Daniel Sjursen is a Westpoint graduate, and a retired Army officer who
Daniel Sjursen
served in combat tours of both Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, and is a Westpoint history instructor. His books include Ghost Riders of Baghdad, Patriotic Dissent, and A True History of the United States.
Matthew Hoh was a Marine Corps company commander who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. After reassignment to the US State Department, he resigned in
Matthew Hoh
protest from his post in Afghanistan over US strategic policy and goals there in September 2009. Since then he has worked as a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and is the former director of the Afghanistan Study Group, a network of foreign and public policy experts and professionals advocating for a change in US strategy in Afghanistan.
Aaron Mate, one of my “go-to” journalists, recently interviewed both men about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and their professional opinions about our 20-year war in that country.
Over the past few weeks, I have watched and read a great deal of material about America’s longest war and president Biden’s decision to withdraw ground forces.
Of everything that I have scoured, this interview is one of the best.
Both veterans have been long-time critics of American policy in Afghanistan. In the interview below, they rehearse their critical analysis of why this war was wrong from the beginning, why nothing ever improved, and why it was long past time for us to get out. (56 minutes long)
I believe that the speaker at my morning worship service was trying to be nonpartisan. And I appreciate that.
But it’s hard to keep our biases in check, especially when they are rarely confronted by someone who sees the world differently.
Hers were showing this morning.
In the opening moments of the sermon, the speaker began to lead a prayer
A person wounded in a bomb blast outside the Kabul airport in Afghanistan on Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021, arrives at a hospital in Kabul. The Pentagon confirmed at least two blasts outside the Kabul airport and said there were a number of casualties. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)
on behalf of the families of the 13 soldiers recently killed by 2 suicide bombers in Afghanistan. She didn’t mention the 170+ Afghan civilians, men, women, and children who died, as well.
Then she included a prayer request for the Christians in Afghanistan who will almost certainly suffer under Taliban rule. I could see people nodding their heads in agreement.
But the real enthusiasm was yet to come.
Finally, she mentioned the need for our nation’s leaders to be directed by
God’s wisdom in their decision-making. Wow. Suddenly, the congregation erupted in applause and loud “amens” rippled throughout the auditorium.
Obviously, the community agreed heartily that THIS was the most essential request — “God, give us leaders with greater wisdom.”
I agree with these words, but I know that the kind of wisdom I was praying for is very, very different from the “wisdom” my fellow church members believe is now lacking in Washington, D.C.
You see, I know my community.
I know that the majority of the folks in my church are devoted consumers of Fox News. Many also watch Christian television, with people like Pat Robertson offering their “religious” views on world events. Consequently, their perspective on world affairs is shaped heavily by these dual propaganda outlets of the Republican party. (CBN news is only Fox News with a smile.)
Ever since president Biden initiated our withdrawal from Afghanistan (which, remember, will never entail a complete withdrawal of all special forces, intelligence operatives, and drone strikes), the Republican party and the entire assembly of corporate, cable news outlets have all uniformly condemned Biden’s withdrawal efforts.
More than that, they continually argue that US troops should remain in Afghanistan. But, of course, remaining in Afghanistan means more war, more killing and destruction, more dead Americans, more slaughtered, innocent Afghans.
No doubt, the current withdrawal could have been planned more thoroughly. But it is far from clear that all the blame should fall on Biden’s shoulders. There is more than enough blame to go around, and we ought to be heaping shovel-fulls of it onto the culprits in the Pentagon, the CIA, the State and Defense Departments, the weapons contractors, and the entire military command structure that all perpetuated this $2.35 trillion, 20-year boondoggle of a horror show on the Afghan and American people.
However, I know that the vast majority of the men and women who were enthusiastically applauding for “leaders with divine wisdom” in my worship service this morning were not thinking about the selfishness or the guilt of America’s bloodthirsty military-industrial complex — a complex that enriched itself to the tune of billions of dollars over the past 20 years.
No. They were condemning the president who finally decided “to end” this 20 war.
