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Just in case you didn’t realize it, the lost war in Afghanistan was their fault, not ours. If we had any fault at all, as Secretary of Defense and former Iraq War commander Lloyd Austin pointed out at a Senate hearing last week, it was not fully grasping how bad our Afghan allies — in other words, the very government and military we had created there — were. “We need to consider some uncomfortable truths,” he said. “That we didn’t fully comprehend the depth of corruption and poor leadership in the senior ranks. That we didn’t grasp the damaging effect of frequent and unexplained rotations by President Ghani of his commanders.” Oh yeah, and maybe that weird president we had not so long ago had something to do with it, too, when he reached an agreement with the Taliban at Doha, Qatar, for the withdrawal of American troops. As Austin put it: “And that the Doha agreement itself had a demoralizing effect on Afghan soldiers.”

The only people who had nothing to do with disaster in that country, it seems, were the splendid generals of the U.S. military who commanded up to 100,000 American troops and monumental air power against the Taliban at the height of the war and have never wanted to give up the ghost. As we now know, until the very last moment (almost 20 years of devastating failure after it began), they were still “advising” President Biden not to withdraw our troops from that land.

Honestly, our commanders who, like Austin, often enough made literal fortunes off their war records, should be ashamed and yet, two disastrous decades later, there isn’t an apology in sight, as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“It’s A Really Dangerous Situation” – Afghanistan Faces Imminent Blackouts As Power Bills Skyrocket

October 3, 2021

“It’s A Really Dangerous Situation” – Afghanistan Faces Imminent Blackouts As Power Bills Skyrocket

While the Taliban are clearly preoccupied with the security situation inside the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as emphasized by Sunday’s bombing at a major mosque in Kabul (ironically, the former insurgents are facing an insurgency of their own led by ISIS-Khorasan, the Islamic State’s Central Asian faction), there’s an even more pressing issue currently confronting Afghanistan’s new leadership.

It’s looking increasingly likely that the Central Asian suppliers who contribute roughly half of the country’s electricity are getting ready to pull the plug, according to the guy who used to run Afghanistan’s state power authority, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat, which he quit roughly two weeks after the Taliban takeover and likely fled. He at least felt safe enough to tell WSJ that the consequences of the Taliban not making good with Afghanistan’s Central Asian power suppliers could be “really dangerous.”

“The consequences would be countrywide, but especially in Kabul. There will be blackout and it would bring Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages when it comes to power and to telecommunications,” said Mr. Noorzai, who remains in close contact with DABS’s remaining management. “This would be a really dangerous situation.”

Afghanistan lacks a national power grid, and is thus dependent on a network of suppliers in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to supply roughly half the country’s power, while Iran supplies some in the western part of the country. Domestic production inside Afghanistan mostly relies on hydroelectric power grids, which haven’t been functioning at anywhere near full capacity due to a drought.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why did the Taliban Win? Lessons From Ancient History

September 22, 2021

Why did the Taliban Win? Lessons From Ancient History

How did the Taliban manage to defeat the most powerful army in the world? One word: corruption. It is not new, it has already happened in many other cases in history. Here, I propose a comparison of the recent Taliban campaign with the case of the Numidian wars at the time of the Roman Republic. (above: these fighters are probably Tajiki, not Taliban, but that does not affect the substance of my interpretation)

During the 2nd century BC, the Roman Republic attempted to defeat the Numidians, a tribal population inhabiting a desertic area of North-Western Africa. Surely, the Numidian fighters were no match for the mighty Roman armies, yet the Numidian kings held on their own for decades. It was only in 105 BC that their last king, Jugurtha, was definitively defeated by the Romans.

The ups and downs of the Numidian wars left the Romans perplexed. How could it be that those unrefined Barbarians could keep at bay the Romans for so long? The opinion of the historian Sallustius was that the Numidians had used corruption to buy the Roman commanders. Sallustius reports that Jugurtha himself said about Rome, “Venal city! You would sell yourself if a buyer were to appear!”.

Sallustius’ interpretation is believable, even though it is not substantiated by historical data. Corruption is an unavoidable side effect of money and Rome was the most monetarized society of antiquity. The Romans had built their prosperity on the precious metal mines of Northern Spain and used their wealth to pay the large armies that they used to dominate the Mediterranean Region. But money is a double-edged weapon: it can be used to pay soldiers to fight, but also not to fight, or to fight someone they were not supposed to fight.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Afghan Correction

September 19, 2021

The Afghan Correction

Interventionistas never seem to learn these seven truths about war and ‘nation building.’

