Lets hope that Afghanistan proves to be the “graveyard of empires.”
“In 1979, Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts, then senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, scrutinized the Pentagon Papers for a better understanding of the secretive internal decision-making processes that had led four administrations in a row to throw themselves into a pointless war in Southeast Asia. Their conclusions were as stark as they were unpopular: American leaders had not been duped into a war. Instead, they had been caught in a web of groupthink and bureaucracy, so focused on preventing Vietnam from falling to communism that they ignored the costs and potential off-ramps of America’s devastating conflict there. “U.S. policy toward Vietnam was not a ‘mistake’ or ‘aberration,’?” Gelb wrote in a later preface to their book, “The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked.” “Rather, it flowed almost inevitably from the fundamentals of American democracy, political culture, and the typical machinations and calculations of the U.S. national security bureaucracy.”
Much has been made of the parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan, two quagmires a half-century apart that highlight the weaknesses of America’s superpower military against poor but determined insurgents. But it was not apparent to me, until reading “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” the excellent new book by The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock, the extent to which the pathologies of America’s national security state in the war in Afghanistan mirrored those of Vietnam. As Whitlock’s book highlights repeatedly, America’s foreign policy elites knew that the Afghan war was failing, that graft was endemic to the country and that nothing approximating a viable state was emerging. Yet even with the example of Vietnam in recent history, they simply could not envisage or accept any other alternative than staying the course. …
You need only look at the past few weeks to see that policymakers must have misled the public about the progress being made in Afghanistan. …
Self-delusion is a theme throughout the book; whether the problem was corruption, insider attacks or failed drug-eradication campaigns, the response of Washington’s political class was to bury the evidence and deny it. As military officials admit over and over in these interviews, “Truth was rarely welcome,” and “Bad news was often stifled.” …”
There are plenty of other countries around the world that we need to get out of as well before it is too late. There are plenty of other potential wars which ought to be avoided because the lesson of this one is also nothing but debt, death, drug abuse, cultural degeneration, creating waves of refugees and blowback from imperial hubris. The same was true of the Vietnam War. In that sense, it is like “Saigon.”
“There are plenty of other countries around the world that we need to get out of as well before it is too late”:
HAITI is one we need to get out of. Hundreds of U.S. Marines are there now, added to all the other forces – special forces, private-contractors, and allied proxy-forces – that were sent in before and after the coup to secure little Haiti for the System, and prevent it from becoming a “bad” example of real national independence. If only Haiti could become the graveyard! That’s what Haitians want. A very high IQ is NOT required to understand how the system works, as you can see here:
I remember as a little boy when thousands of Haitians came to my region for temporary resettlement. The all white communities took them in under the belief that they would go back and we were acting humanely. Almost 30 years later and they are still here having multiplied and formed their own ghettos.
There are no longer many whites anymore just Indians and Pakistanis in the former middle class neighborhoods, Haitians and Central Americans warring on the outter boundaries
Yes, if it were not for the U.S. draining Haiti dry of every ounce of its unlimited talent Haiti would have put men on Mars, built autos that the Japanese would try to copy and the Germans envy and the problem of controlled hydrogen fusion would have been solved.
Haiti is nothing but a drain on the U.S. and has always been. If magically Haiti were to move one day to a position 50 miles off the coast of Africa we would never miss it. The Empire polices Haiti to some degree only to try to mitigate the damage Haitians do especially when they bring their Voodoo and poverty to the U.S.
Russia was smart enough to know to get out after a year, the idiot American politicians wasted trillions on a war that could never be won.
Why does Dementia Joe have to justify withdrawing from Afghanistan? Peace is better than war, that is self evident except to the evil or the insane (there are many of both types).
It seems to me that those who advocate staying in Afghanistan are the ones who need to justify their position, not Dementia Joe or those who agree with him. Credit where credit is due, the guy got one right for a change.
Those advocating for more war:
1.) Exempt themselves and their families, just like Vietnam. They are not sincere, they are hypocrites, a species of lying.
2.) Believe that the life of others should be traded for trivial, insane, ideological goals such as “girls going to school”.
3.) Are absolutely indifferent to the harm the war causes to the country on both an individual and collective level.
4.) The ones pulling their hair out over this are either in the thoroughly corrupt ruling class which profits mightily from war or the ruling class’s stenographers in the press who are worthless prostitutes.
It seems to me that those who advocate staying in Afghanistan are the ones who need to justify their position.
The problem is not the withdrawal, but its execution. It exposes incompetence and hubris at the highest levels.
Remember: the USSR executed an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan.
here;s hoping for “repercussions” in Zionist-occupied Palestine, Zionist-occupied Europe, and Zionist-occupied America.
The agrarian writer Wendell Berry of Kentucky, wrote often about the effects that war had on societies. In his case, world war 2. It grew the state, changed culture, almost always to the bad. It upended morality, took men far away from thier homes and communities. And produced nowhere men who always wanted to bomb someone else’s backyard. Ben Sasse, a nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, still wanting to bomb someone’s else’s backyard, and then bring the ruin he caused back home to others backyards, but undoubtedly making sure it’s not HIS backyard. Hate all of the Republicans, with just a few exceptions. Never learn anything.
As my uncle used to say, “These people are as full of shit as a Christmas goose.” They aren’t conservatives, they sit on Fox network and mouth their crap to clueless hosts. They are big government police state types, they think they are entitled to unlimited public money to screw around in other people’s countries, and they are entitled to send some stupid kid from Podunk Indiana off to get hurt or killed. And this should go on forever.
An invasion of Afghanistan was never needed in the first place, just special forces to go after bin Laden and the other terrorists, and this was accomplished 10 or 12 years ago.
They’ve learned nothing in 20 years, just as crazy and stupid as ever, not to mention the same horseshit logic that kept the country in Vietnam for I don’t know how long.