Former President Trump, President Biden and their partisans are rushing to blame each other for the debacle unfolding now in Afghanistan. The “National Unity Government” and its military and police forces have completely evaporated in the face of the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the entire country in the last few weeks. This culminated in President Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing the capital of Kabul on Sunday as the Taliban walked right in and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar seemed to have assumed power.

But Trump and Biden shouldn’t blame one another. It was George W. Bush who refused to negotiate al Qaeda’s extradition. Bush then let Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri escape to Pakistan while he chose instead to focus on regime change in Kabul and later Baghdad. It was Bush who decided on the strategy of building and training up an Afghan National Army to secure the new regime in power and take the fight to its rivals. American officers, with no one to fight, found and made enemies where there were none before. By 2004, the Taliban, whose surrender Bush had refused to accept, returned to insurgency against the occupation. Of course, the more the U.S. built up a new government and army, the more the people hated and resisted it. As they say about their enemies, the Americans only understand one thing, force, and when confronted with this resistance they only escalated again and again, killing more innocents and combatants alike, and driving even more people into the insurgency.

The CIA, military and their proxies tortured people by the thousands for years.

They routinely slaughtered civilians and wrote it off as “collateral damage.”

They essentially built a government and army of the northern Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara tribes against the plurality population of the country, the Pashtuns. Where Pashtuns did have power in the government, it in no way enhanced the representation of the people. It just meant the people had to deal with the same old corrupt drug dealer, child rapist, murderer warlords, like Pacha Khan Zardari (“PKZ”), President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother Wali Karzai, and Abdul Razik, only now empowered by the corrupt central government in Kabul and U.S. military and intelligence forces. This was never a sustainable project. Even the Great American Fraud, Gen. David Petraeus, admitted that the Taliban’s process for civil and criminal disputes among the people was far preferable to the local population compared to the corrupt court and police systems the Americans had set up to replace them.

Early in the occupation, Bush spurned repeated offers of surrender from former CIA favorite Jalaluddin Haqqani and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar, only to send American GIs off to get blown up by their men for years afterwards.

Our allies the Pakistanis, with Saudi money, have backed the Afghan Taliban since at least 2005, giving them safe-haven and helping to pay their way. This has been to further Pakistan’s goal of limiting Indian influence in Afghanistan. The Americans’ solution? Ask the Indians to intervene even more in support of anti-Taliban efforts there. This of course has only motivated increased Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban in turn.

When Obama ran for president in 2007 and 2008, he called Afghanistan the “right” war in contrast to the massive error of Iraq War II. But he really only promised a small escalation of a couple brigades. The military, however, had other plans. His Bush-holdover secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and Central Command Chief, Gen. Petraeus, demanded that Obama send the general in charge of the Afghan war, Gen. David McKiernan home and replace him with the supposed strategic genius and push-up and jogging super-hero Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The trio then spent the better part of 2009 teaming up with hawkish senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the think tanks, especially the Democrats’ new Center for a New American Security, and the news media to pressure Obama into sending a total of 70,000 reinforcements in a so-called “surge.” The added troops were to implement Petraeus and marine General James Mattis’s rewritten counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) which they sold as a magic potion that would guarantee “success” at winning over the hearts and minds of the good people of the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

Though Vice President Joe Biden urged Obama to go with a much smaller escalation and a narrowing of the strategy to counterterrorism, that is, hunting down the last mythical Arab terrorists still hiding in Afghanistan, while abandoning the fight against the Taliban, Obama gave in to the generals and tripled forces there. Not that Biden resigned over it or anything.

Gen. Petraeus swore he would have the Taliban bleeding from the nose and ready to sign whatever he demanded of them by July 2011. That never happened. McChrystal abandoned COIN after its very first test case in the town of Marjah in the Helmand Province. After the heroic independent journalist Michael Hastings’ journalism got McChrystal removed, Obama insisted that the man himself, Gen. Supposed Bigshot, David Petraeus take command of the war himself. They would lose the war together. And they did. But not before getting more than another thousand Americans killed, tens of thousands of Afghans with them, and sending over all those trucks, rifles and helicopters to the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces that the Taliban have seized in the last few weeks.

As predicted, Obama’s Afghan “surge” only drove more people into supporting and joining the insurgency. McChrystal’s “insurgent math” explained why: for everyone they killed, they were recruiting 10 more into the ranks of the enemy.

By the time Petraeus got there, he’d forgotten all about his own counterinsurgency doctrine and simply escalated special operations night raids and air strikes instead. As the great Gareth Porter proved, they were mostly killing and imprisoning innocent people. The Drone Papers leaked by Daniel Hale further confirmed Porter’s reporting.

The Taliban figured out very quickly that if the U.S. strategy was centered on training up the Afghan National Army, they could thwart that by sending in sleeper agents to commit “insider” or “green on blue” attacks against their American trainers. That was it. The game was over. The distance created between the U.S. soldiers and the local charges by these attacks amounted to the ultimate sabotage of their plans to create an effective force—if that were ever possible.

The ANA was mostly a bunch of “ghost soldiers,” who existed only on paper for the financial gain of the officers in charge. The actual men who showed up were mostly looking for a pair of boots, a rifle and a decent meal. At no time did the largely Tajik and Uzbek army have the Taliban’s sense of morale in fighting for their country. They were fighting at the behest of a foreign power to try to subjugate the population of part of their country, not really in self-defense at all.

Former marine captain-turned State Department official Matthew Hoh broke ranks to blow the whistle and try to stop Obama’s “surge” in the summer of 2009. Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis did much the same in 2012 to tell the people that Gen. Petraeus and the rest of the military were lying and that the “surge” was a counter-productive disaster. Not enough listened to these honest men.

Obama had tried to overthrow the corrupt Hamid Karzai in 2009, but Karzai was able to stuff enough ballot boxes to remain in power for another term. In the farcical election of 2014, Ashraf Ghani and his major competitor Abdullah Abdullah fought it out for weeks until Secretary of State John Kerry came to town to force them to concede to a completely ad-hoc and unconstitutional “co-presidency” instead. The same spectacle took place last year with both refusing to concede and even holding competing, simultaneous swearing in ceremonies.

Obama pretended to end the war in 2014, but he actually did no such thing. He left office with about 8,000 troops still there, mostly fighting Afghan ISIS, so-called ISIS-K for “Khorasan Province,” at its core a group of Pakistani Taliban refugees from America’s war there in the early Obama years.

According to Gen. Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, President Donald Trump ordered the troops out of Afghanistan in March of 2017. But then he apparently just forgot about it. Subjected to a season-long pressure campaign by his generals, Trump eventually gave in, just as Obama had done before him, though to a lesser extent, ordering another 5,000 troops to the country and a massive escalation of the air war there. “My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts. I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office,” he explained.

It was four days after I published my first book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, which was four years ago Monday. In it I wrote:

“The major question seems to be when, not if, the ‘National Unity Government’ will unravel, which leaves them in a very weak position from which to negotiate, if they ever get the chance. If the ‘co-presidents’ cannot figure out how to get along, how can they be expected to negotiate peace with a broad-based insurgency?

“American hawks argue that since the Taliban-led insurgency will not negotiate, and especially considering they currently control more of the countryside than at any time since the turn of the century, the only option is to escalate militarily again, and forever. There is another choice: just forget the whole thing. If the United States withdraws the last fifteen thousand troops, airmen, spies and mercenaries, there is little doubt the insurgency could seize control of at least the predominantly Pashtun areas in the south and east of the country along the border with Pakistan in relatively short order. It is even possible, perhaps likely, that the capital city of Kabul could be lost soon thereafter. The Taliban’s shadow government — the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — already has the run of much of the Pashtun tribal lands as it is. The National Unity Government can meet in their parliament all day long, but without the U.S. there to fund their entire operation, it would cease to exist in no time.

“Yes, the next phase of the Afghan civil war will probably be a bloody disaster, but that is in great measure due to the distortions of power the U.S. has created. Whether the U.S. government throws in the towel now or years from now, the result will be the same: the Pashtun population will throw off whatever degree of rule the national government attempts to maintain over them, and then, in all probability, they will be right back where they were in the 1990s, with a bloody civil war, possibly leading to Taliban dominance in all but the far north of the country.”

If we had left back then, the Kabul government would have at least been in a somewhat stronger position to defend itself, and the Taliban would have had a bigger incentive to negotiate with them. By taking so long to leave, the U.S. allowed the Taliban to make further gains in usurping government authority across the country, preparing for their current successful coup de main.

