The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets. Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline – with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational, trillion dollar heroin money laundering operation.
In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market not only in Russia and Iran but especially in the US. Up to 93% of the world's opium comes from Afghanistan.

16 years since the Bush administration launched its military intervention in Afghanistan, President Trump has announced his intention to increase the U.S. military presence in the country. As Statista's Niall McCarthy notes, there are approximately 8,400 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan and reinforcements could start arriving within days. Trump's new strategy is set to extend the longest war in U.S. history and add even further to its already staggering cost.

Website "The Balance" has been keeping track of Afghanistan's economic impact and the conflict has now cost the U.S. at least $1.07 trillion since 2001.

President Trump has had his foreign policy hands and feet tied by the Russia (and Iran) Sanctions Act.

He now has been rendered “helpless”: in respect to détente with Russia — gulliverized, spitefully, by his own party, working with the Democrats, to empty Trump’s constitutional prerogatives in foreign policy – and to seize them for Congress.

A quagmire is defined as a complex or unpleasant position that is difficult to escape. President Trump’s recently announced war plans in Afghanistan maintain that quagmire. They come at a time when US Empire is failing and its leadership in the world is weakening. The US will learn what other empires have learned, “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.”

During the presidential campaign, some became convinced that Trump would not be an interventionist president. His tweets about Afghanistan were one of the reasons. In January of 2013, he tweeted,

“Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.”

Now, we see a president who carries on the interventionist tradition of US Empire.

US politics stand on two fundamental pillars –
wars and sanctions. These are embodied in US politics in such a way that presidential candidates don’t have a chance of winning elections if they do not touch upon these in speeches and statements.

Candidates may adopt contrasting opinions and manifestos to convince
voters to vote for them, but at the end of the day, once they set foot in office nothing ever really changes.

From Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, US presidents have promised the
American people that they would walk a different political path than their predecessor. However, they each have ended up taking the same path.

While US officials continue to blame the Pakistani government for the enduring Taliban opposition to their Afghan occupation, Pakistan has been increasingly firing back regarding US missteps, and the impact those have had on the Pakistani side of the border.

So while US officials argue that the Pakistani government is providing “safe haven” for the Taliban, Pakistani Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif today noted that throughout the 16-year US war, Afghan soldiers have been routinely selling US-provided arms to the Taliban.

This has been a recurring problem in the Afghan War, as the Taliban really are awash in US arms, both a product of sales from corrupt Afghan soldiers, and of Taliban looting of Afghan police checkpoints and making off with entire armories.

The only voice in the administration making a different case was Steve Bannon, and his departure the previous week confirmed not only that there would be no change in policy, but that the takeover of the administration by the generals was now complete. Trumps three closest advisers on national security matters, Kelly, McMaster and Mattis have never shown the least interest in a reduced American military footprint anywhere in the world, much less in Afghanistan.

The United States has begun sending additional troops to Afghanistan, the top U.S. military commander in the country said Saturday.

It comes after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a strategy on Afghanistan that calls for extra troops in the country.

In an exclusive interview with 1TV, General John Nicholson, the Commander of Resolute Support forces and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said that the additional troops were coming.

Colonel Lawrence B. Larry Wilkerson, a retired military officer and head of the Colin L. Powell office, the former US State Secretary has warned over the possible fight between the world and region super-power countries in Afghanistan.

In an interview with The Real News on Thursday, Wilkerson said the United States might stay for over 50 years in Afghanistan, because according to its strategic location, Afghanistan is the only place from where the US can take action against Russia and China.

He said the new US strategy on Afghanistan has designed the presence of US in Afghanistan in a way that the United States army will remain in Afghanistan for an unknown period of time.

The US military bases are there to assert US control over Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. According to Foreign Affairs, “there are more U.S. military forces deployed there [Afghanistan] than to any other active combat zone”, the official mandate of which is “to go after” the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS as part of the “Global war on Terrorism”.

Why so many military bases? Why the additional forces sent in by Trump?

The unspoken objective of US military presence in Afghanistan is to keep the Chinese out, i.e hinder China from establishing trade and investments relations with Afghanistan.

