Blow to morale: Afghan forces worry about US withdrawal
Several high ranking Afghan military officials, who spoke on condition they not be identified because they were not authorised to speak to the media, said the morale of Afghanistan’s under-trained and poorly
equipped security forces was already at a dangerously low ebb.
DEFDOG COMMENT: If, after 17 years we cannot train an army we had better get out of the business. A major stumbling block has been the inability of the US to understand the Afghan. Most of the military we are training can neither read or write but we are giving them complex weapons systems with which to fight. In the meantime, the insurgents continue to rely on old weapons platforms they have grown up with and use with great skill.
American hubris at its finest and once again BIG DoD has failed to understand the environment. The rag tag armies of Afghanistan have defeated every invader except Alexander (who, in the end, were able to compromise and thus beat). History is a great teacher, we are just poor students….
ROBERT STEELE: It has been my privilege to know DefDog for decades, he is one of the US Army's best clandestine human and offensive counterintelligence officers, now retired. We both served in Afghanistan in similar roles at separate times. My distinction was in telling the chain of command within 30 days of arrival that Karzai would never sign the renewed Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA).
My first clue was Karzai's ordering the Afghan Army to never, ever, call for NATO air support. After that it was easy to find other indicators. No one wanted to believe me. I was ultimately proven right, as I usually am. It is a great sadness for me to observe the US IC and DoD persist with such corruption and impunity, dishonoring the Constitution, the Republic, and We the People.
The other point that DefDog does not mention is that the Taliban was quite skilled at using the Afghan Army and training cycles as Rest & Recreation (R&R), while perhaps 75% of all funding from the US to the Afghan military (not just payroll but equipment and maintenance funding) went into the bank accounts of Karzai and his Ministry of Defense and other cohorts in crime.
During our over-lapping tours the Chief of Staff of the Army built a multi-million dollar home on a monthly salary of $750 a month, and other officers followed suit. The US does not “do” counterintelligence/inspector general operations on its “allies,” turning a blind eye to fraud, waste, and abuse across the board [similarly, during my time in the CIA, the Pakistani military was known to be ripping off 75% or more of the one billion a year we were channeling through them to the “guerillas” in Afghanistan.]
We should never have been in Afghanistan. A cynical person would say we entered Afghanistan because the Taliban was so effective in eradicating the opium crop. Apart from destroying most of the country, our legacy is hundreds of billions of dollars in profit to the Pakistani Army flag officers and the Karzai Atta crime families — opium grown in Afghanistan, processed into high grade heroin in Pakistan, and shipped to Europe by CIA and private military contractors as well as DoD aircraft. All for Wall Street and the 1%, all traceable to the Bush, Clinton, and Obama crime families.
It merits comment that Eric Prince is related to Betsy DeVos who is both one of Trump's Cabinet Secretaries and a major donor and power in Michigan GOP circles, described by some as ground zero for deciding who will be supported in future presidential elections. We should all be on alert for Trump following his good calls with very bad calls — anything that channels money to Eric Prince and Private Military Contractors (PMC) is a very bad call, even an impeachable call.
See Especially:
NEO – Trump Pulls Out of Syria – Why the Surprise Move Now?
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