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Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who appeared in front of Congress last week to discuss the Afghanistan withdrawal admitted to the House Armed Services Committee that the war had been a “strategic failure.”
“It wasn’t lost in the last 20 days or even 20 months,” he said. “There’s a cumulative effect to a series of strategic decisions that go way back. Whenever you get some phenomenon like a war that is lost—and it has been, in the sense of we accomplished our strategic task of protecting America against Al-Qaeda, but certainly the end state is a whole lot different than what we wanted.”
The Trends Journal has reported extensively on the U.S.’s misadventure in the country. Gerald Celente, the publisher, 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.”
(See “AS CELENTE FORECAST: U.S. WOULD LOSE AFGHAN WAR LAUNCHED BY BUSH. THE WORST IS YET TO COME.”)
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 who has appeared twice on Oprah, was blackballed from the press and TV and accused of being anti-American. (See the movie, “ZIZI and HONEYBOY,” starring Doris Roberts.)
The political fallout of the misadventure remains to be seen, and whether President Biden can somehow right his ship by signing the $1 trillion infrastructure bill and $3.5 trillion spending package is still to be determined.
But the fact remains that after 20 years, the blood of 2,448 U.S. troops who met their demise there, and the 20,000-plus Americans injured, and $2.2 trillion spent, Afghanistan’s government and its cowardly, corrupt presidency retreated with nary a whimper.
“If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that can sustain itself and pose little threat to U.S. national security interests, the overall picture is bleak,” the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said.
The SIGAR’s final report on the country was damning and served as a cautionary tale for future U.S. missions, as we reported in our 24 August issue, in an article titled, “BIDEN ON AFGHANISTAN: “FUCK THAT.”
Milley said whenever a military suffers defeat there are usually an “awful lot of causal factors.”
“And we’re going to have to figure that out. A lot of lessons learned here,” he said.
Milley’s appearance in front of the House committee became something of a show trial, with representatives doing their best to get a soundbite that appears on cable news. But one of the other topics discussed was what generals told Biden prior to the withdrawal.
Biden gave an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in August and made it clear that none of his generals told him to keep a small troop presence in the country.
“But your top military advisors warned against withdrawing on this timeline,” Stephanopoulos said. “They wanted you to keep about 2,500 troops.”
Biden became cagey and Stephanopoulos asked again to confirm that no military advisor told him to keep the troops in place.
“No,” Biden said. “No one said that to me that I can recall.”
Milley and Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command, both testified the day before—in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee—that they told the president to keep 2,500 or more troops in the country.
“I recommended that we maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan…The withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the military forces and eventually the Afghan government,” McKenzie said in front of the Senate. He told the House the following day, “My concern was that if we withdrew below 2,500 and went to zero, that the Afghan military and government would collapse. And of course, that’s not a potential counterfactual; that is in fact what happened.”
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, insisted that the president received “split” advice about Afghanistan. (See “BIDEN PRESIDENCY=OBAMA 2021.”)
“Ultimately, it’s up to the commander-in-chief to make a decision. He made a decision that it was time to end a 20-year war,” she said.
TRENDPOST: To clearly illustrate the decline of America, imagine, “Ultimately, it’s up to the commander-in-chief to make a decision,” to both start and stop wars launched by political hacks in violation of the nation’s Constitution which states that only Congress can vote to go to war… which they have not done since WWII.
And, to add economic insult to America’s military defeat, In celebration of its multi-trillion dollar Afghan military defeat, the longest war in American history, last Thursday, the U.S. House on approved its $778 billion fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. (See “WAR MACHINE GETS RICHER AS AMERICANS GET POORER: HOUSE EASILY PASSES $768 BILLION DEFENSE BILL”)
TREND FORECAST: As we have long noted, the business of America has been war, and the business of China is business. The 20th century was the American century, and as we have forecast the 21st century will be China’s… and one of our 10 Top Trends for 2021, is “China 2021.”
Moreover, the United States and Europe will lose in the economic challenge against China. While President Biden stated that Beijing would not surpass Washington in power during his term in the White House, that has zero to do with U.S. policy or the Biden administration.
Indeed, we published an article titled, “WILL TALIBAN CASH IN ON $1 TRILLION WORTH OF AFGHAN MINERAL WEALTH?”, in our 24 August issue, the country—although poor—is sitting on iron, gold, copper and lithium, which has attracted China’s attention.
We forecast that the hard facts and analyses project China to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy within a decade, and the U.S.—incapable of winning a war since WWII—would be defeated by China in a military confrontation.