Trump also continued to allow the Pentagon to send military equipment to the ANA, most of which is falling into the hands of the Taliban now. Really, the Taliban have been buying American weapons from the ANA all along with American cash paid directly to them in the form of protection fees, or taxes, for allowing U.S. convoys through their territory and “reconstruction” money given to them by the duffle bag full. So it makes little difference.

To Trump’s great credit, he never believed in the mission of building a modern, democratic, centralized state in Afghanistan. He consistently railed against such a project for years before ever taking office. In 2018, he finally appointed neoconservative policy adviser Zalmay Khalilzad to make a withdrawal deal with the Taliban, and unbelievably, Khalilzad did so. On February 29, 2020, they signed the Doha Agreement to leave by May 1, 2021.

In fact, as of a year ago, during the cease-fire, U.S. JSOC forces were fighting with the Taliban against ISIS in Nangarhar Province, referring to themselves as the “Taliban Airforce.” Call it the Afghan Awakening.

At the start of this war the U.S. could have negotiated extradition. Or they could have focused on bin Laden and the guilty al Qaeda members there. Or they could have launched punitive air raids against the Taliban but not driven them completely out of power. Or they could have settled for seeing them overthrown and then simply left the country to its own people to sort out. But no. The Bush government wrote themselves a writ for a massive campaign to remake another society on the other side of the globe. The Obama government cashed that check and massively expanded the war and the nature of its failure. Trump initially gave in to the military but later pushed for a real bilateral withdrawal deal with the Taliban.

If it was not for the pathetic CIA stenographer Charlie Savage, whose ridiculous lies in the New York Times about Vladimir Putin paying bounties for Taliban murders of American soldiers in Afghanistan, which was debunked by the NSA, some CIA analysts, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the commander of CENTCOM and the general in charge of the war — but too late — Trump may have been able to follow through on his plan to pull them all out before last year’s election. Even after the election, he balked after initially approving plans for a full withdrawal by the new year.

Fortunately, Biden has long since given up on believing the generals that they know what they’re doing in Afghanistan or that the war to keep the Taliban out of power is one worth fighting. Though they have announced plans to try to leave CIA, JSOC and mercenary “counter-terrorism” forces in the region to continue to hunt down international terrorists there, that seems unlikely to continue very long or in very large measure, barring a new major and embarrassing al Qaeda presence there. The whole concept of Afghanistan as a safe haven is a myth. They don’t seem to mind fighting on the side of AQAP in Yemen against the Houthis or helping the Turks protect Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria’s Idlib Province.

Biden did the right thing by resisting the hawks’ calls to drag this out one more day. (Now it is up to us to prevent the Biden government from allying with the Taliban and the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) against China in Xinjian like it was in old days.)

As embarrassing as the withdrawal is for the Americans, it could have been much worse. The Taliban took many military bases and provincial capitals while hardly firing a shot at all. Though there have been some brutal executions, the fighting has been kept to a minimum. As your author has suggested would be the case for years, when the day came, the Taliban just walked right into Kabul. The chances of a massive Black Hawk Down-type slaughter of U.S. personnel on the two-mile trip to the airport from the embassy seems slim, for the moment at least.

Much of the panic by the Americans and Afghan civilians attempting to flee from the airport may be based on fears that the Taliban would roll into town like the ISIS invasion of western Iraq in 2014 and start slaughtering people. The Taliban can of course be absolutely ruthless, but here they seem to have decided to allow foreign forces to leave in peace and have thus far announced no plans to bar civilians from leaving if they want. The final stages of the withdrawal have not been great, but the hype about the embarrassment is more likely cover for those who have failed us all along by perpetuating this war and want to pretend the failures started in this administration, or the last at the latest.

The ease of the Taliban’s victory over America’s installed puppet government in Afghanistan proves that the whole war was a fool’s errand all along. That regime never had the support of the population, and it never was going to. If all the hawks who already lost this war had their way, and the U.S. stayed another 20 years, that withdrawal would look much the same.

It’s 20 years late and not a moment too soon. Goodbye Afghanistan, sorry and good luck.

antiwar.com

One question that many people ask with regards to the events of September 11 was why the U.S. Air Force went missing in action for over 90 minutes as four lumbering commercial jets traveled around American airspace at will. Now with the death of Donald Rumsfeld, 88, the world may never know.

Prior to the attacks of 9/11, a mosquito couldn’t penetrate U.S. airspace over Washington, D.C. without being intercepted or swatted down. So what went wrong that fateful Tuesday morning? For an answer to that question it is necessary to look at the actions and non-actions of then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, second in military command only behind President George W. Bush, who was out of the loop at the time, visiting a class of elementary school students down in Florida.

Rumsfeld, as Pentagon chief, was in charge of the National Military Command Center [NMCC], which was responsible for coordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] in the event of a hijacking. But when Rumsfeld’s presence was needed more than ever before in his career, he went missing in action. So what exactly was Donald Rumsfeld doing on the morning of September 11?

According to the 9/11 Commission Report, around 9 a.m., just after American Airlines Flight 11 had slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, “Secretary Rumsfeld was having breakfast at the Pentagon with a group of members of Congress. He then returned to his office for his daily intelligence briefing. The Secretary was informed of the second strike in New York [9:03 am] during the briefing; he resumed the briefing while awaiting more information.”

Various individuals pleaded with the Defense Secretary to cancel his morning appointments after news that a second plane had slammed into the World Trade Center. Yet Rumsfeld rejected their desperate appeals. The first person to meet with Rumsfeld after it was clear America was under attack was CIA agent, Denny Watson, who was responsible for giving Defense Secretary his intelligence briefing each morning. At 9:03 a.m., Watson was in the anteroom of Rumsfeld’s office where she witnessed the second plane hit the South Tower live on television. Moments later, she is called into the office and, clearly aware there are more pressing matters at hand, doesn’t bother to remove the President’s Daily Brief [PDB] from her briefcase. “Sir, you just need to cancel this,” she tells Rumsfeld upon entering the office, as cited in David Priess’s book, ‘The President’s Book of Secrets’. “You’ve got more important things to do.” Rumsfeld, however, insists on going ahead with the meeting. “No, no, we’re going to do this,” he tells her.

An incredulous Watson has a seat as the Secretary of Defense flips through the PDB.

Watson was not the only person who tried to impress upon Rumsfeld the urgency of the moment. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Victoria Clarke, wrote in her 2006 book Lipstick on a Pig that she went directly to Rumsfeld’s office after the second plane hit. “A couple of us had gone into… Secretary Rumsfeld’s office, to alert him to that, tell him that the crisis management process was starting up. He wanted to make a few phone calls.” Rumsfeld reportedly told Clarke to report to the Executive Support Center (ESC) and wait for him. Clarke would wait a long time. Yet that was not the only emergency meeting Rumsfeld failed to attend on the morning of September 11.

The acting-Deputy Director of the National Military Command Center, Captain Charles Leidig, who was substituting for Brigadier General Montague Winfield on this very morning, called an emergency ‘significant event’ conference (SIEC). According to the Commission Report, the meeting “began at 9:29, with a brief recap: two aircraft had struck the World Trade Center…” Now if that summary failed to get Rumsfeld out of his office then clearly nothing would.

At 9:37 a.m., eight minutes after Captain Leidig had called the emergency response meeting, the Pentagon was rocked by what numerous witnesses said felt like a bomb detonating inside of the complex. The Commission Report briefly describes what action Rumsfeld took next: “After the Pentagon was struck, Secretary Rumsfeld went to the parking lot to assist with rescue efforts.” Now just try and rationalize that decision.

Rumsfeld, the highest ranking commander of the U.S. military aside from the President of the United States, has taken it upon himself to inspect the crash site and assist with the search and rescue efforts. A quaint, touching story that the media happily devoured, and the Commission Report completely ignored, but an altogether implausible one. That is not to deny the claim, however, that Rumsfeld was on the front lawn of the Pentagon assisting with the rescue efforts. Indeed, there are photographs showing the Defense Secretary, with a security detail at his side, doing exactly that.

Paul Wolfowitz, in an interview with Vanity Fair, spoke glowingly about how his boss responded to the emergency: “He went charging out and down to the site where the plane had hit, which is what I would have done if I’d had my wits about me, which may or may not have been a smart thing to do, but it was. Instead, the next thing we heard was that there’d been a bomb and the building had to be evacuated. Everyone started streaming out of the building in a quite orderly way.”

