October will commemorate 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.
The U.S. government, however, contends that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. But rather than invade Saudi Arabia – a staunch U.S. ally to which Washington has sold hundreds of billions of dollars in weaponry and subsequently supported their war against Yemen, which has devolved into the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, the U.S instead invaded Afghanistan.
More War
Despite the war costing American taxpayers trillions, destroying the nation, and with the Taliban on brink of recapturing control, the Afghanistan Study Group – a panel appointed by the U.S. Congress – said last week that the U.S. should reconsider its 1 May deadline to withdraw forces and instead keep troops in the country.
The panel is led by General Joseph Dunford Jr., a retired four-star Marine general, who told The New York Times that it is not in anyone’s best interest for a “precipitous withdrawal.”
All told, the U.S. launched the war in Afghanistan, the longest in American history, which began in 2001 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 that are in Iraq.) Defense.gov reported those numbers represent 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’ report said the Taliban has warned if American troops do not leave the country by the 1 May deadline, an earlier cease-fire agreement will be disregarded, and attacks on U.S. assets will resume. The Trump administration brokered the deal with the Taliban.
A senior U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times that the ultimate decision is going to be a “tough call.”
“If we stay after the deadline, the Taliban is likely to take that as a sign we are not leaving and start attacking us,” the source told the paper. The paper also pointed out that President Biden has kept Zalmay Khalilzad in his position. Khalilzad negotiated the deals during the Trump administration.
Mr. Dunford said the group found that the correct number of U.S. troops in the country would be 4,500, nearly twice the current amount.
The Los Angeles Times pointed out that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III will meet with NATO officials in Europe to discuss the future of troop deployment in Afghanistan.
Representative Ro Khanna called the report “unacceptable.” “Those who had any part in getting us into this 20-year war should not be opining about keeping us mired in it,” he said, according to the L.A. Times.
TREND FORECAST: The way the mainstream media portrays the panel makes it appear as though it is an open-minded group without an agenda… while, in fact, it is being led by a leader of the military/industrial/intelligence complex.
Considering his war record, we forecast that with Joe Dunford leading the Afghanistan Study Group, more U.S. war and illegal interventionism will be the option.
Nicknamed “Fighting Joe” for the role the Marine general played in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, General Dunford also assumed command of the U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) in 2013. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama nominated Dunford to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until September 2019.
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.
