Thread: US Army Officer Urges "Swift, Responsible Disengagement" From Afghanistan

US Army Officer Urges "Swift, Responsible Disengagement" From Afghanistan




...there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan and it is long past prudent to disengage and bring all U.S. troops home, and simply accept the potential ugliness of Afghanistan...

Wed, 06/05/2019 - 23:05
3 SHARES

Authored by Danny Sjursen via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

The United States has been at war in Afghanistan for more than seventeen years. Despite many years of effort and billions spent, the U.S. military is still suffering casualties in that remote land. In 2017, fourteen American soldiers died in Afghanistan — some, in fact, shot from behind by their supposed local allies. Already, through January 2019, two more American troopers have been killed. They were the 2,418th and 2,419th U.S. military deaths in the war since 2001.
None of this sacrifice has defeated the Taliban or staved off enemy military advances throughout the country over the last several years. In fact, there have been a number of spectacular Taliban successes and attacks of late. On August 21, 2018, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s speech in the heavily fortified capital city of Kabul was interrupted by dozens of mortar rounds fired by the Taliban. It was no mere anecdotal anomaly.
In fact, August 2018 was the bloodiest August in terms of Afghan security-force casualties in any of the past 39 years of persistent war. In one district, 100 Afghan commandoes — the pride of the U.S. advisory effort — were slaughtered. In a five-day battle for the city of Ghazni, 100 more soldiers and police were killed, along with 150 civilians, when the Taliban massed 1,000 fighters to rush and briefly seize the city. At least 350 other Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) members were killed this past August. Massive high-casualty Taliban attacks proliferated throughout 2018, and have continued in the new year, with more than 100 Afghan troops killed in a single attack on January 22, 2019. Such casualty levels are, frankly, unsustainable.
To say the least, the war is not going well. That became inevitable the moment the United States initiated its “nation-building” strategy in 2002, and has remained the case irrespective of the levels of U.S. military and financial investment through the intervening seventeen years. America’s longest war has decidedly not achieved the supposed goal of establishing a liberal democracy in Afghanistan.
Luckily, in December 2018, Donald Trump announced his tentative decision to begin a U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and gradually de-escalate this unwinnable war. It remains to be seen, however, whether he will be dissuaded from doing so by a bipartisan, interventionist clique of the media and his own advisors.
Now is the key opportunity to end this aimless, costly war. As such, two realities should inform U.S. policy in this troubled country.

First, the seventeen-year active U.S. role in Afghanistan is only part of an intractable, ongoing 39-year war that the U.S. government and military cannot and will not “fix.”
Second, there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan and it is long past prudent to disengage and bring all U.S. troops home, and simply accept the potential ugliness of Afghanistan — and the world — as it is, rather than how interventionists want things to be.



The bottom line

1. The ongoing campaign in Afghanistan is America’s longest war, yet it has been largely unsuccessful and inconclusive. That is due to a key reality — the U.S. armed forces have gone to prop up the Afghan government, and there is no external military solution to Afghanistan’s ongoing 39-year conflict.
2. Consistent and even amplified U.S. government spending has not produced, and is not producing, successful outcomes. Current political, economic, and security indicators are trending downward throughout Afghanistan.
3. Risks to the United States in the way of casualties and monetary costs outweigh any potential benefits. Though casualty levels have decreased consistently with reductions in troop levels, American servicemen and women continue to die in this indecisive war.
4. Two decades of futile efforts across the Greater Middle East show that armed nation-building does not work. The emergence of a stable, liberal democracy in Afghanistan, while theoretically desirable, is not a legitimate role for the U.S. government and vital national interest, and isn’t an achievable outcome in any event.
5. The Taliban and homegrown, Afghan Islamist insurgent and terror groups do not present an existential threat to the United States.

