© DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jette CarrPresident Trump departs from the Pentagon alongside Secretary of Defense Mattis.
In a routine dating back to 2004, U.S. officials regularly claim that the latest strategy in Afghanistan is working - or as General David Petraeus
said in 2012, the war had "turned a corner."
It hadn't and it still hasn't. In fact, evidence overwhelmingly affirms that the newest "new" strategy will be no more effective than those that came before it. It is time to stop losing U.S. lives while pretending that victory is just around the corner.
It is time to end the war in Afghanistan.Last week, one of the most brazen insider attacks of the war took place in Kandahar when
one of the Afghanistan governor's bodyguards turned rogue, killing three high-profile Afghan leaders and wounding the senior U.S. field commander, Brigadier General Jeffrey Smiley. Miraculously, the new commander, General Scott Miller, escaped harm. But in 2018,
eight Americans have been killed in Afghanistan, bringing the American death toll to
2,351.
On October 7, 2001, President George W. Bush
addressed the nation as combat operations in Afghanistan began. He emphasized that the American
"mission is defined. The objectives are clear. [Our] goal is just." Those objectives,
he explained, were "targeted actions" that were "designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime."
By the summer of 2002, those objectives were fully met as the Taliban organization was wholly destroyed and al-Qaeda severely degraded. As of 2009, there were reportedly
as few as 100 stragglers scattered impotently throughout Afghanistan. The military mission should therefore have ended and combat forces redeployed.
Instead Bush, and later Obama, transitioned the military mission - without consultation from Congress -
into a nation-building effort that was doomed from the start. Candidate Donald Trump spoke of a different approach to the Middle East and railed against nation-building abroad. His instincts on Afghanistan have been consistent and correct from very early on. Had it not been for the
relentless pressure of several key officials, the war might already have come to end.
Comment: The use of barbaric white phosphorous bombs, which is designed to inflict maximum suffering on its victims, is becoming quite the calling card of the abhorrent Western establishment: