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Barely mentioned in the American and western media is a report released last week which said that despite Washington spending $90 billion over 20 years to train a security force in Kabul, the country’s force easily fell to the Taliban as soon as President Biden ordered the U.S. troops to leave.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction wrote in a 43 page report that Kabul had no plans in place on how to deal with the Taliban without the U.S. That might not be a problem if American forces were staying in the country, but the analysis was made just as the U.S. announced plans to exit last summer. (See “TALIBAN VICTORY: ANOTHER U.S. FAILURE,” “BYE BYE U.S.: TALIBAN TO TAKE KABUL” and “BIDEN ON AFGHANISTAN: ‘FUCK THAT.’”)
John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told NPR that there’s a lot of blame to go around.
“Unfortunately, we had been warning—and as well as others in and outside of the administrations for years—that the Afghan military—the way we were training and advising them—was not able to function on its own. And it was really only a question of time when the ANDSF, which is the Afghan Defense Forces, would collapse,” he said.
He said he believes the main reason that the Afghan military was unsuccessful in its fight against the Taliban was because it suffered a blow to morale after the U.S. signed the withdrawal agreement in 2020. He also said the April 2021 announcement by the Biden administration about the troops and the contractors leaving the country was another blow for morale.
“Basically, it left the Afghan soldiers in the lurch, and their morale was devastated. That’s what this report found,” he said.
The Biden administration laid blame on the Afghan security forces for not putting up a fight to defend their country. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there were no reports that he heard of “that predicted a security force of 300,000 would evaporate in 11 days.”
Biden said that he stood behind his decision to withdraw the troops and said that he learned the “hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.”
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Matt Zeller, a former CIA analyst and Army veteran, told MSNBC in a viral clip at the time.
“The idea that the Afghan military should be blamed for this? Do you know how many casualties the Afghan military took in an average year? More than the United States did in 20. When you’re not getting paid on a regular basis; when you’re not getting fuel…when nobody is supplying you with ammunition, and yet you’re still showing up to the fight? How dare us for having to blame these people for not having the audacity to be able to survive a Taliban onslaught.”
Zeller took issue with Biden’s claim that his administration planned for “every contingency” when it came to the evacuation of Americans and vulnerable Afghans:
“I have been personally trying to tell this administration since it took office. I have been trying to tell our government for years this was coming. We’ve sent them plan after plan on how to evacuate these people. Nobody listened to us.”
These same military leaders are the ones appearing on corporate media outlets trying to give their expert opinions on the Ukraine War. These people have never won a war in their lives and they pretend to have special insights into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next move.
TRENDPOST: Of course, the U.S. will never admit to failure. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters on Tuesday that he did not look at the mission in Afghanistan as a failure and said not everyone would agree that the departure was a mistake.
“Our troops had fought there for 20 years, had accomplished the mission for which they were sent. There has been no 9/11-like attack on the United states since the attack that emanated from Afghanistan. And in the process, we certainly made improvements in Afghanistan,” he said, according to the Journal.
In total the U.S. provided Kabul with funding for 600,000 weapons, 300 aircraft, 80,000 vehicles, and other military equipment. The problem was that Afghans could not use these tools without U.S. help.
The same Pentagon officials who failed in Afghanistan against the Taliban are the ones dominating news programs by giving their opinions on how Ukraine should conduct itself against Russia, and Russia is not the Taliban.
TREND FORECAST: Gerald Celente had forecast when the Afghan War began, that America would lose: “If Alexander ‘The Great’ couldn’t pull it off, if the British couldn’t beat them and neither could the Russians, there is no way America will win.” Mr. Celente also noted that the U.S. had not won a war since World War II.
As a result of his forecast, Celente, once a popular guest on mainstream media and having appeared twice on Oprah, was blackballed from the press and TV and accused of being anti-American. (See the movie, “What Zizi Gave Honeyboy.”)