According to reports, Gen. H. R. McMaster convinced President Trump to give up his longstanding opposition to the Afghan war by showing him this photograph, below, of Afghan women in what the media are describing as “miniskirts.” As the Washington Post put it:

“One of the ways McMaster tried to persuade Trump to recommit to the effort was by convincing him that Afghanistan was not a hopeless place. He presented Trump with a black-and-white snapshot from 1972 of Afghan women in miniskirts walking through Kabul, to show him that Western norms had existed there before and could return.”

Starting with the 2001 invasion, the US war in Afghanistan is now 16 years in: as President Trump pointed out in last night’s speech, the longest war in American history. Even President Trump thought this was excessively long, admitting that “my original instinct was to pull out.”

But the US isn’t pulling out. Instead, President Trump recommitted the US to a new round of escalation with no concrete end conditions, and formally disavowed a “time-based” approach. He added that he doesn’t think the US should publicly announce the dates for ending their “military options.”

The reality behind this rhetoric, though, is that once again any pretense of the Afghan War ending is out the window, and the seemingly endless war again has no end in sight. Trump has laid the ground for reckless new escalations, and in presenting 9/11 and the Iraq withdrawal as justification, is committed to staying.

With President Donald Trump’s new strategy, America’s longest-ever war promises to stretch on indefinitely, despite pledges by previous administrations and by Trump himself to withdraw from Afghanistan.

The European Union approved on Monday an aid package to Afghanistan worth 100 million euros ($118 million) under a State Building Contract (SBC) signed with the Afghan government to support implementation of key reforms aimed at ensuring macroeconomic stability, improving public financial management, state budget transparency and development policies, Delegation of the European Union to Afghanistan said in a statement.

In an extended tweetstorm conccurrent with Trump's Monday night Afghanistan address, Ron Paul lashed out at the president, saying that at long last, Trump's neo-con nature had emerged. "Steve Bannon brakes removed. Neocons feeling their oats" and urging the public to "Beware! @LindseyGrahamSC loves Trump's speech! Why are arch-neocons celebrating so much? Very telling!." It appears that Paul's assessment of Trump's new strategy was not far off, because as the Hill reports today, the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party applauded President Trump’s troop surge in Afghanistan, even as members of the president’s base accused him of capitulating to the national security establishment.

The Taliban have announced that it will be no easy task for the United States to continue occupying Afghanistan after President Donald Trump reneged on his promise to withdraw from the country.

"If America doesn't withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, soon Afghanistan will become another graveyard for this superpower in the 21st century," Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday.

He then urged for the US to prepare for a withdrawal from the country "instead of continuing the war" on Afghanistan, the longest-running war in US history.

"As long as there is one US soldier in our land, and they continue to impose war on us," we will continue our insurgency, Mujahid emphasised.

If one moment stands out as the clearest signal yet of US President Trump turning his back on supporters, it was his announcement this week to re-escalate American military intervention in Afghanistan.

DID YOU KNOW that shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban tried to surrender?

For centuries in Afghanistan, when a rival force had come to power, the defeated one would put down their weapons and be integrated into the new power structure — obviously with much less power, or none at all. That’s how you do with neighbors you have to continue to live with. This isn’t a football game, where the teams go to different cities when it’s over. That may be hard for us to remember, because the U.S. hasn’t fought a protracted war on its own soil since the Civil War.

So when the Taliban came to surrender, the U.S. turned them down repeatedly, in a series of arrogant blunders spelled out in Anand Gopal’s investigative treatment of the Afghanistan war, “No Good Men Among the Living.”

Former Navy SEAL and ex-Blackwater CEO Erik Prince said President Trump has “signed up for what he’d been opposing” in Afghanistan on Tuesday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily.

“As much as the Pentagon wants to claim they focus on diversity, they weren’t really interested in diversity of opinion on how to end this longest war,” Prince told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.

“As you look at 16 years of the Pentagon doing this, they really haven’t adapted. They haven’t adapted to the Taliban,” he lamented.

President Trump unveiled his plan for Afghanistan after seven months of deliberation Monday evening, announcing tweaks around the edges of the current strategy instead of a different approach.

Listening to President Trump’s speech Monday night on Afghanistan, it was pretty easy to figure out how his military advisors had convinced him to endorse what is essentially a continuation of the policy he inherited from Barack Obama: using U.S. troops to train and advise Afghan security forces and engage in counter-terrorism operations, while pressing Pakistan to stop providing a haven for the Taliban and other insurgents.

