Senator Jack Reed, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, signaled last week that the U.S. should refrain from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan to meet an agreed-upon 1 May deadline, calling the pullout potentially destabilizing.
The Trends Journal has been reporting on U.S. troop deployment in the country and how October will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the invasion. The U.S. launched the war in Afghanistan in 2001, which has been the longest in American history and has killed over 157,000 people and left hundreds of thousands dying from war-related causes. Also, some 3,500 U.S. and NATO soldiers have been killed.
Despite no victory in sight, according to The New York Times, the war cost American taxpayers $2 trillion. (See the NYT article here.)
Senator Reed, a former 82nd Airborne Division officer who The Times said visited the country on 18 occasions within the last two decades, said he anticipates an extension to remove the remaining 2,500 troops in the country.
Defense.gov reported those numbers are the lowest since 2001 and were a goal of the Trump administration. The report said that at its height in 2011, under the Obama administration, there were 98,000 troops in Afghanistan.
The Times pointed out that the Taliban had agreed to the 1 May deadline and rejected the idea of another delay. The Times reported the Taliban said it will disregard an earlier cease-fire agreement after the deadline. The Trump administration brokered the deal with the Taliban.
Senator Rand Paul has been a vocal critic of removing U.S. troops from the country. In July, he wrote an amendment tied to the National Defense Authorization Act that was tabled in a 60-33 vote. The bill would have removed all troops within the year and given them each a $2,500 bonus, according to the Hill.
Paul said at the time, “Our amendment will finally and completely end the war in Afghanistan… It is not sustainable to keep fighting in Afghanistan generation after generation.”
TRENDPOST: Going on 20 years, why the Afghan War was launched is ancient history to most Americans. Long forgotten were the lunacy lines sold by President George W. Bush who launched it and how over 80 percent of Americans swallowed his lines.
When George W. Bush launched the Afghan War, long forgotten as well, it was the sounding alarm that is no longer heard: the launch of the War on Terror.
Nine days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, during a televised address to a joint session of Congress, Bush said, “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
With that line, the audience rose to its feet in thunderous applause.
That was it. Just a few, brief sentences about this “person named Osama bin Laden,” and his band of terrorists were responsible for attacking the “beacon for freedom.” George Bush launched “Crusades 2000,” a battle Gerald Celente had forecast in both the Trends Journal in 1993 and in “Trends 2000” (Warner Books, 1997) – which would be fought at the start of the new millennium.
TRENDPOST: As we noted last week, but forgotten by the media, as they promote the continuation of the COVID War, are The Afghanistan Papers, internal government documents released by the Washington Post in early December, which exposed the lies and deceptions told to the American people by Washington and the Pentagon. The papers documented how top generals knew the war in Afghanistan was a calamity that could not be won.
In December, we reported on the papers. Yet, despite these facts of horror, media Presstitutes, who get paid to put out what their corporate pimps and Washington whoremasters tell them to, have essentially blacked out The Afghanistan Papers from the news.
As we detailed in our 9 February article, “U.S. PANEL: KEEP FIGHTING LOSING AFGHAN WAR,” we reported on a panel of Congress, which said earlier this month that the U.S. should reconsider its 1 May deadline to withdraw forces and instead keep troops in the country. The panel was led by General Joseph Dunford Jr., a retired four-star Marine general, who told The New York Times it is not in anyone’s best interest for a “precipitous withdrawal.”