Soviet troops in the highlands near Kabul, Afghanistan, 1986. Photo by Кувакин Е. (1986); scanned and processed by Vizu (2009); размещено согласно Permissions: E. Kuvakin by personal collection, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The chaotic rout of the U.S. in Afghanistan has got the chattering classes all agape and gawking.

One of the poorest countries in the world with virtually no GDP has defeated one of the richest.

OMG

A low-energy spender humbled a high-flying petro consumer.

WTF

Bearded men with time outwaited technocrats with ticking watches.

OMG!!

Another “weak actor” with AK 47s bested “a strong actor” with drones and AI.

WTF???

And on it goes.

But America’s disastrous intervention and ignoble retreat illustrates some uncomfortable if not random truths that are left out of the chatter.

They include the perils of intervention, cycles of imperial collapse, economic theft, energy limits, the power of demographics and ecological degradation.

Here are seven truths we have been taught, yet again, in Afghanistan.

1. Interventionistas by definition do harm.

The straight-talking philosopher and risk expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb lays out the disastrous hubris of interventionista thinking in his excellent book Skin in the Game. Interventionistas, he says, not only lack practical sense, but they never learn from history. They also fail at pure reasoning and cannot imagine complex interactions let alone consequences. (Author Wendell Berry called such unaccountable people “itinerant professional vandals.”) These vandals tend to symbolize the adage that experience is making the same mistake over and over again but with greater confidence.

American interventionistas, just like their Russian and Chinese counterparts, pretend that they can replace regimes, build nations, rewire economies and terrorize civilians with bombs and all without unforeseen consequences.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

WikiLeaks Puts Afghanistan Back on Media Agenda

September 13, 2021

WikiLeaks Puts Afghanistan Back on Media Agenda

Immigration Dominates Cable News

The war in Afghanistan — a subject that has generated periodic spikes in media interest but not a high level of sustained coverage — was back atop the mainstream news agenda last week. And this time, the catalyst was neither violence on the ground nor deliberations in Washington, but the leak of about 90,000 classified war reports by a whistleblower website.

Driven by WikiLeaks’ dissemination of those documents — which highlighted the difficult challenges faced by NATO forces — Afghanistan led the news for the week of July 26-Aug. 1, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Taken together, coverage of the WikiLeaks saga and the overall war effort combined to fill 19% of the newshole.

Afghanistan coverage has generally followed a roller-coaster trajectory in the past year. It jumped to 9% of the newshole in the last quarter of 2009 when President Obama decided on his surge of 30,000 troops. It then plunged to only 3% in the first five months of 2010. In late June, coverage spiked again when Obama removed Gen. Stanley McChrystal as Afghanistan commander after Rolling Stone published negative comments by him and his staff about the administration.

The WikiLeaks story triggered a renewed debate over the wisdom of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. But it remains to be seen how long that will keep the war prominent in the headlines.

A number of other events, though, also competed for space last week. Indeed, four of the five media sectors examined in PEJ’s News Coverage Index had different lead stories. The WikiLeaks story led network news, but the economy topped the newspaper and radio sectors, the Gulf oil spill was No. 1 online and immigration was first in the cable sector.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

OMG Afghanistan Is Invading Afghanistan: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

August 24, 2021

OMG Afghanistan Is Invading Afghanistan: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

During the Trump years the media wept for the poor kids in cages and ignored all the bombs he was dropping. Now the media ignore the kids in cages and weep for the poor neglected bombs.

❖

The US empire will literally invade a country so it can spend decades using the people who live there as target practice for its expensive new military technologies and then tell you to worry about motherfucking Cuba.

❖

Sure is a crazy coincidence how government foreign policy decisions that would advance humanitarian interests always happen to align perfectly with government foreign policy decisions that would be extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers.

❖

Love how everyone suddenly started babbling about China taking America’s place in Afghanistan. Like Beijing’s been watching all the world powers smashing their heads against military interventionism in Afghanistan and thinking “Yeah that looks awesome, we should definitely try that.”

❖

Bush era war criminals are louder than ever right now because they’ve lost the argument. The Afghan “government” proved to be an illusion, proving they spent 20 years lying to us about what they’d been doing there, so now they’re trying to salvage their reputations and legacies.

❖

I can’t believe there are still highly influential people saying we need to keep raining military explosives on the Islamic world to make Muslims less extremist.

