Afghan retrospective and our future…

Hindsight is 20/20.  Granted.  But here are a lot of woulda shoulda’s…

We should have vacated with our heads held high upon our killing of Osama Bin Laden 10 years ago in 2011 –if we should ever have been there at all. After all, he is the alleged reason we were there in the first place as the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

Going back further, why did we support the Islamic Mujahedeen against the Russian invasion designed stabilize the region and defend the borders of its nearby allies with Afghanistan? HERE is a bit of history of Russia’s attempt to assert a sense of order there until the US enjoined (funded and supplied) the equivalent of the Taliban against Russia.

That was our first mistake: Partnering with the Islamic devil in a place we should never have been.

Our second mistake, after we insisted on being there, was our insane “rules of engagement”, or more accurately, our rules of how to demonstrate our ultimate, insane weakness in combat and fuzzified objectives.  “Nation-building?”  Seriously?  Talk about national hubris:  Attempting to change 1,000 years of dark ages violent, tribal culture among a people who hated foreign influence as much as we hated the oppression of the British in the 1770’s. And as far on the other side of the globe as our troops could possibly be.

Train the people who really had no real will to fight against their own people to fight against their own people?  Another huge miscalculation.  No wonder there were so many insider killings of our troops. Dress like allies – kill like enemies.  That is exactly what they did.

The proof of this absurd assumption manifests itself in the performance of the Afghan soldiers we trained over these 20 years. 

From the Wall Street Journal:

After 20 years of war, much of what the U.S. sought to accomplish in Afghanistan crumbled in just one week. The insurgent movement controlled none of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals until it seized the remote city of Zaranj just a week earlier, Aug. 6.

During that advance, Afghan security forces, meant to number 350,000 men, often surrendered without a fight, with soldiers giving up American-bought weaponry and taking advantage of Taliban promises of amnesty.

And finally, our government and media STILL ignorantly insist on believing that Islam is “just another religion” like Japan’s Shinto. We failed to admit their 1,400 year doctrine of hatred toward the infidel, the “people of the book”, Jews and Christians.  Our attempts of westernizing and democratizing their culture and Islamic ideology was a non-starter.

Over 3,500 coalition soldiers were killed. Many times that number have had their bodies, lives and families shattered.

From Wikipedia:

Since the start of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan through mid-2019, nearly 2,400 American servicemembers have died.^[159] Additionally, 20,719 U.S. service members have been wounded in hostile action, according to the Defense Department.^[3]

And how much money did this cost us over these 20 years? 

From US News and World Report:

The U.S. has spent a stunning total of $2.26 trillion on a dizzying array of expenses, according to the Costs of War project.

Where do we go from here and have we learned any lessons?

Number one:  We have lost international credibility and respect. It will take decades, if ever, to gain it back.  I don’t think we know how.

We obviously didn’t learn any lesson from the Vietnam debacle, which suffered from the same mismanagement from the top.  We will have our tail tucked between our legs as we make our hasty and sloppy escape from Kabul, just as we did from Saigon.

We maintain our ignorance and wishful thinking about Islam, its doctrines, culture, and intent, believing it can be partnered with and managed.  Wrong!

Our definition of “victory” was fuzzy and ill-conceived.  “Winning” lost all objectivity.  Winning was redefined into “unwinnable.”  We had a great, capable military, but it’s politicized leadership made it impossible – the “will to win” was destroyed more than the ill-defined enemy.

We have a military/industrial army of federal government lobbyists who buy their way into influencing our woke and easily manipulated politicians to embark on crazy crusades into worldwide places we should never be in. Are our days of being the world’s cop over?  I doubt it.

Even at the very end, our military officials are still lying to us as evidenced by this press conference with Pentagon spokesman John Kirby HERE. Joe Biden has also recently expressed similar otherworldly lying optimism. A Biden interview in July shows how out of touch he is:

"So, the question now is, where do they go from here?" Biden posed in a July 8 press conference, according to Fox News. "The jury is still out, but the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” 

More on lying Joe’s lost mind HERE.

In the meantime, our borders back home remain wide open to Middle Eastern Islamists posing as Mexicans and Guatemalans, all without any ID; drug cartels and violent gang members pumping drugs into our cities; and thousands spreading COVID to every state in the nation courtesy of funding from our duped taxpayers through complicit Pollyanna churches in the name of “compassion.” Estimates range up to one million new illegals will be everywhere in the US by the end of this year – most on welfare paid for by an increasingly out of control federal deficit.

And all the while our leftist politicians in partnership with greedy globalist corporations claim its all for the good (good for their wallets), cancelling any voices that disagree with their insanity.

There is a DVD predicting our “Death of a Nation”, by Dinesh D'Souza which ironically contains similar themes covered by the 1968 book by John Stormer of the same title – another indication of lessons not learned.

I would not be surprised to read a book of history in the not too distant future by the same title chronicling how the death of our nation actually occurred.