Hello,
this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. I am now 6 weeks
post surgery to repair a severed tendon in my left knee. I am happy
to report that I am making great progress toward being able to walk
again. This week I began physical therapy and I can now bear some
weight on my leg. So thanks for bearing with me and thanks for the
prayers and well wishes.
2019 in review
Since this is the beginning of the New Year, a year in review
episode would be appropriate. What was the biggest story of the
year? My vote would go to the never ending impeachment investigation
against President Trump. But there are the presidential election
campaigns of all the Democrats. Then you have the Constitution
becoming ever more irrelevant because it is voluntary and not
self-enforcing so goodbye Constitution. I could also talk about
rising debt at every level of government and the public, and the
inevitable debt crises.
Instead I have decided to revisit the Middle East, specifically
Afghanistan. Where do we stand in Afghanistan after 18 years of
fighting, dying and killing? A New Year is a good time to ask that
question.
History of American involvement in Afghanistan
Washington invaded Afghanistan 18 years ago. As a result America
has suffered more than 2400 dead Americans and more than 20,000
wounded Americans. We also see more than 110,000 Afghan dead and the
expenditure of more than 1 trillion dollars. We don’t have to
wonder what it was all about anymore because a report in the Washington Post published December 9, 2019 tells us.
The report consists of about 2000 pages of material. A court has
ordered the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction to release this to the Post.
The Afghanistan Papers – what exactly do they
tell us?
The Report paints a Robert McNamara type picture of America’s
entry into and occupation of Afghanistan. McNamara was Secretary of
Defense, and therefore responsible for the conduct of much of the
Vietnam War. In a televised interview after the war he said it was
all a mistake that we shouldn’t have made. He said we,
and by that he meant he and President Johnson. LBJ created the lies
and deception to justify what they had already decided to do. The
Afghanistan Papers, as the Post calls the Report, I suppose to
remind us of the Pentagon Papers of Daniel Ellsberg fame, paints a
devastating picture of the lying fraud that made up U.S. war policy
and continues to do so to this day.
The report consists of interviews and recorded conversations of
those who began the war, as well as the generals and bureaucrats who
conducted it. It cuts across the Bush and Obama Administrations and
points out that the Trump Administration is continuing down the same
path.
Victory was never possible
The documents contradict a long chorus of public statements
telling us that victory was just around the corner and all the while
their private comments reveal that it was all just a pack of lies.
They knew and admitted they knew that the war was unwinnable from the
start and that nothing of any value could be accomplished there. The
“good war” in Afghanistan ,as President Obama called it, only
required winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.
Three administrations bogging themselves down
The Report reveals three administrations at the presidential
level, all acting in collaboration with military officers and
civilian bureaucrats who lied deliberately, repeatedly, and
systematically to the public and especially to the media about the
actual conditions in Afghanistan. Thousands of documents reveal how
despite knowing that the struggle was pointless and unwinnable,
additional troops were continually added or “surged” into the
struggle. These same officials regularly overstated the success the
U.S. had in winning hearts and minds. They simply made up or invented
much of the news coming from the war. They understood clearly that
the war was unwinnable and a waste of lives and resources.
Afghanistan became a bipartisan problem
Like many of the problems for which Democrats and Republicans
attack each other attempting to assign blame, the Afghanistan War was
and is bipartisan. One article published in The New Republic points out that the documents reveal a bipartisan consensus to lie
about what was actually happening in Afghanistan. And what was
happening? Chronic waste and chronic corruption, one ill conceived
scheme after another. This resulted in a near-unmitigated failure to
bring peace and prosperity to the country. Both parties had reasons
to engage in the lying and the cover-up. For Bush it was his global
war on terror. For Obama it was the good war, as opposed to Iraq the
bad war.
The true cost? No one can say
What is the true cost of Afghanistan in terms of dollars? No one
seems to know exactly and my guess is that no one wants to know. The
Report makes it clear that the cost exceeds one trillion dollars and
counting. It is also clear that as soon as the U.S. troops were on
the ground, the occupiers, i.e. the politicians and bureaucrats,
began to flood the country with money which is customary in U.S. wars
now, but of course, it makes corruption inevitable.
Hiding the cost
One contractor described in the Report how he was required to
spend 3 million dollars per day on projects in an area the size of a
U.S. county. Unlike U.S. boondoggles, he typically did his boondoggle
for communities of mud huts with no windows. U.S. Army colonel Bob
Crowley described how at headquarters every data point was altered to
present the best possible picture. He went on to say that everything
was totally unreliable, but we became a self-licking ice cream cone.
It’s easy to see how the American people have been misled and
even brainwashed by their government. The media, such as the Washington Post, which published this story, and the New
York Times, acted as the government’s mouthpiece, often
publishing government press releases verbatim. Honest efforts at
journalism were stifled, as were politicians who sought the truth.
Ron Paul and a few others come to mind.
Benefiting from the Afghanistan war
Who benefits from all the waste? Who benefits from more than one
trillion dollars of taxpayer money, but mostly debt which stifles our
future standard of living? The answer to those questions probably
explains the whole war. What about the more than 2400 dead on the
U.S. side. This month that number was raised by two, as two men were
killed when their helicopter crashed. The Taliban took credit for
destroying the helicopter and the men. What about the more than
20,000 wounded and the more than 110,000 Afghan dead; no one knows
how many Afghans have been wounded and no one wants to know.
If those who perpetrated this disaster knew from the beginning
what it was, can there be any doubt that the government from top
bottom contains a lot of lying psychopaths? I don’t use that term
loosely by the way. I don’t refer to leaders of my own government
as psychopaths without evidence.
A psychopathic mindset
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental
Disorders, psychopaths have a poor sense of right and wrong; they
can’t understand or share another person’s feelings. They have no
conscience or that little voice that lets us know we’re doing
something wrong. If he lies to you or steals your money he won’t
feel any qualms though he may pretend to. I submit that psychopath
fits those described in this Report perfectly. Did they care or feel
remorse for the lives they were destroying? If the answer is no, then
psychopath is an appropriate description of them.
Thanks for having to serve for—nothing?
Finally folks; to all the dead, thanks for your service; if you
were left with no legs or no arms, thanks for your service too; blind
or with permanent hearing loss, well thanks for your service; PTSD so
bad you can’t hold a job or have a marital relationship, thanks for
your service; depressed to the point of taking your own life, thanks
for your service too. It was apparently all just a trillion dollar
boondoggle but thanks anyway.
At least that’s the way I see it.
Until next time folks,
This is Darrell Castle.
[…] weakness. That is the U.S. position in Afghanistan, especially with the release of the Afghanistan papers in December, which we talked about, and with this being a presidential election […]