Some of you Afghan Veterans out there are hurting, trying to make sense of what this all means. Including some of my peers, who are not immune to the feel bads coming out of this clusterfuck. So allow me to give you a different perspective, one that will perhaps sooth the pain a bit. I shoot straight, and this isn’t all sunshine and roses. There is going to be some Grim Dark up front. But it does have a silver lining, hear me out.
Was this a foolish mission to start with? Yes. The only way to decisively win in Afghanistan was full scale genocide, which we knew from about 2003 forward. We don’t have the stomach for that, and that is probably a good thing.
Nah, not so much. All’s we ever had to do—ever SHOULD have done—is hew closely to LeMay’s Maxim, a man who very much knew whereof he spoke when it came to waging war: If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.
Did we lose? Yeah, goddamn right we lost. Let’s just get that out of the way now, like ripping off a band aid. Do not get out the “ We were winning when I left” hats and slap a Ghan flag on them. Face the facts, and then act. If the goal 20 years ago was to remove the Taliban, and now the Taliban is back 100% in control without even requiring a name change, then the objective was not met.
Is it your fault? No. The failure here, while stunning, rests on the political class and the Generals. So like I said, the political class. Who, exactly, do you think lost this war? You, out slogging the mountains, and mowing down Taliban fighters with a machine gun, and surviving on fish sticks and MRE crackers at the firebase, and winning EVERY tactical level engagement for 20 years? Or the spineless General who didn’t hear a gun shot despite 9 tours, who was the architect of the grand strategy, and spent his time quite literally getting his dick sucked by his biographer in his office at Bagram instead of trying to win?
We can safely say at this point that the real goal in Afghanistan was a transfer of wealth from the tax payers to the MIC ( Military Industrial Complex) and the politicians they bought with the profits. $88 billion dollars ( for the ANA alone) is a staggering figure. For that much money, you could have paid half of Afghanistan to kill the other half. You could have paid China or India or even Pakistan to do it for you. That money was wasted, and we all knew that well over a decade ago.
Afghanistan should never have been anything except a punitive expedition. We should have left in 2004, 2006, 2007, or ten minutes after Osama Bin Laden died. Any one of those would have been a leave with honor type situation. Instead, we opted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and look like incompetent boobs to the entire planet. I should say, our Generals and Politicians opted for that. Almost like that was the goal………
The idea of spending 2.2 trillion dollars to “export our way of life” to cavemen is retarded, and anyone with an ounce of sense knows that. I often said that giving the Ghans a Jeffersonian Democracy was a fool’s errand, since we could barely keep one functioning ourselves. Post Nov 4th, 2020, we know that “barely functioning” wasn’t true either. The idea of the US Government fighting corruption is laughable in our own country. So no shit we laundered 2.2 trillion into bribes and fake projects, what did you think was going to happen?
How many Company Grade Officers were relieved of command or run up on charges over 20 years? A lot. Hundreds, if not thousands. How many Generals faced the same fate, or resigned in disgrace over their incompetence? None. Stan McCrystal resigned for saying not nice things about Obumer to a Rolling Stone reporter, but that doesn’t count. In fact, perhaps it is telling that General JSOC himself was played in such a manner. If ole Stanley is too much of a fucking idiot not to effectively give his enemy kryptonite and ask him nice not to use it, what does that say about the rest of the Officer Caste? For that matter, how many children did the CEO of Ratheyon or Boeing or Lockheed Martin lose to the meat grinder?
Yeah, it hurts. I feel you. We all lost friends. Had our brothers return home mangled and broken. Was it worth it? No. But those are sunk costs, so we might as well look at what we gained from the experience.
He goes on to list a few of those silver-lining items before laying down some 24-karat-gold, capital-t Truth:
We lost this war the minute Code Pink was taken seriously. The minute Bradly Manning and Bo Berghdale weren’t hung. The first time we charged one of our warfighters with murder or using excessive force. The first time we denied a element in contact air support. Our people, 49% of them at least, are weak and stupid. The great sifting has just begun, and it will get worse. That is the price you pay for allowing weakness to take root in your society.
All of us, I promise, will be needed once again. And soon. And not in some Bureaucrat, Blue Blood , Skull and Bones created debacle on the edge of the Empire. I mean needed as in needed like the Spartans at Thermopylae. The weakness on display right now by the Government of the United States will not go unnoticed by the world at large. We can expect now to be poked in the chest, because we have shown that we will take it.
Seems to me it ain’t really the rest of the world that we need to be concerning ourselves with now. As I keep saying, the war has been brought home to us, right to our very doorsteps. The primary threat to American liberty, American prosperity and security, and Americans themselves, no longer comes from enemies abroad. As in the classic old horror-movie line: The calls are coming from inside the house.
(Via WRSA)
6
- Entries
It’s almost like being weak invites abuse…
I wonder if there’s a lesson in that somewhere?
Is there anyone coming to save us yet?
We never achieved our goal so we were never winning there. Besides we weren’t even sure what our goals were. Kill Bin Laden? Our illustrious “intelligence” didn’t even know he wasn’t there and was hiding out right under their noses in our “ally” Pakistan’s territory.
The only actual goal we could have warranted us staying was the LeMay quote you noted. Kill enough of them. We certainly didn’t and even halfway across the word we Americans knew it. It take a Military History background from West Point to understand that.
I still argue that we had met our goals in Vietnam when Nixon boarded that helicopter after resigning. I’ll stick to that. But Afghanistan was a clusterfuck gong all the way back when we lost Bin Laden in the mountains.
“Our illustrious “intelligence” didn’t even know he wasn’t there and was hiding out right under their noses in our “ally” Pakistan’s territory.”
Not relevant to your larger point, but – I’d be willing to bet that the top of our intelligence knew exactly where the head terrorist was. They only went in to get him when the cover was getting blown.
Agreed.
But that is indistinguishable from incompetence in the end result.
True that.
There was an article from Strategy Page linked over on Glenn’s page yesterday, by Austin Bay titled “On Point: Biden’s Afghanistan Disaster Didn’t Have To Happen“
I can’t be the only person looking at that bullshit and thinking, “Why, yes, it did. It was fucking inevitable once everyone from the Supreme Court down to the State legislatures allowed the Dems to fraud the election and install Bean-Dip-above-the-eyebrows Biden as Figurehead in Chief. It abso-fucking-lutely had to happen. It was fucking inevitable.”
There was absolutely nothing else that these people could have done, because they’re not only stupid, gay, and incompetent, they don’t evenb realize just how stupid, gay, and incompetent they really are, and they won’t admit it to their dying day.
That includes people like Austin Bay who are looking at everything except for the root of the issue to explain the reality of the thing.
I don’t think Austin Bay was NeverTrump.
He was still a believer in the military.
I am not sure whether he’s pulled back from that or not. I thought he was ok though.
I didn’t say anything about Austin Bay being NeverTrump. Once again, Kenny, you’re responding to something that wasn’t typed.
I said he was at fault for examining every cause for the Afghanistan debacle except for the main one: it was inevitable once the Democrats were allowed to steal the election and install Biden. It all flows inevitably from January 6th.
OK then I misread it. Sorry.