Friday 29th of March 2024

they should be in prison....

mugsmugs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How do empires end? The answer seems to be what Mike Campbell says in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when he’s asked how he went bankrupt: “gradually, then suddenly.”

We’ve known for years that our wars overseas aren’t accomplishing their missions, that in Afghanistan we’d eventually have to settle for something less than total victory. Routing the Taliban and growing a Madisonian republic out of the desert sand long ago proved futile. Yet the images that emerged last weekend, helicopters rising portentously over Kabul while Afghans begged for mercy, have jolted the national consciousness all the same. In an instant, whatever remained of our imperial mirages blinked into harsh reality.

We thought we were a hyper-competent humanitarian empire once. No longer.

The key thing about our departure was not that we were leaving. We all knew that was coming even if the “when” was until recently a known unknown. It was that the Afghans proved so woefully incapable of defending their own country. The project of training the Afghan security forces, which spanned two decades and some $83 billion in taxpayer dollars, proved a ludicrous farce, as the army melted away before the Taliban’s onslaught. Taliban fighters were all but waved into Kabul. The head of security at the presidential palace even shook hands with the Taliban commander as he handed the place over.

The irony is pungent: We once talked about regime change like it was easy and seamless, only for the Taliban to go and make it look just that way. In fairness, even before American troops pulled out, the group was well-positioned. All the way back in 2017, it controlled or contested 40 percent of Afghanistan’s districts. It is thus a lie to say, as many hawks have, that a small contingent of U.S. boots was keeping Afghanistan safe, that the Taliban’s advance happened only in a post-American vacuum. Even prior to its regaining a foothold in Afghanistan, the group had been lurking just over the border in Pakistan, where it was protected by the regime in Islamabad. It was never really vanquished, despite our declaration of victory in 2001.

Still, the speed at which they were able to consolidate control was nothing short of astonishing. Two decades of supposed progress undone in a week. That’s how brittle the institutions we created ultimately were, moldering and cracking beneath a CNN-friendly facade of smiling burqa-less women. And while the Afghan war has been plagued from the start by disconnects between Washington and the reality on the ground, it isn’t like our policymakers didn’t know. The Afghanistan Papers, published by the Washington Post two years ago, revealed that top military and civilian leaders had long ago concluded the war was unwinnable. Yet they persisted anyway, lying the whole time, determined to keep the war machine spluttering along even as the conflict lacked any kind of telos.

Who is to blame for this mortifying failure? The Pentagon brass, for starters. And of course there’s the usual flock of war hawks: George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Lindsey Graham. But I want to focus for a moment on a figure who hasn’t received as much attention. Barack Obama back in 2008 ran on a platform of taking the fight out of Iraq and back into Afghanistan. After he was elected, he inserted about 70,000 new troops into that supposedly more sainted theater.

This was, if nothing else, sharp politics, given that Americans associate Afghanistan more than Iraq with 9/11 and the national interest. Yet it also served to perpetuate a myth: that Afghanistan was the Good War, that it was conceived justly and was therefore maybe, just maybe, more winnable. I don’t want to oversimplify here: There really are stark differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet at least from a bird’s eye view, it is striking how frustratingly similar they look. The Iraqi security forces were crushed by ISIS; the Afghan security forces were crushed by the Taliban. The government in Iraq is a kleptocracy; the government in Afghanistan is also a kleptocracy (and a narco-state to boot). The conflict in Iraq looks endless; the conflict in Afghanistan might now end but only because the Taliban won.

This symmetry should show that the problem was never the tactics or the lack of commitment; it was our idea of nation-building applied across the region. What have 20 years of meddling in Afghanistan bought us? A government ranked as the fifth most corrupt on earth, an opium market responsible for 90 percent of the world’s heroin, guards who take bribes, death squads that execute children, armed forces useless without our air power, and the return of pederasty as a custom across the military and police. And then we scratch our heads and wonder how the Taliban gained ground so quickly. The reason is that they exploited frustrations over a feckless and iniquitous Afghan state that we spent $2 trillion and nearly 6,300 American lives installing and defending.