A brief history of a four-decade war

Historically, Afghanistan has been a decentralized region resistant to foreign invasions or occupations. The modern borders, and concept, of Afghanistan coalesced only with the 1747 foundation of the Durrani Empire. During the 19th century, Afghanistan was a tool and buffer in the “Great Game” between the British and Russian empires in Central Asia. Misplaced British fears of Russia’s southward expansion led to three disastrous Anglo-Afghan Wars between 1842 and 1919. Afghanistan was a moderately stable monarchy in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. During the early Cold War, its government successfully played the United States and its global rival the Soviet Union against one another and received development aid from both.
However, the 1970s ushered in a persistent slide toward instability. The opposing Communist and Islamist movements each grew in strength and battled for control. The Soviet Union intervened in 1979 to prop up the nascent Communist government and waged a 10-year counterinsurgency against various Islamist mujahideen fighters opposed to the secular and socialist reforms of the new government. Despite committing some 120,000 modern troops and suffering tens of thousands of casualties, the Soviets ultimately failed in the face of Islamist-nationalist resistance and U.S military aid provided to the mujahideen through the auspices of the CIA.
The Soviets withdrew in 1989 and by 1991 both the U.S and Russian governments cut off military aid to the Afghan combatants. Brutal years of civil war followed. The Soviet puppet, Najibullah, held out for three years but fell to a mujahideen coalition in 1992. Afterwards the mujahideen factions fractured and divided the country among venal warlords. In response, in 1993-94, conservative, rural, and frustrated Pashtun clerics and students formed the hyper-Islamist Taliban movement and fought the warlords with increased success, eventually seizing Kabul in 1996. From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban imposed a brutal, archaic, and intolerant regime across most of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, a “Northern Alliance” of mostly minority groups (Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazara) continued to resist in the far northern quarter of Afghanistan. During that period, the Saudi international terrorist Osama bin Laden sought and received safe haven from the Taliban regime.
After the bin Laden-perpetrated 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban regime, largely destroying or dispersing the al-Qaeda presence in the country. After deposing the Taliban, the United States and NATO made the fateful, and ultimately horrific, decision to shift the mission to nation-building. The continued foreign occupation of the country eventually buttressed the power and influence of the nearly shattered Taliban movement, which now gained strength and began contesting large sections of Afghanistan’s south and east by 2006. Increased violence and instability led to the announcement of a military “surge” by Barack Obama in 2009. By 2011, nearly 100,000 U.S. service members patrolled Afghanistan, though the Taliban was never decisively defeated. By 2014, the United States transitioned to an advisory mission of training the ANDSF and combatting transnational terror threats. Taliban influence only grew, and by 2018 the enemy contested or controlled a higher percentage of Afghan districts than at any previous time since the 2001 invasion.

A question of legitimacy

The Afghan central government in Kabul is largely unpopular and considered by many to be illegitimate. It faces regular criticism from the population and international community for its corruption, division, and inability to guarantee security. As a recent U.S. congressional report concluded, “Afghanistan’s … political outlook remains uncertain, if not negative, in light of ongoing hostilities.” Recent trends indicate that the U.S.-backed federal government is fragmenting along ethnic and ideological lines. That should come as little surprise. The last two presidential elections — in 2009 and 2014 — have been wracked by allegations of fraud, and the Parliamentary elections (scheduled for October 2016) were delayed almost indefinitely. Security is the main issue. Some 1,000 of 7,400 existing polling stations are now located in areas outside the government’s control. In the last presidential election, the United States had to broker a compromise arrangement between the two leading candidates in order to break the deadlock.
In recent years, the Uzbek Vice President (and notorious warlord) Abdul Rashid Dostum has criticized President Ghani’s government for favoring Pashtuns at the expense of minority groups. Dostum even fled the country in May 2017, in the wake of accusations of his perpetuation of political violence. That same month, representatives of several ethnic minority parties formed the Coalition for the Salvation of Afghanistan in opposition to the existing federal government. It is unclear whether the center can hold.
Meanwhile, peace and reconciliation efforts with the Taliban insurgents are ongoing, especially as increased violence has aided the growth of a nationwide peace movement. President Ghani has finally agreed to direct talks with the Taliban “without preconditions,” though the Taliban has largely rejected such initial efforts. In a sign of hope, however, the Taliban did agree to a three-day ceasefire in June 2018. The grassroots peace movement conducted a series of nationwide marches in favor of the cessation of hostilities. After 39 years of perpetual war, it appears that national public momentum increasingly favors an Afghan-brokered peace.

Moreover, in spite of U.S. boasts regarding the humanitarian advances of post-Taliban Afghanistan, human rights remain a significant issue. Simply put, Afghanistan’s conservative religious and political traditions are persistent and perpetuate the denial of educational and employment opportunities to women and girls. Furthermore, 70 percent of Afghan marriages are still forced; the practice of baad — giving away women in marriage to settle tribal disputes — remains prevalent; there is no national law against sexual harassment and women are still routinely jailed for adultery; men convicted of “honor killings” against adulterous wives, meanwhile, serve only a maximum of two years in prison; and, on several occasions, women’s rights activists have been assassinated. In fact, the number of women jailed for so-called moral crimes has increased by 50 percent since 2011.

