It's far from the longest U.S. war. There was no peace before or after it. There is no after it until they end it and bombing has always been most of what it is. It has had nothing to do with opposing terrorism. It has been a one-sided slaughter, a mass killing over two decades by a single invading army and air force dragging along token mascots from dozens of vassal states. After 20 years Afghanistan was one of the worst places to be on Earth, and the Earth as a whole was a worse place to be the rule of law, the state of nature, the refugee crises, the spread of terrorism, the militarization of governments all worsened. Then the Taliban took over.
When the U.S. armed the Afghan military with weapons costing enough to cause panic attacks in U.S. Senators had the expense been for anything other than murder, and predicted a happy little civil war, and then the Afghans refused to fight each other, the President of the United States denounced such reprehensible restraint, blaming the victims, instead of acknowledging the massive gift of yet more weaponry to the Taliban, instead of recognizing after 20 years anything about what Afghanistan is like. (Of course he still calls the war a "civil war" as U.S. voices have done for years and years because unless the U.S. military is regretfully helping out in a civil war waged by primitive people, it will be understood to be, you know, waging wars, smack in the middle of what U.S. academics call The Great Peace.)
The puppet government was never a government outside of the capital. The people were never loyal to the Taliban or the invaders, but merely to whichever set of lunatics was nearby waving guns. First the Taliban collapsed, then the Muppets in Kabul, and for 20 years in between every home and village switched sides as needed, with the U.S. developing permanent enemies, the Taliban making practical alliances, and people persistently noticing that they lived where they lived, while the strange-looking foreigners who killed, imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, urinated on, and threatened them for "human rights" lived somewhere else.
But millions of them were made homeless. Children froze to death in refugee camps. Approximately half the victims of the U.S. war were women. The puppet government passed a law to legalize spousal rape. Yet the hypocritical screech of "Women's Rights" was heard over the agonized moaning of the injured, even as the U.S. government blissfully armed and supported the brutal militaries of such bastions of women's rights as Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Ethiopia, Gabon, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Oman, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen.
The death, injury, trauma, homelessness, environmental destruction, governmental corruption, renewed drug dealing, and general catastrophe were kept quiet by an obsessive focus on the tiny percentage of deaths that were U.S. troops but excluding the majority even of those deaths because they were suicides.
"There is no military solution" the generals and weapons-funded presidents and Congress members chanted for decades while pushing more militarism. Yet nobody asked what "solution" even meant. "We're winning" they lied for decades until everyone announced that they'd "lost." Yet nobody asked what "winning" would have been. What was the goal? What was the purpose?
The rhetoric, official and amateur, that launched the war was about bombing a nation full of people as revenge for the crimes of a small number of individuals who had spent some time in the place. "Hey Mr. Taliban" song lyrics were racist, hateful, and genocidal celebrations of bombing the homes of people who dressed in pajamas. But this was pure murderous bullshit. Crimes can and should be prosecuted, not used as excuses to commit worse crimes. The Taliban was willing to turn Bin Laden over to a third country to be put on trial, but the U.S. government wanted a war. It had long-since planned the war. Its motivations included base construction, weapons placement, pipeline routing, and the launching of a war on Iraq as a continuation of an easier-to-start war on Afghanistan (a war that Tony Blair insisted on starting prior to a war on Iraq).
Soon the U.S. president said that bin Laden didn't matter at all. Then another U.S. president said that bin Laden was dead. That didn't matter either, as anyone paying the slightest attention had known it wouldn't. In fact, that same president escalated the war on Afghanistan three-fold in terms of troop presence but more than that in bombing, principally because he was largely keeping his predecessor's deal to scale back the war on Iraq. One can't just end a war without backing a different one. That's part of why the world's worried about a war on China right now.
But, then what was the excuse for the unending war on Afghanistan? Well, one excuse was a new bin Laden. He would return in another form like Voldemort if ever the U.S. left Afghanistan. So, after 20 years of a global war on terrorism spreading anti-U.S. terrorism from a few Afghan caves to capitals across Africa and Asia, we're now told that the Taliban takeover may mean the "return" of terrorism we're told this by the very same widely respected "experts" who just said the Taliban wouldn't take over.
You know who never believed that crap? The young men and women sent into Afghanistan from the United States year after year after year to become suicide risks and to . . . well, and to . . . to do what?
What passes for "winning" in the propaganda given the troops and everyone else is just the horrific wars with disastrous short- and long-term results that somebody had the sense to end more quickly than other wars: the Gulf War, the War on Libya. But they're not, of course, better than never having started them would have been.
On August 16, 2021, a U.S. military base at Niagara Falls posted this notice:
[graphic, so can't include on this site]
While President Joe Biden swears the nonsense about "nation building" was always nonsense, others cling to it. On August 17th an email from Lauren Mick, Senior Manager for Media Relations, Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), claimed "There is no doubt, however, that the lives of millions of Afghans had been improved by U.S. government interventions, including gains in life expectancy, the mortality of children under five, GDP per capita, and literacy rates, among others." Even if you believe that, imagine what doctors and teachers could have done in that regard. Hell, imagine what giving every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan some $600,000 or even a tiny fraction of that might have done rather than blowing over $1 trillion on war per year for 20 years. Afghanistan, under the benevolent occupation, was the third worst place to give birth in terms of newborn mortality, with the first being the neighboring and heavily impacted Pakistan.
The letter in the image above illustrates one of the points I elaborated on in War Is A Lie, namely that one can have contradictory war lies working simultaneously and certainly at different stages, especially before, during, and after a war. Let us count the lies in the notice above:
- "progress" no explanation given, so irrefutable, but vacuous
- the war-making allowed people to vote, attend school, start a business, and live with basic necessities by definition anyone not killed in the war lived with basic necessities, just as prior to the war only less so; the rest of this has been very weak for 20 years and in fact for 50 years going back to the initial U.S. provocation of the Soviets back when the bad guys were the good guys as they very well may soon be again
- evidence-free prevention of imaginary attacks on the Fatherland those have been made more likely, not less likely, by the war
- saving fellow "service" members not sending them would have saved more of them
- planting small seeds of "Freedom's Cause" what can I say except that people will reach for utter obnoxious nonsense to justify horrible things they've done?
Well, surely this harmless foolishness is better than veteran suicides? Not if it succeeds at its stated purpose of facilitating future warmaking it isn't, no. Guess what one of the minor results of those future wars will be? More veteran suicides!
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