The key was to package a policy largely characterized by continuity as a dramatic departure from the approach followed by Obama. Thus Trump told the nation that U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and Asia “will change dramatically.”

(Ironically, he failed to mention the most significant departure from Obama’s legacy: Trump’s approval of the Pentagon’s request to dispatch a few thousand more U.S. military personnel to Afghanistan. That information was communicated to the press and Congress off-camera by administration officials.)

The president has escalated fights in six countries. Now his supporters are wondering what happened to ‘America First.’

In his Monday night speech on the Afghan War, President Trump committed the US to an essentially open-ended escalation of the conflict without any specific limitations, while granting commanders broader authority to unilaterally target “the enemy.”

Like professional LIAR Bill Kristol said, the Deep State is winning. The Poppy Fields are safe, thank G-d, the European False Flags helped convince Trump to keep killing Afghans for years to come. And added bonus is now we're going to be bombing Pakistan, since Syria is kinda off limits. At least West of the Euphrates River.

Goldman Government Sachs knows the Xmas bonuses this year will be extra big, since the Afghanistan opium output will keep soaring. Just thinking of all those hundreds of billions to be laundered by TBTF Wall Street banks and protected by the USG!

The Taliban warned the U.S. that they would make Afghanistan a "graveyard for the American empire" after President Donald Trump's announcement that he would commit more troops to the country.

The radical Islamist group, who are waging a bloody insurgency against the Afghan government and its security forces, said they would continue "jihad" until all U.S. troops were removed from Afghan soil.

"If the U.S. does not pull all its forces out of Afghanistan, we will make this country the 21st-century graveyard for the American empire," the Taliban's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said in a statement.

This evening Trump will announce a new "path forward" in the occupation of Afghanistan. According to the usual leaks it will be very same path the U.S. has taken for 16 years.

Several thousands soldiers from the U.S. and various NATO countries will (in vane) train the Afghan army. Special Forces and CIA goons will raid this or that family compound on someone's say-so. Bombs will be dropped on whatever is considered a target.

Trump will announce that 1,000 or so troops will be added to the current contingent. About 15,000 foreign troops will be in Afghanistan. About three contractors per each soldier will be additionally deployed.

Trump knows that this "path forward" is nonsense that leads nowhere, that the best option for all foreign troops in Afghanistan is to simply leave:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - 21 Nov 2013
We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let's get out!

Trump on Monday committed the United States to an open-ended conflict in Afghanistan, signalling he would dispatch more troops to America's longest war and vowing "a fight to win".

Vocal supporters of President Donald Trump on the far right slammed his decision to deploy additional troops to Afghanistan and ramp up engagement in the US’s longest war.

Many of the president’s longtime boosters criticised his about-face on Afghanistan, a war he repeatedly pilloried in the years leading up to the 2016 election.

Breitbart News, the site led by recently ousted White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, had a front page Monday evening full of stories lambasting Trump’s decision, referring to it as “unlimited war,” and comparing his strategy to that of President Barack Obama. Its top story described the speech as a “disappointment to many who had supported his calls during the campaign to end expensive foreign intervention and nation-building.”

Haley said she thinks the president's speech was "strong" and showed the U.S. is taking "an entirely new approach."

Germany will not immediately send more troops to Afghanistan in response to U.S. President Donald Trump's request for more backing as it increased its presence last year at a time when others were cutting, the defence minister said.

Ursula von der Leyen welcomed Trump's commitment to continuing the U.S. mission, but said Germany would not be among the first nations to contribute more.

"We increased our troop numbers by 18 percent last year when others were cutting theirs," she said during a visit to a submarine base in north Germany on Tuesday.

"So we don't see ourselves in the front row of people who should be asked for more soldiers."

In his Aug. 17 op-ed, “Preventing a terrorist victory in Afghanistan,” Stephen J. Hadley declared that President Trump’s main goal in Afghanistan should be to “test” the Taliban’s interest in peace. Mr. Hadley suggested without explanation that insurgents and terrorists can be defeated in Afghanistan, just as the Islamic State was pushed out of Iraq, with a “modest increase” in U.S. forces.

While he was right that it is a vital national interest to prevent terrorist attacks against the U.S. homeland, he was widely off the mark to imply that securing the territory of Afghanistan is necessary to produce that outcome.

The two “specialized” in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which hackers use networks to overload and overwhelm online sites, basically inundating them with requests for connections, as a result overloading and freezing them. Investigators said that the two were responsible for no fewer than 2 million such attacks, costing their victims — corporations and government sites around the world — millions of dollars.