Still, at least it wasn’t a total loss. We did bequeath to Afghanistan a brand new natural gas filling station. Estimated price tag: $5 to $10 million.

The United States invaded Afghanistan to create a democracy and a stronghold against jihadism. Instead we ended up indulging one of our worst pastimes, bureaucracy. Our occupation became larded up with officers and administrators more interested in self-preservation and spending reconstruction funds than in telling the truth. It was this bureaucratic accretion that allowed for the “gradually”; the “suddenly” came when the truth could no longer be hidden. So it’s gone with American empire. Afghanistan was once referred to by the Persians as “Bactria the beautiful, crowned with flags.” Today, it’s better known for lowering flags than flying them, from the Union Jack to the hammer and sickle to, now, Old Glory.

This is a moment that cries out for retribution. Those who perpetrated the bloody fiction of a winnable Afghanistan ought to be hauled before committees; reputations should be ruined, egos deflated. Small-r republican government demands as much, lest our civil servants become, to borrow from Winston Churchill, “no longer servants and no longer civil.” Alas, one of the consequences of empire is that you aren’t a functioning republic anymore, that by necessity enough power accumulates in the executive as to place it beyond serious accountability. I’d like to think we might learn something from these dismal 20 years, but what reason do I have to be optimistic?

 

Read  more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/at-empires-end/

 

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crazy trio...

 

The three buccaneers took leave of their senses in invading Iraq – George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard.

The former British Prime Minister earns a rare place in history's crosshairs as one of just two on the planet who might have stopped crazy man Bush – the other being Bush's hapless Secretary of State, Colin Powell. By not restraining the US president, each was an enabler in Washington's worst-ever foreign policy blunder.

And the Australian PM? Howard's was a bit part, but it was important – as the patsy from Down Under, his eagerness to sign on made it possible for Bush to dress up his miscalculated need to go after Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as an imposing "Coalition of the Willing".

 

Now the arrogance – Donald Trump would call it stupidity – of this trio, in unleashing their mind-boggling incompetence on the world, is revealed in a damning critique by the Chilcot Report, which was released in London on Wednesday.

Chilcot can write as he does, because of the exhaustive, forensic nature of his seven years' work – and I can concur because for much of the last 15 years I have seen, first-hand, the brutal impact of their ignorance and indifference, in particular, on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan; and consequentially, on populations great and small, from the Mediterranean all the way to the Hindu Kush.

Chilcot's unambiguous findings include:

  • There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein
  • A strategy of containment was preferable to military intervention
  • There was no justified certainty to London's judgments on the severity of any threat imposed by Iraq's WMD
  • Blair was warned explicitly, but chose to underestimate the consequences of the 2003 invasion
  • Planning for managing post-Saddam Iraq was inadequate

 

In all of Chilcot's 12 volumes that comprise 2.6 million words, just a few hundred words in Blair's "I will be with you, whatever…" letter to Bush are as self-incriminating as they are revealing.

Written in July 2002, the missive reveals that Blair was not as green as he was cabbage-looking. At the same time, that mawkish opening line reveals a man more smitten by power and the lure of a yes-man role at Washington's table than at any European confab, where French and German opposition to the invasion might have challenged Blair's misplaced certainties.

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/world/chilcot-report-the-mindboggling-incompetence-of-bush-blair-and-howard-laid-bare-20160707-gq06hy.html

 

What happened after this report? Blair made another six million dollars on the blab circuit, George W Bush painted dogs and portraits with as much skill as two left-handed Hunter Biden and John Howard promised he would do it all over again should he be asked to... 

No one hanged. Naive people thought "the idiots were stupid", but the stupidity was part of the plan. Destroy, steal, don't rebuild. There was no "intelligence" failure or whatever... The mugs had started with Afghanistan looking for Bin Laden and invaded another country in the process... Now all this crap is falling back on us. I cry for all the good people who gave their heart and soul to help the Afghan people, but the military misplaced invasion was never helping... What will follow? Howard will say it was a good idea at the time, Blair will make another six million dollars on a new Christian project and Bush won't remember whatever he did unless he reads his autobiography...

