Billions Spent on Afghan Army Ultimately Benefited Taliban
August 16th, 2021Flashback 2009: ‘Absurd’ Conspiracy Theories Prevalent in Afghanistan
And now, here’s an actual AP headline from today, “Billions Spent on Afghan Army Ultimately Benefited Taliban.”
The Afghanistan operation was primarily about shoveling trillions of dollars into the gaping maw of the U.S. military industrial complex and getting kilotons of opium out the other end.
Another curiosity: Priceless mineral deposits have been kept in the ground by all of the chaos. I still don’t understand how this fits into the picture, but oil companies definitely benefited from the slow adoption of electric vehicles. What would EV batteries cost now if Afghan rare earths had been in play over the last decade?
Well, what we got instead was the U.S. sending trillions of dollars to the usual suspects, and a U.S. armed flip flop army that now presides over skyrocketing opium production and priceless, but untapped, mineral reserves.
You couldn’t make it up if you tried.
I consider the potential for pipelines to be mostly noise. As for the 9/11 component of the narrative, it’s like the American Dream. As George Carlin said, “You have to be asleep to believe it.”
Via: AP:
Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.
The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.
A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.