So Wolfowitz is somehow of the opinion that Rumsfeld abandoning his command post and dashing outside to the Pentagon blast site, where more attacks could have been forthcoming, was the best course of action. The media papering over Rumsfeld’s disastrous actions did not stop there.

In the New York Times, journalist Andrew Cockburn provided a breathless account of Rumsfeld, the military man of impetuous action, as he inexplicably traversed about two miles around the Pentagon – each side of the Pentagon complex is around the length of three football fields – to inspect the damage site and help the wounded instead of leading the nation at its most critical hour. Brace yourself because this is classic.

“There were the flames, and bits of metal all around,” Cockburn writes, quoting Officer Aubrey Davis of the Pentagon police, who served as Rumsfeld’s personal bodyguard during this mindless morning jog. “The secretary picked up one of the pieces of metal. I was telling him he shouldn’t be interfering with a crime scene when he looked at some inscription on it and said, ‘American Airlines.’ Then someone shouted, ‘Help, over here,’ and we ran over and helped push an injured person on a gurney over to the road.”

Cockburn proceeds to pin media laurels on Rumsfeld’s chest when what the Pentagon chief really deserved was a military tribunal: “[T]hose few minutes made Rumsfeld famous, changed him from a half-forgotten twentieth-century political figure to America’s twenty-first-century warlord. On a day when the president was intermittently visible, only Rumsfeld, along with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, gave the country an image of decisive, courageous leadership… Over time, the legend grew. One of the staffers in the office later assured me that Rumsfeld torn his shirt into strips to make bandages for the wounded …”

Keep in mind, Rumsfeld was paid to serve as chief of the military, not as a nurse.

Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon building by 10 o’clock and despite desperate pleas from staff members, he continued to avoid the command center as if it were a leper colony. Instead, he went back to his office where he had a phone conversation with President Bush, though, as Cockburn reported, “neither man could recall what they discussed.”

Rumsfeld did not make it to the command center until 10:30 a.m., which, by that time, was too late to do anything of consequence, except to have a phone conversation with Dick Cheney, who was holed up in the basement of the White House.

As the authors of the Commission Report noted, “Secretary Rumsfeld told us he was just gaining situational awareness when he spoke with the Vice President at 10:39. His primary concern was ensuring that the pilots had a clear understanding of their rules of engagement.” Well, that concern arose about two hours too late. Rumsfeld’s presence at this point was no longer even symbolic. The emergency, for all intent and purposes, was already over. Now it was up to the media to twist this unforgivable dereliction of duty into some sort of act of heroism. And it was only too happy to comply.

It was a misguided effort from the start, built on lies and false idealism, and it has left a bloody legacy.

By James BOVARD

Former President George W. Bush is bewailing President Joe Biden’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Bush told Fox News last week, “I’m also deeply concerned about the sacrifices of our soldiers, and our intelligence community, will be forgotten,” after the war ends. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the American media has already forgotten how Bush’s lies turned U.S. intervention in Afghanistan into a quagmire that pointlessly killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers.

After Al Qaeda hijacked four airplanes on September 11, 2001, wreaking death and destruction in New York and Washington, it was inevitable that the U.S. military would respond. But rather than targeting Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, Bush chose to conquer Afghanistan and seek to rebuild it as some type of female-friendly utopia. While the Bush White House boasted of liberating the downtrodden Afghan people, Bush’s military geniuses let Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders escape at Tora Bora.

Brazen lies permeated Bush’s efforts from the start. In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, Bush frightened Americans with a bogus nuclear threat: “Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears… We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities” in caves used by Al Qaeda. Senior CIA and FBI officials followed up with “background” briefings to the media, revving up the threat that Afghan-based Al Qaeda fighters were targeting U.S. nuclear power facilities. This made the terrorist threat far more ominous and spurred support for Bush’s preemptive war policy against Iraq.

Two years later, Bush administration officials admitted that the president’s statement was completely false and that no nuclear power plant diagrams had been discovered in Afghanistan. Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Edward McGaffigan, who had testified in 2002 on this falsehood at closed hearings on Capitol Hill, commented that Bush was “poorly served by a speechwriter.” This was a farce—as if the deceit stemmed from some speechwriter’s poetic fancy—as opposed to the conniving of a phalanx of high-ranking officials and the complicity of George W. Bush. Bush’s lies on a nuclear threat from Afghanistan paved the way to his far more destructive lies regarding Iraqi chemical and biological weapons in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Bush shamelessly exploited the deaths of soldiers he sent to Afghanistan. On May 1, 2004, Bush wrapped up his speech to the White House Correspondents Dinner by exploiting the recent death of a former pro football star to valorize his Afghan war. Bush declared, “The loss of Army Corporal Pat Tillman last week in Afghanistan… reminds us of the character of the men and women who serve on our behalf… Friends say that this young man saw the images of September the 11th, and seeing that evil, he felt called to defend America… We count ourselves lucky that this new generation of Americans is as brave and decent as any before it.”

At the time of Bush’s paean, the Pentagon was claiming that Tillman had died while leading a charge against Al Qaeda forces. An on-scene investigation quickly revealed that Tillman had been killed by other American soldiers. A week after Tillman was killed, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a top commander in Afghanistan, notified the White House that Tillman was killed by U.S. troops: “I felt that it was essential that you received this information as soon as we detected it to preclude any unknowing statements by our country’s leaders that might cause public embarrassment if [!!!] the circumstances of CPL Tillman’s death become public.” [Emphasis the writer’s] There was a flurry of emails between the White House and the Pentagon on the Tillman case on April 28 and 29, as a White House speechwriter got key details for Bush’s spiel at the correspondents dinner. The Pentagon delayed admitting that Tillman had been killed by American soldiers until after a grandiose memorial service in Arizona featuring Sen. John McCain.

In May 2005, Patrick Tillman, Sr., bitterly complained: “After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up… They realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy.” The Bush administration continued covering up the details of Tillman’s killing, vexing the family.

Bush sanctified his Afghan war as the greatest triumph for women’s liberation in modern history. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush boasted, “The mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes.… Today women are free.” But a United Nations report the following year on rural Afghanistan concluded that “the situation of women has not changed to any great extent since the removal of the Taliban.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who visited Afghanistan in early 2004, reported that “many Afghan women are still captives in their homes…. The rise of banditry and rape has had a particularly devastating effect on women. Because the roads are not safe even in daylight, girls do not dare go to schools or their mothers to health centers.” One international aid worker commented that during the Taliban era “if a woman went to market and showed an inch of flesh she would have been flogged—now she’s raped.” In 2009, shortly after Bush’s presidency ended, the U.S.-appointed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, approved a law entitling husbands to starve their wives to death if they denied them sex.

But at least the U.S. government was not systematically subsidizing the rape of women—unlike the brutal fate of Afghan boys. Since the start of Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military has poured money into Afghan government operations guilty of Bacha bazi—turning young boys into sex slaves. The Pentagon ignored the abuse until a 2015 New York Times exposé of American soldiers who were punished for protesting atrocities against young boys. The Times reported that U.S. troops were confounded that “instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.” In 2017, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported, “Afghan officials remain complicit, especially in the sexual exploitation … of children by Afghan security forces.” A 2017 Pentagon Inspector General report revealed that some U.S. troops were “told that nothing could be done about child sexual abuse because of Afghanistan’s status as a sovereign nation, that it was not a priority for the command, or that it was best to ignore the situation and to let the local police handle it.” But the U.S. government continued bankrolling Afghan child rapists.

During his 2004 reelection campaign, Bush boasted, “Thanks to the United States… Afghanistan is no longer a haven for terror. Afghanistan is a free country.” But the Bush administration did nothing to prevent the Afghan government it installed from tyrannizing the Afghan people. Even more damning, the U.S. military and CIA brazenly tortured Afghans, atrocities that President Bush perpetually denied even though it was reported as early as December 2002. In 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported allegations that Afghan soldiers detained by the U.S. government had suffered “repeated beatings, immersion in cold water, electric shocks, being hung upside down and toenails being torn off.” The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on Bush-era torture vivified what happened at the COBAL secret CIA site interrogation center north of Kabul:

CIA detainees at the COBALT detention facility were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste. Lack of heat at the facility likely contributed to the death of a detainee. The chief of interrogations described COBALT as a “dungeon.” … At times, the detainees at COBALT were walked around naked or were shackled with their hands above their heads for extended periods of time. Other times, the detainees at COBALT were subjected to what was described as a “rough takedown,” in which approximately five CIA officers would scream at a detainee, drag him outside of his cell, cut his clothes off, and secure him with Mylar tape. The detainee would then be hooded and dragged up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched.

