Comment by hncurious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hncurious | Hacker News Reader

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Oil is largely a red herring, in this case anyway.

Julian Assange in 2011: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1427929346262642688

US veteran that oversaw training of Afghan forces, 2021: "I would sit in on staff meetings, because part of my position there was with a Joint Command that was building the Afghan military and police force — the division that I worked with was about training and policy for the Afghan police. And that also included arming and funding them. I don’t think I could overstate that this was a system just basically designed for funneling money and wasting or losing equipment."

https://mtracey.substack.com/p/a-big-money-funneling-operati...

And now said equipment is confirmed lost or in the hands of the Taliban: "A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous."

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-army-taliban-185017ba29...

Great post. One of the reason the 9/11 wars went so badly is because the concept of "war profiteering" had almost entirely disappeared from American politics by the 2000s. Or at least the political will to combat it was gone.

When there was a draft and people were invested in the outcome of the wars, politicians made their names by going after war profiteers.

There's no real disagreement there unless your claiming that the "transnational security elite" have no interests in other commodities.

The history of the United Fruit Company, the CIA and the term "banana republic" are worth looking into if you're unfamiliar.

Sounds simplistic. Why did Biden withdraw troops? Is he not part of the transnational security elite?

The problem with these conspiracy theories of everything is that they actually never explain anything.

The reason the war was continued was not only and not primarily because a transnational security elite was washing money blah blah blah.

It was primarily because those voters who supported the war had hope for a better outcome. And their hope was greater than their reason.

Without hope, no manipulation would work.

with this in mind and playing along why did the US stop the endless war there?

One answer could be: it was Trump who started this and he wanted to stop the corruption, and the US is getting better. Another answer could be: it hasn't stopped, its just a lull before the US starts up endless war again.

I suspect that one can make any argument fit any reasons from any angle and there will be some truth in some of each of the ideas.

That's what scares me; the pigs feeding at the trough of "endless war" aren't going to get less hungry, and they're not going to take kindly to the idea of missing a meal.

No matter how many stupid looks they show on TV and how much "complete surprise" they proclaim, there's people been making a living off this war for a while and they saw the writing on the wall.

Do we expect they've packed up and gone home to a quiet retirement? Or is the next chapter of "how much shit can we waste" already on railcars?

Or maybe there are multiple competing interests, and the interest who wants an endless war lost out to public pressure and loss of faith of 2 different presidents.

The war in Afghanistan was still fairly popular among the general public until very recently.

The US will be going back to war as soon as it can find a casus belli. The US Dept of defense is the largest single employer on the planet. Our arms industry is enormous. If there is no war the industry faces the threat of reduced employment and ultimately income.

Aside from that, here's a quote from Biden's speech about Afghanistan I find relevant.

"Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan: al Shabaab in Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Nusra in Syria, ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resources."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...

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