Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley sought to defend the Afghan War on Friday, despite the Afghanistan Papers showing systematic official lies about the failed conflict, insisting that the documents were a “mischaracterization” of the war, and that there was no unified decision to deceive the public.

Rather, the position here seems to be that hundreds of Pentagon officials took it upon themselves and each individually decided to deceive the public a little bit, culminating in a colossal lie which couldn’t be explicitly blamed on anyone.

Gen. Milley insisted the war had been a success in that there hadn’t been any specific terror attacks out of Afghanistan for the war’s duration, and particularly objected to the idea that anyone had died “in vain” in the conflict.

SOURCE: NICOLAS DAVIES VIA COUNTERPUNCH

The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on the premise that the U.S. and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, and that they must therefore learn the lessons of Afghanistan to avoid making the same mistakes in future military occupations.

The Washington Post has just released a trove of previously secret records documenting that the U.S. war in Afghanistan has been based on a multitude of lies and deception. It is beyond dispute that the Pentagon and other elements of America’s deep state were determined to keep those records secret from the American people.That’s because it took three years and two federal lawsuits to force deep-state officials to finally release the records.

No one is accusing the Post of publishing lies. It is undisputed that what the Post has published is the truth.

Why then did the deep state oppose release of the records? Why was the deep state so insistent that they be kept secret?

The answer is: Because the deep state knew that the records recounted the truth, and the last thing the deep state wanted was for the American people to know the truth about its war in Afghanistan — that “Operation Enduring Freedom” was built on lies, just like the Vietnam War was.

Congress and especially Congressional leadership of both parties are all as guilty as the three lying Administrations. They were part of the big lie, falsely presenting to the American people as “expert” witnesses only those bought-and-paid-for Beltway neocon think tankers.

What is even more shocking than the release of this “smoking gun” evidence that the US government wasted two trillion dollars and killed more than three thousand Americans and more than 150,000 Afghans while lying through its teeth about the war is that you could hear a pin drop in the mainstream media about it. Aside from the initial publication in the Washington Post, which has itself been a major cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan, the mainstream media has shown literally no interest in what should be the story of the century.

This week, The Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers, an extensive review of thousands of pages of internal government documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. Like the Pentagon Papers, which showcased the lies underpinning the Vietnam War, the Post’s investigation shows that U.S. officials, across three presidential administrations, intentionally and systematically misled the American public for 18 years and counting. As Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1974, told CNN earlier this week, the Pentagon and Afghanistan Papers revealed the same dynamic: “The presidents and the generals had a pretty realistic view of what they were up against, which they did not want to admit to the American people.”

What we learned in what is rightly being called the “Pentagon Papers” of our time, is that hundreds of US Administration officials – including three US Presidents – knowingly lied to the American people about the Afghanistan war for years. This wasn’t just a matter of omitting some unflattering facts. This was about bald-faced lying about a war they knew was a disaster from almost day one.

Remember President Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? Remember how supremely confident he was at those press conferences, acting like the master of the universe? Here’s what he told the Pentagon’s special inspector general who compiled these thousands of interviews on Afghanistan: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

After a lengthy legal battle, the Post got hold of documents compiled by SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. John Sopko, the Inspector General, interviewed over 600 people connected to the Afghan war effort to prepare a series of reports called “Lessons Learned,” which purported to explain what had gone wrong since America’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The “Lessons Learned” reports were critical, but “left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews,” the Post wrote.

The Post sued to get hold of the underlying material, finally obtained it, and is now releasing its contents.

The war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, is based on lies made by top U.S. officials and was “idiotic” as there was no clear plan, according to the documents published by the Washington Post, dubbed the ‘Afghanistan Papers.’ According to the papers, the U.S. has wasted nearly $1 trillion of taxpayers money in war against Afghanistan, with it expecting to cost trillions more. Effectively, it is the taxpayer’s money being wasted to maintain the war and occupation so that shareholders in U.S. military industries can profit while millions of Americans remain in poverty.

