Framing Afghanistan: What Happened to the 300,000 Man Army the US Has Been Training for the Past 20 Years?

As Afghanistan’s regional capitols continue to fall before advancing Taliban forces, president Biden has decided to send 3,000 US troops back into the country to safeguard the diplomatic corps evacuating the US embassy in Kabul.

Naturally, the corporate media frames each Taliban victory as a direct result

of president Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. The headlines are predictably repetitive: As US Forces Withdraw, the Taliban Gains More Ground. Or something to that effect.

The clearly intended implication is that complete responsibility for Afghanistan’s current, military crisis belongs entirely to Joe Biden.

Thus, the withdrawal of US forces becomes the sole, solitary, efficient cause for the Taliban’s successive victories and Afghanistan’s mounting chaos.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

This steady stream of corporate headlines offer a good example of the way framing works to sell a news story  from one direction rather than another. In other words, we are seeing how framing becomes a tool for propaganda.

Let’s sit back and ask ourselves a few questions, the first of which should be this: what happened to the Afghan military in all this mess?

I have yet to see a single US news headline ask, what to my mind, ought to be the more important question: Why is an ineffective and feeble Afghan army allowing the Taliban to roll victoriously through the country uncontested?

This is the scandalous mystery — or is it such a mystery? — that international media outlets ought to be investigating. Yet, it is being ignored. Why?

For the past 20 years, our esteemed leaders in the Pentagon have sworn time and time again with their right hands placed on a tall stack of very large Bibles, before Congress and the American public, that “we were making excellent progress” in training and equipping the Afghan military.

For decades, US generals have sworn that the Afghan government and all of its people would be protected by an Afghan army of 300,000 men. Each and every one of them fully prepared by the best training and equipment that the Pentagon could provide.

Now, after 20 years of very expensive and utterly empty promises, we have finally seen what American training has accomplished!

Yes, it only took 20 years, but we have successfully trained an Afghan army that is run over by the Taliban like a stray dog on a busy highway.

Yet, I doubt if we will ever see a news headline introducing an honest investigation into this bizarre story, though there are certainly many people ready and able to tell the truth about this colossally misguided boondoggle. (I have my theories, but that must be left for another time.)

So, don’t be misled by the misdirection of our corporate, militaristic propaganda.

The tragic mess now on display in Afghanistan is the clearest evidence yet that president Biden made the right decision. Our presence in Afghanistan has almost certainly left the country in worse condition than when we first invaded.

And even then, American policy toward Afghanistan had already made a mess of the nation’s internal affairs.

Let’s not forget that as far back as 1979 both President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski were more than happy to sacrifice the people of Afghanistan on the altar of America’s anti-Soviet foreign policy.

In effect, we created the Taliban to fight the Soviets. We prompted the civil war that has torn the country into pieces over these past 40 years! It is only right and fitting that they are now ready to haunt our backsides until we are finally gone.

Don’t be misled. It is long past time for the US to focus on helping people, not with bombs, drones, or invading armies, but with old fashioned diplomacy, financial aid, humanitarian assistance, and humility.