The American political system has been captured by the military, and only an independent political power can prevent the next Afghanistan

Matt Taibbi Aug 29

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On the Sunday morning shows today, prestige media did its best to soften the blow of Afghanistan. A key theme: we didn’t lose to the Taliban, but beat ourselves. It was “self-defeat,” somehow not-disgraced former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster told NBC, while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson cautiously described the disaster of Afghanistan as “a war we did not win.” Chuck Todd on Meet the Press liked that. “I agree,” he said, smiling a little and noting, “I don’t know if you can say we lost, but we didn’t win.”

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WATCH: "This is what withdrawal from a war that we did not win looks like," says @Eugene_Robinson on #MTP

"It's messy. It's awful. ... It's a tragic thing for a lot of Afghans ... certainly for the 13 service members who lost their lives and their families."

August 29th 2021

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Just a few weeks in, the gruesome story of Afghanistan’s collapse is already being sanitized, cleaved into neat storylines for blue and red audiences who as usual are being herded into safe psychological spaces, where they can happily non-consider what happened across the last 20 years. The images they see on TV aren’t their party’s fault, it’s those other jerks to blame, etc.

Republicans are blissful over Joe Biden’s approval rating nosedive and are thrilled to blame the whole debacle on our Sundowner-in-Chief. Biden, they say, is prioritizing Afghan lives over Americans in his withdrawal plans, and continues to push his $3.5 trillion “socialist wish list” over national security, and should have used Mike Pompeo’s “conditions-based” withdrawal plan instead of the ass-over-elbow deal they used in reality. Multiple Republicans are aping Trump-era Democrats by demanding the president’s resignation, with one, Missouri congresswoman Vicky Hartzler, going so far as to demand closure of the U.S.-Mexican border to “protect American lives” from an alleged heightened terrorist threat.

Democrats, not completely without self-reflection in the first days of this crisis, are already back focused on counter-blame narratives. Blue-state audiences are being reminded Donald Trump negotiated the “premature” May 1st pullout date, and that when critics blasted that deal as “weak and dangerous,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy advised his caucus not to speak against it. McCarthy today is leading the charge in criticizing Biden’s withdrawal, which is “so freaking hypocritical,” according to Senate-to-MSNBC pipeline passenger Claire McCaskill. Moreover, they say, House Democrat Jason Crow offered an amendment for his own “conditions-based” withdrawal plan, and that was shot down by the likes of Matt Gaetz, who last year said, “I don’t think there’s ever a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan.”

It’s all noise, designed to distract from the fact that Afghanistan is as pure a bipartisan fiasco as we’ve had in recent times. Both parties were directly and repeatedly complicit in prolonging the catastrophe. Republicans and Democrats were virtually unanimous in approving the initial use-of-force, both voted over and over to fund the war to insane levels, and both Democratic and Republican presidents spent years covering up evidence of massive contracting corruption, accounting failure (as in, failure to do any accounting), war crimes, and other problems.

Afghanistan was the ultimate symbol of the two-party consensus, the “good war” as Barack Obama deemed it, and defense spending in general remained so sacrosanct across the last twenty years that the monster, $160 billion defense spending hikes of 2017-2018 were virtually the only policy initiative of Donald Trump’s that went unopposed by a Democratic leadership. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” was Chuck Schumer’s formulation in 2018, choosing then to reward the Pentagon for turning Mesopotamia into a Mad Max set and spending two trillion dollars on the by-then-inevitable fall of Kabul.

Worse, as the performance of the legacy media in the last few weeks shows, the national commentariat is also fully occupied by the military establishment. Staffed from top to bottom by spooks and hawks, the corporate press’s focus from the pre-Iraq firing of Phil Donahue through the past few weeks of guest star appearances on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC by the likes of Leon Panetta, John Bolton, Karl Rove, David Petraeus and Marc Thiessen — all people with direct involvement in the Afghan mess — has been the same. It keeps the public distracted with inane tactical issues or fleeting partisan controversies, leaving the larger problem of a continually expanding Fortress America unexamined.