❖

Everyone’s freaking out that Afghanistan is invading Afghanistan.

❖

The Biden administration is perpetuating and advancing all of Trump’s policies better and more efficiently than Trump himself and it’s hilarious that MAGA people still oppose him just because Candace Owens told them he’s a communist.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Investors in US Weapon-Makers Only Clear Winners of Afghan War

August 22, 2021

Investors in US Weapon-Makers Only Clear Winners of Afghan War

Share prices of military manufacturers vastly outperformed the stock market overall during the Afghanistan War.

May 25, 2002: Two U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopters land at Bagram Airfield in Parwan, Afghanistan, after completing a mission. (U.S. National Archives)

As the hawks who have been lying about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan for two decades continue to peddle fantasies in the midst of a Taliban takeover and American evacuation of Kabul, progressive critics on Tuesday reminded the world who has benefited from the “endless war.”

“Entrenching U.S. forces in Afghanistan was the military-industrial complex’s business plan for 20+ years,” declared the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Public Citizen.

[Related: A People’s Guide to the War Industry, Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 and Part 4 and Part 5.]

“Hawks and defense contractors co-opted the needs of the Afghan people in order to line their own pockets,” the group added. “Never has it been more important to end war profiteering.”

In a Tuesday morning tweet, Public Citizen highlighted returns on defense stocks over the past 20 years — as calculated in a “jaw-dropping” analysis by The Intercept — and asserted that “the military-industrial complex got exactly what it wanted out of this war.”

The Intercept‘s Jon Schwarz examined returns on stocks of the five biggest defense contractors: Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics.

Schwarz found that a $10,000 investment in stock evenly split across those five companies on the day in 2001 that then-President Georg W. Bush signed the authorization preceding the U.S. invasion would be worth $97,295 this week, not adjusted for inflation, taxes, or fees.

According to The Intercept:

“This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lev Tolstoy on Afghanistan: “It Happened Because it had to Happen”

August 18, 2021

Lev Tolstoy on Afghanistan: “It Happened Because it had to Happen”

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. (Lev Tolstoy, “War and Peace”)

Excuse me if I return to the Afghanistan story. I don’t claim to be an expert in international politics, but if what happened is the result of the actions of “experts”, then it is safe to say that it is better to ignore them and look for our own explanations.

So, I proposed an interpretation of the Afghan disaster in a recent post of mine, together with a report on the story of how the oil reserves of the region of the Caspian Sea were enormously overestimated starting with the 1980s. Some people understood my views as meaning that I proposed that crude oil was the cause of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. No, I didn’t mean that. Not any more than the story of the “butterfly effect” means that a butterfly can actually cause a hurricane — of course it would make no sense.

What I am saying is a completely different concept: a butterfly (or dreams of immense oil reserves) are just triggers for events that have a certain potential to happen. Take a temperature difference between the water surface and the air and a hurricane can happen: it is a thermodynamic potential. Take a military industry that makes money on war, and a war can take place: it is a financial potential. A hurricane and a military lobby are not so different in terms of being complex adaptive systems.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Afghanistan: The Twilight of the Global Empire

July 25, 2021

Afghanistan: The Twilight of the Global Empire

Afghanistan: a ragged blot of land more or less at the center of the mass of Eurasia and Africa. Over a couple of centuries, it repelled invasions from the largest empires in modern history: Britain, the Soviet Union, and now the United States. Not for nothing, Afghanistan is called the “Graveyard of Empires.” It is possible to make an educated guess on what led the United States to invade Afghanistan in 2001 (oil, what else?), but now the time of expansion is over for the Global Empire. We are entering the twilight zone that all empires tend to reach and maintain for a short time before their final collapse.

In 117 AD, Emperor Trajan died after having expanded the Roman Empire to the largest extension it would ever have. It was a major disaster: the coffers of the state were nearly empty, the production of the mines was in decline, the army was overstretched and undermanned, unrest was brewing in some of the provinces. Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, did his best to salvage the situation. He abandoned the territories that could not be kept, quelled the internal unrest, directed the remaining resources to build fortification at the borders of the Empire. It was a successful strategy and the result was about one century of “Pax Romana.” It was the twilight of the Roman Empire, a century or so of relative peace that preceded the final descent.