 

See: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/11276

 

 

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causas omnino inanis gloriae fabricis...

 

BY Tony Smith

 

Facing the all too predictable chaos left behind by yet another unnecessary Australian military adventure, the prime minister mouthed insulting platitudes about ‘freedom’ and sought propaganda value about no member of the military dying in vain. Such remarks display historical ignorance as well as insensitivity.

 

The Coalition Government should issue an immediate apology to the families of men and women who have been the victims of this ill-advised adventure. It should express sorrow that it exploited patriotic fervour to recruit young people. It should be sorry that it committed the military to war with dubious aims. It should be embarrassed that it sent people to Afghanistan inadequately prepared mentally. It should feel ashamed that debriefing and repatriation have failed totally.

The nonsense about fighting for freedom is straight from the handbook of the US military. Who can forget notions that destroying Vietnamese villages could save them from communism, the plans to save the ‘free’ world through nuclear destruction or that it is ethical to use extremism, torture and assassinations in defence of freedom? Not to mention the secrecy, spying on allies and suppression of domestic dissent. And over it all hangs the historical lie that freedom can survive these tactics.

When committing troops to Afghanistan the then government claimed that we had to be there because that was where the Bali bombers trained. This was a spurious claim. Setting aside the possibility that this argument would have led us to commit troops to Pakistan as well, this was not a war aim. If the Bali bombers training in Afghanistan twenty years ago meant that we had to be there, then this eternal belief means we should stay forever. The notion is silly and tragic.

This argument enabled the government to claim that Australia had its own reasons for the commitment. In the context of the war on terror and the horrific invasion of Iraq by the Anglophone triumvirate of Blair, Bush and Howard, it is much more likely that the open-ended commitment to Afghanistan sought to curry favour with the great and powerful ally. Yet US troops assembled for the Iraq invasion were ignorant about who was responsible for the terror attacks on US soil. Some suggested that it was a simple case of the Iraqis having to be dealt with after they bombed New York and Washington. The toadying mindset has not changed much. US troops are stationed in the north of Australia while they prepare for the next wasteful, unjustified, destructive war which they will expect us to support and justify. One of Coalition icon Tony Abbott’s favourite pieces of hyperbole was that terrorists hated us not because of what we did but because of who we are. We then seemed determined to correct the imbalance by giving good impressions of being anti-Islamic.

Australia is good at apologies. Unfortunately what apologies demonstrate is that we were led yet again into policies which were ill advised and soon shown to be deemed wrong. Apologies have been needed for children stolen from Indigenous families, children sent out of sight out of mind into the hands of religious organisations which abused them, people wrongly accused of welfare fraud and the list goes on. How compassionate we can be in retrospect. What a pity we cannot have the foresight to understand the harm we cause and to prevent it happening.

The prime minister’s remarks about ‘freedom’ and no needless deaths could be designed to anticipate and forestall demands for an apology to veterans. No doubt, the government will rely on its usual obfuscation: ‘No comment. There is a Royal Commission under way’. Meanwhile, glib use of “freedom” will sound hollow to supporters of Julian Assange, Witness K and Bernard Collaery, the Biloela family and refugee and asylum seeker advocates. Somewhere in the future, an ethical government will issue an apology and maybe compensate all the people we have locked away in detention centres without trial. With the likely influx of refugees created by our Afghanistan adventure, we have a good opportunity to abandon our petulant attitude to those people desperate enough to risk their lives on the sea in search of freedom here.

As the billions of dollars wasted in futile military gestures and in cruel treatment of asylum seekers could have been spent on social goods, future governments may well find themselves apologising to a range of people seeking justice. How well such resources might have been devoted to ensuring that the elderly do not die waiting for home care packages or in inadequately staffed nursing homes, that the disabled can live meaningful lives, that climate change is addressed and miners retrained, that teachers and nurses are better paid and that effective campaigns are mounted to ensure women are respected in homes and workplaces.

