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.