When is a war not a war? In his recent column for the Gray Lady, bearing the highly dubious title “The Afghan War Is Over. Did Anyone Notice?”, Mr. Ackerman, described by the Times as one of the paper’s “contributing opinion writers”, explains it all for you: Afghanistan in 2009 is not Afghanistan in 2020….
Tag: Afghanistan
Donald Trump tries to do something right. DC aghast.
Yes, you read that right: Donald Trump is trying to do something right. Not only is he trying to take a staggering 2,500 troops out of Iraq, he’s trying to take a staggering 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan as well! Effectively ending America’s only official shooting war! Almost as if we weren’t, you know, in…
Shorter Trump Administration: “F*ck yeah we’re getting the f*ck out of Afghanistan! Pronto! We’re raring to go!
What if we gave a retreat and nobody noticed? That seems to be the situation in Afghanistan, where Secretary of State Michael Pompeo recently made a flying visit to tell the locals to shape the fuck up before Uncle Sam got pissed, or as the Washington Post put it: “U.S. vows to cut $1 billion…
Neocons suffering withdrawal symptoms in Afghanistan
There are about 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now that number is coming down to about 8,600. Yet from the growls n’ howls emitted by unrepentant neocons like Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, writing in the anti-Trump Dispatch—“No Deal Is Better Than a Bad Deal”—and Iranian-born Shay Khatiri, writing in…
Well, this is embarrassing! Donald Trump will probably/possibly/maybe do what Barack Obama should have done. Get us the heck out of Afghanistan!
Yes, it’s true! Or maybe it is, as Donald Trump would say. Who knows? Tune in next week! Indeed, the agreement signed between the U.S. and the Taliban contains a lot of if thens and if whens. As Adam Wunische, over at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, explains, in his article “The U.S.–Taliban Deal…
Old Man War Machine, he jes’ keep rollin’ along
(Editor’s Note: I wrote this piece to describe the military intellectual complex’s endless search for a new Cold War. But Donald Trump seems to be looking for a hot one.) The Washington Post’s recent release of the “Afghanistan Papers”, which reported at least a significant portion of the near-infinite number of lies told to justify…
The War in Afghanistan has been a total disaster, the Washington Post says. After “selling it” for more than a decade.
Who could have seen this coming? The Washington Post has released, with great fanfare, “The Afghanistan Papers”, a massive study documenting what a massive disaster the War in Afghanistan has been. It’s too bad, however, that the Post has “forgotten” how earnestly it pushed that misbegotten war, as recently as August of this year, something…
Myth Busters! Afghanistan ain’t that rich!
Well, it ain’t. Propagating the myth is the sometimes sensible paleo-populist James K. Pinkerton, who, while parking his fedora at the American Conservative, serves up a sensible take on Afghanistan, a-wishin’ and a-hopin’ that his sometime main man Donald Trump would not listen to the military intellectual complex and get the hell out of central…
Dolchstosslegende at the Washington Post
Over at the American Conservative, Gil Barndollar, former Marine Corps officer and currently Military Fellow-in-Residence at the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship, has an excellent article on the modern American version of Dolchstosslegende (“dagger stab myth”)—the claim made by the German Right and immensely amplified by Adolf Hitler that Germany’s…
Max Boot explains it all for you
Unintentionally (I guess) funny piece by Max Boot, published by those cut-ups at the Weekly Standard. Max explains, and I would say that there’s at least a 57% chance that he’s right, that our “alliance” with Pakistan isn’t worth the pain: it would be better to have them outside the tent pissing in than inside…