The Washington Post recently published classified communications that seemingly prove that everyone up and down the chain of command knew that the Afghan war was one giant whopper the whole time. The media darlings of the donor class are talking about it. “Think pieces” are being written, excoriating this state of affairs.
Jimmy Dore had a great line on the 18th anniversary of the war: “The Afghanistan war is now old enough to fight in the Afghanistan war”. So after 18 years, and more money spent there than was spent in the Marshall Plan after World War 2, nothing much has changed in that faraway land, and lies sustained the entire enterprise.
What I want to know is this: why is anyone surprised? Writers and reporters have been shouting about this expensive, murderous, wasteful mess for years. Few have been listening, though. Only now, even many of the people who lukewarmly supported the Afghanistan war, or didn’t have the spine or interest to say anything, now oppose it. And now I see all the mainstream writers suddenly find the courage to write some bold piece about how Afghanistan is a travesty. What I want to know is this: where were you when it mattered? Summer soldiers are coming out the woodwork, and their newly-found self-righteousness is nauseating.
First of all, it has never been a war. It’s been an occupation by a foreign power. The U.S. military has occupied Afghanistan for 18 years, performing police actions, and fighting off any natives who become angry enough to fight back.
And we’ve known it was an expensive lie. How could anyone not see that the United States’ longest, most expensive war ever, was not producing anything remotely resembling “progress”? They didn’t even have a clear idea of what progress would look like, and they couldn’t communicate it to the public. But everyone, the public, the media, our own government, didn’t even care about this war. It was placed on the back burner, and ignored. The “Afghanistan War” became almost a fact of nature, the very archetype of perpetual war. Everyone saw the truth, but for 18 years no one cared. That is the real travesty.