Empires in history tend to follow similar paths. Not that empires are intelligent, they are nearly pure virtual holobionts and they tend to react to perturbations only by trying to maintain their internal homeostasis. In other words, they have little or no capability to plan for the future…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America Keeps Claiming Governments It Hates Are Paying Bounties On US Troops In Afghanistan

December 31, 2020

America Keeps Claiming Governments It Hates Are Paying Bounties On US Troops In Afghanistan

We’re now getting mass media reports that yet another country the US government doesn’t like has been trying to kill American troops in Afghanistan, with the accusation this time being leveled at China. This brings the total number of governments against which this exact accusation has been made to three: China, Iran, and Russia.

“The U.S. has evidence that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] attempted to finance attacks on American servicemen by Afghan non-state actors by offering financial incentives or ‘bounties’,” reads a new “scoop” from Axios, quoting anonymous officials who refused to name their sources.

“The Trump administration is declassifying as-yet uncorroborated intelligence, recently briefed to President Trump, that indicates China offered to pay non-state actors in Afghanistan to attack American soldiers, two senior administration officials tell Axios,” the evidence-free report claims.

The Axios report is already being circulated into public consciousness by mass media outlets like CNN. It is co-authored by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, whose career lately has been focused on churning out extremely aggressive narrative management about China for a liberal audience, including a ridiculous hit piece on The Grayzone and its coverage of Xinjiang which failed to list a single piece of false or inaccurate reporting by that outlet. This eagerness to help manipulate public perception of America’s number one geopolitical rival has seen Allen-Ebrahimian rewarded with plenty of attention from “sources” who provide her with endless career-amplifying “scoops”.

A few months ago, it was Iran we were being told is trying to use proxies to kill US troops in Afghanistan.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bring Them Home for Christmas

November 14, 2020

Bring Them Home for Christmas

Pablo Picasso Dans l’atelier 1954

“There is nothing in Afghanistan worth the life of a single American soldier.”
– Douglas Macgregor

I’m having a bit of a problem finding the right format for this essay. I want to highlight a whole number of quotes, but I also would like you to read the original setting they came from. Please bear with me.

CNN: “A Pentagon spokesman confirmed Wednesday that retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor “will be serving as a Senior Advisor to the Acting Secretary of Defense. Mr. MacGregor’s decades of military experience will be used to assist in the continued implementation of the President’s national security priorities.”

Also CNN: “Macgregor once advocated for the use of lethal force against unarmed migrants [..] and has made a litany of racist comments.”

I must admit even my encyclopedic brain had never heard of Macgregor, and I’m sure most of you hadn’t either, but I’m taking a liking to the man. “The use of lethal force against unarmed migrants” sounds bogus off the bat, that’s “Putin eats babies” territory, and accusing someone of “a litany of racist comments” without naming even one, doesn’t do it for me either.

And even then. The man wants to bring US troops home. Oh wait, but that’s why you accuse him of all these unsubstantiated “facts”. Gotcha. What I do know is for instance this Nov 6 2019 interview Macgregor did with Tucker Carlson, in which he sounds like a reasonable yet worried man. And while opinions may differ on how big of a threat drug cartels may be to the US, his view appears to have its merit.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Seriously, Get The Hell Out Of Afghanistan

July 3, 2020

Seriously, Get The Hell Out Of Afghanistan

With overwhelming bipartisan support, the House Armed Services Committee has added a Liz Cheney-spearheaded amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which throws severe roadblocks in the Trump administration’s proposed scale-down of US military presence in Afghanistan and Germany.

As The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald notes, both parties advancing the amendment cited in their arguments the completely unsubstantiated intelligence leak that was recently published by credulous mass media reporters alleging that Russia has paid bounties to Taliban fighters for killing the occupying forces in Afghanistan. Yet another western imperialist agenda once again facilitated by unforgivably egregious journalistic malpractice in the mass media.

Every aspect of this development is enraging.

The mass media have continued to add to their mountain of Gish gallop fallacies promoting this narrative with a new Daily Beast report citing former senior Taliban figure Mullah Manan Niazi who asserts that “The Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces—and on ISIS forces—in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.” The Beast’s own article admits that its source has severe conflicts of interest and is believed to be a CIA asset by Taliban leadership, and that Niazi provided no evidence of any kind for his claim or any further details whatsoever.

These flimsy, poorly-sourced allegations are being hammered into mainstream liberal consciousness on a daily basis now in the exact same way the discredited Russiagate psyop was, and just like with Russiagate the narrative they are being used to shape helps advance military expansionism and new cold war escalations which just so happen to fit perfectly into pre-existing geostrategic agendas of planetary domination.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The War That Time Forgot

June 27, 2020

The War That Time Forgot

Drone targeting footage, Afghanistan. Photo: USAF.

