Afghan war, United States, Dutch government lies

This 9 December 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

Chris Hayes On WaPo’s Afghanistan Papers: ‘End The War Now’ | All In | MSNBC

New government papers revealed by the Washington Post show the war in Afghanistan was a mess right from the start.

Remarkably, this call to stop the Afghan war, a call heard much earlier from Afghan feminists and from the peace movement worldwide, is now heard on corporate MSNBC TV. MSNBC TV, where journalist William Arkin left this year as he was sick of its warmongering propaganda.

Bill Johnston comments sarcastically on this video:

Thank you MSNBC for elevating this very important issue of wasteful wars. Thank you for supporting [Democratic presidential candidate] Tulsi Gabbard’s talking points. I am sure as you say, you were aware of this all along. I just missed all your reporting of it.

Translated from Guus Dietvorst in the Netherlands today:

“The American people are constantly being lied to.” That is the firm conclusion of the president of the institute that has investigated whether the US American money for the war in Afghanistan is being well spent. The investigation was supposed to remain secret, but The Washington Post published about it yesterday.

From 400 interviews with senior soldiers and officials, the picture emerges that it was clear to those involved from the start that the war could not be won. “Incredible, shocking, fierce, very big”, are words that Socialist Party MP Karabulut uses into the mouth about the investigation that The Washington Post calls The Afghanistan Papers. That is a reference to the Pentagon Papers from 1971, which showed that the American people and Congress were being lied to about the course of the Vietnam War.

All three presidents (Bush, Jr., Obama, Trump) that the US has had in the last eighteen years would have known that a stable Afghanistan was impossible. “It’s unbelievable that president after president knew about this,” says Karabulut. “The question for us is whether that also applies to cabinet after cabinet. Have we also been lied to?”

The SP Member of Parliament has today requested a debate on the issue and received support from almost the entire Lower House …

The war in Afghanistan started in 2001, when a US-led coalition invaded the country. …

To this day, there are thousands of foreign soldiers in the country. Among them also Dutch. In total, some 29,000 Dutch soldiers have been deployed since 2002, of whom 25 have died. At the moment there are about 160 Dutch people in the north of the country. The battle has cost the Netherlands, estimated, billions of euros. …

The Afghanistan Papers confirm what I recently noticed when I visited the troops there, “says SP MP Karabulut. “It is still not safe there, while the eighteen-year-old war has already matured. I have been asking the cabinet for years: is it going to be safer? But it never became safer. ”

While safety after the expulsion of the Taliban seemed to be the approach. Schools were built, roads were built,

Yes: Afghanistan’s supposed reconstruction—$133 billion, more than Washington spent, adjusted for inflation, on the entire Marshal Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe after the Second World War. The United States military-industrial complex and corrupt Afghan warlords profited. Most Afghan people stayed hungry.

elections were organized, and thousands and thousands of Afghan policemen and soldiers were trained, including by the Dutch. Yet it never really became a safe country. …

According to Afghanistan expert Olivier Immig, safety was never the main goal at all. “It is completely clear to me that the West has always had a different purpose than helping the Afghans. It was about Osama bin Laden, about partnerships between countries, about saving NATO, about hostilities like Russia.”

And about oil pipelines. And about the trillion-dollar Afghan mineral wealth.

And that also applies to our country, Immig thinks. “Dutch participation was about our friendship with the US.”

Big ambitions have not really been achieved, Immig believes. And that is also clear from the words of a diplomat quoted in the Afghanistan Papers. “We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them [supposedly] peaceful. And we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”