Afghanistan Proves The US Military Needs Its Budget Slashed To Ribbons

Caitlin Johnstone

US officials are telling the press that Kabul will fall to the Taliban within 90 days and perhaps within the month as US troops withdraw from the war-torn nation.

“One official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the issue’s sensitivity, said Tuesday that the U.S. military now assesses a collapse could occur within 90 days. Others said it could happen within a month,” reports The Washington Post. “Some officials said that although they were not authorized to discuss the assessment, they see the situation in Afghanistan as more dire than it was in June, when intelligence officials assessed a fall could come as soon as six months after the withdrawal of the U.S. military.”

Meanwhile the US is still raining down explosives and murdering Afghan civilians to temporarily slow the inevitable Taliban takeover long enough for the Biden administration to have its ridiculous 9/11 “victory” party. Biden has said the US will continue providing “air support” (imperialist for bombing campaigns) to the Afghan government, for however long that government exists.

This is an unforgivable outrage that cries out to the heavens for vengeance. Not the Taliban takeover; that was always the inevitable result of letting Afghanistan be controlled by Afghans. I’m talking about the invasion and 20-year occupation of that nation by the US and its allies.

It is only by the most aggressive narrative management and journalistic malpractice that people around the world are not calling for the heads of the architects of this occupation. For twenty years the world was systematically lied to that the US coalition was building a government and military that could stand on its own, and that this goal was right around the corner and just needs a little more time. Now it’s crunch time, and we learn that what they’ve been building in Afghanistan this entire time was a fake movie set made of cardboard.

The cost of that fake movie set? More than two trillion dollars, and hundreds of thousands of human lives.

This should be an international scandal for which scores of people should be sentenced to spend the rest of their lives behind bars. More than this, every military which participated in this unforgivable crime should have its budget slashed to a tiny fraction of what it is.

A military which can afford to spend trillions of dollars on a devastating 20-year war that accomplished literally nothing besides making war profiteers fabulously rich is a military which needs its budget slashed to ribbons. Clearly if Pentagon officials can waste such unfathomably vast fortunes lining the pockets of the military-industrial complex to the benefit of not one single ordinary American, they do not need anything like the obscenely bloated military budget the United States currently has.

Just thinking about the things those two trillion dollars could have been spent on instead, like fully ending both homelessness and child poverty in the United States, for example, should make Americans howl with rage. Hell, spending two trillion dollars building a useless brick mountain in the middle of the Mojave Desert would’ve been an infinitely better use of that money than murdering hundreds of thousands of people with US troops dying by the thousands and wounded by the tens of thousands. That last bit alone should have every military family member marching on Washington and Arlington today.

The US government is the single most tyrannical regime on this planet, without exception. It has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century, solely in its wars that are still currently happening, all in the name of power and profit and destroying anyone who disobeys its dictates. Anyone who cares about humanity should place the defanging of this horrific monster at the very forefront of their values.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/afghanistan-proves-the-us-military