I Hate Reruns

Donalt Trump wants to return troops to Afghanistan.

Yes, I know, it's just an airbase, but Tonkin is just a gulf. 

The United States is working to regain control of Bagram air base from the Taliban in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump said Thursday, describing it as “one of the biggest air bases in the world” and suggesting it is “an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.”

“Okay, that could be a little breaking news,” Trump said during a news conference with Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a state visit to Britain. “We’re trying to get it back because they need things from us. We want that base back.”

It was not immediately clear how far talks over the return of the base, which the U.S. military left four years ago, to American control have progressed or how they were conducted.

Such an outcome would signify a remarkable rapprochement. The United States ousted the Taliban from power after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and waged war against them for 20 years before a disastrous withdrawal in 2021 led to the collapse of the U.S.-backed government and the Taliban’s return to power. Relations between the two sides have been almost nonexistent since then amid the Taliban’s repressive rule.

The Taliban are not what one would call the most forward looking of people, but even some of them have to know the old Kissinger quote, "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."

Allowing an American presence at the airbase would allow it to be used as a launch pad for destabilizing the current regime in Kabul. 

I think that this is just Trump's dementia driven ramblings once again. 

The Blob at Its Worst

We know that the US Foreign Policy Blob has a nearly complete record of failure over the past few decades.

In no particular order, and in some cases multiple times, we have Iran,Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia, the former Yugoslavia, (by incompetence) Syria, the Ukraine (referring to the 2014 coup masterminded by Victoria "F%$# the EU" Nuland), NATO expansion, the current bellicose attitude toward China, etc.

None of these provided a meaning improvement in the well being of the people that it was being inflicted on, and non of these provided a long term benefit to the safety and well-being of the United States.

In most cases, the outcome adversely effected both the target and the United States, and some still do to this day.

It is an almost (I don't know of any counter examples off of the top of my head, but my reader(s) might find some) completely uninterrupted record of failure and misery.

The Blob is arrogant, and more importantly it is stupid.

There are different levels of stupid: (in order of increasing stupidity)

• A gazillion CIA plots to kill Castro.
• Supporting the Mujaheddin just to f%$# with Russia stupid.
• Pentagon defense procurement stupid.
• Going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line stupid. (The Princess Bride, watch it, learn it, be it)

And there is:

The senior Afghanistan Expert at the completely inaptly named US Institute of International Peace arguing for a new Opium War in Afghanistan stupid.

Yes,  William Byrd, Ph.D, the self described, "Senior Expert, Afghanistan," is arguing that Afghanistan should keep cultivating opium poppies forever, and for the continuation of the ephedra (a methamphetamine precursor) collection, because there is money to be made in opium addicts and meth heads.

Seriously, this is the f%$#ing Opium Wars all over again, where the British, and later the French, went to war with China in order to ensure that the East India Tea Company, and other white dope dealers should be given unrestricted access to the Chinese people, because there is profit in addiction.

Kind of like the Sacklers on steroids.

While it is true that opium is a significant cash crop in Afghanistan, he gives an estimate of over a billion dollars, which means that less than 1% of the total world market just for heroine goes to the Afghan people, he ignores the enormous costs of addiction, from opium, heroine, and meth.

Given the provenance of the USIP, it is little more than a beard for the US state security apparatus.

It was created by Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey as another CIA cutout, it is completely funded by the United States, and its board, "Must include the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the president of the National Defense University."

Perhaps the CIA wants to use drug money to fund a counter-Taliban insurgency, maybe they intend to spend the money on some other misbegotten plan doomed to failure, or perhaps they are protecting drug traffickers whom they find useful, as they did with cocaine in the 1980s.

In any case, what we are seeing is shot sighted, self destructive, and arrogant stupidity once again taking the helm.

I'm beginning to think that if you replaced the senior personnel at the State Department, CIA, and the Pentagon with bobble-head dolls we could get better results.

The Only Australian Prosecuted for War Crimes is a Whistleblower

Members of the Australian special forces murdered Afghan civilians, and the only person facing legal jeopardy as a result is a former military lawyer turned whistleblower, David McBride.