Religious freedom is also severely restricted by the supposedly modern Afghan government. Members of small religious minority groups — such as Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and Bahá’ís — face regular discrimination. Specifically, the Afghan Supreme Court declared the Bahá’í faith to be a form of blasphemy — punishable by death under Afghan law. It is highly questionable whether such an unstable and, ultimately, intolerant government is worthy of U.S. investment and sacrifice.

Eventually, the Afghan political and military crisis will reach an end state, one that might well end in a negotiated agreement. The Taliban movement is popular in large swaths of eastern and southern Afghanistan — it always has been — and is not going anywhere. It will be a part of Afghanistan’s political and security future. Such a messy arrangement is essentially a fait accompli, regardless of the levels of U.S. efforts, deaths, or other sacrifices. In the end, this is an Afghan, not an American, problem and it must ultimately be solved by Afghan methods and compromises.

Weakness and stasis: a deteriorating security situation

For nearly two decades, one U.S. commanding general after another has assured the American public that — with just a few extra troops and a little more time — he could achieve victory in Afghanistan. That is particularly disturbing considering the attention and resources dedicated to the war in Afghanistan, especially over the last ten years. After all, early in 2018, a Pentagon spokesman stated that “Afghanistan has become CENTCOM’s main effort.” Still, despite Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford’s testimony to Congress that the battlefield situation represented “roughly a stalemate,” he and other senior generals have been far more optimistic at times — promising success if only they received more troops, more money, more … everything. In February 2017, the overall commander (the sixth of seven since 2009), Gen. John Nicholson, stated that the United States had a “shortfall of a few thousand” troops, which, if provided, would help “break the stalemate.” One year later, after getting a few thousand troops and a new strategy from Donald Trump, Nicholson stated that “we’ve set all the conditions to win.”

But results have not matched such optimistic predictions. In February 2018, former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called the situation in Afghanistan “worse than it’s ever been,” and predicted that “the American military can’t fix the problems.” More disturbing, and instructive, are the recent words of a true insider with new, creeping doubts about progress in Afghanistan — a most recent commander of the war. Speaking “from the heart” in a September 2018 farewell address in the ceremony marking his transition out of command, General Nicholson admitted that “it is time for this war in Afghanistan to end.”

Reality and ground-level metrics have confirmed Nicholson’s suspicions. The Taliban has made gains all around the country in recent years, even showing strength outside their traditional areas of support. They’ve even conducted mass operations briefly seizing major cities such as Kunduz (September 2015), Farah (May 2018, and Ghazni (August 2018. Nationwide, according to the July 2018 Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report, 44 percent of Afghan districts are either contested or controlled by the Taliban — the highest rate since 2001. What’s more, just before the Obama surge (often seen as the high tide of Taliban success) that number stood at only 30 percent of Afghan districts. When Obama initially agreed to a surge of nearly 100,000 U.S. troops on the ground, he claimed they were being sent to “reverse the Taliban’s momentum.” Clearly, in the long run that has proved unsuccessful.

Insurgent successes are largely funded by illicit narcotics, which have long filled the Taliban’s coffers. And, despite on-and-off efforts at drug (specifically opium) eradication, the metrics here are also disturbing. In November 2017, the United Nations reported that the total area used for poppy cultivation had broken a national record and was up 46 percent from 2016. Furthermore, opium production itself had increased by 87 percent. Overall, the trend of Afghan security has been downward — this, in spite of nearly seventeen years of varying levels of U.S. military commitment and sacrifice.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-05/us-army-officer-urges-swift-responsible-disengagement-afghanistan

Get us OUT of these wars, no nation building with our money, and they cannot come here!

I do not care if they helped our troops. Leave them in Afghanistan to work towards resolving their own problems...not bring them here!

We do not want them.

They need to stay and defend their own country!

Rally Against illegal immigration & Amnesty at White House Sat June 8

For National Release | June 7, 2019

Share & Discuss this event by email and on (FACEBOOK HERE) . (ALIPAC HERE) .. (TWITTER HERE) .. (GAB HERE)

(Washington, DC) Activists and guest speakers from across America will demonstrate against illegal immigration and Amnesty legislation near the White House in the southwest corner of Lafayette Square this Saturday, June 8 from 11am to 4pm.