In an address to the nation tonight, President Trump will lay out a new plan for the Afghanistan war.

It's widely expected that Trump will announce an increase in U.S. troop levels, carrying on the nation's longest war.

Trump is in a bind. As Taliban forces continue to rack up military and political gains across their country, no serious expert can possibly believe that continued U.S. intervention will deliver “victory.” Sixteen years of experience show that almost every U.S. tactic has not only failed, but backfired.

Far from winning hearts and minds, nighttime Special Forces raids and bombing runs have turned countless villagers against the Afghan government and its foreign backers. Far from bolstering Kabul’s resources, tens of billions of dollars in U.S. aid created an epidemic of corruption that decimated the government’s credibility and put money and weapons in the hands of the Taliban.

While President Trump made public the fact that a decision on Afghan War policy was made during Friday’s Camp David meeting,his administration still hasn’t provided any specific information on what exactly that decision was, apparently saving that for a Monday night speech.

Friday’s Camp David talks on Afghanistan appear to have ended without a final decision by President Trump on troop levels, as he continues to resist pressure from top cabinet officials to sign off on a massive escalation of the 16-year-old conflict with thousands of fresh troops.

Trump had initially delegated the decision to Defense Secretary James Mattis, but Mattis found a cap limiting his maximum deployment too restrictive. Now, Vice President Pence and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster are also taking up the cause of large-scale escalation, pushing Trump to accept the recommendations of the commanders.

Pence and McMaster were at the Camp David meeting, but Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who has been pushing a “privatize the war” initiative, was blocked, apparently at the behest of McMaster. Trump aide Steve Bannon, another skeptic of military escalation, was sacked outright.

Between Bannon's China trade war threats and fears over Cohn leaving, risk was off today, not helped by dismal Industrial Production data and the utter horror in Barcelona... Trannies were worst but this was an ugly say all around and losses accelerate into the close ahead of tomorrow's OPEX...

If you want to radically change the dynamic then you have to apply extreme pressure. I feel this is what Trump and his advisors are doing. They are appearing to “have the strength to force the moment to its crisis” to quote T.S. Eliot.

And that strength or purpose is creating large movements. Trump is a bully. It’s what he does, at least publicly. The response so far from China has been to denounce the idea of regime change in Pyongyang.

The response from Russia, through Foreign Minister (and top diplomat in the world right now), Sergei Lavrov was to announce a deal brokered between it, North Korea and China to get what Trump wants; no potential for nukes in North Korea.

"Russia together with China developed a plan which proposes 'double freezing': Kim Jong-un should freeze nuclear tests and stop launching any types of ballistic missiles, while US and South Korea should freeze large-scale drills which are used as a pretext for the North’s tests."

Worried by the Trump administration’s delay in announcing a military strategy for the war in Afghanistan, Sen. John McCain said Thursday he’ll try to force the debate on Capitol Hill, offering his own plan that would force a troop increase.

The Arizona Republican, who is also chairman of the Armed Services Committee, didn’t lay out a number in the legislation but said more American counterterrorism forces should be deployed, and given independent authority to strike targets of the Taliban, al Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

Mr. McCain also said the U.S should secure a long-term agreement with Afghanistan for an “enduring” military presence there, and should begin to impose penalties on neighboring Pakistan as punishment for that country’s harboring of insurgents and terrorists.

His plan comes at a time when the Trump White House is divided by debate over what to do in the war-torn nation, which continues to backslide on a host of security yardsticks.

To characterize congressional conduct regarding the Vietnam War as timorous and irresponsible is to be kind. There were individual exceptions, of course, among them Senator Morse who had opposed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and Senator Fulbright who by 1967 openly regretted his vote in favor and recognized Vietnam for the disaster it had become. Collectively, however, legislators failed abjectly.

Well, with the passage of a half century, here we are again, back in the soup (or perhaps more accurately, the sand). With the United States currently mired in the longest armed conflict in the nation’s history—considerably longer than Vietnam—Senator Lausche’s proposal of 1967 just might merit a fresh look.

As President Donald Trump vents his frustration with the United States' "losing" strategy in Afghanistan, the "notorious mercenary" and Blackwater founder Erik Prince has seized the moment to offer his favored alternative: privatize the war.

The plan, this literal colonialism, would be very similar to Blackwater’s approach in Iraq, where the private contractors had significant influence on US policy. It will potentially open the door to deadly abuses and murders by unaccountable forces, like those seen in Iraq.

