Ghosts Of Vietnam?

It is the longest American war. It is also one of the most futile ones. 

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. and Taliban will sign a peace deal at the end of February, more than a year after negotiations started, paving the way for broader talks between the Afghan government and the militant group on the country’s post-war future. The peace agreement will be signed during a ceremony in Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban has a political office, according to the group’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed, as well as deputy head of its political office Abdul Salam Hanafi. Mujahed was reached via Whatsapp on Monday. The treaty to end America’s longest war follows an agreement with the Taliban on Friday for them to reduce hostilities for a seven-day period. One of the conditions for a broader peace deal, that would allow the U.S. to start withdrawing troops, has been for the partial cease-fire to hold.

There are some secret addenda to this deal, which include arrangements for some "anti-terrorist forces" to remain and, not least, some hefty declarations such as "requirement" for Taliban to denounce terrorism and extremism. Sure, make bees hate honey, this is so easy, after all. I don't know, this whole things reeks of Paris Peace Accords. Truth is, we knew it was coming. Only completely delusional people believed that some kind of "victory" can be attained in Afghanistan. A face saving arrangement is desperately needed for the United States, but the US leaving Afghanistan will not be the end of it, it will be the start of what Russians (General Gromov and  Dmitri Rogozin) warned about in 2010. 

A “successful end” to the operation in Afghanistan will not come simply with the death of Osama bin Laden. The minimum that we require from NATO is consolidating a stable political regime in the country and preventing Talibanization of the entire region. Nevertheless, our cooperation with NATO is substantially limited since we are not sending our own troops to Afghanistan. We’ve been there before and we did not like it. That said, we are training CSTO Rapid Reaction Forces — an operational formation of elite units from Russia and our allies in Central Asia — in case of a NATO fiasco. Meanwhile, NATO should get down to studying our war in Afghanistan, in which the Soviet Union managed to deter the onslaught of Islamic fundamentalists for a full 10 years.

That was exactly 10 years ago. As experience has shown, not only Talibanization was not prevented, but Taliban gained legitimacy and will enjoy now a status of a force which defeated the Great Satan of America. Russians knew already then, that nothing good was coming out of this US (and NATO) war:

That is the Russian position. We are ready to help NATO implement its U.N. Security Council mandate in Afghanistan. We are utterly dissatisfied with the mood of capitulation at NATO headquarters, be it under the cover of “humanistic pacifism” or pragmatism. We insist that NATO troops stay in the country until the necessary conditions are provided to establish stable local authorities capable of independently deterring radical forces and controlling the country. That is why we are helping NATO by providing transit for goods and training personnel for Afghanistan, including anti-narcotics officers.

I am also not sure that NATO really studied Soviet war in Afghanistan, certainly not on a purely political level, and no one in their own mind believes that Ashraf Ghani's government in Kabul will last longer than Taliban will allow it to exist. The jury is already in on this issue, especially after Washington Post releasing a trove of documents on 20 year long insanity that the War in Afghanistan has become for the United States. As one observer noted:

Anyone with eyes can see quite clearly that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is an unmitigated failure.The war in Afghanistan, now in its 19th year, is about as protracted and bloody as it has ever been. Throughout the entire conflict, hawks have told skeptical voters to sit down, be quiet, and leave it up to the professionals. For years they’ve said victory is supposedly just around the corner and that we’re making progress. And yet all the while, the situation on the ground tells a vastly different story. Still, those of us on the outside have never truly been able to witness the full gravity of Washington’s extravagantly expensive misadventure in Afghanistan — because the national security bureaucracy has a knack of keeping bad information hidden away in a vault. No longer. After a three-year court battle, the Washington Post was able to get its hands on classified government documents that demonstrate the catastrophic nature of the war. The paper reports that "senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable." Based on 2,000 pages and 428 interviews with American officials, the documents expose two disturbing key themes: For one, the United States had no clue what it was doing in Afghanistan, and even worse, government officials lied to voters every step of the way. The picture that emerges is one of three successive administrations stubbornly resistant to confronting the depth of their mistakes, all too proud or scared to admit their failure. As Gen. Douglas Lute, the Afghanistan war czar in the Bush and Obama White Houses, summarized: “If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction ... 2,400 lives lost ... Who will say this was in vain?”