Several major news outlets plan to attend and Couy Griffin and Leo Portugal of Cowboys for Trump plan to ride horses into DC and over the memorial bridge to arrive at the event between 11-12 noon.

Attend in DC or watch and share from home! More info at...
https://www.alipac.us/f8/rally-again...ne-8-a-373035/

US Army Officer Urges "Swift, Responsible Disengagement" From Afghanistan, Part 2



...there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan and it is long past prudent to disengage and bring all U.S. troops home, and simply accept the potential ugliness of Afghanistan...

Fri, 06/28/2019 - 00:05
3 SHARES

Authored by Danny Sjursen via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

Read Part 1 here...

Since the supposed end of the American combat mission in Afghanistan in 2014, the primary mission of U.S. military forces has been to train, support, and bolster the ANDSF (Afghan National Defense and Security Forces) in order to ensure their long-term success and ability to secure the country.

This effort is at least sixteen years old, but the outcomes have been disappointing. The negative metrics are simply overwhelming. At present, the following conditions prevail in the ANDSF:

• There are high rates of absenteeism and 35 percent of the force is not reenlisting each year.
• Widespread illiteracy remains rampant.
• Inconsistent leadership pervades and so does a “deficit of logistical capabilities.”
• Senior U.S. commanders have admitted that casualty rates within the ANDSF are “unsustainable” — numbering 5,500 fatalities in 2015, 6,700 in 2016, and estimates (the number is newly classified) of “about 10,000” in 2017. The 2018 estimates run even higher.
• Between casualties and desertions, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) estimated an overall 10 percent attrition rate for the ANDSF in 2017.
• The U.S. Congress has appropriated about $72.8 billion to this failing force since 2002, with 75 percent of the estimated annual ANDSF budget of $5 billion coming from the United States (the rest pro-vided by America’s international allies, mostly NATO).
• Credible allegations of child sexual abuse and other human rights abuses perpetrated by ANDSF personnel continue to be reported.
• The Afghan National Army (ANA) component of the ANDSF is more than 30,000 troops under its authorized size and actually down 8,000 personnel since May 2017.
• The Afghan Air Force (AAF) component of the ANDSF faces “equipment, maintenance, and logistical difficulties,” and has only 104 total rotary and fixed-wing aircraft — a completely insufficient number to provide tactical air support nationwide — and comparable to just the number of rotary aircraft in a single U.S. Army Aviation Brigade.
• The Afghan National Police (ANP) component of the ANDSF (not strictly police in the American sense of the word, but rather a well-armed paramilitary army) has even higher attrition and desertion rates. Two percent of policemen desert each month and overall attrition stands at about 25 percent annually.

The candid assessments of several U.S. military commanders and advisors are correct — none of the above metrics is sustainable. In spite of optimistic and sanitized assertions from top policymakers, the ANDSF appears on the verge of a veritable breaking point. Seventeen years of American military training, support, and mentoring have, ultimately, been unable to avoid this outcome.
U.S. and NATO troops levels and missions


U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan have fluctuated for nearly two decades, reaching a high of 100,000 in 2011 — when the author served in Kandahar Province — and standing today at about 14,500. Nevertheless, this sustained commitment and sacrifice (to the tune of 2,419 dead as of mid January 2019) has not meaningfully staunched the tide of Taliban gains. The question at hand is this: what can about 15,000 U.S. troops accomplish in 2019 that 100,000 could not achieve in 2010-11?
NATO provides limited support to the U.S. mission but the American military still contributes the vast majority of troops. While NATO leaders have publicly committed to support the mission through 2020, it is unclear what will occur if or when NATO countries lose interest or patience with the two-decade war. Furthermore, it is clear that the ANDSF is still highly reliant on the logistical support, air cover, and special-forces raids of U.S. and NATO troops. That, too, is unsustainable.
Much of the current U.S. mission — in addition to training and advising the ANDSF — is dedicated to combatting the relatively new Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan — the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). That said, ISKP is mostly limited to a few districts in the country’s east and has, according to U.S. military estimates, been attritted from 1,300 fighters in September 2016, to 700 in April 2017, with the pressure only increasing. Furthermore, ISKP is as much a branding slogan as a genuine ISIS identity and, at times, ISKP and the Taliban have clashed over territorial or political control. That presents an opportunity to divide the two groups with little effort or commitment and demonstrates the eminently containable nature of the Afghan ISKP threat.
President Trump’s instincts to withdraw from the country are commendable and he ought to follow them. His “new” compromise strategy, which defined his first two years in office, on the other hand, represented little more than a paltry synthesis of old Obama- and Bush-era thinking on the intractable problem set in Afghanistan.
Unsustainable: Economics and corruption in Afghanistan