Such as that it was the US-backed Mujahedeen, rather than the US-backed Yeltsin, who smashed the government the Soviets had left behind

Even those with qualified praise for Trump’s decision complained about the haphazardness of his policy-making and its implementation, and of his departure from the “norms” of American foreign policy.

What, you might ask, were those norms producing for us? Forever war or isolation is a false choice, they say. But cast your eyes over to Afghanistan, where it really does seem like the alternative to leaving is staying endlessly. At least that’s how policymakers in three administrations have thought about the Afghan conflict, to judge from the Washington Post’s latest scoop, a huge tranche of documents recording the candid, occasionally emotional assessments of the U.S. War in Afghanistan made by White House officials, generals, and policymakers.

The Washington Post has published clear, undeniable evidence that US government officials have been lying to the public about the war in Afghanistan, a shocking revelation for anyone who has done no research whatsoever into the history of US interventionism.

In all seriousness it was a very good and newsworthy publication, and those who did the heavy lifting bringing the Afghanistan Papers into public awareness deserve full credit. The frank comments of US military officials plainly stating that from the very beginning this was an unwinnable conflict, initiated in a region nobody understood, without anyone being able to so much as articulate what victory would even look like, make up an extremely important piece of information that is in conflict with everything the public has been told about this war by their government.

Authored by Tho Bishop via The Mises Institute,

This week saw the Washington Post published a bombshell report titled “The Afghanistan Papers,” highlighting the degree to which the American government lied to the public about the ongoing status of the war in Afghanistan. Within the thousands of pages, consisting of internal documents, interviews, and other never-before-released intel, is a vivid depiction of a Pentagon painfully aware of the need to keep from the public the true state of the conflict and the doubts, confusion, and desperation of decision-makers spanning almost 20 years of battle.

here is a laundry list of reasons for why the U.S. foreign policy establishment comes up short on so many occasions. A total and complete absence of accountability in the industry ensures that those who demonstrate poor judgment are protected from punishment and allowed to repeat it. In this harsh political climate, politicians have an incentive to double down on the status-quo rather than admit mistakes. And an aversion to the smallest reform in Washington, D.C. means that it’s easier to simply go along to get along—even if doing so compounds failure.

Lawmakers, veterans and experts have expressed shock and resignation after a Washington Post report Monday unveiled 18 years of distortion by U.S. officials over the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.

The documents involved — more than 2,000 pages of confidential notes and interviews from more than 400 people, from ambassadors to troops on the ground — exposed a constant parade of failures while three presidential administrations insisted the war was moving in the right direction.

We must end the vicious, lethal cycle of misinformation and unspecified, unsupported strategies,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in response, calling for public hearings with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other officials.

In what's already being hailed as a defining and explosive "Pentagon papers" moment, a cache of previously classified documents obtained by The Washington Post show top Pentagon leaders continuously lied to the public about the "progress" of the now eighteen-year long Afghan war.

The some 2,000 pages of notes from interviews of senior officials who have shaped US strategy in Afghanistan confirm that “senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false... hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable," according to the bombshell Post report.

How to Commit War Crimes—and Get Away With It
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How to Commit War CrimesU.S. President Donald Trump sacked his Navy secretary on Twitter. The main reason is that the Navy secretary did not follow Trump’s advice regarding Navy Special Warfare Operator Edward Gallagher. Trump wanted Gallagher to retain his position as a Navy Seal. Gallagher was accused of stabbing to death a wounded fighter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) in 2017; he was also accused of other incidents of murder (of a schoolgirl and an elderly man), and then of obstruction of justice. In July 2019, a military court acquitted Gallagher of most of the charges but found him guilty of posing with the body of the fighter who had been stabbed to death.

The US-led war in Afghanistan turned 18 in October, and those two decades of fighting and rebuilding appear to have yielded little progress.

The counternarcotics effort there, for example, "has just been a total failure," John F. Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, in November.

The U.S. Army announced Thursday upcoming winter deployments of two infantry brigade combat teams to Afghanistan and Korea.

Soldiers from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, stationed at Fort Drum, New York, will deploy in early 2020 to Afghanistan to replace the 3rd BCT, 82nd Airborne Division, as part of a regular rotation of forces to support Operation Freedom's Sentinel, according to a Dec. 5 Army news release.

