For decades, the U.S. government has tried to define “militant” or “terrorist” to mean any non-American person who dies when an American weapon explodes. We’ve seen twenty years of these lies and uncountable other lies, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. When caught, the military nonchalantly “corrects the record” without apology or explanation, even though there was no basis for the initial claim. A dramatic example of this occurred when Wikileaks (see “Collateral Murder” video) exposed the killings of Reuters employees who the U.S. claimed were “terrorists.” It recently happened again in a dramatic way, as CENTCOM’s mendacity has been exposed. Those dead “terrorists” turn out to have been an aid worker and a family, including multiple children. In wars, truth is the first victim.
As Glenn Greenwald noted, much of the legacy news media (including the NYT and WaPo) played right along with the initial lie. This is one of those rare cases where the reporters kept digging.
One more Tweet channels my frustration:
Who knew NYT remembered how to investigate? The lies have gone on so long, the intelligence organizations have been so politicized, that nobody can ever untangle the truth, or even an approximation. The saddest thing is the lies about inheriting a date from Trump, who had no plan, and failing to talk to the senior sergeants, the lieutenants and captains, in actual contact with the Afghan Army. Any of them could have told the politicians that there was no Afghan Army, and that when the President of Afghanistan fled the country we needed to take custody of Bagram Air Base and send in a drone to kill the absent President.
The claim that there was no plan, but they were following Trump’s plan, represents cognitive dissonance to a level I can’t understand. There was a plan, it is called NEO (Non-Combatant Evacuation Operations) and was written the day we invaded, and updated regularly since then. Trump’s plan might have failed, we’ll never know. But, it was conditions-based. Biden threw away the conditions and claimed Trump had committed him to a date certain with no conditions. Lies.
Any General who agreed that Bagram should be surrendered in favor of defending the Kabul airport is an idiot. Two runways and an infrastructure built for defense beats one runway and some barbed wire every day.
Bill: I offer this as proof that there was never any meaningful metric of what success meant in Afghanistan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3LFbOSPfrE
Agree 100%, Bush’s sin wasn’t the invasion, it was not being able to answer the question “Now what?” The US appealed to NATO under the mutual-defense clause, and when Bush couldn’t answer Now What, he needed to abdicate the lead role and turn it over to NATO to make a decision. The Brits, Germans, Canadians and Poles were all perfectly qualified to devise an extraction and ensure that the seventh-century barbarians and their murderous allies were denied the ability to attack the West again.
Biden’s sins were two-fold. First, and with the greatest long-term impact, he destroyed NATO by pulling out without informing the allies we had pulled in. The second was lying about what was known about the Afghan government and Army’s ability to sustain itself. The call to the President of Afghanistan should be a death-penalty impeachment. I’m actually not upset with Biden. I have no idea who is running the government, but it isn’t the Dodderer-in-Chief, My best guess is a committee of Obama, Klain, Schumer and Pelosi. Klain, a political hack, was named the Ebola Czar by Obama and is now Chief of Staff. He’s a useful tool.