Daily, we see instances of this government refusing to admit the consequences of its policies. By failing to take responsibility it is creating a cynical electorate which sees little reason to take an interest in public affairs. In The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9-11 America, a book for which she was heavily criticised in the USA, Susan Faludi showed how readily people are seduced by appeals to national myths. The war in Afghanistan was conceived as part of a drive to restore lost American virility. It was part of a retreat into ‘platitudes and compensatory fictions’. It is high time Australia came to its senses and faced reality. Like his claim that there has been no slavery in Australia, the prime minister’s assertion that no member of the military has died in vain is not so much wishful thinking as cynical propaganda.

 

Read more: https://johnmenadue.com/time-for-facts-on-afghanistan-not-platitudes-and-propaganda/

 

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not lost yesterday...

 

BY Ron Paul

 

 

This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away.

The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan?

The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building.

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war?

So who is to blame for the scenes from Afghanistan this weekend? There is plenty to go around.

Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood that there was no point to the US occupation. There were some efforts by some Members to end the war, but most, on a bipartisan basis, just went along to get along.

The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.

The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.

The mainstream media has uncritically repeated the propaganda of the military and political leaders about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the other pointless US interventions. Many of these outlets are owned by defense industry-connected companies. The corruption is deep.

American citizens must also share some blame. Until more Americans rise up and demand a pro-America, non-interventionist foreign policy they will continue to get fleeced by war profiteers.

Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but don’t expect it to be understood in Washington. War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide. But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the US global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future.

 

 

Read more:

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2021/august/16/kabul-has-fallen-but-dont-blame-biden/

 

Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given. 
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who’s to blame?...

 

Did anyone expect the U.S. war in Afghanistan to end cleanly? If so, you bought the lies all along and the cold water now is hitting sharp. While the actual ending is particularly harsh and clearly spliced together from old clips of Saigon 1975, those are simply details.

Who should we blame for losing Afghanistan? Why blame anyone?

Why blame Biden? He played his part as a senator and vice president keeping the war going, but his role today is just being the last guy in a long line of people to blame, a pawn in the game. That Biden is willing to be the “president who lost Afghanistan” is all the proof you need he does not intend to run again for anything. Kind of an ironic version of a young John Kerry’s take on Vietnam “how do you ask the last man to die for a mistake?” Turns out, it’s easy: call Joe.

Blame Trump for the deal? One of the saddest things about the brutal ending of the U.S.-Afghan war is we would have gotten the same deal—just leave it to the Taliban and go home—at basically any point during the last 20 years. That makes every death and every dollar a waste. Afghanistan is simply reverting, quickly, to more or less status quo ante September 11, 2001, and everything between then and now, including lost opportunities, will have been wasted.⁠

Blame the neocons? No one in Washington who supported this war was ever called out, with the possible exception of Donald Rumsfeld. Dick Cheney walks free. The generals and diplomats who ran the war have nice think tank or university jobs, if they are not still in government making equally bad decisions. No one has been legally, financially, or professionally disadvantaged by the blood on their hands. Some of the era’s senior leaders—Blinken, Rice, Power, Nuland—are now working in better jobs for Biden. I’d like to hope they have trouble sleeping at night, but I doubt it.

George Bush is a cuddly grandpa today, not the man who drove the United States into building a global prison archipelago to torture people. Barack Obama, who kept much of that system in place and added the drone killing of American citizens to his resume, remains a Democratic rock god. Neither man nor any of his significant underlings has expressed any regret or remorse.

For example, I have recently listened to Ryan Crocker, our former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, on CNN. Making myself listen to him was about as fun as sticking my tongue in a woodchipper. Same for former general David Petraeus and the usual gang of idiots. None of them, the ones who made the decisions, accept any blame. Instead, they seem settled on blaming Trump because, well, everything bad is Trump’s fault even if he came into all this in the middle of the movie.

In the end the only people punished were the whistleblowers.

