U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, former Army General and Board member of Defense contractor Raytheon, is in “no hurry” to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
Austin met with NATO officials in Brussels last week to discuss troop deployment as he saw a troubling increase in violence in the country. Austin said he will “not undertake a hasty or disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan” that puts NATO forces in danger.
Austin’s comment came days after Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban deputy leader, urged the U.S. to withdraw troops from the country and make good on its promise to leave by 1 May.
Austin said the U.S. is “mindful of the looming deadlines, but we want to do this methodically and deliberately. But we’re focused on making sure that we make the right decisions, and we’ll go through this process deliberately.”
October will mark the 20th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan. The war was launched under the guise of capturing Osama bin Laden and ridding the nation of its Taliban leadership because they both were, allegedly, responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
As we have extensively reported in the Trends Journal, not one shred of evidence was provided to support that claim, and then-President George W. Bush refused to negotiate with the ruling Taliban government.
The war is the longest in American history, costing American taxpayers trillions 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.
There are currently 2,500 U.S. service members in Afghanistan. (The same number of troops currently in Iraq.)
The Financial Times reported U.S. lawmakers believe a withdrawal will lead to Afghanistan’s collapse. Representative Paul Gosar said it seems “rather impossible” that the will Taliban agree to any kind of committed peace.
TRENDPOST: Addressing the nation on the evening of 9/11, the newly-elected president, George W. Bush, said, “America was targeted for attack… because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.”
Nine days later, in his address to a joint session of Congress and the nation, President Bush, playing the role of Commander in Chief, set the stage for U.S. action by identifying the masterminds behind the strikes as “a radical network of terrorists” who, as “enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our county.” The live audience thunderously applauded every two-bit line.
“Americans have many questions tonight. Americans are asking: ‘Who attacked our country?’ The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda that ‘practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism.’”
Saying that “Al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime,” President Bush fingered “a person named Osama bin Laden” as Al Qaeda’s crime boss.
Without one shred of evidence, the people and the press swallowed the lines of rhetoric as though they were incontrovertible facts.
TRENDPOST: Long forgotten, when George W. Bush launched the Afghan War, it was the sounding alarm that is no longer heard: the launch of the War on Terror.
In his address to 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: The Afghanistan Papers, internal government documents released by the Washington Post in early December, 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.
In our 9 February article, “U.S. PANEL: KEEP FIGHTING LOSING AFGHAN WAR,” we reported on a panel by the U.S. 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.”
