I'm mad as hell an I'm going to talk about it.

August 18th, 2

Meditation in the shade of a hollow tree.

I said, "I Feel I've Been Lied To".

My Politician whisper, "It was Not a Sin to Lie, if The Truth is Not Expected".

"Don't worry, we have your backside of covered", our military leadership will inform their civilian oversight committees...Through back channels, of course.

Those who stand in the shadows behind the thrones of power in our capital, will slide a one page memo across the table, and say, "Don't worry. We can really make hay with this. This is how we will play this in the off-year election campaign.  My people gotcha covered".

And the religious leader told his autobiographer,  "...Gee I dunno, somewhere along the line, my vision began to fail me, but I knew the routine by heart. I knew which sacred texts to use. So I just continued on... as if nothing had happened".

And on the hillsides surrounding our capitol, the sheep, in unison, raise their heads and look about in a startled fashion, then return to their grazing.

Actually, I don't "feel" I've been lied to, I "know",  that I've been lied to.  The fact is, we've all been lied to.  Our leaders (both parties) have lied to us...And we have lied to ourselves.  The time of denial is over.  There is a time in an addict's decent where he can finally admit he has an addiction.  There is a point in a marriage rife with infidelity, the partners can admit to the extent of the rot.  There is a time, while there still is time, for addict to come clean.  There is a time, while there still is time, for the married couple to cease what is evil and to recommit to pursuing health.

The fall of Afghanistan is not a singular monument to our failed foreign policy as much as it is just another mile marker counting down our progressing failure as a nation and our failure to come even close to the self proclaimed Mantle of World Leadership we so confidently proclaim from our walled city upon the hill.  Like the married couple, like the addict, we absolutely must not flinch and divert our attention elsewhere.  Though we present ourselves to the world as addiction-free, as a rock solid marriage to be emulated by all... the world snickers behind our backs and increasingly to our face.  It wags it's finger at us and says, "Physician, heal thy self first". 

We Americans are very vulnerable at the moment. We are divided among ourselves.  We live off a lie of past glories.  We live off of a past that never was for too many of us.  We borrow from a future not guaranteed.  Worst of all we eagerly chase after those who encourage this infighting through twitter feeds of unadulterated poison.

Let us look at collapse of Afghanistan, and let us examine the facts it presents to us;

For twenty years we have occupied Afghanistan.  A country with a long history of infighting, of ever shifting clan loyalty, of multi-generational corruption and cronyism, and of an environment that is cold, harsh, cruel, and unforgiving.  There was no aspect of Afghanistan daily life we did not touch.  We poured money into everything.  To the tune of $83b over the twenty years just on building and training their security forces.  To put that in perspective, Indiana FY20-21...budget is for... $17.125 billion in general-fund spending.  So roughly, we blew almost the equivalent of 5 years of Indiana's general fund budget, building and training Afghan security forces over twenty years.   All that we built and all the weapons we provided are now in the hands of the Taliban, the very enemy they were suppose to protect against.

Our military leadership and our elected officials knew this "security force" was a mirage.  According to stories carried by AP news service, "Afghan security forces collapsed quickly and completely.  Without firing a shot, being more the rule than the exception. The Taliban grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.

The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend".  Tourists in peacetime, could not have covered this itinerary any faster.  The security forces were not a house of cards, that collapsed in a light breeze, the were a mirage... that just vanished into thin air.  

The news articles continue, "A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous.  The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces...which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.   

I think this more than deeply embarrassing to our generals and our intelligence agencies.

The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse,  should be grounds for termination of employment for civilians involved, and court marshals for the military.  The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.  Yet the American people were led to believe, we were nation building, we were making progress where all who before us had failed.  All we had to do was stay the course.

Now read the following closely;

“Money can’t buy will. You cannot purchase leadership,” John Kirby, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said Monday.

Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who help direct Afghan war strategy during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that what the Afghans received in tangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles.

“The principle of war stands — moral factors dominate material factors,” he said. “Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. As outsiders in Afghanistan, we can provide materiel, but only Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors.”

Was my bullsh_t detector the only one to peg?  Can you see the strategy being fleshed out for deflecting blame away from our leadership in the committee hearings that are sure to follow.

The bottom line is, With each side pulling combatants from the same cultural pool, after twenty years of training, showering them with training, and advanced tech weaponry, our side found itself publicly  pantsed by the Taliban insurgents, who were fewer in number, used cruder weapons, and had no air presence.

 The news reports continue; "U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly."

... and here is what I think; H-e-l-l-o, is anyone at home??? "Earth station to the American public; Listen up!  Saying our intelligence agencies "largely underestimated" the Taliban is like saying the Titanic "took on a little water after bumping into an iceberg".

“If we wouldn’t have used "hope" as a course of action, ... we would have realized the rapid drawdown of U.S. forces sent a signal to the Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,” said Chris Miller, who saw combat in Afghanistan in 2001 and was acting secretary of defense at the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

And here are my thoughts; "Hope" should NEVER be a strategy by those in charge in defending a nation.  After 20 years of being every corrupt government official's sugar daddy, just what kind of a signal did you think that would send???

Here is some additional comments reported in the press;

"Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden’s announcement set the final collapse in motion".

“The problem of the U.S. withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the jig is up — a sudden, nationwide signal that everyone read the same way,” Biddle said. Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war, he said. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”

Let me rephrase that for you; "When the Afghan generals and the corrupt politicians realized the aquifer of seeming unlimited money and aid was soon going to run dry, they hung on to the last minute-sucking up funds and assets like crazy, then faded into the woodwork".

Again, from the news reports fed to the American public;

 "The failures, however, go back much further and run much deeper. The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism. Year after year, U.S. military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall. In 2015 a professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute wrote about the military’s failure to learn lessons from past wars; he subtitled his book, “Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold.”

There is two things I have to say here; When does "US military leaders downplayed..." turn into, "downright lied"???, and why are we going to let them get away with it???

The professor continues; "Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan,” Chris Mason wrote. He added, presciently: “Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.”

"...Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.”  I'm confused, was he discussing Afghanistan or the U.S.?

"The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the misspent dollars coming"...and we the American voter are to believe our elected representatives were ignorant of this?  Really?? You expect me to swallow that crap?

Folks, I know none of us want to read what I felt I had to write, so show me where I'm wrong, show me.  America is a citizen owned country.  For too long we've been absentee landlords, happily content to reap the benefits of ownership, while dabbling in politics by playing one of our management teams against the other.  THIS MUST STOP.  We, the owners of this country must wrest away from our management teams the sense of divine right to run this country as they d_mn well please.  But to do that, we have to grow up and mature in our thinking, to understand our history, our true history,  What we did right in the face of opposition, and what we did wrong, when we let our principals weaken.

Luvyal,

bobb