Decades of brutal warfare have “stunted the development of domestic industries,” including the vital mining sector. Afghanistan’s GDP (according to 2015 estimates) tops out at only $62.62 billion. Foreign aid accounts for more than 95 percent of the national GDP. Furthermore, annual Afghan government revenues amount to only $2 billion, despite the country’s having a $7.3 billion annual budget (the remainder is picked up primarily by the U.S. taxpayers and other foreign partners). Afghan revenue mostly comes from taxation, but that is also tied to the security crisis, as enemy-held districts are difficult to effectively tax, even with the new computerized system. Afghanistan’s government is also stagnant. Despite initial annual GDP gains of about 7 percent per year from 2003 to 2013, growth has dropped to about 1 and 2 percent from 2014 to 2017.
The costs to the United States to maintain this unsustainable economic status quo have been immense. Congress has appropriated more than $126 billion in aid to Afghanistan’s government (62 percent for security, 38 percent for development) since 2001 — and that doesn’t count U.S. military operational expenses, which run to at least $752 billion over the last seventeen years. Furthermore, despite recent improvements, corruption runs rampant in Afghan government industries. Owing to concerns about fraud, waste, and abuse (including losing billions), the FY2008 defense authorization bill mandated the establishment of a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which has churned out one pessimistic report after another ever since.
The economic bottom line is as simple as it is stark: The Afghan GDP is largely based on foreign aid; and domestic revenue is insufficient even to fund the security sector (which runs at $5 billion annually against $2 billion of domestic revenue). That is an unsustainable formula for perpetual U.S. involvement in the conflict. Afghanistan’s government (and economic sector) has an incentive to maintain the status quo in order to ensure continued U.S. funding and thereby propping up the economy; that also fuels and feeds ongoing problems with corruption.
Come home

The prudent course for the United States is to swiftly and totally disentangle from the Afghan maelstrom and immediately bring all U.S. troops home. Afghanistan has been at war, persistently, for 39 years. In 2001, the United States entered a nation already long at war and the U.S. portion of the mission has covered only 17 of those 39 years of Afghan conflict. Afghanistan was broken when the United States arrived; it will, undoubtedly, remain at war when America departs — whether that is now or in a generation.
The United States, which has already spent nearly a trillion dollars and 2,500 lives in this land-locked backwater, should pivot instead to homeland defense from any actual existential threats to American security. Here it is vital to remember that contemporary transnational terror does not require the safe haven of the ungoverned caves and valleys of Afghanistan — even 9/11 was largely planned from Germany and within the United States itself. Finally, the opportunity costs and tradeoffs inherent in the expenditure of $1 trillion in a losing and futile war must be understood. Resources are limited.
Countering critiques

Undoubtedly, some readers will counter with certain common, if worn out, counterarguments. Each is rather easily refuted:

• If the United States leaves, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State will enjoy a “safe haven” from which to plan the “next” 9/11-style attack on the United States. At this point, the safe-haven myth belies reality. Transnational terror groups populate portions of countries from Niger to Pakistan, yet the United States has neither the capacity nor intent to indefinitely occupy them all with military forces. Indeed, Afghanistan has fewer al-Qaeda and ISIS fighters than several other countries in the Greater Middle East.
• If the withdrawal of American troops hasn’t brought stability, perhaps a greater infusion of troops and counterinsurgency saturation will bring victory. Beyond the questionable definition of what exactly would constitute victory, the United States possesses neither the resources nor the national will to militarily pacify Afghanistan. How many troops would it take? That is a difficult question, but it’s possible to estimate. In 2003, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki estimated — correctly — that it would take “several hundred thousand troops” to occupy and stabilize Iraq — far more than the Bush administration (incorrectly, as became obvious) argued were necessary. If one defines “several hundred thousand” as 500,000 troops, takes into account that Iraq is about two-thirds the size of Afghanistan, and that the Afghan terrain is far more mountainous and imposing, an estimate of 750,000 troops on the ground is not inconceivable. Considering that the entire U.S. Army numbers fewer than 500,000 soldiers, it becomes obvious that the United States lacks the necessary resources to achieve “victory.”
• Still, won’t there be chaos in the wake of American withdrawal? Yes! There will, but that is inevitable no matter when the U.S. military departs. First off, the chaos and insecurity are already worsening even with U.S. troops still on the ground. Indeed, the outcome in Afghanistan will very likely be ugly, but matters in this troubled country have long been ugly. The likely reality is that an Afghan equilibrium will eventually be reached. That may mean a new national partition along ethnic and geographic lines, with a Taliban-influenced south and a Northern Alliance-like federal government in Kabul and in the country’s north. The question is what, exactly, the U.S. military can do — short of perpetual occupation — to reverse that likely outcome?

Disentangle from Afghanistan

There is no military solution to the Afghan War. An Afghan settlement to the ongoing Afghan conflict will be ugly, but that is an inevitable, irreversible reality the United States must accept and immediately end its costly and futile, indefinite intervention.
The “melancholy fact,” according to long-time regional specialist Ahmed Rashid, “is that the American public is not much engaged with what happens in Afghanistan, either way.” That, in itself, is a persuasive argument for military disengagement. The American people may, in fact, be way ahead of Washington policymakers in realizing the futility of continued U.S. engagement. When announcing his “new” strategy in August 2017, Trump candidly admitted that his “original instinct” was to pull out of Afghanistan. He, and the American people, were correct — and he should follow those sound instincts.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...anistan-part-2

Get out, no money to rebuild, and they cannot come here as refugees, asylum, TPS, illegal aliens, or any other BS program the swamp rats have!

The Taliban Have Won In Afghanistan



"...The only people who don’t know what’s going on are the people who are paying for all of this, and that’s the American taxpayer."

​Tue, 07/09/2019 - 21:25
2 SHARES

Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

On June 26 two US special forces soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, bringing the total of US military personnel who have died in that useless war to 2429, according to iCasualties, an independent casualty tracker.
No matter what one might think about the rights and wrongs of the war in Afghanistan, it is sad to record such fatalities, and the question that comes to mind is: What did they die for?
According to the US State Department the military are there because “we continue to invest US resources to help Afghanistan improve its security, governance, institutions and economy,” and the Pentagon says “the principle goal… is to conclude the war in Afghanistan on terms favourable to Afghanistan and the United States.”



How?
Neither the current occupant of the White House nor any others aspiring to become president in 2020 have produced any workable proposals to end this disastrous conflict, and in an exchange of views on June 27 two of the Democratic contenders cast some light on the darkness of frustration and confusion. Members of Congress Tim Ryan and Tulsi Gabbard had a heated argument that involved Gabbard (who had served in Iraq) declaring that “The Taliban was there long before we came in; they’ll be there long before we leave. We cannot keep US troops deployed to Afghanistan thinking that we’re somehow going to squash this Taliban.” Even if she didn’t offer a solution, she is perfectly right — but it was the rejoinder of Congressman Ryan that was eye-opening. He said “I didn’t say squash them. When we weren’t in there, they started flying planes into our buildings.”
Gabbard was astonished, as well she might be, and replied “The Taliban didn’t attack us on 9/11; al-Qaeda did. That’s why I and so many other people joined the military — to go after al-Qaeda. Not the Taliban.”