More generally, the establishment of military bases in Afghanistan on China’s Western border is part of a broader process of military encirclement of the People’s Republic of China.–i.e naval deployments in the South China sea, military facilities in Guam, South Korea, Okinawa, Jeju Island, etc. (see 2011 map below)

Pivot to Asia

A foreign company hired by the U.S. government to mentor and train Afghan intelligence officers billed Uncle Sam for more than $50 million in luxury cars - including Porsches, an Aston Martin, and a Bentley - and the lucrative salaries of executives and their spouses (who didn’t do any work). The firm also spent $1,500 on alcohol and $42,000 on automatic weapons prohibited under the terms of the contract, according to figures provided by a U.S. Senator from a federal audit that has not been released to the public.

President Trump’s speech on Monday to the soldiers at Fort Myer about his Afghan policy did contain a few good points. But it also raised questions about his overall policy and strategy.

On the plus side, the president backed away from his campaign promise to precipitously withdraw from the conflict, and did not support using private contractors to fight the war, as some of his aides had urged.

But the failings in Trump’s new policy and strategy can be placed in at least ten major categories.

When President Trump attributed his flip-flop on Afghanistan to his team of military generals , who informed him that a withdrawal from America’s 16-year war would leave a “haven” for terrorists, I couldn’t help but think of former presidential candidate George Romney during the Vietnam War. After opposing the war, Romney traveled to Vietnam and returned with the same flip-flop mindset that Trump has experienced. Like Trump, Romney blamed it on the generals, who, he said, had “brainwashed” him into supporting the war. Romney’s brainwashing, however, wasn’t permanent, as Romney later returned to an antiwar position. So maybe there’s hope that the same thing will happen to Trump.

There is one important point, however, that we must continue to emphasize, even though it is continuously ignored by the Washington establishment: the illegality of Trump’s War (and Bush’s and Obama’s Wars before him), given that there is no congressional declaration of war.

A sense of "arrogance and heightened grandiosity" on the part of US defense officials has underpinned efforts to obscure the true number of US forces in Afghanistan, a former US State Department official tells Sputnik.

Of relevance to the current debate on Heroin addiction in the USA.

Narcotics is big business.

90 percent of the heroin consumed in the US comes from Afghanistan

Trump calls for escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Why? Is it part of the “Global War on Terrorism”, going after the bad guys, or is it something else?

Unknown to the broader public, Afghanistan has significant oil, natural gas and strategic raw material resources, not to mention opium, a multibillion dollar industry which feeds America’s illegal heroin market.

These mineral reserves include huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium, which is a strategic raw material used in the production of high tech batteries for laptops, cell phones and electric cars.

War has always been about resources and control. Alongside the supposed surprise discovery of Afghanistan’s $1 trillion wealth of untapped minerals, the Taliban had successfully eradicated the opium crop in the Golden Crescent before the US invasion. Now, more than 90% of the world’s heroin comes from the war torn country.

As reported by Global Research:

“Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored…By early 2002, the opium price (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000. In 2001, under the Taliban opiate production stood at 185 tons, increasing to 3400 tons in 2002 under the US sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.”

After more than twelve years of military occupation, Afghanistan’s opium trade isn’t just sustaining, it’s thriving more than ever before. According to a recent report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, 2013 saw opium production surge to record highs:

The CIA is also overjoyed because its black-ops budget - which is tied to the exponential growth of opium production in Afghanistan - is now secured possibly for another 20-50 years, claims Mike Raddie, co-editor of online site BSNews.

Heroin from Afghanistan has killed more people than the 55,000 Americans killed in the Vietnam War. An American now gets killed every 32 minutes by Afghan heroin. With US heroin deaths tripling every four years, an American will get killed by heroin every 16 minutes by 2020.

Interestingly, while the mainstream and pseudo-alternative media outlets keep playing up drugs from Mexico, we hardly hear a peep on the massive amount of Afghan-sourced heroin. To put it in perspective: In 2014, according to the DEA drug threat assessment, Mexico produced an estimated 42 metric tons of heroin. Afghanistan produced 6,400 metric tons of opium that same year. The largest share of US heroin is Afghanistan-sourced. It is coming from US-occupied Afghanistan. There is no other mathematical possibility:

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.”