Ronald Neumann, who served as the US Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, has echoed these concerns in an interview with mainstream media: "There's a bad record of contractors and human rights abuses. There's no legal structure to govern this."

As President Donald Trump vents his frustration with the United States' "losing" strategy in Afghanistan, the "notorious mercenary" and Blackwater founder Erik Prince has seized the moment to offer his favored alternative: privatize the war.

"A private air force and a bombing app! From the people who brought you Blackwater; an even more disturbing idea."
—Cal Perry, NBC News

According to a report by Katrina Manson of the Financial Times on Monday, Prince has drafted a proposal—dated August 2017—that would hand the longest war in American history over to a private "band of experienced sergeants," who would fight alongside U.S.-trained Afghan forces.

Prince, Manson writes, "proposes a two-year plan for fewer than 5,000 global guns for hire and under 100 aircraft, bringing the total cost of the U.S. effort to turn round a failing war to less than $10 billion a year."

An Army court will decide this week whether to review and perhaps reduce the life sentence of a soldier who massacred Afghan civilians — and in the process it will judge a controversial malaria drug given to troops that is known to cause hallucinations, anxiety and paranoia.

Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, left, is shown during an exercise at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, August 23, 2011. Bales is suspected of shooting, stabbing and burning sleeping villagers in a horrific attack that has sparked fury across Afghanistan. Bales is suspected of shooting, stabbing and burning sleeping villagers in a horrific attack that has sparked fury across Afghanistan.

Attorneys for Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the serviceman convicted in 2013 of killing 16 Afghans in the worst U.S. military massacre since Vietnam, are expected to raise the soldier’s use of mefloquine, also known by the brand name Lariam, before or during his deployment.

Caught between the Taliban, Islamic State and US airstrikes, Afghan civilians have been forced to flee their homes to the outskirts of Jalalabad, where they found refuge inside an unfinished university building.

Around 1,500 internally displaced people (IDPs), including hundreds of women and children, are reportedly seeking refuge in the area, many of them from the Achin and Haska Meyna districts in the Nangarhar Province of southern Afghanistan. They have fled the fighting between Afghan forces and the Taliban, as well as the atrocities of other terrorist groups.

“Islamic State militants slaughtered our uncle, saying he was a spy, so we left our homes as they said the next day they will also kill us,” a Pashto-speaking man from Haska Meyna told RT’s Ruptly film crew.

Media reports claim President Donald Trump let loose on his generals behind closed doors, blasting them royally for their startling failures in Afghanistan, America’s longest war.

The president has many faults and is a lousy judge of character. But he was absolutely right to read the riot act to the military brass for daring to ask for a very large troop and budget increase for the stalemated Afghan War that has cost $1 trillion to date.

Of course, the unfortunate generals are not really to blame. They have been forced by the last three presidents to fight a pointless war at the top of the world that lacks any strategy, reason or purpose – and with limited forces. But they can’t admit defeat by lightly-armed Muslim tribesmen.

Clearly frustrated by the Pentagon’s ineffective strategies, Donald Trump has vowed to fire some of his top generals and aggressively gain ground in Afghanistan. But will the US president be able to prevail in a 16-year war where his two predecessors failed?

Dragging on longer than the Vietnam and Iraq campaigns, Afghanistan is becoming yet another swamp Trump wants to drain in keeping with his colorful election campaign. George W. Bush presided over the two post-9/11 military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and Barack Obama promised to end them – but the everlasting Afghan war relentlessly rolls on.

During a high-profile situation room meeting in July, Trump reportedly told his national security team it's time for a rapid breakthrough in Afghanistan.

“We are not winning,” he said, as cited in an NBC report. “We are losing.”

The use of destructive weapon as such could kill several birds with one stone. It earned Donald Trump somewhat uplift in status amid disgraces whirling around White House at that time. It also played a commercial advertisement for purchasers of the US arms, in part for being over-hyped.

In an interview, an Afghan environment protection expert explained that MOAB-like bombs exposes hazardous chemicals into air that causes cancer, respiratory and digestive problems, deformities in babies, strokes, high blood pressure and weakened vision. It severely contaminates food and water that even stay afloat to affect next generation.

President Donald Trump has become increasingly frustrated with his advisers tasked with crafting a new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and recently suggested firing the war's top military commander during a tense meeting at the White House, according to senior administration officials.

