The End Of An Error

The Taliban has overran Afghanistan, and on Sunday entered Kabul. For all practical concerns, the 20-year war is over.

Frantic Afghans were caught off-guard and have been swarming the Kabul airport trying to catch any flight out to avoid Taliban rule. Such is the plight of collaborators and quislings. It happens everywhere when the occupier they served tucks tail and leaves.

The US skedaddle from Afghanistan is even worse than the US evacuation from Vietnam in 1975.

This was the most serious failure of US military power and prestige in the 21^st century. US vassals have been left speechless.

But will the correct lessons from this be learned?

The US public will not accept that it was duped, that the US military failed, and that the US was wrong. They will undoubtedly make up-or the US regime will make up-new lies and a never ending stream of self-soothing propaganda talking points to create the illusion that the Afghan war was all good, right, and honorable, just like with Vietnam.

They will also create convenient scapegoats to blame it all on-anti-war activists, some liberal politician, those who doubted the success of this war and were proven right, Russia, China, Iran-anyone but themselves. To scapegoat, accuse, and project their sins, crimes, and failures onto others is an American hobby.

After the dust from this failure settles, new myths and flowery rationalizations will be created to make an ugly and unnecessary war popular and somehow worth fighting, just so the US public won't have their tender egos bruised and look like complete, naive fools.

The US regime has also been in desperate damage control mode, and has gone on to contradict itself about what the mission in Afghanistan was.

They are saying that the US didn’t go into Afghanistan to do nation-building, and yet they were saying the opposite for years, and even their actions prove it.

US Secretary of State Blinkie, whether out of sheer ignorance, embarrassment, or exhaustion, recently stated at a news conference that the US accomplished its mission because it destroyed Al Qaeda and killed Bin Laden, and all those who carried out the attacks of 9/11.

Well, if that’s so, then what is the Taliban doing in charge of Afghanistan again? So either the Taliban wasn’t responsible for 9/11 (as the US has contended since 2001), or the US failed in its mission. Which one is it, Blinkie?

Also, why did the US stay in Afghanistan this long after supposedly accomplishing its stated goals?

These US regime-peddled arguments are dishonest and lack logic.

The truth is that the US lost this war on the first day!

Blinkie also said that the Afghan army is to blame for the Taliban’s takeover; as if the Taliban are some foreign force that fell out of the sky or came from nowhere.

The Taliban ARE Afghans. And none of them are going to accept some foreigner dictating terms on their territory about how they should live, what they should do, and how. The Afghan government security forces have familial connections to Taliban members, and they didn’t want to fight people they knew.

The main reason why the deal between the Taliban and the US supported regime in Kabul fell through was because the US tried to co-opt and trick the Taliban into being junior partners without any real power in a US-controlled Afghan government where pro-US quislings had all the authority, and where the Taliban were supposed to be just for-show.

There was no way that the Taliban would’ve ever gone for this. This insult is why the Taliban finally lost patience and rolled over everyone, agreement or not.

Whatever people think about the Talibs, they at the very least have dignity.

There was never any doubt that the US would lose in Afghanistan. All one had to do was look at history. But that's what being a willfully ignorant country gets you.

And the failure of the US in Afghanistan is a wake-up call to all US and NATO vassals.

They can be assured that if the US is unable to achieve its aims in a conflict, it will eventually desert their allies to fend for themselves.

And who will they turn to then? Who will be their saviour? The only country realistically left is China, but it is highly doubtful whether it will want to play the role of nursery keeper for a bunch of whiny and needy vassal states.

US interventions and wars can either end just like Afghanistan has, or with nuclear annihilation. There is no option of a permanent victory for the US in today’s world. NATO is no longer viable, either.

Finally withdrawing from Afghanistan was the proper thing to do. The US does deserve all the embarrassment and humiliation connected with this. The US made the decisions that it made, and continued to do things it shouldn’t have done.

And all those generals and politicians who insisted on continuing the Afghan debacle and advocated for more time, more troops, more money, and more weaponry have disgraced themselves. All of them need to be relieved of any promotions and medals they received for anything to do with Afghanistan.

The politicians that supported this need to be voted out in the next election.

A lot of western news commentators and politicians have been asking, and worrying about what will the Taliban do now that they are back in power?

The chief concern for the world should not be what the Taliban will do, but what the US will do. The US, reeling from this debacle, could do something truly stupid and dangerous to try to offset its failure and embarrassment. We've seen it before with US forays in Lebanon and Granada. It is a tense time.