No one in the who-is-to-blame community seems willing to take the story back to its beginning, at least the beginning for America’s latest round in the Graveyard of Empires (talk about missing an early clue). This is what makes “blame Trump” and “blame Biden” so absurd. America’s modern involvement in this war began in 1979 when Jimmy Carter, overreacting to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up what was already a pro-Soviet puppet government, began arming and organizing Islamic warriors.

Those anti-Soviet warriors were what we now collectively know as “the Taliban.” People who only want to see trees they can chop down so that they can purposefully miss the forest try to sideline things by claiming there never was a single entity called the Taliban, that it only emerged later, and the young Saudis who flocked to jihad to kill Russians technically weren’t funded by the U.S. (it was indirectly through Pakistan), or that the turning point was the 1991 Gulf War, etc. Quibbles and distractions.

If Carter’s baby steps to pay for Islamic warriors to fight the Red Army was playing with matches, Ronald Reagan poured gas, then jet fuel, on the fire. Under the Reagan administration the U.S. funded the warriors (called mujahideen if not freedom fighters back then), armed them, invited their ilk to the White House, helped lead them, worked with the Saudis to send in even more money, and fanned the flames of jihad to ensure a steady stream of new recruits.

When we “won” it was hailed as the beginning of the real end of the Evil Empire. The U.S. defeated the mighty Red Army by sending over some covert operators to fight alongside warriors for whom a washing machine was high technology. Pundits saw it as a new low-cost model for executing American imperial will.

We paid little attention to events as we broke up the band and cut off the warriors post-Soviet withdrawal (soon enough some bozo at the State Department declared “the end of history.” He teaches at Stanford now) until the blowback from this all nipped us in the largely unsuccessful World Trade Center bombing of 1993, followed by the very successful World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. Seems like there was still some history left to go.

How did U.S. intelligence know who the 9/11 culprits were so quickly? Several of them had been on our payroll, or received financing via proxies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or were inspired by what had happened in Afghanistan, the defeat of the infidels (again; check Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Mughal Empire, various Persian Empires, the Sikhs, the British, et al.).

If post-9/11 the U.S. had limited itself to a vengeful hissy fit in Afghanistan, ending with Bush’s 2003 declaration of “Mission Accomplished,” things would have been different. If the U.S. had used the assassination of Osama bin Laden, living “undiscovered” in the shadow of Pakistan’s military academy, as an excuse of sorts to call it a day in Afghanistan, things would have been different.

Instead, Afghanistan became a petri dish to try out the worst liberal internationalist wet dream, nation-building across the Middle East. Our best and brightest would not just bomb Afghanistan into the stone age, they would then phoenix it from the rubble as a functioning democracy. There was something for everyone: a military task to displace post-Cold War budget cuts, a pork-laden reconstruction program for contractors and diplomats, even a plan to empower Afghan women to placate the left.

Though many claim Bush pulling resources away from Afghanistan for Iraq doomed the big plans, it was never just a matter of not enough resources. Afghanistan was never a country in any modern sense to begin with, just an association of tribal entities who hated each other almost as much as they hated the West. The underpinnings of the society were a virulent strain of Islam, about as far away from any western political and social ideas as possible.

Pakistan, America’s “ally” in all this, was a principal funder and friend of the Taliban, always more focused on the perceived threat from India, seeing a failed state in Afghanistan as a buffer zone. Afghanistan is a narco-state; its only real export is heroin. Not only did this mean the U.S. wanted to build a modern economy on a base of crime, the U.S. in different periods actually encouraged or ignored the drug trade into American cities in favor of the cash flow.

The Afghan puppet government and military the U.S. formed were uniformly corrupt, and encouraged by the endless inflow of American money to get more corrupt all the time. They had no support from the people and couldn’t care less. The Afghans in general and the Afghan military in particular did not fail to hold up their end of the fighting; they never signed up for the fight in the first place. No Afghan wanted to be the last man to die in service to American foreign policy.