Bush has never taken responsibility or shown any remorse for setting up an illegal worldwide torture regime. During his years in the White House, Bush perennially denied that he had approved torture. But in 2010, during an author tour to promote his new memoir, he bragged about approving waterboarding for terrorist suspects.

Bush’s Afghan war was not good intentions gone awry: It was profoundly dishonest from the start. Afghanistan quickly became nothing more than a political boasting point for Bush. In October 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was appalled when Bush did not even recognize the name of the U.S. general in charge of Afghanistan and had no interest in meeting him. Christopher Kolenda, a U.S. Army colonel who repeatedly deployed to Afghanistan to advise top U.S. commanders, declared that the Afghan government had “self-organized into a kleptocracy,” a government of thieves, by 2006. Ryan Crocker, Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan, admitted, “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption.” An investigation by SIGAR found that it was “common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.” In 2019, SIGAR chief John Sopko summarized the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan: “The American people have constantly been lied to.”

Forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new political treachery. George W. Bush now serves as a “useful idiot” for politicians who want to perpetuate America’s disastrous interventions abroad. But if there is any justice, the name of George W. Bush will live in infamy as a betrayer of American soldiers and an enemy of decency and the U.S. Constitution.

theamericanconservative.com

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration made a series of blunders that have created havoc in U.S. governance. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the worst of these decisions, but not far behind was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The DHS has turned out to be the perfect authoritarian tool in the hands of a corrupt administration, and there is ample evidence of the department’s role in degrading public life in America in the past several weeks. The department has become Trump’s tool for targeting “anti-fascists,” the label that he has broadly applied to all protestors.

The DHS is a bureaucratic monstrosity that includes the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), and various unrelated departments.  It has over 240,000 employees, a $50 billion budget, and a reputation for excessive waste and ineffectiveness.  It is the third largest government agency, and its 60,000 law enforcement officers represent half of all federal law enforcement agents in the government.  DHS has too many subdivisions, operates in too many disparate fields, and lacks proper congressional oversight.  The creation of DHS meant that immigration enforcement and border protection were moved from the Departments of Treasury and Justice, respectively, and were then treated as national security issues.  Under Trump, demonstrators, dissidents, and protestors have become national security issues.

It took Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to teach us what a mess had been created at DHS.  Several years later, the office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection acknowledged that it “does open mail to U.S. citizens that originate from foreign countries whenever it’s deemed necessary.”  In 2012, a Senate Homeland Security report concluded that DHS intelligence was “irrelevant, useless, or inappropriate.” In 2017, a border patrol agent was investigated for obtaining confidential travel records of a Washington journalist and using them to press for her sources.

Events in Portland, Oregon have illuminated the DHS threat to governance and civil rights as the Federal Protective Service (FPS) has operated without any consultation, let alone permission, from state or local authorities.  The FPS  deployed its unidentified agents in camouflage uniforms without identifying insignia, used so-called “nonlethal” projectiles and tear gas against American citizens, and forced demonstrators into unmarked rental cars to be held in federal buildings without charges.  DHS agents were involved in the separation of children from their parents at the southern border, and agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been labeled as “RoboCops” for their aggressive measures against immigrants.  A CBP drone monitored the protest activities in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd.

Over the past week, the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) disseminated reports to various law enforcement agencies that summarized tweets by a reporter for the New York Times and the editor of the blog Lawfare.  The journalists had posted leaked DHS documents that revealed shortcomings in the department’s aggressive handling of events in Portland. According to the Washington Post, the DHS also tracked the communications of demonstrators, another violation of the First Amendment.  The acting director of DHS, Chad Wolf, immediately acknowledged the threat to the First Amendment, stopped the illegal activities of the office, and removed its director, Brian Murphy, but this was simply an act of damage limitation. Murphy, a former FBI agent, had a reputation for misapplying the authorities of I&A, and ignoring their intelligence assessments. In any event, the overall problems of DHS remain.

The illegal creation of dossiers on journalists is reminiscent of the unconstitutional activities of the intelligence community in the 1960s and 1970s during the Vietnam War.  The congressional investigations of the mid-1970s and the excellent reporting of Seymour Hersh exposed the illegal domestic spying operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency to disrupt the anti-war movement.  The FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) actively disrupted lawful activities of numerous individuals and organizations, including Martin Luther King Jr.  FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s designation of the Black Panther Party as the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country” is reminiscent of Trump’s identification of “antifa” as a similar threat. (At least, there was a Black Panther Party; there is no “antifa” party.) The dossiers on political dissidents is reminiscent of DHS’ collection against U.S. journalists.

Just as the FBI’s COINTELPRO and CIA’s Operation Chaos hurt the reputation of these agencies, the actions of DHS on behalf of Donald Trump are drawing criticism from former Republican directors of the agency.  The first director of DHS, Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, stated that it would be a “cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited intervention into one of my cities.”  Former director Michael Chertoff pointed out that DHS is much too willing to carry out the president’s support for brutal and aggressive force, “especially in cities…governed by liberal Democratic mayors.”

The threat to American governance in an election year is dire.  There is an authoritarian president in the White House with no respect for the rule of law; a strong advocate for presidential power in William Barr as Attorney General; toadying and unconfirmed loyalists at the top of the Department of Homeland Security; and a Republican-led Senate that will offer no criticism of the outrageous actions of the president.  We know little about Barr’s Operation Legend, which is using agents from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to prevent peaceful demonstrations.

At least, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley expressed regret for being present when federal police officers violently cleared Lafayette Square to enable Trump’s blasphemous display of power at the St. John’s Episcopal Church in June.  Chad Wolf, however, has been a willing tool of the White House, parroting the line about “violent antifa anarchists,” and blocking the Supreme Court’s order to restore protections and benefits to dreamers in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals  (DACA).

Barr and Wolf are enablers of the president’s excesses, and It is long past time for them to acknowledge the misuse of the DoJ and the DHS, respectively, on behalf of Trump’s reelection campaign.  It is also time for the Congress to conduct the kind of  oversight that exposed the illegal and unconstitutional activities of the intelligence community during the Vietnam War.  The city of Portland must not become a petri dish for studying the death of democracy.

counterpunch.org

The liberal rehabilitation of George W. Bush is now virtually complete, with his successor Barack Obama declaring this week that the 43rd president was committed to the rule of law, despite all evidence to the contrary. In an online fundraiser for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden Tuesday night, Obama stated that Bush “had a basic regard for the rule of law and the importance of our institutions of democracy.”

Obama, who ran for president in 2008 with promises to restore habeas corpus and uphold the rule of law, went on to claim that when Bush was president, “we cared about human rights” and were committed to “core principles around the rule of law and the universal dignity of people.”

Obama’s comments surely came as a shock to anyone who still has a functioning memory of the Bush years and hasn’t succumbed entirely to the effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Rather than being a champion of democratic principles, when Bush left office, he left behind a shameful legacy of upended human rights norms including due process and the legal prohibition against torture.

If 2008 Obama could speak today with 2020 Obama, he might remind himself that Bush had started a “dumb war” in Iraq in violation of the UN Charter, launched a warrantless surveillance program of Americans and that he had established a penal colony in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

As Obama himself said in said in 2013, during the Bush years, “we compromised our basic values – by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.”

Bush’s ‘Rule of Law’

He dismissed provisions of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and offered legal rationales that justify torture in cases of “military necessity.”At the heart of Bush’s approach to the “rule of law” was the rejection of any independent court evaluation of its detentions. Without judicial review, the U.S. government didn’t need to present any evidence to show that a person actually had ties to Al Qaeda or was otherwise guilty of a crime. The Bush position also held that once designated as Al Qaeda members, individuals have no legal protections against torture.

U.S. sergeant interrogates a detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who is chained to his cell wall in a distressing position. (U.S. Government)

Bush’s approach to the “war on terror” was in fact a steady descent into the “dark side,” as Vice President Dick Cheney had called it. A subsequent Senate investigation found that the torture program instituted by the Bush administration following 9/11 employed gruesome techniques such as near drowning, forcing detainees to stand on broken legs, threatening to kill or rape detainees’ family members, forced “rectal feeding” and “rectal hydration.” It also offered disturbing details on a medieval “black site” prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit, where at least one detainee froze to death.

