Just in one week, Pentagon officials announced they see no security threat in bringing Middle Eastern personnel to train on our military bases, while they believe there is a threat if we don’t continue the Kabul urban renewal project, aka the Afghan war. At the same time, another decorated soldier died over there, just after Congress passed a defense bill dealing with everything except for defense of our soldiers. “Invade the world, invite the world” is still the guiding vision of our broken Pentagon leaders.
Sgt. 1st Class Michael Goble, a Green Beret and Bronze Star recipient, was completing his final tour in Afghanistan when he was killed Monday in the northern Kunduz province, in a roadside bombing. His remains were flown home to his family on Christmas day. Whereas in years past, a soldier solemnly removing his hat when informing the family members of the death was able to look the loved ones in the eyes and tell them how the soldier died while we were taking vital ground in a clear mission, today there are no words to describe the vanity of the mission.
This year, 24 soldiers have died in Afghanistan, the most since 2014. Every single special ops group has lost a soldier this year. This is two and a half years since Trump promised a new strategy there. But as I noted at the time, there is no strategy. The Afghans are just as compromised as ever. Our soldiers are engaged in the most dangerous combat — counterinsurgency patrolling in villages where they are ambushed, often by the very forces they are “mentoring.”
We can have the strongest military in the world, but there is no way we can send isolated units into these types of cities on foot patrol and leave them there indefinitely without any defensive lines or strategic offensive vision, while any suicide bomber dressed as a civilian can attack them directly or with a roadside bomb. This isn’t a war; this is a social work operation in a war zone – the worst combination of all.
It is truly shocking how even after the Washington Post published an exhaustive expose showing that the Pentagon brass knew Afghanistan was an incorrigible and counterintuitive mission, this administration is still pressing on. The expose, which was based on thousands of interviews compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, found decades of deceit and obfuscation about “progress” in the theater. Nothing was done in the defense bill to rectify the situation except that more money was thrown at the Afghan military and we are bringing in thousands more to become immigrants in America! To top it off, the defense bill Trump signed last Friday even pays for Taliban expenses during negotiations.
Shockingly, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week he doesn’t believe the soldiers died for nothing.
“I do not. I absolutely do not,” he said at a news conference on Friday responding to the Washington Post expose. “I could not look at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t answer myself at 2 or 3 in the morning when my eyes pop open and I see the dead roll in front of my eyes. So no, I don’t think anybody has died in vain, per se.”
OK, so what did they die for? The mythical “Afghan military?”
These are the same generals Trump once referred to as being “reduced to rubble,” yet instead of draining the swamp, he has promoted them. On September 4, 2013, Milley, then a three-star general, said about the Afghan military, “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day. And I think that’s an important story to be told across the board.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper, another swamp monster promoted by Trump, said, “We have a mission in Afghanistan, and that is to ensure that it never again becomes a safe haven for terrorists.” Standing next to General Milley at Friday’s press conference, he promised to remain in the godforsaken country “until we are confident that that mission is complete, we will retain a presence to do that.”
The problem with that, as the 9/11 commission staff report said, is that 9/11 was all about visas and immigration because “terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country.” Yet, thanks to these policies, we are sending our soldiers there to build up an Islamic military, and then we are bringing some here to train. This very defense bill that Trump bragged about signing added another 4,000 special immigrant visas for Afghanistan. We’ve been bringing in about 10,000 a year! Prior to 9/11, we barely had immigrants from there. Now, aside from 2,500 dead and tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, we have nothing to show for the war other than 100,000 largely unvetted new Afghani migrants. This is something George Orwell couldn’t have choreographed.
Worse, at the same time, the Pentagon is now saying it sees no threat of terrorism in the military training of foreign military personnel on our bases in light of the Pensacola attack. Last Thursday, the Pentagon announced that following background checks on all Saudi military trainees in the country, it found no “immediate threat scenario.” Remember, these are the same people who, in 2017, found no threat from Mohammad Alshamrani after he tweeted jihadist material. I guess the immediacy of a threat is all relative.
Meanwhile, these same swamp generals refuse to pay attention to our own border, even as they fund endless security programs and even border wall construction in the Middle East. At some point, conservatives must ask which swamp we are draining.
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