There was no way to win. The “turning point” was starting the war at all. Afghanistan had to fail. There was no other path for it, other than being propped up at ever-higher costs. That was American policy for two decades: prop things up and hope something might change. It was like sending more money to a Nigerian cyber-scammer hoping to recoup your original loss.

Everything significant our government, military, and mainstream media told us about Afghanistan was a lie. They filled and refilled the bag with bull hockey and Americans bought it every time expecting candy canes. Keep that in mind when you decide who to listen to next time, because of course there will be a next time. Who, by now, has not realized that? We just passively watched 20 years of Vietnam all over again, including the sad ending. So really, who’s to blame?

 

 

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi PeopleHooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

READ MORE: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whos-to-blame-for-afghanistan/

 

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tony should be in prison...

From Neil Clark— a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66    Serial warmonger Tony Blair has blasted the US decision to pull out from Afghanistan, but history tells us the real madness was invading the unconquerable country in the first place.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair –aka ‘The Blair Creature’– is not a happy bunny this Sunday, folks. He has said that the decision to withdraw western forces from Afghanistan was made “in obedience to an imbecilic slogan about ending the ‘forever wars’.”

What he calls the US’ ‘abandonment’ of Afghanistan was “tragic, dangerous and unnecessary.” 

In fact we could say the same about Tony Blair himself – and certainly the wars of choice he promoted.

Imbecilic? That’s the perfect word to describe what happened in October 2001 when Afghanistan was invaded in response, we were told, to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, even though none of the terrorists were Afghan nationals.

Had Blair read just a little bit of history, he would have pursued an exclusively diplomatic path to try and get Osama Bin Laden handed over and not have been so keen to send in the troops.

As I wrote in the Daily Express in 2009 in an article entitled ’Afghanistan: History repeats itself,’  “‘That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history,’ said Aldous Huxley. Nowhere is this more applicable than in the case of the many unsuccessful attempts by foreign powers to conquer Afghanistan.

I went on: “The mighty forces of the British Empire failed three times between 1839 and 1919. The Soviet Union, which at the time had the largest army in the world, tried in 1979: they too were defeated.

But in 2001, Blair and the then American President George W. Bush thought they would buck the trend. They could topple the Taliban (which they did) and remake Afghanistan – a deeply conservative and very religious country – in the western secular image. Afghanistan would be transformed from a ‘failed terror state’ into a ‘functioning democracy.’ What folly. What imperial arrogance.

Today, Blair is busily trying to spin the invasion of 2001 as a ‘success.’ But, while some things did improve, 'Operation Enduring Freedom' certainly didn’t bring peace to Afghanistan.

According to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan,  579 civilians were killed in aerial operations between January and September 2019. That’s more than double the amount ten years earlier. Nearly 111,000 civilians have been killed or injured in the country since 2009.

Far from bringing stability, the 2001 western military invasion, just like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was a major cause of instability.

I recall chatting to a friendly Afghan taxi driver a couple of years ago and saying to him how I’d love to visit the country to see its great natural beauty. “Don’t go,” he said. “It‘s far too dangerous. You would be targeted.” 

So much for Afghanistan being ‘safe’ post-invasion.

Whenever the US withdrew, we would have had scenes of chaos. But the Americans had to pull-out at some point otherwise its forces would have been in Afghanistan forever. That doesn’t seem to concern ‘The Blair Creature’ too much. ‘Forever wars’ aren’t a great problem to him or indeed the ‘Inside the Tent‘ political and media figures who promote them. They are, though, for the soldiers who die in them, and for their grieving families. 

 

‘But the US and British forces could have stayed in a support role,’ we’re hearing. But, as was pointed out last week, there is a word for countries whose governments only endure because of foreign military support. The word is “colony.”

Blair and his supporters are tacitly admitting that Afghanistan, billed as a ‘sovereign democratic country’, was actually a colony. I thought ‘imperialism’ was supposed to be a bad thing that we’re all supposed to be ashamed of. So why is it ok when it comes to Afghanistan?

