$89 Billion & 20 Years Building Afghan Army and All of It was Toppled in Just Days
To those who have been paying attention, it is no secret that the US government has been lying to its citizens for centuries. From granting the power to coin money to the private Federal Reserve to the war on terror to the endless wars spawned by the war on terror, the United States government should change its official language from English—to lie. One of the most insidious lies ever perpetuated against US citizens was the idea that the US is spreading freedom and democracy in the Middle East when it waged war in Afghanistan.
On October 7, 2001, the United States invaded and began murdering began giving the citizens of Afghanistan “freedom.” For nearly two decades, countless bombs have fallen on the country, turning once beautiful cities into piles of rubble as “freedom” and “democracy” was delivered in the form of hellfire missiles.
Thousands of US military troops lost their lives and tens of thousand of others have been maimed and permanently disabled. Hundreds of thousands of innocent men women and children died as the US bombarded the country with this precious “freedom.”
After lying to the American people for decades, the US government waged one final lie — they were finally leaving Afghanistan. But this simply wasn’t true as covert operations and remote bombing campaigns will remain. Afghan citizens be damned.
Despite decades of bombing campaigns and the suffering and death of countless citizens and troops, the Taliban — the contrived enemy we were ostensibly fighting — is more powerful now than ever before.
Highlighting the superior effectiveness of the American war in the Middle East, Afghanistan’s freedom came to a pinnacle this week as it took just days for the Taliban to topple the Afghan army.
The US spend $89 billion and two decades building up and training the Afghan army and it took the Taliban a matter of hours to overthrow it. As Reuter reports, over the last few days, the insurgents have seized every major city in Afghanistan – from Kandahar in the south to Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, Herat in the west to Jalalabad in the east.
If after countless billions of dollars and 20 years of preparation, the Afghan forces you trained get routed in a week, it was never going to work out.
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) August 15, 2021
Since US-led forces began their withdrawal, the Taliban have taken back the country at an astonishing pace. The insurgents have seized half of the country’s 34 provincial capitals, including it’s second and third-largest cities, and now control two-thirds of the entire country.According to the most recent reports, the Taliban is now taking over the capital city Kabul.
The Taliban's increasing hold over Afghanistan.#AFPgraphics map showing parts of Afghanistan under government control and territories under the influence of the Taliban, from April to August pic.twitter.com/BVbC7wDubt
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) August 11, 2021
“We provided our Afghan partners with all the tools – let me emphasize: all the tools,” U.S. President Joe Biden said when announcing the decision to withdraw American forces. Clearly this was just one more lie in an endless line of lies waged by the US war machine since 9/11.
Twenty years of suffering, tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, countless American lives lost or permanently ruined, hundreds of thousands of dead Afghani citizens and it took just days for it to revert back to worse than it was before.
“Once morale goes, it spreads very quickly, and that is at least partly to blame,” a U.S. official told Reuters of the Taliban take over.
Really? Was it really just a case of “morale” that allowed the Taliban to overthrow the “freedom” that the United States has been forcing on the country for two decades? Or, was the conflict in Afghanistan an inevitable quagmire that is the product of the US military industrial complex and its century long campaign of lying to the American people to promote senseless war abroad?
The lies that were exposed in 2019 in the form of documents obtained by WaPo which prove a vast conspiracy by United States government officials to deceive the American people into thinking the war in Afghanistan was winnable are now but a fleeting thought thanks to the Biden regime who has rebranded the war machine with a new all-inclusive façade.
Since Americans tend to have such short memories, here is a brief reminder of the quagmire which the US has facilitated that’s led to unfathomable death and suffering and which has proven entirely worthless this week.
After hijackers supported by Saudi Arabiaattacked the United States on 9/11, the US waged a relentless, unforgiving, violent, and unwinnable war in Afghanistan — which as Scott Horton points out in his book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, was the desire of Osama Bin Laden.
Since the beginning of the war, the Afghans have been slaughtered, the country has become a hotbed for terrorists, they’ve drastically increased heroin production, and the US was found to have killed more people than the terrorists we were ostensibly fighting. The once beautiful nation has been turned into a pit of rubble by years of bombing and war — and the US taxpayer has funded all of it.
For the last several decades, the US government has openly funded, supported, and armed various terrorist networks throughout the world to forward an agenda of destabilization and proxy war. It is not a secret, nor a conspiracy theory—America arms bad guys. The situation has gotten so overtly corrupt that the government admitted the Pentagon asked Congress for funding to reimburse terrorists for their transportation and other expenses. Seriously.
Since the beginning of the violence, the American people have been told that this war in Afghanistan — which was slaughtering innocent women and children — was to protect their “freedom.” In reality, however, this war has made Americans less free by creating an assembly line of terrorists and police state measures ensuring a vicious cycle of rights violations and attacks for generations to come. All of this bloodshed, death, terrorism, loss of liberty, limbless veterans, PTSD, heroin epidemics, and trillions in taxpayer dollars wasted have been the product of politicians lying to you.
“Every data point” about American efforts there “was altered to present the best picture possible,” according to Bob Crowley, an Army colonel and former senior counterinsurgency adviser to military commander in Afghanistan, as quoted in the 2019 documents. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”
“We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” confessed Douglas Lute, Afghan war czar under Bush II and Obama, back in 2015. Jeffrey Eggers—a former Navy SEAL and a staffer for the Bush II and Obama administrations—asked, “What did we get for this $1 trillion effort?”
The answer to that question is nothing, or rather, more accurately, death, suffering, terror — and now a country that is far worse off than before we ever stepped foot in it. But fret not war mongers, as uncle Joe has plans to send troops back inand this time, it’s sure to work.
Originally published by Matt Agorist at The Free Thought Project.
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Minds.