The brutal interrogation sessions lasted in many cases non-stop for days or weeks at a time, leading to effects such as “hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation,” and produced little to no useful information. CIA agents had illegally detained 26 of the 119 individuals in CIA custody, and the interrogation techniques used on detainees went beyond the methods that had been approved by the Bush Justice Department or CIA’s headquarters (guidelines that were likely overly permissive in the first place).

Calls for Accountability

When the Senate torture report was released in late 2014, it was met with calls for accountability from around the world. The United Nations, the European Union, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as numerous governments, all demanded that those responsible for the illegal torture program face justice. The U.S. was reminded that as a matter of international law, it was legally obligated to prosecute the perpetrators of the torture program.

Some of the strongest words came from the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism Ben Emmerson, who stated unequivocally that senior officials from the Bush administration who sanctioned crimes, as well as the CIA and U.S. government officials who carried them out, must be brought to justice. “It is now time to take action,” the UN rapporteur said.

Needless to say, no one was ever prosecuted by the Obama administration’s Justice Department. And now, Obama not only excuses these abuses, but he actually claims that Bush was committed to “the rule of law and the universal dignity of people.” A charitable explanation for Obama’s comments is that he was trying to draw a distinction between the Trump administration and every other president, and to draw this distinction, he made a clumsy attempt to draw an exaggerated contrast.

Obama’s Damaging Comments

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama walk with former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush after the unveiling of the Bushes’ official portraits at the White House, May 31, 2012. (White House, Chuck Kennedy)

This historic shift in attitudes was abetted by many liberals who have helped refurbish Bush’s image, including daytime talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and former First Lady Michelle Obama.

To hear Barack Obama now making the claim that Bush was committed to the rule of law and human rights is just the latest betrayal of a Democratic Party that has systematically prevented a reckoning for the crimes of the 43rd president, a party that is clearly uninterested in truth or accountability, and is more than willing to rewrite history to advance its political goals.

Only time will tell how America is affected in the long term by this rewriting of history.

consortiumnews.com

George W Bush is in the news again today, and once again it’s not for the only legitimate reason that he should ever be in the news, namely a war crimes tribunal. No, it’s because his voice was used in a cutesy feel-good video about unity during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat,” Bush is heard saying. “We are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God.”

And, needless to say, Democrats are all over social media orgasming in their pants about it.

“This video made me ugly cry,” tweeted actress-turned-McResistance pundit Alyssa Milano.

“A REAL president,” tweeted the other Alyssa Milano, Debra Messing.

“In a million years I never thought I’d be crying watching this, thinking how much better we’d all feel if Bush were president today,” tweeted former Democratic congresswoman Katie Hill to thunderous online applause.

The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan spent all day on Twitter defending his position that Dubya is superior to Trump, at one point even arguing “You can be a sane warmonger. You can be a warmonger but be an ok human being to your friends and family. You can be a warmonger and be able to handle a domestic public health crisis.”

In a million years I never thought I’d be crying watching this, thinking how much better we’d all feel if Bush were president today. Wtf. https://t.co/SSR3ieZEFP

— Katie Hill (@KatieHill4CA) May 2, 2020

For years rank-and-file Democrats have been giving the true Butcher of Baghdad a majority approval rating, running with the common narrative that while Bush perhaps made some “mistakes”, Trump is spectacularly worse. Here are five things that are highlighted by that common perspective:

1. It shows how little Democrats care about the lives of human beings overseas.

By the end of his first term Bush had launched two full-scale ground invasions, murdered a million Iraqis, destabilized an entire region in a way that would shortly give rise to ISIS, and ushered in a whole new level of unprecedented US military expansionism and imperialism. Trump has done none of these things. He has inflicted many evils upon our world and, like Obama, has continued and expanded the warmongering of his predecessors. But he has done nothing that rises to the level of depravity of Bush’s wars.

The fact that Democrats see Trump’s evils as not only equal to but far in excess of Bush’s reveals as plain as day that, for all their supposed bleeding heart liberal sensibilities, they simply do not place much value on the lives of foreigners. Sure they might enjoy a little masturbatory melodrama over kids in cages when it shows up on their doorstep, but kids getting ripped to shreds by cluster bombs and being born severely disabled from depleted uranium munitions simply does not register for them, because they don’t have to look at it.

They do not care. Rude tweets and racism are worse than institutionalized mass murder for them, because they have to look at one but not the other.

2. It shows that Trump-era Democrats are Bush-era Republicans

The problem is that Bush and Cheney’s operatives, speechwriters, policy advisers, propagandistas and top aides are the close friends and colleagues of media liberals and DC Democrats and their beloved pundits, so they have to whitewash Bush’s evil to justify themselves: https://t.co/Z1C3CB7JQn

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2020

“Dems have no choice but to rehabilitate George Bush because their core narrative is the US was a fundamentally good and decent land before Trump vandalized it,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted in response to Democrats’ fawning over Bush, adding, “How do you join with Bill Kristol, Nicole Wallace, Rick Wilson, David Frum and the CIA without whitewashing Bush’s crimes?”

Indeed, Bush-era neocons have been able to fully ingratiate themselves to and integrate themselves with Democrats in the age of Trump by posing as moral opposition longing for a more civilized time when presidents would politely butcher humans by the hundreds of thousands without using offensive language like “shit hole”. A gentlemanly time for gentlemanly presidents to unfold gentlemanly torture and surveillance policies all around the world without posting rude tweets about celebrities they don’t like.

Trump-era Democrats are Bush-era Republicans. That’s how far to the authoritarian right the party has moved in the last few years on important matters like foreign policy. You can see this by the shrieking, hysterical response they had to Tulsi Gabbard calling for what more or less amounted to a simple reversion back to pre-9/11 US foreign policy. It has been necessary for Democrats to gaslight themselves into this position because for three presidential campaigns in a row — Obama 2012, Clinton 2016, and now Biden 2020 — they’ve had to find ways of convincing themselves that a politician who has facilitated Bush’s foreign policy agendas would make a good commander-in-chief.

3. It shows how the amnesia-inducing effects of the mass media news churn make it difficult to retain perspective.

The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth

“It’s not enough to simply expose the truth. You must also fully, repeatedly and consistently expose the ones who are telling lies.”https://t.co/OSW6eFQVAn

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 18, 2019

Mass media propagandists are able to distort perception even while telling the truth using the news churn memory hole. Even when forced to report on uncomfortable truths like not finding any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the fact that the occupation of Afghanistan has been justified by an entire generation of lies, the memory of that reporting can be made to fade into the background by frantically reporting on what’s happening right now without referring back to the previous revelations.

Russiagate alone did so much to distort people’s perceptions in mainstream liberal circles. Having the baseless narrative breathlessly promoted year after year after year that the Kremlin had literally seized control of the highest levels of the US government left rank-and-file Democrats who subscribed to it without any sense of scale or proportion, because they were constantly being told that the Most Important Thing Ever was about to happen. How can you hold perspective on a million dead Iraqis when you’re being told day after day, year after year in myriad ways that Russian Hitler was controlling your country but Super Mueller is going to swoop in to the rescue any minute now? It would be very difficult.

4. It shows the glaring difference between fact and narrative.

Most of the mass media reporting on Trump has been factual, it’s just had a ton of narrative spin attached to the facts. It is a fact that Trump frequently says and does dumb, obnoxious and horrible things. It is a fact that many racists think he’s the cat’s pajamas. It is a fact that there was an impeachment and a collusion investigation. But the narrative overlay that has been heaped upon those facts while they’re being reported — the urgency, the alarmism, the hyperbole — leaves viewers with the distinct impression that this US president is awful in a way that is unique and historically unprecedented, and he simply isn’t.

Trump is not worse than Bush, the mass media just yell about him a lot more. If the narratives matched the facts, mass media consumers would be aware that nothing Trump has done is as evil as Bush’s invasion of Iraq alone. In reality Trump didn’t wind up being another Hitler, he wound up being another Obama (not a compliment). And if the narrative spin matched the factual reality, people would understand that.

liberals have the baffling ability to simultaneously believe both that George W. Bush was a good president whom they love and miss dearly AND that Ralph Nader is a piece of shit who’s going to burn in hell for supposedly getting George W. Bush elected

— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) May 3, 2020

5. It shows that this simply is not working.

Imagine you’re out in the woods with a friend you trust in the dark. You know there’s a horrible monster out there stalking you, and suddenly you hear it in the distance coming crashing towards you. It has picked up your scent and it will be upon you in moments.

