The Aghanistan war: It was all for nothing

When I began this blog in July of 2009 [! How time flies when you're having fun! Ed.], the two countries closest to my heart (and other organs), the US of A and Canada, were heavily involved and invested in the Afghanistan "mission".

It looked like a war to me, but politicians of both blue and red stripes, on both sides of the World's Longest Undefended Border (TM), kept assuring us that it was a peacekeeping mission. Or maybe a peace-making mission. Or how about "nation-building"? I called BULLSHIT on that from Day One of WWW, as did many skeptics including Dr Ron Paul.

No-one paid attention. Many demonized Dr Paul and other anti-war thinkers and writers as "unpatriotic". The pro-war types told us that this was, after all, part of the war against terrorism. (Back then, some even dared to use the phrase "Islamic terrorism".) "If we don't fight them there, we'll have to fight them there!" "Nation-building is the best way to defeat the Taliban!" More bullshit, piled higher and deeper.

Those who opposed the war argued that the Taliban weren't out to get us, so much as to get us out of their country. It was a Muslim civil war, we said, in which we had no business meddling... no dog in that fight. Let them duke it out.

This week, the Washington Post is serializing "At War With the Truth: a secret history of the Afghanistan war", a massive report, based on hitherto secret military documents, proving that... wait for it... the whole Afghan war was a blunder from the getgo -- a colossal waste of money and lives. Putting it another way, we who opposed the war were right, after all. Lifetime pct .979.

MSN carries Monday's part of the WaPo report under the headline "Wasteful spending and half-baked ideas: U.S. officials reveal how massive rebuilding projects in Afghanistan backfired". The newly revealed government documents raise profound questions about the execution and results of the war in Afghanistan and the massive nation-building effort that surrounded it. No wonder, then, that the American government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents -- 2000 pages of interview records -- under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare. With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

Through the interviews we hear the voice of Gen. Lute and scores of others who detail the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents -- George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump -- and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan. Here's a sample.

In 2015, US Army Gen. Douglas Lute, who served as the White House's Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers, "We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan -- we didn't know what we were doing. What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.... If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction...." He blamed the deaths of 2400 American military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.

Since 2001, more than 775,000 US troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Besides the 2300 (that's the Dept of Defense number) who died in that shithole, 20,589 were wounded in action.

The number of Canadians who went to Afghanistan and didn't return was much smaller -- 158 soldiers and seven civilians died -- but proportionately greater than US casualties. 40,000 members of the Canadian Armed Forces served in Afghanistan. 158 soldiers and seven civilians were killed. Walt ran a body count, in those first years of WWW, each time asking the question "Why did they die?"

Another 2000 Canucks were wounded in a "peace-keeping/nation-building mission" (read" war) which began under a Liberal government and was then enthusiastically embraced by a Conservative government. In 2006 and 2008, Conservative and Liberal Members of Parliament voted together to extend the "mission", at a projected cost of as much as C$18 billion. The Canadians finally realized the war was unwinnable, and bailed out (of military involvement, at least) in 2014. The Americans are still there.

The conclusions of the Post's report -- that the war lacked clear direction and purpose, that the American government misled the public about the war's progress, that the effort to establish a new government in Afghanistan was misguided and quickly corrupted, that billions of dollars in aid and development money were mishandled -- should trouble not just Americans, but citizens and taxpayers of every country meddling in the Muslim civil war. Can our politicians please just cut the BS, bring the trooops and "foreign aid" personnel home, and leave the Islamists to make of their countries what they will. Please!!!