After the judge refused to provide the defense evidence of the war crimes, and explicitly ruled out any argument of interest in public McBride pled guilty to lesser charges.

With his options for a fair trial exhausted, Australian whistleblower David McBride on Friday asked for a new indictment to which he pled guilty on all counts.  

McBride, a former military lawyer, was charged with stealing government documents and giving them to journalists to reveal covered-up murders of unarmed civilians by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.  

His defense had rested on the court accepting his argument that his oath to the British crown gave him a duty beyond obedience to military orders to instead inform the entire nation of these crimes.

But the trial judge, Justice David Mossop, said he would instruct the jury, which was to be selected starting Monday, to disregard any public interest in the defense. “There is no aspect of duty that allows the accused to act in the public interest contrary to a lawful order,” he told the court Wednesday.

McBride’s legal team tried to appeal that decision, but its application was denied by Supreme Court Chief Justice Lucy McCallum on Thursday. Later that day Mossop ordered that agents of the Attorney General’s office could remove classified documents from the defense’s possession, which McBride’s team had intended to present to the jury.

The appropriate term here is "Kangaroo Court."

Because of those regressive rulings, McBride accepted his attorneys’ advice that, left with no viable defense, he should plead guilty.

Maybe a State Sanction of Corruption?

During the US involvement in Afghanistan, the growth of opium poppies exploded.  Now that the Taliban is in charge, something in excess of 80% of opium poppy crops have been eradicated,

This raises the obvious question, given that eradication of opium production in Afghanistan was an explicit goal of US occupying forces, why was the US eradication program so ineffective?

There are three possible explanations:

1. The US was just that incompetent in Afghanistan.
2. The US local allies were tremendously corrupt and involved in the opium trade, and the US turned a blind eyes to their activities.
3. Elements of the US occupation of Afghanistan **cough** contractors **cough** were involved in the opium trade.
   

My money is on some combination of numbers 2 and 3:

The Taliban government in Afghanistan – the nation that until recently produced 90% of the world’s heroin – has drastically reduced opium cultivation across the country. Western sources estimate an up to 99% reduction in some provinces. This raises serious questions about the seriousness of U.S. drug eradication efforts in the country over the past 20 years. And, as global heroin supplies dry up, experts tell MintPress News that they fear this could spark the growing use of fentanyl – a drug dozens of times stronger than heroin that already kills more than 100,000 Americans yearly.

It has already been called “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history.” Armed with little more than sticks, teams of counter-narcotics brigades travel the country, cutting down Afghanistan’s poppy fields.

In April of last year, the ruling Taliban government announced the prohibition of poppy farming, citing both their strong religious beliefs and the extremely harmful social costs that heroin and other opioids – derived from the sap of the poppy plant – have wrought across Afghanistan.

It has not been all bluster. New research from geospatial data company Alcis suggests that poppy production has already plummeted by around 80% since last year. Indeed, satellite imagery shows that in Helmand Province, the area that produces more than half of the crop, poppy production has dropped by a staggering 99%. Just 12 months ago, poppy fields were dominant. But Alcis estimates that there are now less than 1,000 hectares of poppy growing in Helmand.

Instead, farmers are planting wheat, helping stave off the worst of a famine that U.S. sanctions helped create. Afghanistan is still in a perilous state, however, with the United Nations warning that six million people are close to starvation.

Yeah, the threat of starvation has the authorities moving from cash crops (poppies) to staple crops like wheat.  Go figure.

The Taliban waited until 2022 to impose the long-awaited ban in order not to interfere with the growing season. Doing so would have provoked unrest among the rural population by eradicating a crop that farmers had spent months growing. Between 2020 and late 2022, the price of opium in local markets rose by as much as 700%. Yet given the Taliban’s insistence – and their efficiency at eradication – few have been tempted to plant poppies.