You turn to run, but your friend grabs you and won’t let you move. He falls to the ground grabbing your legs screaming “No! No! We must stay here! We mustn’t move an inch!”

Who do you need to fight first? The monster? Or your “friend”?

That’s why I focus so much of my criticism on the Democratic Party instead of the Republicans. Ultimately they’re the party which could actually allow for positive changes to be made to the world, but instead they keep moving further and further into the warmongering totalitarianism they once purported to despise in George W Bush.

Relying on either head of the two-headed one-party system to make meaningful changes simply is not working, and will not ever work. No institution that would so warmly rehabilitate and welcome a bloodthirsty monster like Bush is going to help humanity one iota. In fact, its sole purpose is to do the exact opposite.

medium.com

After 19 years of war, over $1 trillion in spending, 2,400 dead and a torrent of lies, the US may now be facing an end to its longest war.

The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001. There were three reasons: 1. to cover up the humiliation of the tough-talking Bush administration for being caught sleeping on guard duty by the 9/11 attacks; 2. To secure oil pipeline routes through Afghanistan from Central Asia down to Pakistan’s sea coast; and 3. To occupy a supposedly empty square on the Asian chessboard before China did.

Since 2001, hardly a word of truth about Afghanistan has come out of Washington. All wars are accompanied by a bodyguard of lies, as Churchill wrote, but the lies and
propaganda about Afghanistan were extraordinary and shameful.

Chief among the lies: Osama bin Laden was the architect of the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 Americans and that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan with the help of the Taliban movement. In fact, the plot was hatched in Germany and Spain by Saudi exiles, not Afghans, who claimed the US was occupying their nation and exploiting its riches.

Faked videos were shown on US TV to implicate bin Laden. He applauded the attacks after the fact, saying they were revenge for Israel’s destruction in large part of Beirut in 1982.

The so-called ‘terrorist training camps’ in Afghanistan cited as a reason for the US invasion were actually camps run by Pakistan’s intelligence service, an ally of the US, to train insurgent guerrillas for action against Indian rule in Kashmir. I know this because I toured some of the camps. General Hamid Gul, the head of ISI, Pakistan’s crack intelligence service, briefed me on this operation.

Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, told me the US had threatened to ‘bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age’ if it did not allow the US to wage war against Afghanistan from Pakistani territory.

Al-Qaeda’s founder, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, told me `after defeating the communists in Afghanistan, we will go on to liberate Saudi Arabia from American rule.’ He was assassinated soon after.

To this day, what’s left of al-Qaeda remains an anti-imperialist movement. In recent years, al-Qaeda and Taliban have become bitter enemies. Taliban agreed in recent talks never to shelter al-Qaeda or the more recent, Islamic State movement. It originally sheltered bin Laden only because he was a hero of the anti-Communist struggle and an honored guest. Taliban offered to hand bin Laden to an impartial court. The US refused and quickly invaded Afghanistan.

Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, was a serious enemy of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Yet the Bush administration lied that Iraq was somehow behind 9/11 to justify invading and grabbing its oil riches. Most Americans believed this falsehood promoted by Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney.

I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan when Taliban was formed. Far from being a ‘terrorist’ movement, as the Americans and their Afghan communist allies claimed, Taliban was created by a village preacher, Mullah Omar, to protect caravans from bandits during the Afghan civil war of the early 1990’s, and to protect women from mass rape. When Taliban took Kabul, it crushed the drug trade and restored order with an iron fist.

America’s main ally in Afghanistan, the Communist dominated Tajik Northern Alliance, was put into power in Kabul and quickly restored the opium trade. Today, US Afghan allies control almost all the drug trade which props up the puppet government in Kabul.

Three US presidents claim they tried to end the Afghan War – but failed. Why? Intense opposition from the war party, military industrial complex, and the neocons. $1 trillion is huge business. Many war suppliers grew rich on this conflict; imperial generals got promotions and new commands. Politicians loved to orate against so-called ‘terrorism’ and call for more war. The costs of the Afghan War were buried in the national debt, to be repaid by coming generations.

None of the presidents were able to stand up to the deep state. President Donald Trump claims he will shut down the Afghan War, which he properly termed, ‘stupid.’ But can he?

It will be so easy to sabotage the fragile cease-fire agreement just signed in Qatar. The Afghan drug lords have already started fire fights. US generals and conservatives quail at the prospect of being charged with losing this war.

The best way to end a war is to end it. Declare victory, bring the troops home, cut off the dollars and ammo and leave.

ericmargolis.com

In 2005 I wrote that “The insurgency in Afghanistan will continue until foreign troops leave, whenever that might be. After a while, the government in Kabul will collapse, and there will be anarchy until a brutal, ruthless, drug-rich warlord achieves power. He will rule the country as it has always been ruled by Afghans: by threats, religious ferocity, deceit, bribery, and outright savagery, when the latter can be practiced without retribution. And the latest foreign occupation will become just another memory.”

In 2007 GW Bush, up until 2016 the worst US president in memory, declared that “Our goal in Afghanistan is to help the people of that country to defeat the terrorists and establish a stable, moderate, and democratic state that respects the rights of its citizens, governs its territory effectively, and is a reliable ally in this war against extremists and terrorists.” But after 18 years of war, following the 2001 invasion, it has been Mission Unachieved.

Over the years there have been some peculiar statements, claims and outright lies told about the war in Afghanistan by the political-military establishment that continues to foster it, and one of the most intriguing observations was made by President Obama in March 2009 when he said that “the United States of America did not choose to fight a war in Afghanistan.” As I noted at the time, to hear this pronouncement was rather like being told that “Hitler didn’t cause World War Two” or reading newspaper headlines like “Republican Politician Tells Truth” or “Netanyahu Says Arabs are Human” and falls neatly into the category of “failing to tell the truth” about the Afghanistan debacle.

The Post recounts that in 2015 Lieutenant General Douglas Lute “who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations” told government interviewers that “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing. What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” But that same general, who could have swayed — or at least tried to sway — these presidents away from their catastrophic war, did nothing of the kind.

On December 9 Lute was interviewed on US National Public Radio, the most objective US news outlet, and therefore under threat by Trump, and continued to sway like a US general in the winds of promotion.

The interviewer quoted an army colonel as saying that “every data point was altered to present the best picture possible. Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable, but reinforced that everything we were doing was right, and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.” General Lute was asked if he had been “aware of or party to any effort to use data to mislead the public about the state of US progress in Afghanistan?” Lute, who is now a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, replied, barely believably, that “No. My experience with regard to collection of data and reporting on progress or lack of progress in Afghanistan is an experience of candour, of bluntness and speaking truth to our senior leaders.”

Then the interviewer noted that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR; the only senior official who has been honest concerning affairs and events in Afghanistan) had said that “the American people have constantly been lied to” and asked Lute if he agreed with that. Predictably he replied that “I don’t agree with that assessment” and fantasised that “every approach that I know of to communicate progress in Afghanistan by senior American political officials and military officials has always been couched as, on the one hand, we’re making progress, but on the other hand, the challenges are severe.”

He should have listened to one of his own breed, the senior military commander in Afghanistan from 2016 to 2018, General John Nicholson, who declared in October 2017 that “a tidal wave of air power is on the horizon”, and that “this is the beginning of the end for the Taliban.” The man was grossly over-promoted from kitchen orderly, but he was the most important person in Afghanistan for thirty months, and seemed to take pleasure in making what the Washington Post calls “rosy pronouncements.”

The Afghanistan Papers make it clear that such as Nicholson were in the vast majority and that there were “explicit and sustained efforts by the US government to deliberately mislead the public.” Interviewees said “it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.”

It is appalling that the lies continue, and not only in Afghanistan. The war on Libya in 2011 was a put-up job, and Foreign Policy magazine summed it up by headlining a 2016 analysis “The Big Lie About the Libyan War” in which “The Obama administration said it was just trying to protect civilians. Its actions reveal it was looking for regime change.” Another colossal lie.

In Syria there are military forces from the US and Russia, but the difference is that the Syrian government asked for Russian support while the US presence is largely aimed at assisting rebels to overthrow that government. As the BBC notes, the situation is made more complicated because “the group calling Islamic State (IS) joined the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, where it found a safe haven and easy access to weapons.”

