Bombs
have numbers. Humans have names. Our American military boasts a skill and
passion for using numbers to turn names into yet more numbers. But these
numbers have grown so gargantuan and out of control that one struggles to
comprehend them.
In just
10 months in 2018—the latest numbers made available—our military dropped 5,982 munitions on
Afghanistan, turning many thinking, living and loving names into cold, lifeless
numbers. Over the span of the war, 43,000 Afghan civilians have been
numberized. We, as Americans, essentially never even notice when it happens.
Statistically speaking, it will happen again many times today, and no one in
America will really care. (At least not while the game is on.)
64,000 Afghan security forces have been
numberized since 2001.
Our
government has known for years that the war in Afghanistan is a jaw-dropping
disaster on the level of “Cats”: the movie. How do we know they knew? The
Washington Post actually just published some impressive reporting, taking a
step back from its lust for pro-war propaganda. (The last time it achieved such
a feat was during the O.J. Simpson trial. The first one. The one with the
glove.) The Post unearthed a trove of thousands of internal government
documents that expose the catastrophic war. And it turns out there are Tinder
dates between a young neo-Nazi and an old Jewish lady that have gone better
than this war.
“[The document trove] reveals that
senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan
throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be
false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable,” the
paper reported.
Let me
translate The Washington Post’s fancy-pants language: U.S. officials didn’t
“fail to tell the truth”; they fucking lied. The phrase “failed to tell the
truth” oozes around the brain’s neural pathways, strategically dodging the
anger receptors. “Failed to tell the truth” sounds like veracity is a slippery
fish U.S. officials just couldn’t catch.
424 humanitarian aid workers have been
numberized.
Let’s
take a moment to consider the motivations and goals of the war in Afghanistan.
The U.S. ostensibly invaded the country to stop al-Qaida from attacking us in
any way, namely by flying large planes into our buildings. We achieved this
goal within the first couple months. With al-Qaida essentially decimated, it
seems logical that we should have left the country, reserving the right to
return if any other big passenger airplanes came after us.
But we
didn’t leave. We never leave. Rule No. 1 of the American empire is “Never Truly
Leave a Country After Invading.” In order to explain our continued presence, we
had to move the goal post. To what? We weren’t sure. We’re still not sure.
Nearly 20 years later, if you ask a U.S. general or president (any of them)
what the goal is in Afghanistan, they’ll feed you a word salad so large it’ll
keep you regular for months. In fact, we now know that even during some of the
earliest years of the war, the Pentagon and the Bush administration didn’t know
who the bad guys were. (Right now you’re thinking it’s rather juvenile and
uninformed of me to refer to enemy forces as “bad guys,” but, as you’ll see in
a moment, our government literally spoke about them in those terms. Side note:
This is because murderous rampages by war criminals are always juvenile.
Murder, by definition, is unevolved.)
According
to the Post’s Afghanistan Papers, an unnamed former adviser to an Army Special
Forces team said, “They thought I was going to come to them
with a map to show them where the good guys and bad guys live. It took several
conversations—[a]t first, they just kept asking: ‘But who are the bad guys,
where are they?’ ”
Yet we
Americans were instructed in the early years that Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld had everything under control. To imply otherwise was to make a mockery
of tens of millions of yellow ribbons. But in reality, Rumsfeld, too, had a
sizable bad-guy problem.
“I have no visibility into who the bad
guys are,” he said behind closed, locked, soundproof doors. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld
publicly and boldly led the nation in a well-defined and decisive victory in
the land of the Afghans.
In
2003, he said, during a press conference alongside
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, “General Franks and I … have concluded that
we’re at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a
period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction and activities.”
Yep, no
more major combat—just 17 years of reconstruction (and activities). Apparently,
most U.S.-backed “reconstruction” is done from the air, via bombs. Let that be
a lesson to you, rest of the world: You better not screw with us or we’ll
reconstruct you and your whole family!
67 journalists have been reconstructed
during the war in Afghanistan.
Is two
decades too long for an utter, unmitigated disaster? Maybe we can stretch it to
three? We’ve been funding warlords and extremist jihadis and hoping they will
play nice. Yet American presidents have continually told us we’re making
progress. “Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who
served as Afghanistan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told
government interviewers in 2015, ‘What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have
the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.’ ”
I
imagine that quote particularly upsets many Americans, because if there’s one
thing we’re good at, it’s having a foggy idea of what we’re doing.
Vietnam:
foggy idea.
Iraq:
very strong foggy idea.
Libya:
one hell of a foggy idea.
Unfettered
capitalism: the foggiest idea.
To put
it simply, we are the best at bad ideas. But these Afghanistan Papers unveil a
pretty terrible picture. One we need to confront as a nation and not just sweep
under the rug (and not just because the rug would have to be the size of the
Pacific Rim).
