Michael Hoh at Common Dreams writes—The Lies on Afghanistan Trump Will Now Tell: (I have added extra paragraph breaks not included in the original—MB.)
There has never been progress by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, unless you are asking the U.S. military contractors or the Afghan drug barons, of whom an extremely large share are our allies in the Afghan government, militias and security forces, there has only been suffering and destruction.
American politicians, pundits and generals will speak about "progress" made by the 70,000 American troops put into Afghanistan by President Obama beginning in 2009, along with an additional 30,000 European troops and 100,000 private contractors, however, the hard and awful true reality is that the war in Afghanistan has only escalated since 2009, never stabilizing or deescalating; the Taliban has increased in strength by tens of thousands, despite tens of thousands of casualties and prisoners; and American and Afghan casualties have continued to grow every year of the conflict, with U.S. casualties declining only when U.S. forces began to withdraw in mass numbers from parts of Afghanistan in 2011, while Afghan security forces and civilians have experienced record casualties every year since those numbers began to be kept by the UN.
Similarly, any progress in reconstructing or developing Afghanistan has been found to be near non-existent despite the more than $100 billion spent by the United States on such efforts by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR). $100 billion, by the way, is more money than was spent on the Marshall Plan when that post-WWII reconstruction plan is put into inflation adjusted dollars.
Oft-repeated claims, such as millions of Afghan school girls going to school, millions of Afghans having access to improved health care and Afghan life expectancy dramatically increasing, and the construction of an Afghan job-building economy have been exposed as nothing more than public relations lies. Often displayed as modern Potemkin Villages to visiting journalists and congressional delegations and utilized to justify continued budgets for the Pentagon and USAID, and, so, to allow for more killing, like America's reconstruction program in Iraq, the reconstruction program in Afghanistan has proven to be a failure and its supposed achievements shown to be virtually non-existent, as documented by multiple investigations by SIGAR, as well as by investigators and researchers from organizations such as the UN, EU, IMF, World Bank, etc.
I highly recommend Garrett’s post on this subject What Was Missing from Donald Trump's Speech on Afghanistan.
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“No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war.”
~Ambrose Bierce, Talk of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Bush to declare war on Iraq:
Okay, this is really funny:
Today President Bush said the situation in Iraq had deteriorated to the point where he had no choice "but to declare war on that country."
"I've just become aware that good people are dying out there. Terrorists run rampant, killing people, blowing up oil pipelines, wreaking havoc, maybe just plain reaking. They've got to be stopped."
Bush said that he had recently learned that since May 1, 2003, Iraq has become the "number one nexus of the terrorist activities in the world," and he called it "the nexus of the axis of evil," speaking from his ranch in Texas.
He said that it was a difficult decision but he had "no choice" given the state of the country at this time.
"Whoever is running that country has allowed it to turn into a hornet's nest that threatens the stability of the Middle East, and with it, the safety and security of the United States, and of the world."
Priceless.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Happy eclipse! We’ve got more on the Confederate monument phenomenon, and a fascinating turn into some real lost Southern history. Also, an update on those alt-right idiots at sea, and the first post-mortems on Bannon’s “departure.”
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