………

The Taliban’s successful campaign to eradicate drug production has cast a shadow of doubt over the effectiveness of American-led endeavors to achieve the same outcome. “It prompts the question, ‘What were we actually accomplishing there?!'” remarked [Former State Department Official Matthew] Hoh, underscoring:

This undermines one of the fundamental premises behind the wars: the alleged association between the Taliban and the drug trade – a concept of a narco-terror nexus. However, this notion was fallacious. The reality was that Afghanistan was responsible for a staggering 80-90% of the world’s illicit opiate supply. The primary controllers of this trade were the Afghan government and military, entities we upheld in power.”

Hoh clarified that he never personally witnessed or received any reports of direct involvement by U.S. troops or officials in narcotics trafficking. Instead, he contended that there existed a “conscious and deliberate turning away from the unfolding events” during his tenure in Afghanistan.’

Suzanna Reiss, an academic at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the author of “We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of U.S. Empire,” demonstrated an even more cynical perspective on American counter-narcotics endeavors as she conveyed to MintPress: 

The U.S. has never really been focused on reducing the drug trade in Afghanistan (or elsewhere for that matter). All the lofty rhetoric aside, the U.S. has been happy to work with drug traffickers if the move would advance certain geopolitical interests (and indeed, did so, or at least turned a knowingly blind eye, when groups like the Northern Alliance relied on drugs to fund their political movement against the regime.).”

Afghanistan’s transformation into a preeminent narco-state owes a significant debt to Washington’s actions. Poppy cultivation in the 1970s was relatively limited. However, the tide changed in 1979 with the inception of Operation Cyclone, a massive infusion of funds to Afghan Mujahideen factions aimed at exhausting the Soviet military and terminating its presence in Afghanistan. The U.S. directed billions toward the insurgents, yet their financial needs persisted. Consequently, the Mujahideen delved into the illicit drug trade. By the culmination of Operation Cyclone, Afghanistan’s opium production had soared twentyfold. Professor Alfred McCoy, acclaimed author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” shared with MintPress that approximately 75% of the planet’s illegal opium output was now sourced from Afghanistan, a substantial portion of the proceeds funneling to U.S.-backed rebel factions.

The US support drug running allies in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua, in South East Asia, in Panama, and in Haiti are well documented.

The tacit or active support of drug traffickers by elements of the US state security security apparatus has been a constant since WWII.

This has almost never ended well.

Maybe It’s Time to Fire People for Incompetence

To be fair, the reason that all four major US intelligence agencies f%$#ed up the collapse of Afghanistan might have been corruption, rather than incompetence, their agencies and the former members of their agencies, were getting not-inconsiderable remuneration as a result.

In either case, these blokes should be fired ………out of a cannon and into the sun:

Leading U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict the rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan prior to the final withdrawal of American troops and instead offered scattershot assessments of the staying power of the Afghan military and government, a review of wide-ranging summaries of classified material by The Wall Street Journal shows.

The nearly two dozen intelligence assessments from four different agencies haven’t been previously reported. The assessments charted Taliban advances from spring 2020 through this July, forecasting that the group would continue to gain ground and that the U.S.-backed government in Kabul was unlikely to survive absent U.S. support.

The analyses, however, differed over how long the Afghan government and military could hold on, the summaries show, with none foreseeing the group’s lightning sweep into the Afghan capital by Aug. 15 while U.S. forces remained on the ground.

………

Representatives of the CIA, the DIA, the State Department and the Office of Director of National Intelligence, which coordinates all U.S. intelligence agencies, declined to comment.

………

Bill Roggio, a senior fellow who follows Afghanistan at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think tank in Washington, said intelligence agencies and policy makers bear responsibility for being blindsided by the Taliban’s swift battlefield success.

Mr. Roggio said individual analysts at several agencies he was in touch with foresaw a rapid Taliban takeover, “and for whatever reason that didn’t make it to the top.”

This is why we need to fire or sideline people at the most senior levels with responsibility in this area.

It's either incompetence through groupthink, or corruption through groupthink, and the only way to fix that is to break up the whole dysfunctional group, and make sure that they don't go onto lucrative consulting gigs in the private sector.