They were also — knowingly, self-consciously — endorsing the litany of war-mongering media figures now calling for American troops to remain in Afghanistan to keep up the fight.
Implicitly, they were praying for more death and destruction because, rather than thinking with the mind of Christ, they have been thoroughly propagandized and brainwashed by our corporate media whose corporate owners ALL LOVE WAR.
It is always a struggle for me to worship with people who embrace without question (and applaud with both hands) the egocentric brutality of the American Empire with its colonial hubris and penchant for human exploitation.
But I am a part of Christ’s church. So I stay. And I pray in my own way. And I try to talk with others about these things whenever I can. Though few will listen for long.
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
Taliban fighters pose with an abandoned Humvee
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?
Thisis 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.
Not since the days immediately following the Twin Towers attacks on 9/11 has the war in Afghanistan received as much media attention as it is getting today. Now, everyone is for its continuation, or so it seems.
Corporate media war-mongering knows no bounds.
President Biden’s plans to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan has suddenly turned every broadcast journalist into a distressed, hand-wringing, honorary member of Human Rights Watch, fretting and fussing over the future state of an Afghanistan free of American military forces.
Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that US forces will continue to dominate the Afghan landscape (and neighboring Pakistan) with armed drones dropping bombs and missiles into peoples’ homes, a legion of civilian contractors pursuing American business interests, and intelligence operations manipulating the government and assassinating anyone who gets in their way.
Not since music producer Phil Spector’s famous “wall of sound” have I heard such a fully orchestrated, monotonous, uniform wall of repetitious lament from corporate news broadcasters universally expressing, whether explicitly or by implication, their desire to keep US troops in a war overseas.
Never mind that this war – which has always included US attacks in neighboring Pakistan – has dragged on for over 20 years; never mind that the original mission of capturing Osama bin Laden was accomplished long ago; never mind that the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers demonstrates what many have long suspected – that no one in the Pentagon, State, or Defense Departments ever had any hope for the situation’s improvement, much less a military solution to our “why can’t we fix Afghanistan?” query.
Nevertheless, everyone from Fox News to MSNBC is now lamenting president Biden’s “irrational,” even “cowardly” decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Suddenly, it appears that American elites actually care about the fate of poor
Army troops returning in December from a deployment to Afghanistan. Credit…John Moore Getty Images
Muslims overseas. Thoughts of a barbaric Taliban regime imposing their version of Sharia law over women and girls is more than suburban coffee table conversations can tolerate.
But the fact of the matter is that the only reason CNN and CBS news anchors now want us all to believe that Afghanistan’s future (sans US group troops) looks so devastatingly bleak, is because these same people have thoroughly and irresponsibly ignored the lives of the Afghan people for nearly 20 years.
Propaganda is not only a matter of spreading misinformation. It also requires withholding inconvenient truths.
Think about it.
How often has the American public been updated, on a regular basis, about the details of what the US presence in Afghanistan has meant for the country’s civilian population?
What about the regular CIA assassinations; murders that can wipe out entire families, including young children?
(Below. Watch “Living Under Drones,” approx. 7 minutes)
No. Only the ignorant or the propagandists will believe that the future suddenly looks bleak for the Afghan people after America “leaves.” The truth is that sharing their country with America’s occupation army has always been a nightmare for the Afghan and Pakistani people.
Just ask the little children who instinctively run in fear every time they imagine a noise overhead because they are terrified of another drone attack.
In the early days of planning in the Oval Office, there was a nanosecond given over to the suggestion that al Qaeda should be treated as an international criminal organization, and that the Twin Towers attack should be viewed as a horrible crime rather than an act of war.
Two possible paths were laid out before president George W. Bush. The first option, with important historical precedent, is explained in a 2006 report, 9/11: Five Years Later. The Forward to this government report explains that: “Before 9/11, combating terrorism was treated largely as a law enforcement problem.”
Not anymore.
