Former Trump National Security Advisor Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster says America’s Afghanistan “war weariness” narrative is factually wrong, short-sighted and dangerous to our national security and that of our allies. He defends “the long war” as an “insurance policy” against a caliphate. Bill Whittle takes it further, dealing with the argument that this foreign adventurism is none of our business, driven by neocons and globalists, or at the behest of America’s puppet-masters in Israel.
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H.R. McMaster Shatters “War Weariness” Narrative: Defends Long War in Afghanistan
Former Trump National Security Advisor Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster says America’s Afghanistan “war weariness” narrative is factually wrong, short-sighted and dangerous to our national security and that of our allies. He defends “the long war” as an “insurance policy” against a caliphate.
6 replies on “H.R. McMaster Shatters “War Weariness” Narrative: Defends Long War in Afghanistan”
I wouldn’t sacrifice my 18-year-old son to this. Nor would I sacrifice anyone else’s son. (There are good reasons Afghanistan is what it is, and always will be).
” … and then there was Yaghiband.
Since the local Jihad was in temporary abeyance, no enemy convoys, no bombing, the villagers of Yaghiband had evidently elected to fight a little war of their own, for no apparent reason. When I asked them why, they laughed, and shrugged, and laughed some more. There were five or six separate bands of muj, each holed up in its own set of ruins, and they sniped and potshot at each other whenever the mood struck them, which was almost always, from sunrise to sunset.
They didn’t seem to be seriously trying to kill one another, but it was hard to be sure. One afternoon, the cook at the marcaz where I was staying went down to the river to get water. A few minutes later I heard a heavy machine gun, a 12.7 mm, hammering away, and I looked over the wall and saw the cook racing back across the fields, water flying from his buckets. Machinegun slugs were kicking up puffs of dust all around his feet. The poor man ran faster and faster, finally jettisoning his pails and diving over the wall, landing next to me. He was gasping for breath, cursing and laughing, all at the same time.”
(Night Letters / Inside Wartime Afghanistan)
Puppet masters in Israel? Funny, this idea comes from a group that includes people that would be happy to see Sharia law enforced on all.
The United States and Israel happen to have common goals and enemies. Thats it.
Three days of silence and then three vids in just a few hours? Time to work on your release schedule, guys!
I know, I’m sure there were circumstances beyond your control but I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you some flak over it!
I’m sorry. Illness played a role. But we’re also shifting responsibilities among team members to allow us to focus on what’s ahead, after a few months of seeking stability with the new platform. Your flak is received with gratitude and regret.
War. As a retired professional warrior, I get tired of seeing the word used wrongly, like in War on Drugs or War on Poverty. Those were not wars, they were programs. War will always be a part of humanity because human nature is such that even good people can’t get along indefinitely. When they begin killing each other to establish dominance, you get a war. Always have, always will. Even though we can’t know how an alien might think or how it might communicate, I think war is common enough in species that at least some of them will be potentially warlike if we ever meet any. If they don’t cause it, we will. Human nature. The source of all of our current jihadist problems comes from the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia. They gave the Ministry to the Wahhabi sect decades ago and it festered and brewed jihadism and then exported it around the world. That source must be cut off. Too keep a war going until it is WON (not continued indefinitely) it needs to e declared (to get full national support), it needs to affect Americans daily (so they remember its on) and it needs to be won. It is hard to declare war on an ideology, but we need to find a way to do it. Otherwise, American ADD is such that if it is not in our faces every day, we will focus on something else. War is seldom the right answer, but when it is it is the only answer and you only get in one to win, not keep status quo. Otherwise, it’s a program and a police effort, not a war. In Afghanistan, I am more concerned about America keeping its word to support allies. We pulled out on the South Vietnamese, we’ve pulled out on the Kurds way too many times, and we need to not pull out on our allies in Afghanistan. If we can’t keep our word as a nation, we will not be trusted by anyone.
This explains why Afghans might look at American military “help” with healthy scepticism. (Night Letters / Inside Wartime Afghanistan)
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The U.S. had an agreement with the Afghan resistance: After the war, when the Soviets were gone, we would help establish a stable, democratic government in Afghanistan, and aid in rebuilding the country. Back in the glory days of the British Empire, critics used to talk of “Perfidious Albion.” Now, as the twentieth century segues into the twenty-first, it is “Faithless America.” Ask the Hmong, the Kurds, the Tibetans, or any of the other peoples we persuaded to fight for us, waving our flag, our money and guns, and then promptly betrayed for a few pieces of silver.
“As long as the rivers run”. Nothing has changed.
Around the time the last Soviet-backed puppet fell in Kabul, the Cold War ended. Our priorities instantly changed, and faster than you can say “amoral” the United States government forgot all about Afghanistan: It was as if the place had never existed.
But there was worse. Just as we erased the last vestiges of Afghanistan from our conciousness, we invited our friends the Saudis and Pakistanis to set up shop in the ruins and squeeze the last drops of life from them.
This process had already begun during the Jihad, when the CIA allowed Pakistani military intelligence, ISI, to give most of our military aid to Pakistan’s pet guerrilla leader, an unsavory character named Gulbuddin Heckmatyar. No matter that Gulbuddin had spent his pre-war years at Kabul University throwing acid in the faces of women students he dubbed “too liberated.” Or that he was the prime suspect in the murders of several Western journalists, aid workers, and proWestern Afghan intellectuals. Or that his troops spent more time fighting rival mujahedin groups than they did battling the Soviets. For years, the CIA sat blithely by as the Pakistanis armed this petty thug with the best and most of our weapons and money. Gulbuddin, for instance, was the first guerilla leader to receive Stinger antiaircraft missiles, while his rival Achmad Shah Massood, the main architect of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, never received any. In one incident, ISI sent a booby-trapped truckload of ammunition to Massood that exploded on delivery and barely missed killing him. And still the CIA did nothing.
Why? I can think of reasons, but they are all unspeakably evil.
At the same time, the CIA was helping bring thousands of Arab volunteers unto Afghanistan to help fight the Soviets, though there was no evidence the Afghans needed more fighters, only better and more equipment and supplies. Like Gulbuddin, these religious Foreign Legionaires caused more trouble than they did good, murdering Afghan civilians they deemed “un-lslamic,’ harassing Western aid workers, and alienating the mujahedin they fought beside.
One of these Arabs, of course, was a wealthy young Yemeni-Saudi trust funder named Osama bin Laden, who, like many of his CIA-recruited Arab brethren, already despised the West and America in particular.”