This is a familiar pattern, which repeats itself time after time in the United States which refuses to face a reality until it is too late and nothing could be done about it. Obviously there is plenty of a denial to go around, especially among US military:

“I’ve been to Afghanistan 10 times in the last four years in this job and I feel that we’ve never been lied to and we are continuing to move forward,” he said, adding that he served as the senior enlisted adviser to the International Security Assistance Force in 2011 and, “I firmly thought the strategy we had in place was working.” Troxell was joined Monday by Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Ramon Colon-Lopez, a career special operations pararescueman, who also weighed in on his experiences deployed to Afghanistan. “The men and women that have been going back to since 2002 to perform this mission have been pouring their heart and soul into its success,” he said. And, he added, he never questioned his superior officers’ orders during the many capture-or-kill missions he completed in the country. “We were there with a purpose," he said. "And up to today, from 2002, I will tell you that there’s a lot more safety and security because of the actions taken ― not only by myself, personally, but by my peers.”

I am ready to give the guys the benefit of a doubt, after all, these were they, not me, who did tours in Afghanistan but "continuing to move forward" doesn't sound to me as a viable strategy or operational concept in a country in which in 20 years the United States controls only few very limited areas. Even British BS corporation couldn't deny facts on the ground:

Taliban fighters, whom US-led forces spent billions of dollars trying to defeat, are now openly active in 70% of Afghanistan, a BBC study has found. Months of research across the country shows that the Taliban now control or threaten much more territory than when foreign combat troops left in 2014. The Afghan government played down the report, saying it controls most areas. But recent attacks claimed by Taliban and Islamic State group militants have killed scores in Kabul and elsewhere.Afghan officials and US President Donald Trump have responded by ruling out any talks with the Taliban. Last year Mr Trump announced the US military would stay in the country indefinitely. The BBC research also suggests that IS is more active in Afghanistan than ever before, although it remains far less powerful than the Taliban.

If this is how the moving forward is defined, then it looks like it is Taliban which is moving forward, not the US military. It is clear that Vietnam moment has come and that after 20 years the United States has nothing to show for blood and treasure spent in this war-torn country. In the end, Afghanistan also factors in the US election cycle and Trump cannot afford being called out for his failure to deliver on his 2016 campaign promise to end America's wars. Afghanistan, though, is the easiest (relatively) war to end since Afghanistan is not high on Israeli Lobby's agenda and American public is tired and is ready for this withdrawal. 

In a bizarre twist of historic fate and with a great deal of a dark historic irony, it was Soviet aid to Vietnam which played a crucial role in US loss there. It was also Vietnam War which influenced one Polish pseudo-"scholar" afflicted by a fanatic Russophobia to help destabilize Afghanistan in 1970s, which started this deadly, spanning 4 decades, spiral of violence. It is, indeed, darkly ironic that the United States faces her Vietnam Moment in the land in which it helped to create all conditions for gestation of the most extreme Islamic fanaticism, which, in the end, resulted in a tragedy of 9/11 and de facto defeat of the United States. It will be left to Russians and Middle Asian former Soviet States to eventually, at least, contain the utter mess the US leaves in Afghanistan. Hopefully, this time the United States will abstain from arming fanatic jihadists. US had the chance to fix it, it blew it. What's left to do today is to declare a victory and leave. Because, quoting Ronald Reagan from 1982:        

 It cannot get any more bitterly ironic than this.

The Hell You Say. Say It Ain't So.

James Antle of TAC arrives to the conclusion that: 

Democrats have inadvertently supplied the template for undermining a future antiwar president.

"Inadvertently"? Really? Well, if one considers a density of lunacy in both parties, that, theoretically, could be somewhat true. But Antle himself makes a very good point after that:

Nobody will be impeached for lying about Afghanistan. There will be no intelligence community whistleblower setting in motion an impeachment inquiry over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In fact, the same Nancy Pelosi who ultimately caved to the Resistance shut down antiwar Democrats who wanted such hearings into George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But here John Bolton, an advocate of preventive presidential war during this very administration, may finally get his wish of being greeted as a liberator.