President Bush forever changed the US attitude towards “terrorism” – which still remains horribly (and conveniently) ill-defined.
Eager to declare himself “a war president,” George W. Bush acquiesced to the military bureaucracy’s (which naturally includes the weapons manufacturers who have made billions since this war began) insistence that 9/11 be viewed as an act of war requiring a military (rather than an international law-enforcement) response.
The people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Yemen, AND the United States have all suffered the devastating, inhumane consequences of that egotistical, presidential decision ever since.
Only those who have not been paying attention will now believe that US forces have been protecting Afghan women and children, civilians who will suddenly come under threat by our withdrawal.
I will keep my fingers crossed and hope that president Biden follows through on his promise to withdraw all US ground forces from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021.
But even if he does resist the pressure of DC warmongers now mounted against him, the senseless 20 year war in Afghanistan is bound to continue.
Investigative journalist, Norman Solomon
Journalist Norman Solomon’s article at SheerPost reminds us that we always have to read the fine print in any presidential statement.
There we will see that the air war will continue. US drones will not stop murdering anonymous Afghan civilians, including women and children.
The CIA and various special ops units will continue their clandestine operations.
The insanity of American foreign policy, which appears intent upon dominating the entire globe, has not changed. President Biden remains a neo-liberal, American imperialist.
The publication of the Afghanistan Papers by the Washington Post — this generation’s equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, revealing the truth about the horrid, unwinnable war in Vietnam — has been ignored by the public and Congress, meaning that there is little public pressure to TRULY bring this war to an end.
Solomon’s piece is entitled, “The Fine Print on Biden’s Afghanistan Announcement.”
Here it is:
Contrary to what Joe Biden has said and corporate media has parroted, U.S. warfare in Afghanistan is set to continue well beyond September 11, 2021.
When I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she slept
Guljumma, 7, and her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, at the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 31, 2009. [Photo by Reese Erlich]at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. With a soft, matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.
Troops on the ground didn’t kill Guljumma’s relatives and leave her to live with only one arm. The U.S. air war did.
There’s no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over when — according to President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday — all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from that country.
What Biden didn’t say was as significant as what he did say. He declared that “U.S. troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan” before Sept. 11. And “we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”
But President Biden did not say that the United States will stop bombing Afghanistan. What’s more, he pledged that “we will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces,” a declaration that actually indicates a tacit intention to “stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”
And, while the big-type headlines and prominent themes of media coverage are filled with flat-out statements that the U.S. war in Afghanistan will end come September, the fine print of coverage says otherwise.
The banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage during much of Wednesday proclaimed: “Withdrawal of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Will End Longest American War.” But, buried in the thirty-second paragraph of a story headed “Biden to Withdraw All Combat Troops From Afghanistan by Sept. 11,” the Times reported: “Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said.”
Matthew Hoh, a Marine combat veteran who in 2009 became the highest-ranking U.S. official to resign from the State Department in protest of the Afghanistan war, told my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy on Wednesday: “Regardless of whether the 3,500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”
We scarcely hear about it, but the U.S. air war on Afghanistan has been a major part of Pentagon operations there. And for more than a year, the U.S. government hasn’t even gone through the motions of disclosing how much of that bombing has occurred.
“We don’t know, because our government doesn’t want us to,” diligent researchers Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote last month. “From January 2004 until February 2020, the U.S. military kept track of how many bombs and missiles it dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and published those figures in regular, monthly Airpower Summaries, which were readily available to journalists and the public. But in March 2020, the Trump administration abruptly stopped publishing U.S. Airpower Summaries, and the Biden administration has so far not published any either.”
The U.S. war in Afghanistan won’t end just because President Biden and U.S. news media tell us so. As Guljumma and countless other Afghan people have experienced, troops on the ground aren’t the only measure of horrific warfare.
No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won’t stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the bombing and “special operations” that remain shrouded in secrecy.
about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and their professional opinions about our 20-year war in that country.
today. Now, everyone is for its continuation, or so it seems.