There has therefore been much posturing about Syria, in which “the US initially supplied the rebels of the Free Syrian Army with non-lethal aid . . . but quickly began providing training, money, and intelligence to selected Syrian rebel commanders. At least two US programs attempted to assist the Syrian rebels.”

The entire charade was based on the claim that Washington was there entirely to combat the terrorists of Islamic State, but this fell to bits in October after US forces were reported to have “started reinforcing… positions around oil fields in eastern Syria, saying the new deployments are part of its continuing counter-terrorist mission.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, told reporters  that “The fundamental purpose of securing those oil fields is to deny those oil fields access to ISIS in order to prevent ISIS from resurgence.”

This sounded plausible until Trump made US priorities clearer by declaring “We’ve secured the oil, and, therefore, a small number of US troops will remain in the area where they have the oil… We’re keeping the oil — remember that. I’ve always said that: ‘Keep the oil.’ We want to keep the oil. Forty-five million dollars a month? Keep the oil… what I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an Exxon Mobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly.”

The Pentagon’s lie had been inadvertently contradicted by Trump who probably didn’t know the seriousness of what he was saying, and in any case made his statement when he was speaking to a group of police chiefs in Chicago — hardly an international forum. But it shows that endless lies continue to be told in Washington’s endless wars.

Humanity was treated to an important lecture on peace at a recent event for the NIR School of the Heart by none other than Ellen Degeneres BFF and world-renowned peace expert George W Bush.

“I don’t think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest,” said the former president according to The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, whose brief Twitter thread on the subject appears to be the only record of Bush’s speech anywhere online.

“An isolationist United States is destabilizing around the world,” Bush said during the speech in what according to Rogin was a shot at the sitting president. “We are becoming isolationist and that’s dangerous for the sake of peace.”

For those who don’t speak fluent neoconservative, “isolationist” here means taking even one small step in any direction other than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and “We are becoming isolationist” here means “We have hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world.”

President George W. Bush tonight at the Nir School of the Heart event: “I don’t think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest.”

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) 16 октября 2019 г.

It is unclear why Bush is choosing to present himself as a more peaceful president than Trump given that by this point in his first term Bush had launched not one but two full-scale ground invasion wars whose effects continue to ravage the Middle East to this very day, especially given the way both presidents appear to be in furious agreement on foreign policy matters like Iran. But here we are.

From a certain point of view it’s hard to say which is stranger: (A) a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is endangering peace with his “isolationism”, or (B) the claim that Trump is “isolationist” at all. As we’ve discussed previously, Trump’s so-called isolationism has thus far consisted of killing tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions in an attempt to effect regime change in the most oil-rich nation on earth, advancing a regime change operation in Iran via starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops, and reckless military escalations, continuing to facilitate the Saudi-led slaughter in Yemen and to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, inflating the already insanely bloated US military budget to enable more worldwide military expansionism, greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians in airstrikes for which he has reduced military accountability, and of course advancing many, many new cold war escalations against the nuclear superpower Russia.

But these bogus warnings about a dangerous, nonexistent threat of isolationism are nothing new for Dubya. In his farewell address to the nation, Bush said the following:

“In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led.”

As we discussed recently, use of the pro-war buzzword “isolationism” has been re-emerging from its post-Bush hibernation as a popular one-word debunk of any opposition to continued US military expansionism in all directions, and it is deceitful in at least three distinct ways. Firstly, the way it is used consistently conflates isolationism with non-interventionism, which are two wildly different things. Secondly, none of the mainstream political figures who are consistently tarred with the “isolationist” pejorative are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists; they all support many interventionist positions which actual non-interventionists object to. Thirdly, calling someone who opposes endless warmongering an “isolationist” makes as much sense as calling someone who opposes rape a man-hating prude; opposing an intrinsically evil act is not the same as withdrawing from the world.

The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is “Isolationism”

“Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism.” #war #peace #TulsiGabbardhttps://t.co/dLbW6O2bRV

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) 29 июня 2019 г.

Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness that the opposite of “war” is no longer “peace”, but “isolationism”. By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things.

It would actually be great if George W Bush could shut the fuck up forever, ideally in a locked cell following a public war tribunal. Failing that, at the very least people should stop looking at him as a cuddly wuddly teddy bear with whom it’s fun to share a sporting arena suite or a piece of hard candy or to hang award medals on for his treatment of veterans. This mass murdering monster has been growing more and more popular with Democrats lately just because he offers mild criticisms of Trump sometimes, as have war pigs like Bill Kristol and Max Boot and even John Bolton for the same reason, and it needs to stop. And in the name of a million dead Iraqis, please don’t start consulting this man on matters of peace.

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Robert O’Brien is a respected authority on international relations and now replaces John Bolton as U.S. President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor. He is a neoconservative who feels that Barack Obama wasn’t nearly enough of a neocon. However, the differences between the two are a matter of degee, and not of type. O’Brien is a Republican who served in the Obama Administration as well as in the G.W. Bush Administration, and in the Trump Administration, and he represents only mainstream U.S. scholarly views about international relations. Here are some of his views, as stated in his 2016 anti-Obama book While America Slept:

The overthrow of “Putin puppet Viktor Yanukovych” in 2014 Ukraine was a democratic revolution, not a bloody coup that removed the democratically elected President and which was entirely illegal. Communism was finally crushed in Ukraine, because of this “revolution,” he says. “Notwithstanding the war and punishing economic circumstances, Russia’s invasion and occupation have inflicted on them, Ukrainians are happy today. They showed the world that they remain unbowed in the face of aggression.” “Liberty and the Rule of Law are Universal Values” and the U.S. Government needs to impose them globally. Because of Obama, “China, Russia, and Iran engaged in significant arms buildups even as America drew down,” while “these nations grabbed territory in the South China sea, Eastern Europe, and across the Middle East.” Limits need to be removed from the defense budget he says, so that America can impose democracy and legality everywhere.

It’s all fantasy. For example: As a result of the February 2014 U.S. takeover of Ukraine: Ukrainians became amongst the unhappiest people on the planet, and the Government’s debt doubled, and Ukraine’s GDP plunged 50%, and the incomes of Ukrainians plunged 50%, and two regions which had been in Ukraine (Crimea and Donbass) broke away from the U.S.-imposed nazi Government that wanted the residents in those areas to be killed or else expelled into Russia.  Why were the residents impoverished while the Government’s debt doubled? Where did that money go? All of that debt-increase was borrowing in order to be able to afford the war against Donbass. O’Brien says “Ukrainians are happy today”, but, by all objective measures, they’ve not been less happy except during World War II — they disliked Hitler and Stalin even more than they disliked the 2014-installed U.S.-coup-regime.

Robert O’Brien is an even stronger believer in the statement that President Obama so often stated, that the United States is “the one indispensable nation”, which means that all others are “dispensable.” That’s the core belief of neoconservatism, and O’Brien is so extreme a believer in it as to attack Obama for having not been as extreme as he himself is.

The entire range of neoconservatism is, however, the norm in U.S.-and-allied international relations. Extreme as O’Brien is, he’s merely extremely normal for a top person in international relations, in any country that’s allied with the United States today.

To study international relations isn’t evil, but to rise to the international top in that field is evil, because the international top in this field can’t be reached unless the writer is propagandizing for the world’s leading power and is therefore an imperialist, and that’s a reliable definition of what it means to be evil in international relations.

Imperialism is ‘justifiable’ only on one basis, supremacism; and that’s the belief in might-makes-right, which is also the core belief in fascism — which is intrinsically evil. This is the reason why Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, were commonly called “fascist,” even though only in Italy was the tyrant’s political party named that with a capital “F”. The ideology is lower-case, “fascism” — this is simply the might-makes-right belief, and this ideology has existed ever since the dawn of civilization itself. Mussolini didn’t invent it, but he updated it, so as to call  it “corporationism,” and, synonymously, “fascism.” He called it that in order to enable the prior aristocratic system, feudalism, which was based upon ownership and control of land, to become ‘updated’ to “fascism,” which is based instead upon ownership and control of corporations. Now in the industrial era, ownership of shares of stock replaces ownership of acres of land, the aristocratic system which had prevailed in the pre-1600 human era, the agrarian era. And this is the modern form of feudalism: fascism. They’re just different eras of supremacism.

