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"We didn't know what we were doing" - The Afghanistan Papers

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Alma, Dec 9, 2019.

  1. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    This is politics, yes, but very deserving of its own thread.

    The Washington Post, after three years, got ahold of 400 interviews of all the mistakes and lies surrounding the war in Afghanistan. It'll take me a week to sift through it all but, at first blush, it's incredibly damning, and it's also notable that the government sought to keep the extent of the disaster to itself.

    With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

    The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

    The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

    Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

    Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

    “What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

    The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.


    Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They 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.

    Our government has to stop doing this.

    Our government also needs to come to terms with an ongoing obsession with war and fighting.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/grap...ner-high_afghanbanner-625a:homepage/story-ans
     
    maumann likes this.
  2. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    You are right of course Alma. As an old, I am struck and incredibly depressed by the similarity of this story to the Pentagon Papers. The basic deal is, no administration in the post WW2 era, Republican or Democratic, has had the nerve to tell the American people this country's lost a war and worse, got in one that could never be won. Even more depressing is that the consensus in the American political class that voters will viciously punish any pol who tells these truths is surely correct.
     
    maumann and qtlaw like this.
  3. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    What can I say (that I haven't already said)?

    [​IMG]
     
  4. Regan MacNeil

    Regan MacNeil Well-Known Member

    This is going to be hilarious when noted liberal Alma ends up swearing fealty to the one Republican in the Democratic field.
     
  5. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    I think the person probably best aligned to end that nonsense is Sanders. Really. He intends to spend so much on American initiatives, I'm not sure there'd be a trillion left over for nation-building.

    Sanders just plays the notes he needs to play on foreign policy. I think he'd be pretty non-interventionist, honestly.
     
  6. Regan MacNeil

    Regan MacNeil Well-Known Member

    Really? Even more so than Mistress Regime Change Wars?
     
  7. CD Boogie

    CD Boogie Well-Known Member

    We also need to stop soft-peddling the involvement of Saudis in U.S.-based terror attacks, but as seen with the actions of pornstache this past weekend, that ain't happening.

    https://nypost.com/2019/12/09/pensacola-shooter-was-infuriated-over-porn-stash-nickname-report/

    Oh, and we also need to train people not to insult others with monikers that are truly insulting to their religions and cultures. Good luck with that in our "embrace the derp" culture.
     
  8. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    Well, in the sense that she's not going to be winning the nomination or even coming close, yes. Tulsi Gabbard is a one-issue candidate, and her stance on that issue is closer to that of a news columnist that something formed into a worldview.

    Anyway, have you read any of this, yet? I think one of the most notable things in it revolves around how the US spent far more aid money than was even helpful; that, at some point, it became deeply counterproductive. I think that's a takeaway for any president going forward. There's a book we use for missionaries, "When Helping Hurts," that was helpful for me in understanding some of the issues at play when us from the West attempt to resolve mass change through a capitalistic lens.
     
  9. heyabbott

    heyabbott Well-Known Member

    ObL could not have believed that the US would go Wolf Bltizer navel gazing and agonize over what the "Arab Street" would think about a retaliatory act for 9/11. He probably didn't believe it could be as successful as it was. But the Bush/Cheney Admin so thoroughly dismissed the Clinton warnings about bin Laden as to make Al Queda's plan a virtual lock to be successful.
    ObL was ultimately successful beyond his prayers that Bush and Cheney pissed away a united world to go after Iraq and destroy the unity that was most world military powers. And ObL had no love for the Afgan people, he clearly had no problem sacrificing the entire nation to tie the US up in a trillion dollar outlay for zero success. Iraq isn't even a US client state. In fact, the US is now a client State of the Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Trump is the hotelier to terrorists
     
  10. BitterYoungMatador2

    BitterYoungMatador2 Well-Known Member

    To play devils advocate here: not all of the blame goes to the politicians, even though it ultimately falls at their feet. This country's population was out for revenge after 9-11. We all probably knew at least one or two people who felt the entire Middle East, not just Afghanistan, should be carpet bombed and turned into a parking lot. Meanwhile, what would have more than likely been more effective were covert operations similar to how the FBI took down the Italian Mafia. Of course, that's secretive, takes a helluva lot of time and sure as shit doesn't satisfy the blood lust of The Big Dum in this country.
     
  11. Neutral Corner

    Neutral Corner Well-Known Member

    The phrase "Never get into a land war in Asia" was coined by the British after their Afghan wars. We should have listened.

    That said, we had Afghanistan reasonably well in hand until GWB decided to invade Iraq. Once we divided our attention and efforts, things went downhill. Still being in there twenty years later is stupidity.
     
    wicked likes this.
  12. Small Town Guy

    Small Town Guy Well-Known Member

    Jim Brady with a great line on Twitter that when the movie comes out about how the Post put the Afghanistan Papers together he assumes it will be called "The Times."
     
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