One of many odd things I enjoy as hobby, besides eccentric tastes in food, is subscribing (free) to and reading disparate political and social views. I know how conservatives feel about abortion, and why, their moral basis, "Life", and though I have contempt for the politicos who pander for their votes, I sympathize; even though, feeling that all government is always all ways all bad and so despising government interference in matters of personal conviction, conscience, need, bedroom activity, I understand the other side, "Choice", as well.
A native of the Old South, I also understand, but no longer sympathize or have patience with, or tolerance for, white conservatives who fear encroaching demographic shifts that are rapidly and inexorably reducing Whites to a minority in the American electorate. I understand their race to contain nonwhite voting, though I detest and utterly condemn it.
More, and to my point here, having watched it all my aware life, I especially read and try to understand the viewpoints of both unshakeable sides in the Middle East, and I see both evil and good in both Israeli and Palestinian points of view and actions. To my personal goal of working better to understand, I daily receive by email, news sources from both sides, one being "Palestine Updates". So, I was - - stunned - - is the right word - - but in retrospect probably should not have been, to read this opinion posted in the current issue of "Palestine Updates", because frankly it'd never occurred to me and it so differs from all that I've been feeling these days about the Afghanistan situation.
I dare you to read through it and contemplate that there are people who feel so different to us, who evidently harbor such hatred of us, although we have indeed earned the world's contempt for our Afghanistan adventure, and have rightfully lost our credibility as world leader, all to my mind simply part of our progression into our own national sequel to "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". You thought the American Experiment could never falter, fail or fall? You are living into it. And we have proved ourselves dishonorable and not trustworthy in the bargain.
There are three enclosures below, an essay, a WaPo extract, and another essay. The last, starting with my red cap font to set it off, is an essay which is anonymous and admittedly has not been source-ratified, was forwarded to me overnight, by a fellow retired naval officer with whom I share trust and many opinions, points of view, and I added early this morning. It is, as he said, sobering. As I say, it is anonymous, but it coincidentally ties in with the second headline in The Washington Post extract that is "second in line" below.
The first, the opinion essay "Afghanistan is free" is challenging, you can taste the hatred, smell the blood There is no thought of peace, but goading, gloating contempt, lust for vengeance, vehemence for destruction, a claim of victory. Why is it so? Trying to understand instead of returning hate for hate, I remember after 9/11, the Saudi prince who, after having given Mayor Giuliani a relief check for $10 million, released a statement that said, "At times like this one, we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack. I believe the government of the United States of America should reexamine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause." Mayor Giuliani thereupon rejected the check, but Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's statement could hardly have been more "right on". We bring the hatred on ourselves, comes to mind the dimwit in a television cartoon who wanders onto the stage and, seeing a string, pulls it, is dumped on, covered over with whatever, then reads the sign, "do not pull string". Yes, our policies gain contempt and hatred for us. Anyway, read all of this:
Pic. A smiling, evidently happy man sells Taliban flags.
Pic. Evacuees crowd inside a U S Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft, carrying some 640 people from Kabul to Qatar.
Palestine Update 488
Opinion
Afghanistan is free
The Taliban have won back their terrain and the Americans have scooted after having invested two trillion dollars or more leaving behind death and destruction. It is a new dawn, a new era. American colonialism and their allies have been crushed. Another Vietnam?
Will Afghanistan degenerate? Or will the Taliban transform from being a fighting liberating force into a ruling category. If one were to hazard an objective conjecture, the Taliban has no more war to fight. They have their territories in hand and have crushed the USA and all those who allied with them.
President Ghani oversaw a regime that was far, far away from the aspirations of the people. He had no clue what the country was all about. His end came with an escape on a helicopter supplied by the US Army into which he loaded tons of stolen money, cars, and the luxuries he had gotten used to in his palace in Kabul. Ghani is presently hiding somewhere in a Central Asian State where he will bide his time until he finds a safer haven that will give him refuge, but as a fugitive for life. He is like many of the corrupt and cruel dictators who escaped their countries from advancing peoples movements who wanted them no more. Like them, Ghani was a sheer coward and a thief pretending he was an intellectual and a good guy. Like all the US backed corrupt and cruel dictators, he never in his wildest dreams thought that the Taliban would capture village after village until they final swept Kabul. The Afghan army simply dissolved.