During the July 19 meeting, Trump repeatedly suggested that Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford replace Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, because he is not winning the war, the officials said. Trump has not met Nicholson, and the Pentagon has been considering extending his time in Afghanistan.

Former Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who earlier urged Donald Trump to appoint a US “viceroy” to win the Afghan war, has reportedly pitched up a “business proposal” to Kabul, offering a fully-fledged private air force to back the local army’s operations.

Prince, the founder and former CEO of private military company Blackwater (now rebranded Academi), has floated a business proposal offering a privately-manned “turn-key composite air wing” to the Afghan government, whose troops steadily lose ground to the Taliban, the Military Times reported on Thursday.

Prince's plan, cited by the newspaper, was reportedly submitted to the Afghans back in March. It includes providing “high speed response” as well as close-air support for Afghanistan’s army fighting the Islamists. The private air force’s fixed-wing planes, attack helicopters and drones would be flown by hired pilots, but “weapons release decisions will still be made by Afghans.”

After months of the Pentagon failing to sell a concrete plan of escalation to the White House, officials now say that the administration is considering getting back on track with a drawdown headed for a full pullout from the country after 16 years.

This is happening for the same reason the Pentagon hasn’t been able to sell the escalations, that a number of officials are unconvinced that the escalation is going to accomplish anything, and that they don’t think there’s a clear strategy for victory.

The Pentagon was more or less uniform in arguing escalations, albeit of varying sizes, and are said to be objecting to the proposed pullout as a “minority viewpoint,” warning that it does not meet the goals of the conflict.

After months of the Pentagon failing to sell a concrete plan of escalation to the White House, officials now say that the administration is considering getting back on track with a drawdown headed for a full pullout from the country after 16 years.

This is happening for the same reason the Pentagon hasn’t been able to sell the escalations, that a number of officials are unconvinced that the escalation is going to accomplish anything, and that they don’t think there’s a clear strategy for victory.

The Pentagon was more or less uniform in arguing escalations, albeit of varying sizes, and are said to be objecting to the proposed pullout as a “minority viewpoint,” warning that it does not meet the goals of the conflict.

With opposition parties boycotting what they call a rigged election, Reuters reports the streets of Caracas were deserted on Sunday as a minority of Venezuelans trickled to the polls to elect a constitutional super-body that unpopular leftist President Maduro vowed would begin a new era of combat in the crisis-stricken nation. That is good news as, following the death of two people yesterday, shortly after a large group of motorbikes sped through the city, and explosion hit, reportedly injuring a number of police officers.

President Trump, searching for a reason to keep the United States in Afghanistan after 16 years of war, has latched on to a prospect that tantalized previous administrations: Afghanistan’s vast mineral wealth, which his advisers and Afghan officials have told him could be profitably extracted by Western companies.

Mr. Trump has discussed the country’s mineral deposits with President Ashraf Ghani, who promoted mining as an economic opportunity in one of their first conversations. Mr. Trump, who is deeply skeptical about sending more American troops to Afghanistan, has suggested that this could be one justification for the United States to stay engaged in the country.

It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on with the weapons because identifying markings have been removed in most instances. However, many of the guns appear to be in the style of Russian weapons like the Kalashnikov sniper rifle. That said, other weaponry and accessories observed include the JGBG M7 scope, which is made in China. It’s possible that some of these guns are indeed modeled on the Kalashnikov but aren’t actually Russian in origin, or they are indeed genuine Russian manufacture but weren’t actually distributed by Moscow.

At the beginning of the year The Intercept published a lengthy article straightforwardly titled “The Crimes of the SEAL Team 6.” The article tells little about the heroism or professionalism of the servicemen of the American special forces unit SEAL Team 6, which Hollywood and bestselling authors are so fond of. The Intercept took the courage to investigate the darker side of war – crimes that are being routinely committed by US servicemen. The investigation into SEAL Team 6 was conducted for two years and included 18 interviews with former and current soldiers and officers of the unit. The Intercept article is somewhat reminiscent of The New York Times piece on the same topic published back in 2015.

The weekend once again saw the Taliban racking up territorial gains within Afghanistan, seizing the Taywara District in the Ghor Province, and also taking control of the Kohistan District in the far northern Faryab Province, forcing security forces in both districts to retreat and wait for reinforcements.

Taywara is the bigger fight, according to reports, with around 70 Afghan soldiers killed and 30 others wounded in the fighting. In Faryab, the attack was more of a surprise, with Taliban arriving under the cover of night and burning the police headquarters and other office buildings.

