A gloomy reality check: America did lose

It’s a safe bet most Americans reflexively would not support American military action anywhere, for any reason. Over 20 years of military adventurism, thousands of American lives lost and gravely injured, billions upon billions of dollars spent and in the end, last week a top retired general finally admitted that our mission in Afghanistan was a “strategic failure.” That was retired General Mark Milley, testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

A former top US military official stating an assessment of over 20 years of American blood and treasure expended on a foreign policy effort that was a STRATEGIC FAILURE should demand accountability and a serious study of what all went wrong and they should seek to learn from those lessons, but that’s not how Washington works. No one in any of the administrations, Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden administration or any of the prominent policy experts involved in crafting these policies will ever admit they made serious strategic mistakes.

Here’s a CBS News link to that 3+ hours House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing last week, where retired General Milley and General McKenzie testified about the decision-making and failures with the Afghanistan withdrawal. If you’re interested, Milley’s assessment of “strategic failure” comes in his opening statement at minute 21:47 in that CBS News video. Clearly, the blame for the withdrawal debacle lies with the Biden White House and State Department, who ignored and dismissed all of the Pentagon’s advice and warnings. It’s an utter disgrace that Anthony Blinken is still the Secretary of State and Jake Sullivan is still the National Security Advisor.

However there’s a bigger picture that continually gets lost in these highly-charged partisan issues. For decades before 9/11 US strategic-thinking operated from a “small footprint” in the Middle East and predominantly Muslim countries, due to the clash of western culture with Islamic culture. The hostility within the Muslim world toward the secular West was no mystery and US policy operated that it was better to limit American military presence in the Muslim world. The US government was well aware of the rise of Al Qaeda and back in the 1990s there were several attacks by radical jihadists against US military interests. Bin laden had been issuing fatwas swearing death to America long before 9/11. Al Qaeda and later ISIS comprise the Sunni brand of radical Islam, but there’s also the vast Shia brand, controlled by Iran, who likewise preach “Death to America” as one of their core Islamic missions.

Both our “Global War On Terrorism:” and our entire building western-style democracies among tribal Islamic people, who have no cultural underpinnings that bolster a democratic state, were delusional from the start. The magic ingredient to success in Afghanistan, centered on the idea that we could somehow build some sort of western-style police and military in Afghanistan, and from that the government we were propping up in Afghanistan would flourish. Except those Afghan security forces were completely dependent on the US military to function. The entire fabric of Afghan culture is rife with deeply-embedded corruption and it’s also a narco-state where opium production is a lucrative part of the economy, so these idealistic “democracy-building” goals were not based on any sort of reality-based assessments. Opium production under the Taliban is booming, according to the UN, with a 32% increase in 2022, per this UN report: Afghanistan opium cultivation in 2022 up by 32 per cent: UNODC survey.

Experts throughout the American foreign policy class latched onto the democracy-building projects and then during the Obama administration, we moved from regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the Taliban was hosting Al Qaeda leadership and Iraq, where Saddam Hussein had been a thorn in America’s side for over a decade, to Secretary of State Clinton pushing to topple Gaddaffi in Libya and the push to arm imaginary “moderate Syrian rebels” to topple al-Assad in Syria. In the process of American military adventurism pursuing the “Democracy in the Middle East” delusion, America became a force for regional destabilization. That’s the hard truth.

In 2021, the Afghan leader America was propping up fled the country and the Afghan security forces, we had been training for 20 years, crumbled in days, as the Taliban seized control of Kabul. While it’s good that Milley and McKenzie, showed up at this hearing, they were part of that Pentagon groupthink that persisted all those years, even though they had to know none of the catchphrase strategy they all mouthed was any sort of coherent strategy. The other big loss, that could be even more ominous, is there’s been a widespread erosion of American trust in US military leadership over the past 20 years. As the years rolled by, top generals repeated the same “winning hearts and minds” spiel, but many Americans did not believe America was winning and even worse, the perception that we were being lied to grew. An America where the American people lose faith and trust in their military leadership reminds me of our post-Vietnam era and our military morale and readiness suffered because of that. The Afghanistan withdrawal provided the American people with real-time images of “strategic failure” and images eerily reminiscent of Vietnam, with a US embassy being evacuated from a rooftop, blazed across the media: Afghanistan: Near-identical images of US evacuating Saigon and Kabul go viral as Taliban seize power

