Afghanistan

1975


2021

So, over the weekend, the "Afghan Government" collapsed like so much overcooked broccoli.

This was inevitable, and the fact that it happened sooner rather than later is a good thing.

Any extension would just mean more dead Afghans with the same result.

The speed of the collapse was striking:

The Taliban effectively sealed their control of Afghanistan on Sunday, pouring into the capital, Kabul, and meeting little resistance as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, the government collapsed, and chaos and fear gripped the city, with tens of thousands of people trying to escape.

The insurgents’ return to power, two decades after they were ousted, came despite years and hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the United States to build up the Afghan government and its defense forces. In a lightning offensive, the Taliban swallowed dozens of cities in a matter of days, leaving Kabul as the last major redoubt of government control.

The rapid collapse of the US backed regime in Kabul is not a surprise.

The cause has been lost since the US invaded, because the model, one largely created by Richard Bruce Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense under George Herbert Walker Bush:  Privatize as many military functions so that more money goes to contractors, who then buy off politicians with political donations.

According to some reports, something like 80% of the aid money went to contractors, where the money went back to the US where it went into stock buybacks.

Joe Biden pulled out quickly because he was there in 2009 when the Pentagon sandbagged Obama into the surge though lies and aggressive leaks to the press.

The reason the US military has been openly insubordinate about leaving Afghanistan, because it allows senior officers to get their combat ticket punched, and because contractors, who hire the those senior officers after they retire, made so much money there.

Given the underlying dynamics of the military, a slow withdrawal would be impossible.

Biden had no option but to rip off the band-aid quickly.

So over 20 years our generals trained/supplied the Afghan army in a way to assure they could never function on their own and the US Army could never leave. https://t.co/mGqNLEsBTg

— Jon Walker (@JonWalkerDC) August 15, 2021

The Roach Motel

The War Nerd describes the cynicism, corruption, and toxic self-regard of the US State Security Apparatus that has driven the whole Afghanistan project far better than I ever could:

The one that struck me is that in 2007, when Iraq was in crisis and Afghanistan was clearly lost, Cheney’s people made a big, expensive switch in the Personnel Department, drawing down the much cheaper and more effective US Army troops and flooding Afghanistan with much more expensive, less effective private contractors. You wouldn’t do that if you wanted to win in Afghanistan, but you would if you wanted to spend money within the Blob (specifically the Erik Prince wing) and insulate a doomed Afghan war from public criticism by keeping official US Armed Forces casualties low.

Matt Taibbi, on the other hand, takes an optimistic view of this, and believes that this is a product of delusion, and not corruption.

I'll go with the War Nerd, particularly since the it explains the profoundly self-destructive nature of our actions over the past 20 years. (See also the Tweet)

The involvement of the US government, starting with Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski in the 1970s, has been an ongoing series of crimes against the Afghan people.

One can only hope that further US meddling in the "Graveyard of Empires" will end, but it appears that the US is going to continue down the path of sanctions and seizure of assets, because the blob must be appeased.