Last week, as the mainstream media continued to obsess over the CIA's evidence-free
claim that the Russians hacked the presidential election, President Obama quietly
sent 300 US Marines back into Afghanistan's Helmand Province. This is the first
time in three years that the US military has been sent into that conflict zone,
and it represents a final failure of Obama's Afghanistan policy. The outgoing
president promised that by the end of his second term, the US military would
only be present in small numbers and only on embassy duty. But more than 8,000
US troops will remain in Afghanistan as he leaves office.
When President Obama was first elected he swore that he would end the US presence
in Iraq (the "bad" war) and increase US presence in Afghanistan (the
"good" war). He ended up increasing troops to both wars, while the situation
in each country continued to deteriorate.
Why are the Marines needed in the Helmand Province? Because although the foolish
and counterproductive 15-year US war in Afghanistan was long ago lost, Washington
cannot face this fact. Last year the Taliban controlled 20 percent of the province.
This year they control 85 percent of the province. So billions more must be
spent and many more lives will be lost.
Will these 300 Marines somehow achieve what the 2011 peak of 100,000 US soldiers
was not able to achieve? Will this last push "win" the war? Hardly! The more
the president orders military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, the worse it
gets. In 2016, for example, President Obama dropped 1,337 bombs on Afghanistan,
a 40 percent increase from 2015. According to the United Nations, in 2016 there
were 2,562 conflict-related civilian deaths and 5,835 injuries. And the Taliban
continues to score victories over the Afghan puppet government.
The interventionists in Washington continue to run our foreign policy regardless
of who is elected. They push for wars, they push for regime change, then they
push for billions to reconstruct the bombed-out countries. When the "liberated"
country ends up in worse shape, they claim it was because we just didn't do
enough of what ruined the country in the first place. It's completely illogical,
but the presidents who keep seeking the neocons' advice don't seem to notice.
Obama - the "peace" candidate and president - has proven himself no different
than his predecessors.
What will a President Trump do about the 15 year failed nation-building experiment
in Afghanistan? He has criticized the long-standing US policy of "regime-change"
and "nation-building" while on the campaign trail, and I would like to think
he would just bring the troops home. However, I would not be surprised if he
accelerates US military action in Afghanistan to "win the war" once and for
all. He will not succeed if he does so, as the war is not winnable - no one
even knows what "winning" looks like! We may well see even more US troops killing
and being killed in Afghanistan a year from now if that is the case. That would
be a terrible tragedy.
