Projeet on Government Oversight - Assuming you’re an American, your grip on how your country wages its wars loosened a little more last week.
President Trump gave the Pentagon responsibility for determining how many U.S. troops will be deployed to Afghanistan to continue fighting the longest war in the nation’s history. The United States, turning 241 years old next month, has been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly 7 percent of its existence.
Trump’s decision surfaced the same day Defense Secretary Mattis told Congress that the U.S. is “not winning” the Afghan war, where the foes now include elements of ISIS. That comes as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the conflict. But the frank acknowledgement by the defense chief—in a town where perception is often reality—raises the stakes for what comes next: doubling down, or defeat?
The nation has already spent close to $1 trillion and sacrificed more than 2,300 young American lives on this purported anti-terror treadmill.
Trump is basically handing off a key decision on waging the war to military men. Mattis wore a Marine uniform for 41 years. Congress had to issue him a waiver to serve as the Pentagon boss because he had been a civilian for only three years, and not the seven required by law. His liaison at the White House is Lieut. General H.R. McMaster, a 33-year Army officer who is Trump’s national security adviser.
2 comments:
Add that trillion in the heist from taxpayers to the other trillions in drug sales. Not a bad decade for the pipeline imperialists although they are losing the war against civilization to the civilized Silk Road. The US is in the role of outlaw train robbers against Chinese railroads, the grand colonial game lost to the locals. Vietnam all over again but by this domino theory one more nation from which the US is required to remove itself, doesnt equate to one better opportunity for independence. The invention of ISIS is that local self determination is co-opted. As long as there are radical islamists the US can still wage war even if not by taking ground, but secular government can be destroyed never to return as is the plan with Syria. Ultimately the Silk Road will go to the UN to clear out the US marauders and will deal themselves with defeating their ISIS surrogates.
In Vietnam the US learned that it wasn't sufficient to destroy the economy, the environment and to reduce population. Genocide was not enough, national governance itself must be obliterated to facilitate US access to resources. Al qaeda was invented to make Afghanistan ungovernable by the Soviets. Since that success it has become the dominant instrument of US foreign policy. To the extent that 2 presidential candidacies were based on the ability to assassinate respectively a quietly retired Pakistani subject and also the leader of Libya. Unlike Who Shot Liberty Valence, on which those candidacies were modeled, it is the US in the role of the cattle rustlers and potentially the Silk Road as the proponent of the rule of law.
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