Afghanistan the war we can't win.

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Will this report, from the Washington Post, on the Afghan War be like the Pentagon Papers of the Vietnam War?
A major Washington Post investigation released Monday is a confirmation of the peace movement's message that "there's no military solution in Afghanistan."

That's according to Paul Kawika Martin, senior director of policy and political affairs at Peace Action, replying to "The Afghanistan Papers." The report exposes how top officials spanning the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations waged a deliberate misinformation campaign to conceal the total failures of the 18-year war in Afghanistan.

The bombshell from investigative reporter Craig Whitlock "broadly resembles the Pentagon Papers," and it is based on over 2,000 pages of notes from interviews with a federal agency that "bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day" and belie comments by officials "who assured Americans year after year" of progress made in the war.

The paper obtained the cache of documents following a legal battle that lasted three years and included two lawsuits.

The documents came out of a project from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an agency now headed by Obama-appointee John Sopko. That project, entitled Lessons Learned, was meant to assess "the U.S. reconstruction experience in Afghanistan." While it has released a number of reports beginning 2016, those public documents had major omissions, namely "the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews" SIGAR conducted.

As the Post reported, the interviewees, who were directly involved in the war effort, were forthright, believing their remarks would not be made public. They revealed that officials continually misled the public about the war's success, there was no strategy, their efforts fueled corruption, and the U.S. was clearly losing ground as well as tens of thousands of lives and at least $1 trillion.

The trove includes transcripts and notes from over 400 interviewers between 2014 and 2018. SIGAR blacked out names of roughly 85 percnet of interviewees.

"It was impossible to create good metrics" about the troop surge, one unnamed senior National Security Council official said in a 2016 interview. "We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture." They added, "The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war."

That theme was similar to Army colonel Bob Crowley's remarks in a 2016 interview. "Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone," Crowley said.

Ryan Crocker, who was the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul from 2011 to 2012, said in a 2016 interview, "Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption."

The Post's reporting also used previously classified memos known as "snowflakes" from former Pentagon chief Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.

"I have no visibility into who the bad guys are," Rumsfeld said in a 2003 memo. "We are woefully deficient in human intelligence."

"Take the time to read every word of this," progressive commentator Krystal Ball said on Twitter of Whitlock's new investigation. "Three administrations have lied to us about Afghanistan. How many lives have been lost and fortunes spent for nothing??"

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said the takeaway from the reporting was clear: "18 years later it's time to get out. Now."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/ ... n-campaign

How may Lies and Wars have cost how many lives. Let's start with Vietnam with Eisenhower putting in advisors and observers. Kennedy ordered them removed three days before he was killed in Dallas. LBJ cancelled the order. Nixon prolongs the war to get elected. Desert Storm under George HW Bush. Had Bush kept a tighter rein on his puppet Saddam we would not have had that war. Afghanistan George W Bush Response to the 9/11 attack. Could have easily been a surgical strike on Ben Lauden as Clinton had wanted to do but was blocked by Congress. Iraq Two lies, by Darth Cheney from the start, for oil. Seems the Reptilians can't keep from using the defense department at every chance they have. Not to say the Dems hands aren't clean.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Afghanistan the war we can't win.

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I thought I was voting against Middle East/Afghan War in 2008... I should have read the fine print.
I: ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADED
II: NEVER LET THE MUZZLE COVER ANYTHING YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO DESTROY
III: KEEP YOUR FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOUR SIGHTS ARE ON THE TARGET
IV: BE SURE OF YOUR TARGET AND WHAT'S BEHIND IT

Re: Afghanistan the war we can't win.

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Tedzilla wrote: Tue Dec 10, 2019 4:32 pm I thought I was voting against Middle East/Afghan War in 2008... I should have read the fine print.
I think that wars are just a part of American life. How many invasions, police actions, peacekeeping actions, and wars in your lifetime? Seems like we have always been at war since WW2.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Afghanistan the war we can't win.

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Ah yes... Median and Persian Empires, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Indo-Greeks, Turks, Mongols, British and Soviet soldiers all dug their own graves in Afghanistan. And now the United States.
Afghanistan—where empires go to die.
-Mike Malloy
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi

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