MoA—Since 2001 the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion on Afghanistan. Most of the money has flown back to ‘contractors’ in the United States. A significant part, whatever bribes and corruption would generate, was invested by Afghan officials in real estate in Dubai.
Trump’s Monday remarks are only his latest threat to annihilate a foreign country and reveal that the US president—who has ordered a $1 trillion “modernization” of the US nuclear arsenal and the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia—is actively considering unleashing nuclear violence to forestall the collapse of US global hegemony.
MoA—Earlier today a raid on a military training center for the National Security Directorate, the Afghan CIA offshoot, killed some 200 forces. (See main image above). The attacking rebels used a U.S. made armored Humvee to drive into the compound and exploded it. An infantry unit followed and shot up the survivors. Many successful raids on outlying security posts and police checkpoints are no longer mentioned in western media. The Afghan government has stopped providing casualty numbers. U.S. foreign policy thinking on Afghanistan is as inept as ever.
MOA—Years before October 2004, before regular U.S. soldiers came into the Korengal valley, U.S. special forces combed through the region looking for ‘al-Qaeda’. They made friends with a timber baron in Pech valley, a Pashtun of the Safi tribe, who claimed that his main competitor in the (illegal) timber trade who lived in the nearby Korengal river valley was a Taliban and ‘al-Qaeda’. That was not true. Haji Matin was a member of a Nuristani tribe that spoke Pashai. These were a distinct people with their own language who were and are traditional hostile to any centralized government (pdf), even to the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate.
ADAM DENKER—A few weeks after that, as we were all smoking inside of a bunker, listened to an old sergeant brag about the moped he had bought from one of the spec-ops guys. He gleefully told the story of how the operator (military slang for special-operations soldier) killed a kid (yes, he said kid) who tried to run away from the operator on that moped. The operator left his body there for his parents to find, and kept the moped as a trophy. Who knows if the kid actually was a terrorist, his only crime was running away. But to them only guilty people run away. The story still makes me want to throw up.