As R. Jeffrey Smith, who hangs his hat at the Center for Public Integrity, so admirably demonstrates, every word of that headline is true, except the part about the tee-shirt. Jeff puts the blame on Hillary, but I’d give the lion’s share to President Obama, who rather gratuitously decided that Afghanistan was the “good war,” though, to be “fair”, I think Obama decided that in large part to accommodate the ego, and fanny, of Robert Gates, George Bush’s secretary of defense, whom Obama wanted to retain as SecDef in order to cover his fanny against any charges that he might be, you know, a damn hippie.
As Jeff explains, the U.S. knew from the get-go that Afghanistan was simply a mass of corruption, that the notion that we were somehow going to turn it into a sort of a Switzerland of the Himalayas was ridiculous, but that truth was just too goddamn inconvenient to be spoken out loud. I’ve previously railed against SecDef Gates for proclaiming in his memoirs how much, how very much, he worried about our boys over there in Afghanistan. Bob, they didn’t have to be there. And they wouldn’t have been there if you hadn’t kept sending them there so that you could pretend that you knew what you were doing.
Afterwords
Knowledge of the gross corruption that infected and sabatoged our efforts to turn Afghanistan into a modern secular state hasn’t exactly been a secret. Back in April 2013, the New York Times explained how the CIA had been handing out millions of dollars in “walking around money” (my term) in Afghanistan for years, causing considerable heartburn in the breast of one-time Afghan war enthusiast Fred Kaplan.