I hear it all the time. The most crucial decision of this century was the vote to go to war against Iraq. It’s meant to serve as a political line of demarcation, a sure-fire way to determine which politicians, celebrities and news personalities you can trust.

But there’s little question, to my mind at least, that the impulsive decision to invade Afghanistan was the more consequential and enduring tragedy, a political bloodletting that nearly every political leader, left and right, fell for, even putative peaceniks like Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul. This was the true moral test of our time and almost everyone failed, except Barbara Lee. She was the lone voice of conscience in the fall of 2001, a vote of dissent in a time of mass hysteria that has been vindicated time and again over the past 18 years.

Remember, the vote to go to war against Afghanistan, enacted only seven days after the 9/11 attacks, was actually a vote for an open-ended war waged against nebulous “terrorists” anywhere on the planet: Pakistan, Niger, Yemen, Somalia, Algeria. You name it. No questions asked. It was only Barbara Lee foresaw the consequences, how even a highflying critic of the rush to invade Iraq like Barack Obama could 14-years later use the hastily-written AUMF as a legal basis for launching airstrikes on ISIS forces inside Syria. Now, Donald Trump has claimed the same unilateral authority and used it to justify strikes against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and to justify the assassination of Qasem Suleimani. It’s the gift that keeps on killing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mentally Replace Everything Before “U.S. Intelligence Says” With “Blah Blah We’re Probably Lying”

June 27, 2020

Mentally Replace Everything Before “U.S. Intelligence Says” With “Blah Blah We’re Probably Lying”

“Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill Troops, U.S. Intelligence Says”, blares the latest viral headline from The New York Times. NYT’s unnamed sources allege that the GRU “secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops”, and that the Trump administration has known this for months.

To be clear, this is journalistic malpractice. Mainstream media outlets which publish anonymous intelligence claims with no proof are just publishing CIA press releases disguised as news. They’re just telling you to believe what sociopathic intelligence agencies want you to believe under the false guise of impartial and responsible reporting. This practice has become ubiquitous throughout mainstream news publications, but that doesn’t make it any less immoral.

Whenever one sees a news headline ending in “US Intelligence Says”, one should always mentally replace everything that comes before it with “Blah blah blah we’re probably lying”. In a post-Iraq invasion world, the only correct response to unproven anonymous claims about a rival government by intelligence agencies from the US or its allies is to assume that they are lying until you are provided with a mountain of independently verifiable evidence to the contrary. The US has far too extensive a record of lying about these things for any other response to ever be justified as rational, and its intelligence agencies consistently play a foundational role in those lies.

Voices outside the mainstream narrative control matrix have been calling these accusations what they are: baseless, lacking in credibility, and not reflective of anything other than fair play even if true.

“Same old story: alleged intelligence ops IMPOSSIBLE to verify, leaked to the press which reports them quoting ANONYMOUS officials,” tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Never Trust a Failing Empire

December 18, 2019

Never Trust a Failing Empire

The Washington Post, through documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, has published a long investigation into Afghanistan. Journalists have collected over 400 testimonies from American diplomats, NATO generals and other NATO personnel, that show that reports about Afghanistan were falsified to deceive the public about the real situation on the ground.

After the tampering with and falsification of the report of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), we are witnessing another event that will certainly discomfit those who have hitherto relied on the official reports of the Pentagon, the US State Department and international organizations like the OPCW for the last word.

There are very deliberate reasons for such disinformation campaigns. In the case of the OPCW, as I wrote some time back, the aim was to paint the Syrian government as the fiend and the al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked “moderate rebels” as the innocent souls, thereby likely justifying a responsibility-to-protect armed intervention by the likes of the US, the UK and France. In such circumstances, the standing and status of the reporting organization (like the OPCW) is commandeered to validate Western propaganda that is duly disseminated through the corporate-controlled mainstream media.

In this particular case, various Western capitals colluded with the OPCW to lay the groundwork for the removal of Assad and his replacement with the al-Nusra Front as well as the very same al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked armed opposition officially responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

As if the massaging of the OPCW reports were not enough in themselves to provoke international outrage, this dossier serves to give aid and comfort to jihadi groups supported by the Pentagon who are known to be responsible for the worst human-rights abuses, as seen in Syria and Iraq in the last 6 years.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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