This is likely to be a recurring problem for the Afghan military, as the force is nowhere near as large as it is on paper. Many of the Afghan soldiers officials on the payroll are actually “ghost soldiers,” just names that are on the books so some higher ranking official can pocket their salary without any real soldier to complain that he didn’t get paid.

On April 13, the US dropped a non-atomic bomb in the Achin district of the Afghan province of Nangarhar, known as the “Mother of All Bombs” or MOAB. Following the incident the citizens who survived are showing signs of horrible diseases.

One of the employees of the Health Care Corps of the Achin district in an interview with Sputnik, on condition of anonymity, stated that after this incident, the residents of the district began to show skin and eye diseases.

According to him, the symptoms found in these civilians are very likely indicative of radiation exposure that could have been caused by the presence of uranium inside the dropped bomb.

The civilian death toll in Afghanistan, some 16 years into the US-led invasion and occupation, continues to rise precipitously, with the most recent figures out of the United Nations showing 1,662 civilians killed in the first half of 2017, the highest civilian toll of the entire war.

Officials had expressed hope civilian deaths had more or less leveled off, when the first half of 2016, the previous record, gave way to a roughly identical figure in the second half. Increased airstrikes and some major suicide bombings drove another increase, however.

The civilian toll was particularly grave for women and children, with casualties among women up 23% and 9% among children. This was exemplified by an early February US airstrike in Sangn District, which killed 26 civilians.

The Pentagon's top leader says officials are still mulling the proper strategy in Afghanistan to avoid rash decisions that could hurt the United States and its allies in the long run.

"Welcome to strategy," Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday. He had stopped in to speak with Pentagon reporters before a meeting with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to further discuss options in Syria.

Mattis said he's listening to all options and wrapping everything "under a regional context."

"This is hard, and there's a reason we got into some wars in our nation's history and didn't know how to end them. This is hard work and, if anyone else says otherwise, [he] is either somebody who didn't have to deal with it or deal with the consequences of the decisions of it," he said.

Earlier this week, The New York Times published a story on how top Trump administration officials have asked Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, and billionaire Stephen Feinberg, who owns military contractor DynCorp, to come up with alternative plans on how to proceed in Afghanistan.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the two men, who have made untold sums of money off the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, came up with a plan to rely on private contractors instead of the US military. This story may sound familiar and it usually doesn’t end well.

Last month — after The Wall Street Journal fired Jay Solomon, its chief foreign affairs correspondent, for failure to disclose shady business deals with one of his sources — we published a book excerpt that revealed some juicy details about that source, Farhad Azima, and his unsavory colleagues.

Since President Trump handed off the decision on the Afghan War’s escalation to Defense Secretary James Marris, we’ve heard several wildly different figures from different sources, with some reports suggesting that an escalation of 3,000 to 5,000 was too small, and that Mattis might ultimately go much, much bigger.

In reality, however, officials now say that Mattis’ autonomy on the matter has its limits, and those limits are 3,900 more US ground troops. A classified memo is said to be in place which would oblige Mattis to get White House authorization if his escalation is to be any larger than that.

The Pentagon has declined to comment on the matter, noting the memo is classified, but some administration officials are said to have been surprise that any restrictions at all were placed on Mattis for deciding on troop levels in Afghanistan.

Now comes President Donald Trump. His policies for the Middle East are similar to those of the previous two administrations but on steroids. Trump has already escalated the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. When Trump sends his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to solve the seventy-year-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu cannot hide his happiness with the appointment. The Democrats and the media are too busy with election results, hacking, and the Russian probe to pay much attention to Middle East policy, with one exception – Israel.

Anyone attempting to “rebuild” Afghanistan will have their work cut out. The success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative hinges on progress being made, however

Will the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) ever manage to cross the Hindu Kush?

Temerity is the name of the game. Even though strategically located astride the Ancient Silk Road, and virtually contiguous to the US$50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – a key BRI node – Afghanistan is still mired in war.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg today confirmed that the alliance has agreed at a ministerial-level meeting on a plan to escalate military involvement in Afghanistan. The exact details of this are yet to be worked out, and it’s not clear which countries will actually commit troops to the buildup.

That could involve a substantial amount of wrangling with the US, as America’s own planned escalation has yet to be announced, and Defense Secretary James Mattis is heavily pushing NATO on the merits of continuing the already 16-year-old war into the future.

The basic outline agreed to would see up to 10,000 troops, between US and NATO nations, sent to Afghanistan, and puts the assumed US figure somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000. President Trump has delegated the decision on troop levels to Mattis, but he has yet to announce a decision.