Milley admitting at this hearing that our Afghanistan adventure was a strategic failure was latched onto by Republicans and right-wing media to feed their fury against the Biden administration over the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle. Democrats and the liberal media are still trying not to talk about the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle and they just flip to Trump trash talk.

Both sides refuse to admit to the big picture American strategic failure and no one’s talking much about what that portends for America now and in the future. If we lost, the obvious question is who won when America made such a humiliating and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021? The Taliban came out a big winner and they’re back in power in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is emboldened. ISIS is emboldened. China, Russia and Iran are on the move to assert global economic and military dominance in the world. China has offered economic and development aid to the Taliban. China also secured rights to Afghanistan’s vast mineral reserves. Here’s a 2021 CNN Business article: The Taliban are sitting on $1 trillion worth of minerals the world desperately needs. Iran has aided Hamas and is funding and arming the Houthi rebels launching drone and missile attacks against American ships.

The October 7th Hamas attack in Israel was carried out with direct aid and military support from Iran. Moscow just suffered a major terrorist attack perpetrated by ISIS. Despite Putin wanting to point the finger at Ukraine, because that feeds his domestic propaganda effort, ISIS immediately claimed responsibility for this attack.

There’s a potent Russian propaganda effort in America too and it gains traction within a segment of the American right, who are virulently anti-Ukraine and perceive Putin as a victim. They’ve bought into some sort of belief that it’s the mean Ukraine/West “poking the bear” Russian victimhood. It’s absurd, because although the Obama administration was clumsily involved in the toppling of the pro-Russian Ukraine government in 2014, Russia was doing the same thing in Ukraine and elsewhere in former Soviet bloc countries. Then rather than stand up to Putin, Obama quickly folded and left Ukraine with part of the country embroiled in a frozen conflict against Russian troops and allowed Russia to annex Crimea. Putin has had a long-range goal to regain influence and control over as much of the former Soviet Union territory as possible – that’s not “poking the bear,” that’s a very aggressive bear on the move.

With the Biden administration’s dangerous, lax US border policy, millions of illegal aliens have flooded into the US and our own Homeland Security has reported a dramatic influx of military age men from countries hostile to the US – from China, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. At the same time the FBI director, Christopher Wray, has been warning about the escalating cyberattacks against critical US infrastructure being perpetrated largely by Chinese hackers. Wray testified to Congress recently that US cyber experts are outnumbers 50 to 1 by Chinese hackers. 9/11 was carried out by 19 Al Qaeda jihadists. That propelled America down over 20 years of strategic failure dealing with Al Qaeda. We’re in a more dangerous strategic threat environment now than before 9/11 – that’s a hard pill for most Americans to swallow.

The Moscow terrorist attack last week has resulted in 137 deaths so far. Russian authorities have charged 4 gunmen and detained 7 others, according to this linked ABC News article. The article also reports:

” The U.S. said it shared intelligence with Russia that warned that ISIS was preparing similar attacks on concerts in Moscow just two weeks ago. A U.S. State Department official said Saturday that the U.S. government had shared information on a possible attack with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding “duty to warn” policy.”

“The U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued a warning on March 7, advising U.S. citizens to avoid large gatherings for 48 hours, saying extremists have “imminent plans” to target large-scale gatherings in Moscow.”

Whether Americans are weary of “forever wars” or not – we lost in our “Global War On Terrorism” and democracy-building projects in the Mid-East.

The winners are on the move.

What happened in Israel and Moscow should be wake-up calls – more radical jihadist terrorist attacks are likely, especially in Europe and the US. While I’d like to forecast sunshine and rainbows, I believe the forecast is more dark clouds and storms ahead.