Tag: Afghanistan

What America failed to understand about its war in Afghanistan

James Fetzerblog

Carter Malkasian As the United States leaves Afghanistan after 20 years of war, there can be little doubt that we lost the war — or to put it more gently, did not attain our objectives. In recent weeks, the Taliban have advanced across the north of the country. Bereft of US support, the Afghan army and police have reportedly lost more than two dozen districts over the course of a month and are now fighting on the outskirts of key cities such as Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif. Senior US officials have…

Chris Hedges: The Unraveling Of The American Empire

James Fetzerblog

Chris Hedges America’s defeat in Afghanistan is one in a string of catastrophic military blunders that herald the death of the American empire. With the exception of the first Gulf War, fought largely by mechanized units in the open desert that did not — wisely — attempt to occupy Iraq, the United States political and military leadership has stumbled from one military debacle to another. Korea. Vietnam. Lebanon. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. The trajectory of military fiascos mirrors the sad finales of the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, French, British, Dutch, Portuguese and…

ZeroHedge, 6 Warning Signs From Biden’s First Week In Office

James Fetzerblog

BY TYLER DURDEN Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org, The “progressive” candidate praised as a “woke bloke” seems to be carrying on where all his authoritarian Imperialist predecessors left off…   It’s been a busy first week for the 46th President of the United States, there are the 20,000 troops occupying the capital city to organise, as well as the totally unprecedented show-trial of his immediate predecessor. You know, usual democracy type stuff. On top of that, Biden has now signed at least 37 executive orders in his first week. The record for any President, and…

Matthew Hoh, Heaven Protect Us From Men Who Live the Illusion of Danger: Pete Buttigieg and the US Military

James Fetzerblog

by MATTHEW HOH “America deserves a Commander-in-Chief who knows what that sacrifice means and who will honor the sacred promise we make to our veterans.” – Pete Buttigieg January 6, 2020 #CIAPete has been trending on social media this past month as stories and commentaries have emerged telling and re-telling Pete Buttigieg’s role as a naval intelligence officer in Afghanistan, his duties in his assignment in Kabul as a member of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, and his relationship to CIA colleagues. This would be all rather amusing and just another dust speck of…

Barbara Boland, 5 Infuriating Takeaways From The ‘Afghanistan Papers’

James Fetzerblog

BARBARA BOLAND Lies, spin, over a trillion dollars wasted, and no strategy. They knew for 18 years and no one said a thing. After an extensive investigation and a three-year long Freedom of Information Act legal battle, The Washington Post released a trove of documents entitled the Afghanistan Papers Monday, and there’s a staggering amount of infuriating information contained therein. The trove comes from a project entitled “Lessons Learned” commissioned by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR.) As part of the project, SIGAR staff interviewed over…

Marc Thiessen, The Ten Worst Things Trump did in 2018

James Fetzerblog

By Marc A. Thiessen   [Editor’s note: Once again, I regard some of what Thiessen takes to be bad as good  just as I take some of what he regards as good as not. In this case,  where I regard 3 (seperating children from their families at the border as having been his obligation to follow a law signed by Bill Clinton and enforced by Barack Obama overwhelmingly more often) as one more Democratic political ploy, 2  (his plan to pull out of Afghanistan) and 1 (his plan to pull out of Syria) as his wisest foreign…