President Trump’s announcement on Thursday that Afghanistan peace talks have resumed came as a surprise to many, because while there was an apparent process already going on, it wasn’t being made public by anyone.

Taliban officials confirmed that the talks are ongoing, with spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid saying that they are ready for talks, but that their position is the talks resume where they were previously suspended by President Trump.

Taliban negotiator Suhail Shaheen said much the same thing, saying that it is up to the US to get back to the table to resume the talks that were already nearly successful, and that their positions haven’t changed.

SOURCE: MIDDLE EAST MONITOR
The Israeli government is aiming to increase the volume of Israel’s defence exports, reported Globes, which has revealed the main points of the plan for the first time.

The project, being overseen by the Defence Ministry’s International Defence Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) led by Brigadier General (Res.) Yair Kulas, will begin to be rolled out in early 2020.

According to Globes, the plan is based on “focused seminars for senior commanders in foreign armies”, Israeli military “assistance for promoting sales of Israeli weapons”, and “subsidising small and medium-sized defence companies seeking to sell arms around the world”.

Speaking this week, Kulas said that SIBAT favours a major expansion of agreements between countries, resulting in significant deals for the large defence companies, especially Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems.

The alleged bid by the British government and army to close down investigations into torture and murder in Iraq and Afghanistan appears to be the latest aspect of a widespread desire in in the UK to forget all about these failed wars.

Joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is commonly blamed on Tony Bair, but there is little interest in the desperate situation into which British troops were plunged post-invasion, first in southern Iraq and then, three years later, in Helmand province in Afghanistan.

The gravity of the miscalculations in each case is not in doubt. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador in Kabul at the time, wrote in his memoirs that the worst mistake made by the Foreign Office in the previous 30 years was the invasion of Iraq, and the second worst was “its enthusiastic endorsement of Britain’s half-baked effort to occupy Helmand in 2006”.

The men were jolted awake again sometime after midnight. The main gate to the clinic, which was next to the guard’s room, had been blown in, and the staff heard hurried footsteps in the ruined entryway. The intruders ran past the guard’s room and into the clinic’s main building. The clinic staff huddled in the darkened room as several doors were kicked in across the compound yard. After what one of the clinic workers described as five or six minutes, the staffers, worried that they’d surprise the intruders when they eventually reached the guard’s room, called out, “We’re in here!”

In Afghanistan on 22 September at least 40 civilians attending a wedding party were killed in a raid conducted by Afghan soldiers and supported by US airstrikes. Four days earlier a US drone attack killed 30 civilians and injured 40 others while they were resting after collecting pine nuts in a forest.

The insurgents in Afghanistan are killing people, too, as evidenced by the plethora of suicide bombings, and the Taliban have stated that they will continue their fight against “foreign occupation”. The entire country is being torn apart by savagery on the part of all those involved. It is a broken nation.

SOURCE: COMMON DREAMS
Dozens of Afghan civilians are dead, local officials said Monday, following operations carried out late Sunday by U.S. and Afghan forces targeting al Qaida fighters.

The incident in the southern province of Helmand, which came just days after a U.S. drone strike killed at least 30 farm workers in eastern Nangarhar province, highlights the fragile situation for civilians as the U.S. enters its 19th year of war in Afghanistan.

Details on exactly how many people were killed and who was responsible for the Sunday attacks remain unclear, a fact attributed at least in part to the area being under Taliban control. The U.S. has blamed the "majority of the deaths" on al Qaida. U.S. and Afghan officials say they're investigating.

The New York Times reported:

Authored by Eoin Higgins via CommonDreams.org,

A U.S. drone attack killed 30 pine nut farmers and wounded at least 40 others in Afghanistan Wednesday night, the latest killing of innocent civilians by American forces as the "war on terror" enters its 19th year.

The farmers had just finished work and were sitting by a fire when the strike happened, according to tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul.

"Some of us managed to escape, some were injured, but many were killed," said farm laborer Juma Gul.