Afghanistan is virtually impossible for foreign powers to subjugate. There’s its hostile terrain, its harsh weather, its fiercely independent people who are very brave, very tough and are highly skilled in mountain warfare. But anyone who’d read the history books would have known all this and not intervened in the first place.

Tony Blair, with his Messiah complex, thought he’d be different. He could succeed in Afghanistan where other, lesser mortals had failed. But the ‘new’ neocon empire met with exactly the same result as the old empire did. Wasn’t it ‘imbecilic’ to think it would be any different?

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/532761-tony-blair-afghanistan-withdrawal/

 

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assangeassange

forever wars criminals...

 

From Caitlin Johnstone

 

Support Caitlin Johnstone on Patreon!

 

After the US troop withdrawal established conclusively that the Afghan “government” they’d spent twenty years pretending to nation build with was essentially a work of fiction, thus proving to the world that they’ve been lying to us this entire time about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, you might expect those who helped pave the way for that disastrous occupation to be very quiet at this point in history.

But, far from being silent and slithering under a rock to wait for the sweet embrace of death, these creatures have instead been loudly and shamelessly outspoken.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former Prime Minister who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of “obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’,” bloviating about “Radical Islam,” and asking, “has the West lost its strategic will?”

 

Read Tony Blair’s article on Afghanistan and what needs to happen next.https://t.co/WLy5UcxMpU

— Tony Blair Institute August 22, 2021

 

It’s essentially a 2,750-word temper tantrum, authored by the same man who fed the British people this load of horse shit after 9/11:

The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.

 

This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

Blair promised that by helping the Bush administration usher in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism they could seize this unfortunate event to “re-order the world” in a way that would benefit all the world’s most unfortunate people. Mountains of corpses and tens of millions of refugees later it is clear to anyone with functioning gray matter that this was all a pack of lies.

And now, like any sociopath whose reputation is under threat, Blair has begun narrative managing.

 

Tony Blair is paid around £1m a year as an international advisor to an organisation called the Mubadala Development Fund in the UAE

It has been reported that Mubadala has been developing a plan to mine US$1 trillion worth of resources in Afghanistan.

Skin in the game?

— Lowkey August 22, 2021

 

Tony Blair is being paid £9m to advise the Saudi Arabian government. Yesterday the Saudis blew up a bus full of schoolchildren in Yemen. Reports suggest at least 29 children died. That works out at about £300,000 per child. Who says crime doesn't pay? https://t.co/hi4m5H79Bj

— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush August 10, 2018

 

This is also why George W Bush has released his own statement through his own institution. It’s also why Bush-era neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton are doing media tours condemning the withdrawal, and why Bill Kristol, whose neoconservative influence played a key role in the Bush administration’s military expansionism, is now promoting the arming of proxy forces against the Taliban. They’re narrative managing.

They’re narrative managing because they’ve been proven wrong, and because history will remember them as men who were proven wrong. Their claims that a massive increase in military interventionism would benefit the people of the world have been clearly and indisputably shown to have been false from top to bottom, so now they’re just men who helped murder millions of human beings.

It’s about preserving their reputations and their legacies. No no, we’re not mass murdering war criminals, we are visionaries. If we would have just remained in Afghanistan another twenty years, history would have vindicated us. If we would have just killed more people in Iraq, it would be a paradise right now. The catastrophe cannot possibly be the fault of the people directly responsible for orchestrating it. It’s got to be the fault of the officials who inherited it. It’s the fault of the ungrateful inhabitants of the nations we graciously invaded. It’s the people and their imbecilic desire to end “the forever wars”.

But of course it’s their fault. None of this needed to be this way, it was made this way by stupid people with no functioning empathy centers. They can try to re-frame and spin it however they like, but history will remember them for the monsters they are. The saner our society becomes, the more unforgiving our memory of their crimes will be.

 

Read more:

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/08/22/bush-era-war-criminals-are-louder-than-ever-because-theyve-lost-the-argument/

 

Read from top.

 

I've got a couple of dead cockroaches that are more Catholic than Tony Blair...

 

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