We need new institutions free of Pentagon influence, probably starting with a new political party. It doesn’t even matter so much what such a party would stand for, ideologically, so long as it adheres to one basic principle: don’t accept contractor money. It seems like the only possible solution to the disease that gave us Afghanistan. Our two parties, just like our academic research institutions, news networks, and even Hollywood’s movie studios, have become de facto Pentagon subsidiaries. They’re all hopelessly corrupted by the financial powers Dwight Eisenhower warned about, in his famous speech prophesying “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” from America’s armaments sector.

A few stray pundits in the last two weeks have pointed out the obvious fact that despite awesome financial and technological advantages, the United States has now “lost” virtually every war it has entered since World War II (with the possible exception of the first Gulf War, though the cleanness even of that victory is very debatable). Dominic Tierney, the author of The Right Way To Lose A War: America in the Age of Unwinnable Conflicts, told Time magazine a big reason for this was that “the nature of war itself” has changed since 1945:

Nearly all wars now are civil wars, complex arenas of counterinsurgency and terrorism. When you put the U.S. against another country where there’s a military that wears uniforms and they meet on the field of battle, the U.S. usually wins those kinds of wars—like the Gulf War in ‘91. But in complex civil wars, the United States has really struggled.

I’d agree, with a twist: under the influence of captured parties and the military’s ubiquitous and extravagantly funded public relations apparatus, America has itself redefined the “nature of war.” Armed conflict has gone from being an occasional unpleasant political necessity to the core product line of the American corporation. Wars are what we make, and like blue jeans or Louisville Sluggers, we build them to last, with Afghanistan the prime example. That should be the issue dominating Meet the Press, not whether we lost or just “didn’t win,” or which party’s leaders decided to pull out first, and why.

Just as we’re always designing new rifles and tanks and jet fighters, we’ve become adept at manufacturing fresh intellectual justifications for deploying troops, churning out everything from “humanitarian war” to “benevolent hegemony” to “regime change” to “nation-building” to Eisenhower’s own “domino theory.” Where once we fought for literal survival against other nations, and knew who’d won when one side surrendered, we’re now sending our kids to die (and kill) in open-ended engagements where victory is either impossible or indefinable, and the main concrete “results” are masses of foreign deaths and the gigantic houses built by defense executives in places like Loudon and Fairfax Counties in northern Virginia.

This is why, whenever we get a rare look at the real thinking underlying our modern conflicts, whether via the Pentagon or Afghanistan Papers or the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables, we keep seeing the same story: senior American military and intelligence officials struggling to come up with “metrics for success,” in some cases years after they’d already invaded and occupied places like Vietnam and Afghanistan.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but if you have to invent a “metric for success” in war that goes beyond defeating an enemy, you’re not really at war, you’re doing something else.

Is the military for building roads and power plants, fighting drug lords, promoting “democracy,” securing women’s rights, raising the average vehicle speed on roads, rooting out terror cells, training foreign police, improving “poultry management,” building independent radio stations (we can’t even do that in America!), ending sectarian or even domestic violence, even reducing carbon emissions? So long as the money kept coming, our military was willing to be about all of those things in Afghanistan, which initially mystified the Taliban, whose leaders had no concept of a war without goals.

Thinking we were there in search of revenge and bin Laden, the Taliban offered to turn him over once we started bombing, but were refused. We now also know that when we’d beaten them militarily at first, the Taliban tried to surrender, but we rejected even those overtures. The U.S. broadened the mission instead. “We originally said that we won’t do nation building,” said Bush National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, “but there is no way to ensure that al-Qaeda won’t come back without it.”

When those early efforts didn’t go so well, Americans blamed “endemic corruption” and then turned attention to eradicating that, forcing many initial allies into the Taliban camp, whose numbers began swelling for a variety of reasons. These included practices like drone-bombing funerals and assassinating “HVTs,” i.e. “high value targets” (a modern take on measuring progress by “body counts” which even the CIA, in a report leaked by Wikileaks, warned might “strengthen an armed group’s bond with the population”).