Exactly. But Ryan’s demonstration of ignorance is disturbing to put it mildly. If a Member of Congress actually believes that the Taliban flew planes into New York buildings and the Pentagon on 9/11, then the Democratic Party has serious problems. Certainly, Mr Ryan will never be president, but the point is that his ignorance of history is reflected widely throughout America. (With one example being Trump’s observation in his Independence Day speech that there were airports in America in 1775.)
Fifteen of the 19 al-Qaeda hijackers were Saudis, two came from the United Arab Emirates and one each from Lebanon and Egypt. USA Today reported that they had “multiple links to associates of Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar, the former longtime ambassador to the United States. The documents show possible conduits of money from the Saudi royal family to Saudis living in the United States and two of the hijackers in San Diego. The documents also indicate substantial support to California mosques with a high degree of radical Islamist sentiment.” Not a Taliban in sight. In spite of the fact that the head man, the evil bin Laden, was in Afghanistan (and was later killed in Pakistan in a US special forces raid) the main 9/11 planning centre was in Hamburg.
And it was intriguing that Gabbard played the Afghanistan card, because as Jeffrey St Clair notes in Counterpunch, she “volunteered to go kill people in Iraq in 2004, a year after the massacre at Fallujah and the ‘casus belli’ of the war had been revealed to be a hoax, which is like signing up for a tour of duty in Vietnam after My Lai and the release of the Pentagon Papers.”
Neither of the presidential contenders had anything to say about the increasingly appalling human situation in Afghanistan, but we do get some indication from the New York Times which has a weekly ‘War Casualty Reportwhose record of events is sobering, although, as the NYT points out, understandably incomplete.
For the week June 28 to July 4, for example, it notes that “At least 264 pro-government forces and 58 civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the past week, the highest death toll of 2019. Attacks by the Taliban spiked around the country as American negotiators met with Taliban officials in the seventh round of peace talks in Doha.” In addition to roadside and car bombings, the Taliban mounted forty ground attacks on government forces. We’re approaching the end of Phase Two of Chairman Mao’s three phases of revolutionary war.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Mr John Sopko, reported to Congress on April 30 that, among other things, the NATO-run Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan “is no longer producing its district-level stability assessment of Afghan government and insurgent control and influence.”
The Pentagon has refused to provide such information for over a year, and Mr Sopko was reported by the Military Times on 1 May 2019 as saying “I don’t think it makes sense. The Afghan people know which districts are controlled by the Taliban. The Taliban obviously know which districts they control. Our military knows it. Everybody in Afghanistan knows it. The only people who don’t know what’s going on are the people who are paying for all of this, and that’s the American taxpayer.”
That sums it up: when the US military establishment knows that things are going downhill, they do their best to keep citizens in the dark. They refuse to admit that the situation in Afghanistan is out of control of the US and the Afghan government in Kabul, even when it is blindingly obvious that there is chaos and that, for example, as Mr Sopko points out, “As of March 11, 2019, most Afghan households faced acute food insecurity — meaning they were likely to suffer acute malnutrition or be forced to deplete assets to meet minimum needs.”
This is unlikely to cause concern in Washington, where official policy on treatment of illegal migrant children is inhumane to the point of criminality. New York magazine reported that in one prison camp in Texas 351 children had been separated from their families and “100 were under 13, and the youngest was just over 4 months… many of the kids had been held for three weeks or longer” in the most dreadful physical and mental state. So there won’t be much compassion for starving kids in Afghanistan.
Not that the Taliban are humane do-gooders. Far from it. They are barbaric and unthinkingly savage and have no regard for human rights. Their treatment of women is worse than mediaeval and their idea of governance is to install sharia law, which is a thoroughly retrogressive jurisprudence. But this is what eighteen years of war have brought to the top in that historically chaotic country.
The most significant recent indicator that the Taliban are ascendant has been their killing of these two US special forces soldiers in a classic firefight. Afghanistan isn’t supposed to be like this, because of the vast US airpower available to strike insurgents, wherever they may be. It is astonishing that the Taliban were able to attack in this fashion. No details of the firefight have been given, which is not surprising, given official policy of concealment of awkward facts, but that the engagement took place at all is a most serious sign that the Taliban have got the initiative.
The current series of negotiations might produce some sort of agreement between the US and the Taliban, but there is no representation of the Kabul government at the talks. Nobody knows whether President Ashraf Ghani will accept a US-Taliban agreement, but that is verging on the irrelevant because the Taliban only need to sit him out. They have already won in Afghanistan.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...on-afghanistan

The ENTIRE ENGAGEMENT was a #1. FRAUD since Day #1. of it!!!!! BIN LADEN and this BOGUS CIA created group Al Queda "DID'T DO 9-11"!!!!! ISRAEL MOSSAD DID 9-11 and we have all the proof in the world. The US Military has been in Afganistan RUNNING DRUGS since late 2001.

The most important thing they teach you in special ops training is:

"THERE IS NO PROBLEM KNOWN TO MAN THAT CAN'T BE SOLVED WITH THE APPROPRIATE SIZE EXPLOSIVE DEVICE."