them due to the endless war. So we stuck around pretending to "democracy-build," all while trying to figure out a way to get our hands on the treasure.
About the only decision-maker who was blunt about the underlying economic interest was former U.S. President Donald Trump, who reportedly told officials at a White House meeting in July 2017 that the U.S. should demand access to Afghanistan's mineral wealth in exchange for continued support of the Afghan government, according to Reuters. Everyone else pretended that it was about counterterrorism.
Which brings us to yet another problem.
We really need a less propagandistic definition for terrorism. When you occupy a country for 20 years and a group of people who live there attack you inside their own country and on the other side of the world, it's not terrorism but rather self-defense against a foreign invader/occupier. When two groups of fighters -- both citizens of the same country -- are fighting with each other, it's not terrorism if the side that you support happens to be losing.
Afghanistan isn't the only place where we've seen terrorism evoked as a pretense to defend U.S. proxy fighters losing a civil war. The same thing happened in Syria, where the U.S.-backed "Syrian rebels" lost to the Syrian army, which was casually describe
Lesson: Never fight in a war that the left can easily throw away all of the sacrifices made by American soldiers. Either fight to win or don’t fight at all. ANYTHING ELSE IS TREASON!
Stolen elections have consequences.
The lesson should be obvious: Don’t try to nation build among tribal societies.
Just make it a punitive expedition. Kill the targets, everyone associated with the targets, everyone who supports the targets, and everyone who gets between us and the people we are killing. Human shields should just tell us where to shoot.
When finished, stack their heads in the city center, warn the surviving locals that next time we won’t go so easy on them, then leave.
They knew that the Taliban didn’t attack the U.S. homeland or have the capacity to do so, yet they led the American people to believe that these guys in flip-flops were capable of doing so by conflating them with al-Qaeda.
This brings up issues of the whole “war on terror”, because in such a “war”, there is not a specific country that you can say attacked us. True the Taliban didn’t attack us, but they gave safe haven to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had training camps in Afghanistan.
Even though most of the hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis, it’s not as if the government of Saudi Arabia sent them on a mission to attack America.
Which gets back to this war on terror, is not a war between one country and another, in the traditional definition of warfare.
It seems the CIA is the cause for more problems then solutions.
That's the way I am on putting most of the focus of 9/11 onto Afghanistan, though I wished we'd attacked Pakistan too.
They knew that the Taliban didn't attack the U.S. homeland or have the capacity to do so, yet they led the American people to believe that these guys in flip-flops were capable of doing so by conflating them with al-Qaeda.
The author must have forgotten that OBL was given refuge and room for training camps in Afghanistan.
American leaders omitted the inconvenient fact that bin Laden was trained in the early 1980s as the leader of pro-American proxy fighters in the CIA-led war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. The question that should have been asked at the outset was why the U.S. was suddenly concerned about a terrorist that it had created...
OBL was the leader of the Mujahadeen? News to me. I do know that none of those people were "pro-American" as the author says. They appreciated our help to be sure, but they were never pro-American and we didn't expect them to be. Also, we never "created" OBL as a terrorist - that's bullshit. Sure, we may have helped people like him terrorize the Soviets, but we never created the 9/11 mastermind. He and his fellow Wahabists did that on their own.
Our leaders were clearly interested in sticking around until they could get a return on investment. ...That includes one of the world's largest reserves of lithium... It was clearly taking longer than anticipated to shake those interests loose...
I think the author overestimates our government's ability to strategically plan anything. We weren't sticking around to develop lithium mines. We stuck around because Afghanistan became a tar baby and no President wanted to have the loss on his record.
When you occupy a country for 20 years and a group of people who live there attack you inside their own country and on the other side of the world, it's not terrorism but rather self-defense against a foreign invader/occupier.
Not a lot of people that write for Townhall call the Taliban "Freedom Fighters", but there you go. What a fool.
Did *any* Afghani do anything to a US citizen prior to our invading?
Did any of them do anything other than what any of us would have done to an invader.
FU GWB and rot in hell to anyone who ever supported a ‘war on terror’ or ‘nation building’, the blood is on YOUR hands, and your hands alone.
“When you occupy a country for 20 years and a group of people who live there attack you inside their own country and on the other side of the world, it’s not terrorism but rather self-defense against a foreign invader/occupier. When two groups of fighters — both citizens of the same country — are fighting with each other, it’s not terrorism if the side that you support happens to be losing.”
I’d change that first sentence to “When you invade a country that did not directly attack you and a group.....”
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