All those Afghans trying to leave Afghanistan, crying, and protesting the US withdrawal are fools. They should know better. And they should look at the crimes the US committed in Afghanistan and elsewhere to know that the US isn’t a good guy in any of this.

No amount of pity and emotional dribble can ever change this fact. And for all those talking about a clean, responsible exit are simply fooling themselves. There is, and never was such an option, regardless of who the president was.

This pity party is also meant to gloss over the horrible war crimes the US and its allies committed in Afghanistan, and this cannot be allowed to happen. What the US did cannot ever be forgotten, or swept under the rug; no matter how many people they evacuate.

And these pathetic appeals for Afghan womens' rights are the worst of all. Suddenly, the US and its vassals are so concerned about womens' rights. But the fact is that for the vast majority of women in Afghanistan, life didn't change for the better in the last 20 years. A handful of women in bigger cities whose lives may have become better don't represent the majority; and constitute an exception, not the rule in Afghanistan. 

Besides, where is the western concern for Saudi women, or for the women trapped in Syria's Idlib which remains under the control of Islamist militias? The situation for people living in these two places are just as bad, if not worse than in Afghanistan.

The Taliban was sure to take over regardless of what happened, and how it ended 

So it’s no use analyzing any of this.

Occupations are risky and expensive. Eventually, the native population will create conditions for the occupied that are so unbearable, that a breaking point will be reached. At the end, the occupiers always will throw more money and soldiers and bombs at the situation, but that is just a prelude to their defeat. This has happened everywhere where an occupier squatted.

The US had to withdraw from Afghanistan, and the sooner the better.

It is thankfully over.

Much Ado About Afghanistan

The US regimes’ Afghan misadventure has finally ended, after twenty years of accomplishing nothing.

The Taliban has been on a land-capturing spree for weeks, and poised to retake major cities soon.

But this is no surprise. Afghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires for a reason.

Many have tried to subdue these people, and failed. Greeks, Persians, British, Russians, and now the US.

All the promises about helping Afghan people have been exposed as empty. All the propaganda about how the US was going to ‘remake’ Afghanistan into some sort of a democracy has collapsed on itself. Perhaps because it was never about democracy, but natural resource exploitation.

By 2009 at the latest, it was evident that whatever the US was planning wasn’t going to work.

The Afghans have no interest in US-style democracy or other nonsense. They have their millenia-old traditions and mentality, and the western way simply doesn’t appeal to them. The US refused to understand this, and so now it has to leave with a tail tucked between its shaky legs.

The entire effort was a waste of everything.

Look at how many peoples' lives were ruined by this useless invasion. How many were needlessly killed? How many committed suicide? How many are in jail because they made horrible judgment calls? How many relationships ended badly? How many spouses and kids were abused and subjected to psychological torment by the returning soldiers with untreated PTSD? How many turned to drug addiction, which started in Afghanistan?

The fact is that during Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, poppy and heroin production was virtually eradicated. After the US invasion, it picked back up and reached records. Why was this allowed? Notice how the opioid epidemic in the US skyrocketed after the US went into Afghanistan.

Some ask if the US learned anything from this failure, and if they will do this again somewhere else. They will do it again because there are still too many countries that aid, abet and benefit from US criminal behavior. Until those countries stop doing so, the US will continue to terrorize and kill many more people for no reason.

Faced with this debacle and embarrassment, the US has turned to projection and petty provocations against Russia and China and others to distract people from its failures.

Even the Olympics weren’t spared by the bitter and vindictive US losers; where certain sore-loser US athletes and whiny US pseudo-journalists went on to disparage and insult Russian and Chinese victories as being the result of cheating by doping in the case of Russia, and a work of government-enslaved automatons trained to win competitions at all costs in the case of China.

All these things are a sign of a nation that is losing confidence and control. Faced with failures, the US will blame and insult others, and cause problems for those it sees as undermining its hegemony. This behavior will continue the more the US slips from its perch. 

And now, how will the US military establishment reconcile itself to the Afghan loss? How will it explain the tremendous waste and sacrifice, only to fail after twenty years of fighting and effort? How will the US political establishment attempt to make all this worthwhile? What propaganda will it spin to justify this failure? Every officer in the US army should be ticked off that they were sent on a fool's errand-a mission impossible-and they all should be resigning their commissions at the earliest opportunity.

The US went into Afghanistan to show Russia that it could succeed where the Soviets failed. It was supposed to be a place where the US could showcase its superiority. But the only thing the US out-did the Soviet Union with was an extra decade of failure.