13, December 2019 Vietnam Redux, Afghanistan the Graveyard of Empires
According to a trove of documents obtained by the Washington Post, senior U.S. officials deliberately misled the American people throughout the 18-year campaign, making sunny pronouncements they knew to be untrue and hiding unmistakable evidence the war was doomed to fail.
Remember Vice President Dick Cheney boasting “we have the Taliban on the run” mimicking President Nixon’s oft repeated pronouncement “we see light at the end of the tunnel,” misleading progress in the failed Vietnam War.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, confessed General Lute, The White House’s Afghan war czar during Bush and Obama’s administrations.
2,400 American lives lost, 20,589 wounded and thousands of innocent Afghan civilians killed and maimed. Unable to cope with the horrors of war many US soldiers took their own lives.
The core failings of the war that persist to this day span three presidencies, Bush jnr, Obama and Trump.
Obscene amounts of money were squandered in the mistaken belief that Afghanistan would be crushed with America’s superior firepower ignoring the mistakes of Vietnam, Iraq and so many other failed conflicts.
Sadly, no government official will be held accountable for the appalling mistakes in conducting the war or fueling runaway corruption and failing to put a dent into Afghanistan thriving opium trade. This is also a damning indictment of Congress which completely failed in its oversight duties. The CIA and military budgets need to be drastically cut to halt these costly military adventures. Afghanistan really is the graveyard of empires.
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