Reteurs reported that there may be more farmers missing:

Haidar Khan, who owns the pine nut fields, said about 150 workers were there for harvesting, with some still missing as well as the confirmed dead and injured.

A survivor of the drone strike said about 200 laborers were sleeping in five tents pitched near the farm when the attack happened.

On a very warm September morning in Kabul, several dozen men, women, and children sit on the carpeted floor of a room at the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ Borderfree Center. The women cluster together. All wear burqas, but because of the heat they push the steel blue veils back, revealing their faces. Most of the men wear traditional tunics and pakol hats.

Parents and children alike listen intently to Masoma, a young Afghan woman who coordinates the Center’s “Street Kids School.” She explains the importance of steady attendance, and parents nod in agreement. Most of the 100 students come on time for their Friday classes, but a handful had recently skipped, showing up only on the day when the center distributes monthly food rations for the Street Kids families.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan has led to the deaths of about 2,400 American service members, including 16 in combat action this year. Some 20,000 more have been wounded, many grievously.

But there’s another set of revealing numbers about the war that exposes its sprawling nature. Data provided by the Pentagon shows that more than 775,000 U.S. service members have deployed to Afghanistan at least once. The numbers detail the story of a war that has persisted for an entire generation.

Authored by Whitney Webb via MintPressNews.com,

Today the event that defined the United States’ foreign policy in the 21st century, and heralded the destruction of whole countries, turns 18. The events of September 11, 2001 remains etched into the memories of Americans and many others, as a collective tragedy that brought Americans together and brought as well a general resolve among them that those responsible be brought to justice.

While the events of that day did unite Americans in these ways for a time, the different trajectories of the official relative to the independent investigations into the September 11 attacks have often led to division in the years since 2001, with vicious attacks or outright dismissal being levied against the latter.

Bipartisan critique of Trump’s plan to roll out an Afghan peace plan during the 9/11 anniversary from Camp David misses the point: negotiation was the only hope to avoid more needless American deaths.

With the Taliban already engaging in several offensives across Afghanistan, they’ve really got the government on the defensive. Friday, they added to the fighting, with a new offensive against Farah City in Western Afghanistan.

Heavy clashes are reported in several parts of Farah Province, and while police say the Taliban have been pushed out of the city, they seem to be moving to continue to contest the territory.

The Taliban controls much of Farah Province going into this fight. The province is an important opium-farming area which is a potential source of revenue. With control over much of the surrounding area, it’s only natural they would also want the provincial capital.

While the Trump Administration has yet to officially sign the peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the clearest sign yet that they’ll do so came in a new interview with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

While US officials have often been unrealistically rosy-eyed about the state of the war, Pompeo took the talking points to a new level, and now is arguing effectively that the US has won the war in Afghanistan, and “delivered” on all of its goals.

Earlier, Trump tweeted that he had decided to cancel a meeting with the Taliban movement's leadership after the group claimed responsibility for staging a terrorist attack in the Afghan capital Kabul which left “12 innocent people” dead, including a US soldier.

US National Security Adviser John Bolton has described a peace agreement that Washington is trying to clinch with the Taliban as irrelevant, reminding President Donald Trump of the deal’s “potential pitfalls”, Bloomberg cited several unnamed sources as saying.

The sources added that Bolton specifically berated US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad for agreeing to terms offered by the Taliban that Bolton claimed were too vague.

The president announced on Twitter on Sunday that the meeting was cancelled after the Taliban admitted to murdering a dozen people in an attack.

The attack killed an American soldier and that ruined the peace talks between the United States and the Taliban.

“Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday.

Authored by US Army Major (ret.) Danny Sjursen via AntiWar.com,

It has taken me years to tell these stories. The emotional and moral wounds of the Afghan War have just felt too recent, too raw. After all, I could hardly write a thing down about my Iraq War experience for nearly ten years, when, by accident, I churned out a book on the subject. Now, as the American war in Afghanistan – hopefully – winds to something approaching a close, it’s finally time to impart some tales of the madness. In this new, recurring, semi-regular series, the reader won’t find many worn out sagas of heroism, brotherhood, and love of country. Not that this author doesn’t have such stories, of course. But one can find those sorts of tales in countless books and numerous trite, platitudinal Hollywood yarns.