As I repeat ad nauseam--look who is running the country? Of course, I can wax "Marxist" (in reality it is REAL realism) here, if I need to, all I want but I will invoke here good ol' anti-war wisdom by Bronislav Malinowski (hardly a Marxist) "that like the charity, aggression starts at home". We always have to remember that the American war, an expeditionary warfare with relatively low costs in life for the US that is, while undeniably being a very lucrative affair for many contractors, is also driven by people with all their views, beliefs, misconceptions and even psychological and psychiatric disorders. Consider the Crusades--while there is very little denial of the fact that those were driven in a large part by desire for loot and highly valuable real estate, one cannot discount the issue of faith in them--it was there too and it was manifested on many occasions by and in crusaders. People in charge or near the current US war machine also have their beliefs and disorders. Sadly, many of those beliefs and disorders are extremely dangerous. The further those people are removed from battlefields the more aggressive and hysterical they become. 

It is only natural for them, because they convinced themselves that sacramental Samuel Johnson's patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel doesn't apply to them. It, however, fully does--most of them (not all, some exceptions do exist) are scoundrels. US forces behind America's disastrous military adventurism are usually people who do not know the difference between the FOB, as in commerce shipping, and FOB as in Forward Operating Base, forget about explaining to them the difference between tactics and operational art, not to speak of combat networks and weapon systems' integration. They have neither mental faculties to grasp it nor are interested because they think that they can control things of which they have no idea. This is in general a psychological portrait of people in US "high places", such as House of Representatives or US media, who unleashed Cold War 2.0 with Russia--they believe in a number of falsities in the foundation of this new Cold War, plus, being petulant infantile children, it is for them the only way to lash out in their not completely internalized and understood, but surely profoundly felt, desperation when things do not go their way. So, behind hysterical Russophobia of the US political elite, the reason of a massive geopolitical assault on Russia as a way to preserve US hegemony is very important but not the only defining factor, by far the most important one is a rotten to the core moral fabric of the American elites or, speaking in plain language, many of them being just self-serving ass-holes. In other words, one has to be a decent man or a woman to make different decisions and have different non-hysterical reactions. US power politics attracts primarily people with a very specific psychological profile--a profile of sociopaths who only see their self-realization through power and aggression, especially if the actual fighting is done by someone else. Plus, they all lie, non-stop. 

All politicians, everywhere, lie, but it seems that only in the United States as of lately lying all the time became a strict requirement for pass to the power "elite" Parnassus. It is one thing to lie about Russia, but to lie to oneself--this is something new. When even a WaPo--a professional lie-generating organization--is forced to report on Afghanistan catastrophe, that shows how bad things are getting:

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case. Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

Lie permeates the Washington's corridors of power, it is everywhere, it oozes from the pages of news papers and magazines, it is dissolved to a dangerous poisonous levels in the economy statistics, it is being squeezed from non-stop useless public opinion polls, lies penetrated even into decision making levels of military and even manufacturing. No wonder the US can no longer shake off this sticky feelings of things not going right. They don't and it cannot be other way because everything is being fueled by lie. They lied about Iraq, they lie about Afghanistan, they lie about Russia. They need a cover for their gigantic egos and disproportionately puny abilities which feed those egos. And they do it in full consciousness because that is who they are. Once American meritocracy was killed, this outcome was inevitable--the trash moved in. But one cannot lie non-stop and those bubbles of lies, big and small, are beginning to pop practically non-stop. And this popping sound generates more and more aggression in a desperate attempt to prevent popping of the biggest bubble of them all--a myth, which is one of the iterations of lie, of the American omnipotence. Cold War 2.0 in their opinion can give them, as they thought would be with, now completely discredited, Russiagate, at least some new lease on life in their privileged positions. But they are wrong, after all, in that they lied not only to the public but to themselves too. They can not do anything else anymore and release of the papers on Afghanistan and 3-year long exhibition of a collective madness in sabotaging American governance, however inept, and Constitution, illuminated a staggering scale of rot and corruption of the Empire. Now it is just a matter of time before house of cards comes crushing down. Something built on lies in our modern world doesn't live that long. Not to mention when being run by ass-holes.