And This Is The News Exactly How?

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along:

US officials have been lying to the American people about US failures in Afghanistan, where the US military has been fighting its longest armed conflict in US history, a collection of confidential documents obtained by the Washington Post revealed. Over the past 18 years of war, US officials have repeatedly insisted that the US is making progress in Afghanistan, but over 2,000 pages of notes from interviews with more than 400 people who had a direct role in the war in Afghanistan have revealed the truth about the conflict — that data was altered and facts were twisted to present a positive picture when the reality in country was far from it, The Post reports. John Sopko, head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the agency that conducted the interviews, told The Post that the documents clearly show "the American people have constantly been lied to." The documents obtained by The Post show that the US and its allies and partners had no clear mission, the US does not have a sufficient understanding of Afghanistan, and the US has wasted massive amounts of money trying to stabilize the still unstable country. "We didn't know what we were doing," Douglas Lute, a retired Army three-star general who oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told interviewers in 2015. "What are we trying to do here? We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,"

There is one teeny-weeny "detail" here. The number of KIAs, same as in Iraq, is given only for regular military. There are, of course, those so called "contractors", who, if to believe reports by 2015 accounted for another around 2000 KIAs. Plus, lest we forget purely civilian contractors. As the news-piece continues:

"If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction ... 2,400 lives lost," he added. Since the start of the war in 2001, the US has sent more than 775,000 troops to Afghanistan. Around 2,400 service members have been killed, and more than 20,000 have been wounded. Furthermore, the US is estimated to have spent roughly $1 trillion on the conflict. "What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?" Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL who served both Bush and Obama as a White House staffer, asked, according to The Post.

So, at this stage, one must ask the question--what are they thinking in D.C.? It is especially scandalous against the background of Russia having to clean up the mess left by the United States in Afghanistan, with all fruits of Afghan "democracy", such as Taliban and ISIS, and other "progressive" Jihadist movements having plans for Middle Asia. That means Russia. One, of course, can wax geopolitical and conclude that the United States has The Great Game plans of  "containing" Russia by means of disturbing her "soft Asian underbelly". Well, sure, but not at the price of own humiliating defeat. The game is worth playing only when one gets some benefits. What benefits, exactly, did the United States reap from its longest war in history? So, the abused, as you may have guessed by now by political "scientists", and false argument of this Great Game simply doesn't fly, even if to imagine that some nominally American Transnational Corp will decide to do business in minerals-rich Afghanistan and will be ready to payoff Afghan conflicting tribal interests. Good luck with that. 

Of course, Afghanistan lies perilously close to China's BRI routes....

 

And Afghanistan seems like a nice bridgehead from which to destabilize weak links in this route, especially Tajikistan. Can they have such plans in D.C.? Observing the "level" of Geo-strategic "thinking" in Washington, one can totally conceive that such a delusion is being exercised. But that is where Russian 201st Military Base may turn itself into something much more substantial, granted Tajikistan wants to survive, but that is another issue altogether. Considering the fact that the United States is ungovernable and is mired in lost wars trying to postpone inevitable, as one observer noted about Syria "withdrawal" :

So to recap, we have a withdrawal that isn’t a withdrawal. We have an ostensibly antiwar left that’s too busy ferreting out the Russian spies in its Peloton supply chains to actually accomplish anything useful. We have a shiny, rebranded, “pro-working class” right that refuses to heed the foreign policy wishes of its newest constituents. We have a president who looks less like a commander-in-chief than a Tom and Jerry character falling down an endless set of stairs. And we have a national debt of $23 trillion and counting. Gold stars all around.

Couldn't have said better myself.