I live in India and Afghanistan is not next door but it is in my geographical neighborhood. Many in my country are filled with Islamaphobia. They worry about how people in the new Afghanistan will be treated. I’m cynical and smile. I ask: How good is our own regime? Muslims and Christians are insecure. Dalits and Tribals are oppressed. The poor live in absolute misery and our regime is fascist to its deepest core.
Ghani was no angel – although the West would like to project him as one – a man of books unwilling to stage a war. But his friends were blood lusty. He loved his palace and ended up being the Emperor without clothes. Members of Ghani’s cabinet cursed him. They said at the end: “They tied our hands from behind and sold the country.”
A formal transfer of power is underway. The head of the High Council for National Reconciliation Abdullah Abdullah announced that former President Harmid Karzai and Hizb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, are currently in negotiations with the Taliban over the formal transfer of power.
The US and its allies are the laughing stock, just like after Saigon. The things they brought back to their country were body bags and stolen goods. They learned the hard way that military superiority and training do not offer warranty of solidity, permanence and steadfastness. The regime they left behind was dilapidated.
Biden was utterly imprudent, thoughtless and mindless, arrogant and foolish. From distant Washington, he declared that the Afghan military was better trained, and better equipped to win the war. He counted them in numbers and swore the Taliban were not match for his well trained imbeciles. He will now have to find a place to hide his face in the midst of the disgrace which he and his equally inane predecessors created. America’s military establishment has proven once again its insufficient brain power and common sense in war. The only thing they can create is chaos not victory. The courageous Afghan men, who the Americans held in contempt, thoroughly outmaneuvered their stooge army. The Afghan fighters have proven they are not savages, as the reference to ‘bearded’ implies. They survived and outclassed the forces of the US, NATO and rival militias.
Soon they will announce the new inauguration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. History has taken a full violent circle. America’s half baked solutions have been dumped into the garbage dumps of history. And what is the moral? Get back to where you belong and humanize your own barbaric society that are replete with capitalistic abuse, racial exploitation, and faulty democracies that are run on the basis not of first past the past, but one which hands victories to those who have money bags. I wonder what the fighter who was put into the Guantanamo prison for over a decade is saying now. He sits in Ghani’s chair today. I wonder where Saddam Hussein, and Gaddafi, Osama Bin Laden and many others who the American’s killed on nonsensical pretexts are today. They are surely celebrating. They will party will party in heaven! Yes, in heaven. Rumsfield and his ilk will meanwhile have the heat turned on as they burn and rot in hell for starting evil and needless wars, while minting millions in their dirty wars.
How will Taliban be in their new avatar? Taliban has promised to respect women's rights, media freedom and amnesty for former officials in the country. "We don’t want any internal or external enemies," Zabihullah Mujahid, the armed group’s main spokesman said. They were clearly adopting a softer line compared when they were in power 20 years ago.
Hamas has applauded the Taliban victory. Tens and thousands around the world are celebrating. The Palestinians now know they can dream dreams of an end to the cruel colonial, racist, apartheid occupation. If powerful America can collapse in the face of resistance in a mere 30 years, how many years more can Israel, once a determined resistance is launched? What form of liberation will they achieve?
The sun has set on one phase of history. Left alone, the Afghans will rebuild. All initial signs point in this direction. The political system which now shapes up may be imperfect. No country comes close to being perfect. But at least the people have the choice to bend and shape it to their liking.
There is hope in the Afghan freedom for other oppressed peoples. The Palestinian struggle will find new life and a different paradigm. Palestine will be free.
Ranjan Solomon
I do not subscribe to WaPo, but, interestingly for those of us who remember our shame after the Saigon debacle, here are the half-dozen top headlines Wednesday afternoon:
 |  | | The day's most important stories, curated by Post editors. | | |
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 A mural of former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani at the airport in Kabul. (AP) By Rachel Pannett, Erin Cunningham, Jennifer Hassan and Claire Parker ● Read more » | | |
By Timothy Bella ● Read more »
+++++++++++++++++++ MOST SOBERING: THE THIRD ENCLOSURE: THE ANONYMOUS ESSAY, PURPORTEDLY FROM A SERVING GENERAL OFFICER OF THE U S ARMED FORCES Subject: Thoughts on Afghanistan from a self-proclaimed senior military officer, whatever that means? AUGUST 18, 2021 THOUGHTS ON AFGHANISTAN, from a senior military officer with whom I am acquainted:
I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer and what I have to say is highly critical of our current military leadership. But it must be said.
I don’t blame President Biden for the catastrophe in Afghanistan. It was the right decision to leave, the proof of which is how quickly the country collapsed without US support. Twenty years of training and equipping the Afghan army and all that they were capable of was a few hours of delay in a country the size of Texas. As for his predecessor, the only blame I place on President Trump was that he didn’t withdraw sooner.
We should blame President Bush, not for the decision to attack into Afghanistan following 9-11, but for his decision to “shift the goalposts” and attempt to reform Afghanistan society. That was a fool’s errand any student of history would have recognized. And yes, we should place blame on President Obama for his decision to double down on failure when he “surged” in Afghanistan, rather than to withdraw.
However, most of the blame belongs to the leadership of the US military, and the Army in particular. The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” detailed years of US officials failing to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” That report was two years ago, and the stories within it began more than a decade before that. Afghanistan was, and always will be, “unwinnable”.
Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders. They stonewalled President Trump rather than beginning deliberate preparations to exit the country when he told them to. They thought that they could outlast him and then talk sense to his successor. Then after the inauguration, they pressed the new president to reverse course. He wisely chose withdrawal. Then and only then did the generals begin their preparations in earnest. But it was too late to do it well.
The war in Afghanistan lasted more than twice as long as the Vietnam War. Although the cost in terms of American blood was thankfully far smaller, the mistakes are the same: America got involved in a long land war in Asia, in a peripheral region, in order to prop up a floundering and unreliable government, and at a time when there was a much bigger looming threat. In fact, Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in that at least the Vietnam War was tangentially related to the effort to stop the global spread of communism during the Cold War. Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in another respect: the military’s leaders of the Vietnam era had no precedent to dissuade them from a disastrous path. Today’s military leadership has the precedent of not just Vietnam, but also Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. That much obtuseness must be punished and removed from the system.
General Milley must resign. Not only is he the Chairman of the Joint Staff, prior to that he was the Chief of Staff of the Army. While all services share the blame, the Army is the land domain proponent. The 20 years of failure in Afghanistan is an Army failure. Scores of other generals also deserve a thorough evaluation; many of them are complicit in the lies to protect a decades-long failed strategy.
Secretary of Defense Austin also must be fired. The recently retired Army general and former CENTCOM commander was, and still is, part of the culture that is impervious to the fact that 20 years of trying it their way did not work.
Just as it did after Vietnam, the military, and especially the Army, must conduct a comprehensive review of why it exists. The purpose of the Army is to visit profound violence on our nation’s enemies; it is not to rebuild failed states. We have decades of experience: counter-insurgencies and nation-building does not work for America. We do not have the stomach for long wars of occupation—and that is a good thing. We are a nation of commerce, not conflict. A constellation of retired stars will tell you that the two can coexist. They are wrong. Retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane said only two months ago that because Afghanistan consumes just a small portion of the force, America “can afford the cost of fighting” there. What he does not see is that for 20 years, that “small portion” was the most important portion of the military. Everything else necessarily is subservient to the portion of the force in conflict. It has altered who the Army is and how it thinks. There exists only a handful of officers below the general officer ranks who served during the Cold War and who have lived through an era of great power conflict. From private through brigade commander, virtually every Army Soldier serving today has experienced little other than counterinsurgencies or nation-building while operating out of secure FOBs. Large scale combat operations and insurgencies require different cultures and mindsets. In a resource constrained environment, the same service cannot do both well. The Army today could not win a major war. Yet, winning a major war, is the number one reason why an Army exists. It will take a generation to break bad habits, to think in terms of closing with and destroying the enemy versus winning hearts and minds. Keane sees raw numbers (and ignores the stark evidence that there was no progress over 20 years) and thinks that America’s Army can sustain that level of commitment. It cannot, and the opportunity cost to the culture of the force is much too great. Ignore him. Ignore Petraeus, McMaster, Stavridis, and the rest of their ilk.
