The Pentagon And The Generals Wanted This Disastrous War OpEd – Eurasia Review

By Ryan McMaken*

In early July, Ron Paul penned a column titled Its Saigon In Afghanistan, invoking the imagery of the fall of Saigon in 1975, when US military helicopters scrambled to evacuate personnel from the roof of the US embassy. But Paul suggested that maybe the situation in Afghanistan was perhaps not as dramatic as the situation in Saigon forty-six years ago.

But that was six weeks ago.

Now, it looks like the end of the USs war in Afghanistan may be in many ways every bit as chaotic as the US regimes final defeat in Vietnam.

When Paul was writing his article in early July, we were already getting hints of the direction things were going. USforces abandoned Bagram Airfield in the middle of the night, and the US didnt even tell its allies what was going on. Afghan officials discovered the US was gone hours later. Shortly thereafter, looters ransacked the base.

But that, it seems, was just the beginning. Over a period of a mere ten days, provincial capitals in Afghanistanhave fallen one after the other. On Sunday, the Taliban entered the strategically key capital Kabul. The Talibans reconquest of the country was so fast thateven the US regimes spokesman admitted the militants progress came much more quickly than the U.S. had anticipated.

Now, after spending twenty years implementing regime change in Afghanistan, and after spending more than $800 billionan official figure thats likely far smaller than the real monetary costthe USs strategy in Afghanistan has completely collapsed.

Indeed, for the USs local allies, the situation is far worse now than what it was in 2001. Those who were unwise enough to ally themselves with the Americans over the past twenty years now face reprisals from the Taliban. Death will likely be the result for many.

Not surprisingly, then, Afghanis in recent days have flocked to Kabul International Airport, desperateto find some way out of the countryas the Taliban closes in.

Its doesnt take an immense amount of imagination to recall the images of those who were desperate to escape from the US embassy in Saigon.

So now we reach the stage of figuring out who is to blame for this total strategic failure in Afghanistan.

Some politicians will try and use the US regimes failure in Afghanistan to score points against the Biden administration. We already see it with some Republicans who still havent figured out that the American public long agostopped caring about the war.

Its easy to see the partisan reasons for this, but if we want to honestly focus on whos to blame for the utter waste of time and resources that was the war in Afghanistan, we have to look far beyond just a handful of civilianpoliticians.

Yes,much of the blameshouldgo to the civilianbureaucrats, because they share an immense amount of the blame in bringing about this strategic blunder. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Madeleine Albrightare just a few of the politicos who encouraged the continuation of this lost war.

But the fact is the civilian war architects were encouraged and enabled every step of the way by Pentagon bureaucrats (i.e., the generals), who were only more than happy to have an excuse to pad their budgets and increase their relevance on Capitol Hill. As Ron Paulput it this week:

The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.

And of course, the Pentagon allied itself with the private sector industries that suppled the materiel. Paul continues:

The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.

Or, as Timothy Kudodescribes it,

Across two decades, our military leaders presented rosy pictures of the Afghanistan War and its prospects to the president, Congress, and the American people, despite clear internal debate about the validity of those assessments and real-time contradictory information from those fighting and losing the daily battle against the Taliban. Or, to put it in the words of John Sopko, the inspector general who issued a series of reports known asthe Afghanistan Papers: The American people have constantly been lied to.

Nor did the military officers council caution or peace.Douglas MacGregor at theAmerican Conservativecorrectlyrecalls:

All that can be said with certainty is that between 2001 and 2021, none of the senior officers expressed opposition to the policies of intervention and occupation strongly enough to warrant their removal. None felt compelled to leave the service and take their opposing views to the public forum.

When it became clear that the collective strategies and tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq were failing, not only General David Petraeus, butmost of Americas senior military leaderschose to prevaricate and distort facts in public to show progress when there was none. How many American lives might have been saved had someone only told the truth will never be known.

Moreover, Petraeus and countless military technocrats continued to call for more military action while trying to place the blame on others.1Doug Bandowsums it up:

Many of those once responsible for U.S. forces in Afghanistan while in authority have taken the lead in trying to perpetuate the mission. For instance, David Petraeus is busy trying to shield his reputation andshift blame to Bidenas the Afghan project collapses. Joseph Dunford, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, recently co-chaired the congressionally mandatedAfghanistan Study Group, which predictably insisted that the United States should stay in the country. What other conclusion was imaginable? As the entire geopolitical enterprise collapses, its promoters insist that American forces should stick around with no good purpose and no realistic plan of action.

Indeed, the incompetence of the USs military leadership has been on clear display in recent weeks as the US-trained and US-armed military personnel have been impotent in the face of Taliban advances. The USs military hierarchywas specifically tasked with training these Afghan forces, yet its now clear how wellthatdirective was carried out.

The complicity of the military brasss role has always been especially damaging, because the generals have long banked on the unwarranted amount of credibility they enjoy with the public. As Kudo notes:

The promise that victory was just around the corner proved intoxicating to presidents and politicians, not to mention everyday Americans, who blindly trusted anyone with four stars on hisepaulettes. Despite the partisanship and institutional mistrust of the past two decades, the military consistently has been themost trusted institutionin the country, rated highly by roughly 70 percent of Americans. Cloaked in near-universal trust, these officers repeatedly argued that an unwinnable war could be won.

Unfortunately, because of this, military personnel are likely to continue to be shielded from the criticism they deserve.

After all, there is a persistent habit among many Americans to repeat the narrative that all wars will be won if only the politicians listen to the generals, and let the generals do their job. One still hears this today from those who still engage in wishful thinking aboutthe Vietnam War and who still cling to the idea that the war could have been won if only the military experts had been in charge. In actual experience, however, the lost war in Afghanistan is what we get when we listen to the generals.

But dont expect any meaningful reform. In the United States, when bureaucrats fail, they usually get rewarded with larger budgets, such as when the USs intelligence community allowed 9/11 to occur right under its collective nose.The same is likelyat least in the short termfor the Pentagon. The generals will simply pivot to argue for ever-larger military budgets in the name of fighting China, Iran, Russia, and other perceived enemies.

In other words, the generals and the civilian politiciansare hard at work planning the next Afghanistan. Lets just hope the taxpayers who pay for it all may be a little less nave next time.

*About the author: Ryan McMakenis a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for theMises WireandPower&Market,but readarticle guidelinesfirst.

Source: This article was published by the MISES Institute

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The Pentagon And The Generals Wanted This Disastrous War OpEd - Eurasia Review