Instead of stopping practices like this, or reassessing the whole occupation, we then became convinced that keeping soldiers from joining battles against us required building a “stable economy” for a country that’s never had one, which in turn meant rebuilding the “agricultural sector,” a goal we began pursuing just as we began the related/contradictory work of eradicating poppy crops.

We ended up spending $8.62 billion on counter-narcotics programs that our Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) concluded were not effective on any level, with “local reductions in poppy cultivation… almost always short-lived or offset by increases elsewhere.” In fact, when we entered Afghanistan in 2001, the country was at an all-time low of 7,606 hectares of opium production, ironically thanks to a short-lived, Taliban-imposed ban. By 2017, however, the country had reached all-time highs of 328,000 hectares of production. In other words, we might have been 43 times as effective at our stated drug-reduction goals if we’d never dropped a boot in country.

There is no way to look at what happened in Afghanistan and conclude anything but that it was a giant spending program in search of a mission that ended with the mightiest army in the world fleeing from a pre-historic fighting force armed with our own weapons.

As Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was undone by typhus and snow, our army sank under the weight of its own 20 years of changing mission statements and nut-bar spending mandates. As SIGAR put it, “The U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve.” The Afghan people were incidental to all this, bystanders who couldn’t do anything but wait to see how long American politicians would keep writing big checks for whatever it was they claimed to think we were doing there from week to week.

The reason we kept writing those checks is obvious: the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties are little more than donation-fattened proxies for contractors, in particular the big five of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, who also happen to be the top-five federal contractors overall. Lockheed Martin by itself gobbled a remarkable $75.8 billion in contracts last year, and the top five defense firms overall took in a staggering $167 billion.

By tradition a significant share of that money gets recycled back to congressional pols and presidential candidates in the form of lobbying efforts and donations. Six key committees — the Armed Services, Defense Appropriations, and Foreign Affairs/Relations committees in both the House and Senate — were the target of $135 million in lobbying cash since the start of the Afghan war, enough to guarantee that most every harebrained scheme and operational course change in that war got rubber-stamped.

Defense contractors spent nearly $300 million on congressional candidates from 1990 on, and throughout that time succeeded in crushing every political challenge to military spending or expansion of our footprint abroad. In 1993, Bill Clinton’s new Defense Secretary, Les Aspin, proposed deep cuts to the old “Cold War” defense budget, offering four “bottoms-up” scenarios that included cutting three army divisions, 110 ships, and 233,000 active duty personnel. Analysts predicted the proposals would lead to criticisms within the Beltway of unpreparedness, that in turn would lead to calls for increased spending, and they turned out to be exactly right. By the time Clinton left office, congress was plowing the $11 billion savings from welfare reform into the B-2 Bomber and the Seawolf submarine. This pattern repeats over and over: proposed cuts become increases.

When I wrote a few years ago about the Pentagon’s amazing decades-long refusal to submit to a legally mandated audit, a Senate staffer whose boss served on one of the relevant committees explained that because Pentagon contractors essentially control a permanent supermajority of appropriations votes by flooding both parties with cash, there is no realistic way to threaten consequences for the Department of Defense for things like failing to do accounting. “You can’t get the Pentagon to take an audit seriously unless you threaten to stop funding, and you can’t stop funding without campaign finance reform,” he said.

We now know that Democratic politicians will occasionally talk about shifting resources from defense to social programming, while Republicans will occasionally flirt with isolationist themes, but in the end, both parties always take the money. They consume massive amounts not just from weapons makers but from aerospace firms, energy companies, research facilities, and services companies like Bechtel and Halliburton, all of which profit handsomely from debacles like Afghanistan, whether those “missions” succeed or not.

These financial powers have successfully lobbied into existence the cancer-like growth of the American military presence abroad, where we have over 800 bases in over 80 countries, with special forces operating in as much as 70% of the world’s countries in any given year (we were in 135 countries in 2016, for instance). American troops are now in the middle of more conflicts than most voters can count, or know about in even the dimmest sense. For instance, even as we reduced our troop presence in the Middle East after some public outrage in the mid-2010s, we jacked up deployments to Africa 1600%, sending units to places like Niger, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda, where we’ve of late been moving many Afghan refugees.