The CIA wasn’t just involved with the transportation of the drugs, however. The heroin was refined in a laboratory built at the CIA headquarters in Northern Laos. After about a decade of U.S. military intervention, SEA represented 70% of the world’s opium supplier. Unfortunately, many of the operatives became addicted to the heroin themselves. At the same time, SEA also became the main supplier of raw materials for the U.S. heroin industry. Though Air America apparently stopped operations in 1976, the CIA’s involvement in the opium and heroin industries continued in other parts of the world.

Since the U.S.-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the production of opium in the country has increased by 40 times according to Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service, or FSKN, fueling organized crime and widespread death.

The head of the FSKN, Viktor Ivanov, explained the staggering trend at a March U.N. conference on drugs in Afghanistan. Opium growth in Afghanistan increased 18 percent from 131, 000 hectares to 154, 000, according to Ivanov’s estimates.

“Afghan heroin has killed more than one million people worldwide since the ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ began and over a trillion dollars has been invested into transnational organized crime from drug sales,” said Ivanov according to Counter Current News.

A dramatic drop in U.S.-funded opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan over the last few years is fueling a growing heroin addiction problem afflicting tens of thousands of women and some children in the war-ravaged country, reports the Washington Post (WaPo).

The Pentagon unnecessarily spent big on Afghan army uniforms that are the wrong color because the guy in charge of making the choice “liked what he saw.”

Last week President Trump delegated to Secretary of Defense James Mattis the authority to determine how many more troops to deploy into Afghanistan. Mattis has reportedly settled on 4,000. He claims that this will help end the stalemate in that war. He is wrong. This deployment will have no impact on the outcome of the 16-year-old war in Afghanistan, but more importantly, continues a troubling trend in U.S. foreign policy: The military move has no ties to a strategic outcome.

The United States has a pattern of pushing for regime change in sovereign nations, while ignoring the consequences. One major result from the list of countries the U.S. has invaded this century is that they make up the top of the “least peaceful” nations in the 2017 Global Peace Index.

The 2017 Global Peace Index is another reminder that the United States’ seemingly endless pattern of pushing for regime change in sovereign nations that have done nothing to the U.S. has indeed resulted in a significant amount of blowback—most of which will be misrepresented, if not ignored by the mainstream media.

Americans may stay on Afghan soil for a “long-haul” mission that could evolve into several decades of “generational struggle,” General David Petraeus, ex-commander of US troops in Afghanistan, admitted.
The current war in Afghanistan is unlikely to end in the foreseeable future, David Petraeus, who led the US military campaign there back in the 2000s, told PBS News Hour.

Though the retired General argued that “we went there for a reason and we stayed for a reason,” to defeat Al-Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks, he hinted that “a generational struggle” may unfold in the war-ravaged country.

“This is not something that is going to be won in a few years. We’re not going to take a hill, plant a flag, go home to a victory parade,” he said. “And we need to be there for the long haul, but in a way, that is, again, sustainable,” he added.

To back his remarkable statement, he cited other examples of US deployments in other parts of the world that have lasted decades.

The US is definitely going to be sending more ground troops to Afghanistan soon, but the exact number is yet to be determined, with the Pentagon today backing away from media reports yesterday that they’d settled on a figure of 4,000 more troops, saying no final decisions have been made yet on numbers.

That might suggest they’re leaning toward an even bigger number, with influential retired Gen. Jack Keane suggesting that the US needed to send up to 20,000 more ground troops if they wanted to win the war, saying he believed the 4,000 figure was not likely to change the direction of the war.

Defense Secretary James Mattis conceded in testimony to the Senate this week that the US is “not winning” in Afghanistan, and President Trump has since given him unilateral authority to decide on troop levels and strategy. Mattis was seen as leaning toward the high end of escalation proposals.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is reportedly set to announce an increase of about 4,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Most of the US boots on the ground will train or advise Afghan forces, but some will battle both a resurgent Taliban and Islamic State.

The U.S. has a problem with the former Marine General Mattis as Secretary of Defense. Mattis thinks tactics, not strategy.

It makes little sense to send additional troops when one does not what strategy they will have to serve. There is so far no other way to end the war in Afghanistan other than to simply pull out of it. The racket that the war has become can only be stopped by such a grand strategic decision. Sending troops before deciding on the strategy practically guarantees that the choice of a pull-out will be excluded from the evaluated possibilities. The tactical decision of sending more troops will drive the strategy.