A Term You Need to Know

When talking about Afghanistan, I have described a cycle of senior officers getting their tickets punched with combat citations, contractors making obscene profits, and then those senior officers securing comfortable sinecures with these same contractors.

It leads to a 20-year cycle of expensive failure which can be called, (here comes the term) a, "Self licking ice cream cone."

This goes a long way toward defining the US failure in Afghanistan:

There is a rapidly growing political demand for making American officials accountable for the failures of the Afghanistan War, with a focus now on the military leadership and top generals’ role in keeping forces there for 20 years despite all the signs they knew the war was unwinnable.

One indication of a new political stage for the issue is the fact that Afghanistan War veterans Republican Joe Kent, running for a House seat in Washington state, and Democrat Lucas Kunce, running for a Senate seat in Missouri, have both called for such accountability, questioning the war’s continuation despite evidence it could not be won. Kunce has said that the “right call” would have been to get out of Afghanistan in 2002 or 2003. Kent has charged that U.S. commanders in Afghanistan “have been lying for years, because they want to keep these wars going.”

This is the first time political candidates have suggested that the interests of senior military officials played a key part in prolonging the war in Afghanistan. The idea that national security institutions and their leaders pursue such parochial interests has been almost entirely ignored in past discussions, because mainstream foreign policy specialists have disapproved of it.

………

But Morton Halperin, who was a senior official at the Pentagon and on the White House National Security Council staff in four different administrations, beginning President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, documented the existence of such institutional interests as a fact of political life in his classic book “Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy,” the second edition of which was published in 2006.

Halperin identified the three kinds of interests that shape the positions taken by government institutions on national security issues: 1) budgetary resources, 2) the missions and capabilities defining their institutional identities, and 3) their internal staff morale. Using this frame can go a long way toward explaining the decisions made by the military services and the Pentagon over the last 20 years.

………

The troop withdrawal from Iraq made the continued U.S. counterinsurgency war against the Taliban the Army’s primary mission. A 2009 Pentagon plan for restructuring the military budget around a “counterinsurgency” mission to justify a 14 percent increase in military spending was based on the assumption that U.S. forces, including the Army, would be deployed around the world in “stability operations” for the foreseeable future. But that plan for increased spending had originally assumed a semi-permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq and a smaller long-term presence in Afghanistan.

………

As the U.S. troop presence in Iraq wound down, the Army’s role in Afghanistan became emblematic of its new mission and the rationale for continued high levels of budgetary support. Consequently, during and after the U.S. troop surge of 2009–2011, it proved impossible for the commander in Afghanistan to come up with accurate metrics that would show any real progress against the Taliban, as an NSC official later admitted. “The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war,” the NSC official said in a confidential interview made public by the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers in December 2019.

The use of phony metrics to sell the war was not new to cynical enlisted men in Afghanistan. They considered it one of the main features of what they called a “self-licking ice cream cone” or “SLICC”, which a popular glossary of military slang defined as any program that “appears to exist in order to justify its existence and produces irrelevant indicators of success.”

……….

The third primary institutional interest — internal institutional morale —was also well-served by the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, especially with regard to the officer corps of the Army, which dominated the U.S. military footprint. That was accomplished by rotating a large number of officers through the war for relatively brief periods, which meant that more of them could be promoted to higher ranks. This resulted in the U.S. Army having more four-star generals on active duty by 2020 than at any time since April 1945. As candidate Joe Kent put it succinctly, “Wars are good for generals. This is how they make their rank.”

………

The historical circumstances surrounding the decision to plunge ahead with war in Afghanistan and the deceptions used to support that decision, indicate that Halperin’s analysis of the three kinds of institutional interests that motivate policy can and should be used more widely for analyzing national security policy. That analytical approach can provide a more realistic understanding of what has driven other historical and contemporary national security policies — and how they can best be challenged.

This is why Joe Biden had but to pull out abruptly.  The US Army would have sabotaged any other effort, because having any conditions, or a less aggressive timetable, would have guaranteed efforts by general officers to manufacture a crisis to prevent the withdrawal.

Not a Tragic Mistake, a War Crime

Following a New York Times expose revealing that the drone strike against alleged ISIS-K militants in Kabul in fact targeted an aid worker and his family, and that all the victims were civilians, the Pentagon has admitted that they made a mistake.

This was not a mistake, it was deliberate.  Someone at very senior levels decided that they had to drone someone on the flimsiest of evidence to retaliate for the bombing at the Kabul airport.

It's kind of like kicking your cat because your boss chewed you out.

Both are immature, but only one kills children, and only one is a war crime:

The Pentagon acknowledged on Friday that the last U.S. drone strike before American troops withdrew from Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, after initially saying it had been necessary to prevent an attack on troops.

The extraordinary admission provided a horrific punctuation to the chaotic ending of the 20-year war in Afghanistan and will put President Biden and the Pentagon at the center of a growing number of investigations into how the administration and the military carried out Mr. Biden’s order to withdraw from the country.

Almost everything senior defense officials asserted in the hours, and then days, and then weeks after the Aug. 29 drone strike turned out to be false. The explosives the military claimed were loaded in the trunk of a white Toyota sedan struck by the drone’s Hellfire missile were probably water bottles, and a secondary explosion in the courtyard in a densely populated Kabul neighborhood where the attack took place was probably a propane or gas tank, officials said.

I would like to see some accountability.  Every officer who signed off on this action, and everyone who enabled this callous disregard for civilian life and the law of war, needs to be investigated, and prosecuted if the facts bear this out.

Of course, the people who should be prosecuted, General Officers and Colonels, won't be prosecuted.

At best they will find a junior officer, or a non-commissioned officer, to tie this to, and blame them, because that is how military justice (an oxymoron if there ever was one) works.

We just created another few dozen people who want to kill Americans.

Tweet of the Day

“I agree with Ann Coulter” has for more than a decade been my designated signal that I am being held at gunpoint and to immediately alert law enforcement. I shall now replace that with “Matt Gaetz can date my teenage daughter.” https://t.co/F6PIVlZz61

— David Simon (@AoDespair) August 31, 2021

Ann Coulter called Donald Trump a wuss for not standing up to the Military-Industrial complex, and compliments Biden. 

I agree with Ann Coulter too, and I cannot f%$#ing believe that  I said that, and no, I am not being held hostage. (Unless you count my cats)

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan

The last US forces have been withdrawn from Kabul, and we have credible reports that the drone strike targeting ISIS-K instead hit civilians and killed 10 civilians.

A capstone to a miserable failure.

Of Course They Are

US mercenary operation CACI, and its pet "think" tank, are noting that the Afghanistan withdrawal is bad for profits.

Of all the toxic legacies of Dick Cheney, the worst is the outsourcing of core military functions to contractors.

It creates a political dynamic, reinforced by an army of contractors, that is antithetical to the safety and security of the United States of America:

On August 12, the military contractor CACI International Inc. told its investors that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is hurting its profits. The same contractor is also funding a think tank that is concurrently arguing against the withdrawal. This case is worth examining both because it is routine, and because it highlights the venality of our ​“expert”-military contractor feedback loop, in which private companies use think tanks to rally support for wars they’ll profit from.

The contractor is notorious to those who have followed the scandal of U.S.-led torture in Iraq. CACI International was sued by three Iraqis formerly detained in Abu Ghraib prison who charge that the company’s employees are responsible for directing their torture, including sexual assault and electric shocks. (The suit was brought in 2008 and the case is still ongoing.)

In 2019, CACI International was awarded a nearly $907 million, five-year contract to provide ​“intelligence operations and analytic support” for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.

………

Despite CACI International’s clear economic interest in continuing the war, on the August 12 call, company officials were careful not to editorialize about the Biden administration’s decision. The closest they came was a cautious statement from Mengucci: ​“At least as of today we’ve watched the administration make the decision to completely exit Afghanistan by 9 – 11 and all I can say is they’re executing on that decision.”

But CACI International does not have to broadcast its positions on the war: Instead, it is funding a think tank that has been actively urging the Biden administration not to leave Afghanistan.

Our privatized military contracting system is profoundly, and completely dysfunctional.

