Fall of Kabul: The Fedora Chronicles News Of The Week.
20 Years Later, What Was It For?
Jason Cousineau and Eric Renderking Fisk | August 21st, 2021
Jason Cousineau and Eric Renderking Fisk have an honest conversation about The United States Military Forces withdrawing from Afghanistan after occupying the country for almost 20 years... and ten of those years was after Osama Bin Laden was captured and killed in Pakistan.
What does this withdrawal from Afghanistan mean for our allies in that country and around the world? Why would any other country in The Middle East ever trust us again? What happens to the people we left behind.
Jason and Eric also discuss the parallels between 'The Pentagon Papers' and 'The Afghan Papers,' the similarities between this event and The Fall of Saigon, and the toll these wars take on our veterans.
Show Links and News Sources:
Military Veteran Project - Restoring America's Heroes - The Military Veteran Project is a volunteer-driven charity with a mission of military suicide prevention through research and treatment.
The Atlantic: "Everyone Knew We Were Losing in Afghanistan And everyone in charge insisted we were winning." By David A. Graham
The New York Times: Documents Reveal U.S. Officials Misled Public on War in Afghanistan. The documents, obtained by The Washington Post, paint a stark picture of missteps and failures in the American effort to pacify and rebuild the country.
The Washington Post: "AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found." By Craig Whitlock Dec. 9, 2019
Amazon: "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War," by Craig Whitlock.
The groundbreaking investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about the longest war in American history by Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock, a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives.
Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military became mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory.
Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains startling revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war, from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground.
Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander - and didn’t want to make time to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are”. His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.”
The Afghanistan Papers is a shocking account that will supercharge a long overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.