Another good example of a leading scholar of international relations is Harvard’s Graham Allison, whom I have previously discussed in regards to his views regarding Russia. This time, however, I shall discuss his views regarding China, and I also shall discuss his views concerning existing U.S. foreign policies relating not only to China and Russia but to the entire non-U.S. world. As you will see: he agrees with Barack Obama that “The United States is and remains the one  indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.” In other words: Allison believes that every other  nation is “dispensable.” That view is American supremacism — America’s form  of fascism. It’s also called “neoconservatism.” This is how one becomes appointed to — and he leads — Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

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On 11 December 2018, the anonymous “Zero Hedge” headlined “This is What The ‘Trade’ War With China Is Really All About”, and provided there a brilliant description of what the conflict with China is actuallyabout, and of why this conflict has now reached the stage where it inevitably will dominate geostrategy in the centuries going forward (if a resulting nuclear war won’t end everything, which would eliminate future centuries). Global warming could be permanently interrupted by nuclear winter from a major-powers nuclear war, but those are the only two reasonably credible doomsday scenarios, at present (other than an asteroid-hit against this planet, which would be far less likely): global burnout, or else WW III.

Perhaps these two possibilities are why the great poet Robert Frost wrote:

Fire and Ice

BY ROBERT FROST

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Both options — “fire” and “ice” — would be Man-made; and, in both options, the people who are leading us there are imperialists — fascists. Some of them push for global burnout; some push for WW III; some push for both.

When Frost said, “I hold with those who favor fire,” he was suggesting that he expected a World War III, which, as a nuclear mega-conflict, would actually end up freezing the planet to death, thus: “nuclear winter.” Consequently, his “fire” would produce the opposite of fire; and global burnout (which would take far longer to implement) isn’t  the “fire” that he was referring to. Global burnout would simply kill everything on the planet — there would be nothing left to burn.

Fascists aren’t concerned about either “fire” or “ice,” but only about supremacy: their conquest, and rule over the world. They are heedless of both global burnout and nuclear war — except insofar as they think that either outcome could end up placing “our side” on top — and would thus be ‘good’ in their view, because to them it would be “victory,” and “Might makes right.”

For example: Robert Scheer’s 1982 book, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War, was about the U.S. Republican Party mainstream, which is fascism, and specifically was about the Ronald Reagan and G.H.W. Bush (and very much also later described G.W. Bush’s) view, that America must build nuclear weapons in order to use them to conquer Russia — not really in order to prevent war between the U.S. and Russia. One of Scheer’s interviews in that book was with Charles Kupperman, who at that time was a national-security advisor to President Reagan, and became subsequently a vice president both at Lockheed Martin and at Boeing — the two largest sellers to the U.S. Government, meaning the top two U.S. Government contractors (basically, the two largest suppliers to the Pentagon). Here are excerpts from Scheer’s interview with Kupperman about this, when he asked (p. 131) Kupperman about whether victory in a nuclear war is possible:

Scheer: So you think it is possible to win? …

Kupperman: I think it is possible to win. [Scheer asked what that means.] It means that it is clear after the war that one side is stronger than the other side, the weaker side is going to accede to the demands of the stronger side.

No definition was supplied as to what measures should apply in order to determine “that one side is stronger than the other side.” But clearly, Kupperman meant that “the weaker side is going to accede to the demands of the stronger side.” He was thinking in terms of Russia’s surrendering. To a fascist, surrendering means that the surrenderer is inferior to the victor: after all, “Might makes right” is  their ‘ethic’. That’s what it means  to be  a supremacist.

Scheer asked what that victory would be like, and Kupperman said: “It would be a struggle to reconstitute the society that we have. It certainly wouldn’t be the same society [that had existed] prior to an exchange, there is no question about that. But in terms of having an organized nation, and having enough means left after the war to reconstitute itself, I think that is entirely possible.”

Nothing was asked about how that’s possible after the nuclear war, when there would be nuclear winter. Wikipedia has a good article about “Nuclear Winter”, and it not only describes that, but states:

A “nuclear summer” is a hypothesized scenario in which, after a nuclear winter caused by aerosols inserted into the atmosphere that would prevent sunlight from reaching lower levels or the surface,^[58]has abated, a greenhouse effect then occurs due to carbon dioxide released by combustion and methane released from the decay of the organic matter and methane from dead organic matter and corpses that froze during the nuclear winter.^[58][59]

Another more sequential hypothetical scenario, following the settling out of most of the aerosols in 1–3 years, the cooling effect would be overcome by a heating effect from greenhouse warming, which would raise surface temperatures rapidly by many degrees, enough to cause the death of much if not most of the life that had survived the cooling, much of which is more vulnerable to higher-than-normal temperatures than to lower-than-normal temperatures.

So: a reasonable assumption would be that people such as Kupperman understate, to the point of basically lying about, the consequences if they succeed. First, there would be the immediate deaths and then the deaths from injuries and diseases afterwards; then, there would be the starvations, the global famine; then, there would be the nuclear winter; and, then, there might be global warming “rapidly by many degrees, enough to cause the death of much if not most of the life that had survived the cooling.” And, of course, any surviving Republicans, and the many Democrats who likewise are neoconservatives-imperialists-fascists, would try to kill as many of their surviving opponents as possible, so that “the weaker side is going to accede to the demands of the stronger side,” which would be victory, for the ‘winners’, of that nuclear war.

Before Robert O’Brien got the nod on September 18th, Kupperman was the temporary National Security Advisor to the President of the United States, when Kupperman’s immediate superior, John Bolton, was fired by Donald Trump, for having failed to conquer either Venezuela or Iran or Syria or Russia or China or North Korea. Perhaps Bolton and Pompeo, and the other people whom Trump had surrounded himself with, expected that Trump would go to war against all or at least one  of them (perhaps Venezuela?), in order to reassert America’s supremacy over the entire globe, but Trump refused to do that so short a time before the next U.S. Presidential election, and so they all were disappointed in him, and he was disappointed in them. On 10 September 2019, the New York Times  reported that, “the president appreciated Mr. Kupperman’s just-the-facts style compared with Mr. Bolton’s often ideologically charged delivery: If Mr. Trump had to have a national security brief concerning long-term planning, he preferred it from Mr. Kupperman as opposed to Mr. Bolton, according to a person with knowledge of that process.” And now, Trump will get his neocon advice from O’Brien.

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Graham Allison’s best-selling 2017 Destined for War says that China is destined for war with the United States because China will be stupid or recalcitrant enough to resist becoming part of the American empire. In the standard self-righteous way of aristocrats and their sycophants, he starts with the unquestionable assumption that “we” are right and “they” (whomever challenges “our” supremacy) will be so stupid or otherwise flawed as to force “us” to ‘defend ourselves’ by demonstrating ‘our’ ‘superiority’. This is similar to the barbaric views that are expressed by virtually all members of the U.S. Congress, and by all U.S. Presidents, since at least the time of Reagan — all of them similarly self-righteous and imperialistic. In fact, America’s leading national-security scientists have asserted that the U.S. Government is now so strongly neoconservative that America’s weaponry is now designed definitely with the purpose being to win a nuclear war  against Russia, instead of to prevent, or even to avoid, such a war. They have documented that, at the very top of the U.S. Government, there is more extreme supremacism than has ever existed anywhere. Never before in history has a regime — not even Hitler’s — implemented a plan to conquer the world even if its only realistic result, if the plan succeeds, would be to terminate all life on Earth. America’s supremacism — such as is advocated by Graham Allison and all U.S. Administrations since at least the time of G.W. Bush — is the one and only supreme supremacism.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, these were the views that were similarly expressed by the aristocracies and sycophants in places such as Germany, Italy, and Japan. I am not saying that those people, or ours, who hold to supremacist views, are “filth,” or “trash,” or other such supposed pejoratives. After all, there can be good filth or trash. However, there cannot be any good fascist (or “imperialist”). (Is there “good evil”? Does anyone actually think so?) I agree with FDR on that.

Succeeding in the field of foreign affairs, in Washington, DC, by repudiating American imperialism, or “neoconservatism,” is, and long has been, impossible. That town has emerged, since WW II, to become the fascist capital of the world. In this sense, the sides have become reversed, since FDR’s death.

So: the differences between Robert O’Brien, and Graham Allison, and Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, and G.W. Bush, are, actually small, when it comes to international relations. They’re all fascists. They’re all normal U.S. experts on topics of international relations.

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