We need to shut this down.

What do the Islamic State, John Bolton, and Henry Kissinger Have in Common?

They all want the US military to stay in Afghanistan.

Bolton and Kissinger have explicitly said so, and with the bombing at Kabul's airport which killed 60+ Afghans and 13 US troops, ISIS, or more accurately Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), has made it clear that they want more troops in Afghanistan, because they can't kill American troops in Afghanistan if they have all been reassigned to Fort Dix and Bitburg. (Also, ISKP is an implacable enemy of the Taliban)

Another thing that the Islamic State, John Bolton, and Henry Kissinger all have in common is that they are all murderous psychopaths.

Yet another thing that the Islamic State, John Bolton, and Henry Kissinger all have in common is that they don't give a sh%$ about the well being of the Afghan people.

The claim of responsibility from the Islamic State for the devastating suicide bombing at Kabul airport came as little surprise to analysts. The organisation’s affiliate in Afghanistan known as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), had been pointed to as the prime suspect immediately after the blast.

The IS official Amaq news agency said on its Telegram channel that a member called Abdul Rahman al-Logari carried out “the martyrdom operation near Kabul Airport”. The name suggests the killer of at least 12 US servicemen and more than 60 civilians was Afghan.

On Sunday, US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said there was an “acute” and “persistent” threat to the continuing evacuations from the Afghan capital from ISKP – which takes its name Khorasan from that used by a series of Muslim imperial rulers for a swath of land stretching from Iran to the western Himalayas.

………

“They achieve several things: they hit legitimate targets (from their perspective), they send a signal of still being a force to be reckoned with and they challenge the Taliban’s state project by highlighting that the group can’t secure Kabul.”

ISKP was founded just under six years ago after representatives of IS made their way to south-western Pakistan to meet disaffected Taliban commanders and other extremists who felt marginalised within the jihadist movement in the region.

Any one who is suggesting that this attack is a reason for the US to stay in Afghanistan is either a complete idiot, a member of ISKP, or makes their money from Pentagon contracts.

Don't Give During Pledge Week, Part Gazillion

Not sure John Bolton needs to be one of the first people to be interviewed on the fall of Kabul by NPR’s Morning Edition. pic.twitter.com/e7fQALSgxV

— Michael Knigge (@kniggem) August 16, 2021

NPR has been an screaming for a US reinvasion of Afghanistan this week, and aggressively interviewing pundits who support this course of action, and it is worse than journalistic malpractice, it is an obscenity.

I guess that a few hundred thousand more dead brown people doesn't matter when the hurt feelings of their sources at the Pentagon, Langley, and K-Street are considered.

Tweet of the Day

“It’s true that we weren’t making progress toward sustainable Afghan security forces, but is tends of billions of dollars a year and an open-ended military conflict really too high a price to pay to avoid personal embarrassment to me?”

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 19, 2021

I cannot believe that I am quoting Matthew Yglesias non-ironically.

Either he has matured over the past decade, (possible) the situation is so outrageous that even he gets it, (more likely) or he has had a stopped clock moment. (most likely)

The point though is correct:  The people supporting the Afghan war are overwhelmingly those who personally benefit from its continuation.

Snark of the Day

Apparently, the Afghan Military Had Something in Common With the Massachusetts State House

—Charlie Pierce

The invaluable Mr. Pierce is referring, of course, to the Beacon Hill tradition of no-show jobs.

I cut my teeth covering politics in the Massachusetts State House, which is where Captain Blood would have done business had he gone to parochial school in Dorchester. I became very familiar with the activities of politicians in the wild—their quirks, their penchant for nickel-and-dime graft, the mysterious ability of their otherwise unemployable relatives to appear on state payrolls. After three years, I was Marlin Perkins in that Wild Kingdom. Or maybe I was Jim Fowler, the guy who had to wrestle snakes while Marlin sold life insurance during the breaks.