The only way to start breaking up the “Iron triangle” of congress, the Pentagon, and defense contractors that holds all of this insanity together is to elect politicians with no financial affiliation to the war machine, and it’s now obvious that this can’t be done within the framework of the current two-party system.

The Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020 seemed like a plausible effort to switch out the Democratic Party’s dependence on industry cash to become a party supported by small individual donations, but we saw what happened in South Carolina when that came too close to being reality. In fact, the only Democrats with anti-interventionist leanings in that cycle, Marianne Williamson, Tulsi Gabbard, and Sanders, were all hit with smear campaigns that came from within their party, with Gabbard and Sanders both openly tabbed useful idiots for Russia to boot. Keeping antiwar sentiment off the ticket has always been a top priority of the DNC. Even Howard Dean, who later eagerly supported troop increases in Afghanistan, was bashed by his own party and the “liberal” press in 2004 as a terror-loving peacenik who’d had the temerity to propose asking “permission” of the international community before invading places like Iraq (“Dean and the McGovern Thing” was the Washington Post’s formulation). The party brahmins wiped him out so John Kerry, a yea vote for both Iraq and Afghanistan who reportedly tried to pick John McCain as a running mate, could be subbed in, just as another McCain pal in Biden was subbed in last year.

When Trump bashed NATO as obsolete and a waste of money, saying we should be spending more of it at home, the consternation in the Beltway was hysterical, bipartisan, and instantaneous, and lasted throughout Trump’s presidency, despite his record spending hikes. Trump’s later threat to pull out of Syria also inspired howls of outrage from within his own party. “Disastrous,” said Lindsey Graham, while Ted Cruz tweeted in all caps: “DISGRACEFUL.” Republicans like Josh Hawley may occasionally flirt with “rethinking America’s foreign policy consensus,” scoring points in flyover towns full of disillusioned vets nursing tumors, lung problems, and other nightmares after standing too long next to Middle East burn pits, but the GOP archetype will always be flag-waving clods like Duncan Hunter and Mac Thornberry, who wolf down Northrop checks by day and get dewey-eyed at showings of American Sniper by night. It will be a cold day in hell before the Republican Party does anything meaningful to break the Pentagon’s grip on government.

What went wrong in Afghanistan wasn’t just about a failed withdrawal plan. It wasn’t even about a mission that was corrupted from the start, or lacked clear goals, though those things are obviously also true.

The problem is the entire American government has become a factory for producing open-ended conflicts, and voters no longer have any political mechanism for slowing them. People like Chuck Todd can comfort themselves that we didn’t lose in Afghanistan, and merely beat ourselves, but that’s the problem. We can vote out Democrats or Republicans, but there’s no lever to throw the bums out at the Pentagon, which somehow keeps winning by losing. We need a way to vote on war in general, and just don’t have one.

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Michael T13 min ago

I really find the repetition of this claim that the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden infuriating. Matt, did you actually read the WaPo article you linked to in support of it. It doesn't say what you said it says. You're stealing a couple of bases between what actually happened and what you're now claiming happened.

What actually happened was that the Taliban initially refused to turn him over and, after the US invasion started, they made a BS offer to negotiate the possibility of sending him to a third country that wasn't subject to US pressure if only we'd stop the invasion. They made clear they wouldn't put him in our hands, or in the hands of anyone remotely friendly to us. In short, they made clear he wasn't going anywhere where he'd face justice. And they didn't even actually offer to turn him over to anybody. They just offered to sit down at a table and discuss the possibility of doing so, if only we'd stop the invasion we had invested vast resources in and give up the leverage over the Taliban it created. There's a word for an offer like that - it's a sham. And you should stop telling people it was something it wasn't.

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Boris PetrovAug 29

Always remember Tulsi's words after utterly corrupt Hillary criminally accused Tulsi of being -- a "Russia's asset":

Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton . You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why.

Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.

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(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4911647&forum_id=2#43041831)

what kind of absolutely retarded thesis is this lol. this guy thinks "the military" is who is calling the shots....?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4911647&forum_id=2#43041949)