SOURCE: INDIATIMES.COM
KABUL: The United States would withdraw almost 5,000 troops from Afghanistan and close five bases within 135 days under a draft peace accord agreed with the Taliban, the chief US negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad said on Monday.

The deal, reached after months of negotiations with representatives from the insurgent movement, must still be approved by US President Donald Trump before it can be signed, Khalilzad said in an interview with Tolo News television. "In principle, we have got there," he said.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has been briefed on a draft of the accord and will look at details of the deal before giving an opinion, his spokesman said on Monday.

In exchange for the phased withdrawal, the Taliban would commit not to allow Afghanistan to be used by militants to plot attacks on the US and its allies.

SOURCE: THE INTERCEPT

After 18 years of war, and months of direct talks, the United States appears to be on the brink of reaching an unprecedented peace agreement with the Taliban that would bring about U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

A draft agreement was reached in March, and negotiators in Qatar have reportedly been ironing out the details ahead of a September 1 deadline — including exactly when U.S. troops will withdraw and when a permanent ceasefire between the parties will take effect. The U.S. is reportedly also seeking assurances from the Taliban that it won’t harbor foreign terror groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and will engage in dialogue with the Afghan government after the U.S. military leaves.

The war in Afghanistan has reached new levels of insanity as a UN report shows US forces are killing more civilians than ISIS and Taliban combined.

The Trump administration is preparing to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan in exchange for concessions from the Taliban, including a cease-fire and a renunciation of al-Qaeda, as part of an initial deal to end the nearly 18-year-old war, U.S. officials say.

The agreement, which would require the Taliban to begin negotiating a larger peace deal directly with the Afghan government, could cut the number of American troops in the country from roughly 14,000 to between 8,000 and 9,000, the officials said. That number would be nearly the same as when President Trump took office.

US willing to draw down troops for a ceasefire.

With the new round of Doha peace talks between the US and Taliban getting underway, reports are that a peace deal could be reached. On Thursday, reports indicated that could include the US withdrawing 5,000 troops as an initial cut.

Though no deal is apparently finalized as of Thursday evening, the indications are that the US has expressed a willingness for more or less immediate draw down of forces in return for a Taliban ceasefire.

US officials have long presented the peace process as four stages, with deals on withdrawing foreign troops, the Taliban pledging to keep ISIS and al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, the ceasefire, and then a power-sharing deal between the Taliban and Ghani government.

The US has spent more than $50 million on drug treatment programs in Afghanistan, but these programs are losing money and may not even be working, a new report has concluded.

The report, by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), makes clear how difficult it is to even begin to gauge the effectiveness of the programs.

“Overall, we just found that the State Department failed to create performance standards and requirements for these programs,” said Lauren Mick, public affairs specialist for SIGAR.

Out of $56 billion that the Department of Defense (DOD) has spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction, only $21 billion can be properly accounted for.

The $35 billion discrepancy is revealed in a new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

SIGAR’s core mission is “to prevent and detect waste, fraud and abuse” in the Afghanistan aid program. Yet the Pentagon is claiming that it would be “extremely labor intensive to compile information” on how exactly the remaining $35 billion has been used.

The Afghan government asked for “clarification” following U.S. President Donald Trump’s remarks Monday about being able to wipe Afghanistan “off the face of the earth” if he really wanted to win the war there.

US President Donald Trump is seeking help from Pakistan to extricate Washington from the war in Afghanistan, saying that he could “win” that war in a week if he wanted to kill millions and wipe off the country.

“I could win that war in a week,” Trump said on Monday, as he met with Pakistani PM Imran Khan at the White House. “Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth... literally in 10 days.”

“I don’t want to go that route,” the president added. “I don’t want to kill 10 million people.”

Instead, Trump said, Pakistan will help “extricate” the US from the long war in Afghanistan the previous administrations have got entangled in.