Imagine the shock of the familiar that came over me when I was reading the Special Investigator For Afghanistan Reconstruction report from 2015 and saw this:

Despite 13 years and several billions of dollars in salary assistance to the Afghan government for the ANP, there is still no assurance that personnel and payroll data are accurate. Since 2006, U.S. government audit agencies have consistently found problems with the tracking and reporting of Afghan National Police (ANP) personnel and payroll data.

………

In January 2015 SIGAR reported that more than $300 million in annual, U.S.-funded salary payments to the Afghan National Police were based on only partially verified or reconciled data, and that there was no assurances that personnel and payroll data were accurate. SIGAR found similar deficiencies during the course of the April 2015 audit of Afghan National Army personnel and payroll data. There are continuing reports of significant gaps between the assigned force strength of the ANDSF and the actual number of personnel serving.

………

All that money going all that distance around the globe, and we end up with a no-show job scam. All that high-falutin’ rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and we find out that our war is being run as though it were a Middlesex County road crew. I admire the departed Afghan government’s dedication to the classics, however.

Yes, the US State Security Apparatus created an even more corrupt and dysfunctional version of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!) (as Charles P. Pierce would say) in Afghanistan.

The problem here is that the interventions^* the US has made, notwithstanding the assertions otherwise, have never had the slightest concern about human rights and the rule of law.

They have been exclusively about enriching politically connected actors in the United States, and advancing US geopolitical goals.  (The Great Game)

We invariably act brutally and stupidly, and we put the worst of the worst in charge, because they will kowtow to US demands, and equally invariably, we fail, and are left with a country hostile to US interests.

This is not a sustainable strategy.

^*Just since WWII, and not a complete list: Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Vietnam, and Iran, and Italy, and Korea, and Syria, and Guatemala, and Nicaragua, and Brazil, and Indonesia, and Cuba, and Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, and Guyana, and Laos, and Cambodia, and Chile, and Bolivia, and Ecuador, and Panama, and Grenada, and Libya, and Somalia, and Iraq, and Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia, and Greece, and Russia, and Australia.

Why Not a "Conditions Based" Withdrawal?

Start at about 25:00

Colonel Wortman: [takes phone from Col. Blake]  Colonel Wortman here, General Kelly's aide. Now listen carefully, this is an order. Take the General's body, put it in a Jeep, and drive it up to G sector.

Cpl. Walter Eugene 'Radar' O'Reilly: Uh, sir, there's no fighting there, just diarrhea.

Colonel Wortman: [covers phone]  I'll provide the fighting.

[on phone]

Colonel Wortman: Get on with it!

[talking to Radar again]

Colonel Wortman: Get me Kimpo Air base. I want a squadron of jets. And get me the Navy for some offshore bombardment. Major General Robert "Iron Guts" Kelly is gonna perish in a full-scale, blazing, all-out glorious, star-spangled bannered death.

The usual suspects are wondering why Joe Biden did not set some performance based metrics before pulling out of Vietnam Afghanistan.

The answer is simple:  These metrics would never be quite met, because as I noted earlier, the military industrial complex will corruptly fight tooth and nail to preserve their profits and prerogatives:

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.

What is not being said, and what should be said is that the Pentagon, and the constellation of businesses who sell to it, are relentlessly corrupt, and in the case of the uniformed military, insubordinate.

If given the chance they would lie and leak to keep kicking the can 6 months (1 Friedman Unit) down the road, as they have for the past 20 years.

As Upton Sinclair pithily noted, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

To his credit, Joe Biden understands this, he saw the Pentagon browbeat and sandbag Barack Obama in 2009, and he knows that their capability to transform diarrhea into a full blown battle is nearly limitless.

Tweet of the Day

Residents of Martha's Vineyard would love have Afghan refugees.

— Branko Milanovic (@BrankoMilan) August 18, 2021

At least, there is symmetry. 

Also, having a refugee camp next to Obama's digs would be prize.

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.

I'm Not So Sure That This Is a Bad Thing

Over at the Wall Street Journal, they are wringing their hands over the fact that thousands of Western trained and Western educated professionals are looking to flee as the Taliban gains ground.

One of the changes over the past 80 years is that in much of the non-Western world, colonial functionaries from the ruling nations have been replaced with neo-colonial functionaries trained by what used to be those colonial powers.