Concurrent with its review of purpose, the Army must reevaluate its size and how it is organized. The active component is much too large. That makes it too eager to get involved in irrelevant theaters where failure is likely or even preordained. It should be very difficult for an American president to deploy the Army without the National Guard performing most combat operations. You argue that that takes time? Yes, that’s the point: it should take time to make the case to the American people that war is worth it.
The Marine Corps must provide the nation’s rapid response forces. It is a self-contained deployable multi-domain force. Some would argue that the service has both insufficient combat power and staying power. However, that is a feature, and not a flaw, as it forces the nation to rely on its Army—and hence its reserve components—before engaging in heavy combat or lengthy operations. The current Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Berger, already seems to recognize his service’s role—hence his decision to eliminate armor from the Corps.
Congress must reevaluate the authorities contained within Sections 12301 through 12304 of Title X. The president has too much latitude to, on his own authority, mobilize tens or even hundreds of thousands of Guardsmen and Reservists without congressional approval. It must be the policy of the United States that we do not place our service members in harm’s way without first making the case to the American people. This also means ending the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force as well as strengthening Congress’ role in the War Powers Act such that, absent an actual declaration of war, there can be no war.
Some would argue that such a constraint would limit the nation’s ability to respond to a Russian incursion in the Baltics or a Chinese attack on Taiwan. However, recent open-source studies conclude that the US military already is unable to defend against either attack. Pretending otherwise while not having the means to back up our assurances unnecessarily emboldens our partners and allies, making such an attack more likely. We lose nothing by making the law match the reality.
Let us not forget the intelligence agencies. They reported that Kabul was at risk of falling in as little as 90 days. That report was from last Thursday! The capital fell in less than 90 hours. Failure must be punished. And punishment in a bureaucracy means mass firings and a smaller budget—not more money so that they might be better the next time. Congress must consolidate and collapse our intelligence agencies. And when its reorganization is done, if the overall size of the nation’s intelligence apparatus is a quarter of what it is now, that still is too large.
And while we are on the topic of “too large,” DoD must be halved. There are too many flag officers, too many agencies, departments, and directorates. It is the only secretariat with independent but supposedly subordinate secretaries. There are too many Geographic Component Commands—each led by a 4-star virtual proconsul whose budget dwarfs what the Department of State spends in their regions. The result is a foreign policy that is overly military and underly diplomatic, informational, and economic. Congress must revisit the 1947 National Security Act and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Both were good for their times, but after decades of experience, there clearly are new reforms necessary.
Unreformed, DoD is an inscrutable labyrinth which invites fraud, waste, and abuse. The excess attracts unscrupulous camp followers. Amazon did not choose Crystal City to locate its new headquarters because of low rents and ease of transportation access for its 25,000 employees. It chose the Arlington, Virginia neighborhood because it is two blocks from the Pentagon. That building controls the distribution of three-quarters of a trillion dollars every year. Most of it is wasted. The excess is apparent in the scores of class-A high rises housing defense contractors just blocks from the Pentagon. To end that waste, nothing so concentrates the senses as austerity.
Let me conclude with one last thought: the generals, the intelligence analysts, the defense contractors, and the pundits all leveraged America’s rarest resource: the American serviceman and woman. They are the ones who fought, and sweat, and bled, and died for what is now clearly a failed strategy and a doomed mission. Even after its failure was apparent to their leaders, they continued to enlist and reenlist, largely because their superiors—the experts—assured them that success was possible. It was not. It never was. Absent American support, Afghanistan collapsed over the length of a long weekend. That is proof enough that the last 20 years were in vain, and proof enough that the system is broken from within.
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WHY DO MANAGERS, INCLUDING MILITARY
OFFICERS, LIE TO THEIR SUPERIORS? TO
MAKE THEMSELVES LOOK GOOD. ONE
NEVER ADMITS FAILURE. TO GET A GOOD
OFFICER EVALUATION REPORT. TO STAY IN
THE COMPETITION FOR PROMOTION. IT
WORKS. AND ONE "MOVES ON" IN ROTATION
BEFORE BEING CAUGHT. IT'S THE CULTURE. |
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