21A035 A 13th Big Lie by Jim Davies, 9/14/2021

Back in mid-2020, an Edition of this Blog offered Twelve Huge Government Lies. It's time to update that list; we must race to keep up. On its twelfth item, about the Wuhan Bug being a plague like the Black Death, there's comment in several recent ZGBlogs; so let's find a place for America's longest war, and its astonishing conclusion: the breathtaking mendacity of the Afghan occupation.

The events of August there quite took me by surprise. The withdrawal of foreign forces was very proper, and very late; US soldiers should have been brought home no later than 2002 - indeed, they should never have gone in. There was a dispute in 2001 about a named suspect in the 9/11 attacks - the FedGov wanted to extradite Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government in Kabul was dragging its feet - but that could and should have been resolved without force. In any case once an invasion had been launched and OBL had skipped over the mountains towards Pakistan, there was no excuse to stay. Yet, they stayed; there was a mission creep. The task of extradition morphed into one of nation-building, for which the authority can be read in the US Constitution, Article VIII. Look it up.

Its absence is just the first part of this 13th Big Lie. Twenty years later, having lost $2 trillion, 6,500 US and 116,000 Afghans dead, no nation has been built and the Taliban is back in control, so it was all for nothing; but the speed of their success is what's emphasized here. It was long predictable that after NATO withdrew there might be a civil war and that the Taliban might win it, but it was not publicly predicted that the carefully trained and equipped Afghan Army would lay down its weapons and walk home, leaving them free to take control almost without a shot being fired; yet it could not possibly have surprised the many smart Americans who were on the ground there for so long.

So they concealed from us the abject weakness of the US-prepared Army, and that completes the thirteenth Huge Government Lie - that the War was needed, to secure a "democratic" state in the MidEast free of Muslim theocrats and could be and was being won. They knew it was neither. But they said nothing; they did not tell those who, by democratic theory, had appointed them to care for society's interests, and paid their salaries. They lied. For twenty years.

Evidently, there is not an united wish among Afghan ladies to stay free of Islamic restrictions, to attend schools, to pursue careers; for if there were, they would in August have leaned hard on their husbands and boyfriends to stay in the Army and fight the Taliban (that may be disappointing, but is clearly factual.) Apparently there is not a hunger for US-style democratic government. Apparently, the Afghan Army was not dedicated to defend one. We were all told the contrary, and no doubt some Afghans do wish for all that; but not many. The FedGov lied to us. For twenty years.

There's one other implication of this systematic lying. Given that it's impossible for scores of thousands of American officers and men deployed to the country over two decades to have been unaware that the Afghan Army would fold as soon as they left, why did they leave a bonanza of weaponry for the Taliban to pick up and, in due course, use to create mayhem?

Their departure date was well known. They could easily have shipped most of the guns and rockets (and some at least of the vehicles) out in the closing months of the occupation and so denied them to the new government. Why not?

Two possibilities come to mind: (1) the deal they struck with the Taliban (and which Trump negotiated) provided that they would be allowed to leave unmolested but only if they left their weapons behind. Or (2) they left them behind on purpose so as deliberately to arm the Talibangers.

That second one does look bizarre. On whose "side" is the FedGov anyway? Why arm a hostile group? Those questions presume that the FedGov truly wants peace and prosperity in the Middle East and elsewhere, and if that were so then Possibility #2 should be discarded. But, does it? The FedGov has been busy for 18 months past foisting upon us the Covid Scam - in effect, a major war against humanity - and over its history has begun 115 shooting wars, nearly one every two years. So why make that presumption? "War is the health of the State" - the more war (unless it's lost!) the more easily can any government command the loyalty of its population. So I'm leaving both those possibilities in place.

All government lies from the outset; first about the need for it to exist. Its whole being is squarely based on deceit and mendacity. There is no slight possibility of reform. It absolutely has to go.