The West remains in charge, only the middle management changes.

To the degree that they are chased out of ANY less developed country, this is probably a good thing, because they serve their masters, not their neighbors:

Afghanistan’s professional class of men and women, part of a generation that came of age under the shield of the U.S. military, are weighing the danger of rapidly advancing Taliban forces. Many are packing their bags. 

………

Long before President Biden announced the U.S. withdrawal in April, hundreds of thousands of Afghans had fled to Europe, Australia and the U.S. Now, many of the well-educated people who prospered in the new Afghanistan and hadn’t dreamed of leaving have also concluded that staying put is no longer an option.

………

More affluent Afghans are paying thousands of dollars on the black market for visitor visas to Turkey, India, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—the few destinations that remain relatively accessible.

………

Modern Kabul bears little resemblance to the city the Taliban ruled before the U.S.-led invasion 20 years ago. The capital city has expanded to a metropolis of nearly six million people. It is dotted by shopping malls, high-rise buildings, bowling alleys and espresso bars catering to a young Afghan generation that has grown up in a relatively liberal environment fostered by the U.S. presence.

I believe that the description for this would be, "Colonial Outpost."

………

The 20-year U.S. effort in Afghanistan had many failures. It generated corruption, creating a class of tycoons who grew wealthy from U.S. military contracts. The political system is dominated by the same ethnic warlords who confronted the Taliban in the 1990s.

It created even more wealth for the US companies managing those contracts.

Colonialism, again.

Before the US started meddling in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, this country was on the road to modernity, but the US decided to support the creation of a world-wide Islamic fundamentalist network so as to destabilize the nation and draw the Soviets in.

The Afghans are still suffering from this, particularly in places other than Kabul, and the 911 attacks are a direct consequence of this as well.

The fact that the "Stooges of the American Empire" are on the short end of the stick is unfortunate, but it is better than the alternative, both for the people of Afghanistan, and the people of the United States.

Nostra Dumbass

Once again, The Onion predicts the future.

The Onion 10 years ago, and AP today

Ten. Fucking. Years. pic.twitter.com/ykEkrRXUbs

— PanickedJanet (@SIGSYS) July 6, 2021

I am pretty sure that if we broke into their offices, we would find a REMARKABLY spacious blue police call box that looked rocking it like it's 1963.

Truely this is America's Finest News Source.

Gee, Now There's a Surprise

It turns out that the evidence that Russia put bounties on American Troops was decidedly sketchy.

The technical term for this is, "low to moderate confidence."  The layman's term for this is, "Likely bullsh%$."

Color me not surprised. This allegation has been made against the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

It's bullsh%$.  It's always been bullsh%$.

When you invade someone's country, the occupied citizenry will try to kill you for free:

It was a blockbuster story about Russia’s return to the imperial “Great Game” in Afghanistan. The Kremlin had spread money around the longtime central Asian battlefield for militants to kill remaining U.S. forces. It sparked a massive outcry from Democrats and their #resistance amplifiers about the treasonous Russian puppet in the White House whose admiration for Vladimir Putin had endangered American troops.

But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.

………

“We have noted our conclusion of the review that we conducted on the bounties issue and we have conveyed through diplomatic, intelligence, and military channels strong, direct messages on this issue, but we are not specifically tying the actions we are taking today to that matter,” a senior administration official told reporters in reference to the bounty claims.

According to the officials on Thursday’s call, the reporting about the alleged “bounties” came from “detainee reporting”–raising the specter that someone told their U.S.-aligned Afghan jailers what they thought was necessary to get out of a cage. Specifically, the official cited “information and evidence of connections to criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government” as sources for the intelligence community’s assessment.

Given the rather dubious history regarding intelligence reports from tortured prisoners, I think that it's safe to call bullshit, particularly since any halfway competent intelligence agency would be using cut-outs if they were making payments.

Also, there never was a justification for the Russians to do this.

Also, with 2,312 deaths in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, if the Russians wanted to kill Americans, they would have done a better job.