Yesterday the Secretary of Defense Mattis was asked during a Congress hearing what "winning" in Afghanistan would mean:

The idea, [Mattis] said, would be to drive down the violence to a level that could be managed by Afghan government forces with the help of American and allied troops in training their Afghan counterparts, providing intelligence and delivering what Mr. Mattis called “high-end capability,” an apparent allusion to air power and possibly Special Operations forces.
The result, he said, would be an “era of frequent skirmishing,” but not a situation in which the Afghan government no longer faced a mortal threat.
Winning in Afghanistan is an "era of frequent skirmishes" in which the proxy government is continuously endangered? That does, of course, not make any sense. It is a holding strategy that will only work as long as the general framework stays the same. Should the Taliban change their strategy or a new actor come in the "holding" strategy will be finished.

Defense Secretary James Mattis was grilled before the Senate yesterday, with Sen. McCain expressing his frustration that there is no new strategy yet to "win" in Afghanistan. Mattis promised a new approach by July, but the real question is that after the 2009 surge of 100,000 US troops, what kind of victory might be achieved by yet another surge, this time of perhaps 5-6,000? In today's Liberty Report we point out that victory is not possible because Washington doesn't even have a clear view of what it might look like. How many more billions of dollars wasted? How many thousands more lives lost?

For quite some time, professor Iman Soleh and I discussed the link between the ‘old guard’ Southeast Asian (mainly Indonesians and Malaysians) jihadi cadres, so-called ‘Afghan alumni’, and the vanguard, a ‘new wave’, that which is now trying to destabilize, even destroy both Syria and the Philippines.

While the name ‘jihad’ itself has been used habitually and ‘liberally’ all over the Western mainstream media, it was clear to all of us at the table that behind the brutal combat as well as most of the horrors unleashed in such places like Syria and Philippines, hidden are the geopolitical interests of the West in general and of the United States in particular.

Professor Soleh has explained the latest ‘dynamics’:

Defense Minister, General of the Army, Sergei Shoigu, speaking at a meeting of Defense Ministers - members of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Kazakhstan, spoke of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and expressed the view that the international coalition in the country has not brought any tranquility.

He noted that the Islamic State operates in Afghanistan - a state which has observer status in the SCO.

"Of particular concern is the strengthening of Afghan militants positions, the number of which reaches around 3.5 thousand. Establishing an Islamic caliphate threatens the security of all; Afghanistan and neighboring countries."

In this regard, Shoigu said Russia will strengthen its military bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with the latest weapons, as well as assisting the armed forces of Central Asian states in their defense measures.

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that President Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster will soon be proposing yet another troop increase in Afghanistan. According to the Times, “The White House shelved the deliberations over Afghanistan three weeks ago, after an initial Pentagon proposal to deploy up to 5,000 additional American troops ran into fierce resistance” from White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and other advisers.

But McMaster, reports the Times, is “undeterred” and “plans to bring the debate back to the front burner this coming week,” according to an anonymous U.S. official.

Displaying what one commentator called “sheer 19th century bloodlust and thirst for empire,” Erik Prince, founder of the private mercenary firm Blackwater, argued in The Wall Street Journal this week that the United States should deploy an “East India Company approach” in Afghanistan.

The country, he wrote, should be run by “an American viceroy who would lead all U.S. government and coalition efforts - including command, budget, policy, promotion, and contracting - and report directly to the president.”

Prince continued:

In Afghanistan, the viceroy approach would reduce rampant fraud by focusing spending on initiatives that further the central strategy, rather than handing cash to every outstretched hand from a U.S. system bereft of institutional memory.

During the election campaign of 2008 before he was elected as the president, Barack Obama made an artificial distinction between the “just war” in Afghanistan and the unjust war in Iraq. In accordance with the flawed distinction, he pledged that he would withdraw American troops stationed in Iraq.

More to the point, however, when President Obama decided to withdraw American troops from the unjust war in Iraq, at the same time, he pledged that he would commit additional American troops and resources into the purportedly “just war” in Afghanistan. And consequently, the number of US troops in Afghanistan jumped from 30,000 during the Bush Administration to more than 100,000 during the supposedly “pacifist” Obama Administration.

A huge suicide bomb ripped through a secure area of Kabul at the height of the Wednesday morning rush hour, killing at least 80 people and wounding more than 300, Afghan officials said.

The blast, which came a few days into the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, was one of the deadliest to hit the Afghan capital in recent years.