Less than a day after Pentagon officials quoted Defense Secretary James Mattis as insisting the US military would do a better job with transparency on troop levels, they’ve thrown that plan entirely out the window. Mattis has now signed orders on a planned escalation of the Afghan War.
The US had falsely claimed 8,400 troops were in Afghanistan, and corrected that yesterday to “about 11,000.” These new orders make that corrected figure obsolete, as the US is offering no details on the size of this new force being deployed.
The lack of figures should be unsurprising, as just last week President Trump insisted that the troop levels would not be made public, claiming the “enemy must never know.” Still, it makes Mattis’ comments just yesterday all the more bizarre, as he surely would’ve known the escalation was coming.
Some media outlets are still speculating that the figure will be around 4,000 as officials in the White House gave out such a figure before Trump’s speech. This however is believed at best to represent the immediate escalation, and Trump’s pledges for an open-ended war in Afghanistan seemed to suggest a plan to add more troops as commanders seek them. This makes accurate figures impossible to discern, and we don’t even have the old-fashioned false figures the Pentagon used to provide to base our guesses on.
This is a very strange phenomenon. The side that has lost the war is continuing the war. War for war’s sake is criminal and immoral. It is the civilian population that suffers the consequences.
There’s no winners. Maybe you can say the Taliban is prevailing over the dumpster fire, but it’s still raging away. Marshmallows anyone?
Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics…there are lots of winners.
What ? The US has not lost any war in Afghanistan, not by a longshot, and the US Army is under no obligation whatsoever to make its deployment numbers public for all the world to see, either.
The US Army has spent 15 years fighting goat herders with AK-47s and the insurgency controls more than half the country. I’d have to say the trend is not favorable for Uncle Schmuel.
The US was winning in Afghanistan for about six weeks. It’s been nothing but fail ever since.
Winning what? ISIS is not there, al Qaeda was chased out years ago, and the Taliban has never been a threat.
They are winning the drug war there. The CIA is exporting more opium than ever.
And our troops who are being sent to die in vain. You’re right — this is murder.
It must be horrible to be a soldier in Afghanistan. You really have no idea why you’re there.
Answer, so America can control and profit from the trillions in hydrocarbon extraction, transport & sales. And to try to prevent Russia & China from deriving any benefit or profit from those reserves. It’s a fools errand as JR points out…. It’s another 1 of those deals where tens of thousands get killid including our “volunteers” and some U.S. corporations make hundreds of millions… And it only costs us taxpayers a couple of trillion… Doesn’t sound like the type of deal that Trump should be very proud of making…
And don’t forget the petrodollar.
“Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.” ~ John Adams