Upon
hearing these revelations, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer did his best impersonation of
someone who gives a shit. He
said:
A bombshell
series of investigative reports from The Washington Post exposing heartbreaking
truths about the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which has claimed some 2,400 U.S.
lives and cost nearly a trillion dollars. The Post says … officials routinely
lied to the American people about the war. … This is truly a bombshell.
Yes,
it’s a bombshell—despite the fact that much of the information in the
Afghanistan Papers has been known for a decade or more. Back in 2012, I myself
was doing poorly written standup
comedy bits about how our government funded both sides of the
war in Afghanistan. This goes to show that the mainstream media has two
priorities—one is to spout the U.S. government’s talking points, and the other
is to distract us all from the whitewashing of history.
They
help Americans believe that we just found out about the
failures in Afghanistan; that we just started McCarthyism, and
it didn’t happen before in the 1950s to horrific consequences; that we just
now discovered the breathtaking environmental consequences of factory
farming. (I’m kidding—corporate media will never report on that. You could have
a CNN anchor tied up in a sack in Gitmo, and he would still refuse to
admit factory animal farming is killing the planet at
an aggressive pace.)
But
Blitzer wasn’t content pretending to be shocked that the Afghanistan War isn’t
going well, so he put his acting chops to the test by further postulating that
there also might be flaws with the war in Iraq. He
said, “I can only imagine and brace for a similar report about the
long U.S. war in Iraq as well. I suspect that could be some horrifying news as
far as that is concerned also.”
That’s
right: As of last month, Blitzer thinks there might be some problems with the
war(s) in Iraq. (Blitzer strikes me as the type of guy who wouldn’t notice if
you stole his pants off him in negative-10-degree weather.) Yes, Wolf, not only
has there been similar mismanagement and mass war crimes committed in our
invasion of Iraq, but you, in fact, helped manufacture consent for that war as
well. You are complicit in the deaths of millions of people
who will never come back from numberization.
Throughout
the past 20 years, the mainstream media reiterated the lies told by our various
presidents. They beat those lies into our heads with impressive frequency. Lies
like those told by President Obama, when, in 2012, he
said on national television: “Over the last three years, the tide
has turned. We broke the Taliban’s momentum. We’ve built strong Afghan security
forces. … Our troops will be coming home. … As our coalition agreed, by the end
of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their
country.”
I don’t
know about you, but I’m pretty thrilled for the war to be over in 2014—whenever
2014 may come.
3,800 contractors have died in
Afghanistan for these lies.
The
Afghanistan Papers show that not only has the 20-year war been wasteful of
human life, it’s also been wasteful of money. Of course, this is the point when
you think, “The military— wasteful?! Well, paint my nipples and call me Phyllis
Diller; that’s the damnedest thing I ever did hear!”
Yes,
this is hardly shocking, since $21 trillion has gone unaccounted for at
the Pentagon over the past 20 years. That’s two-thirds of the amount of money
wrapped up in the entire stock market. Money has been flowing into Afghanistan
so fast that officials aren’t even able to waste it quick enough! (I wish that
were a joke.)
From
the Post’s report, again: “One executive at USAID guessed that 90 percent of
what they spent was overkill: ‘We lost objectivity. We were given money, told
to spend it and we did, without reason.’ … One contractor said he was expected
to dole out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly
the size of a US county.”
The
contractor said he couldn’t conceive of how to spend $3 million a day for
people literally living in mud huts. Well, I guess USAID should start handing
out furniture built out of blocks of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar notes. Maybe
fill bean bag chairs with small bills. (If you aren’t yet outraged enough,
please keep in mind that, according to The New York Times, adjusting for
today’s dollars, it would take less than eight days of the Pentagon’s stated
budget to give the entire world clean water for a year, thereby saving millions
of lives and turning the U.S. into the most beloved nation on earth.)
But
rather than accept our own corruption and war profiteering, our military placed
the blame squarely on the Afghan people. Per The Washington Post, “The U.S.
military also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries—paid by U.S.
taxpayers—for tens of thousands of ‘ghost soldiers.’ ”
Although
ghost soldiers sound like an incredible and tough-to-defeat resource, I think
they meant the Afghan commanders claimed they had a certain number of soldiers,
but most weren’t real. So America can’t fund the health care of our own
goddamn real soldiers who get home and wait in line for months
to secure any semblance of care, but we can fund ghost soldiers
half a world away?!
Donald
Trump just cut food stamps to 700,000 people,
impacting more than a million children, but we’re funding fucking ghosts? Maybe
we could start a campaign asking the ghost soldiers to donate some of their
supper to the starving kids of America.
Ghosts
seem to be an ongoing difficulty for the U.S. In the same issue of The
Washington Post containing the Afghanistan Papers, there was an unrelated article titled, “The U.S. Wasted Millions on
Charter Schools” that said, “A report found that [during the Obama
Administration] 537 ‘ghost schools’ in America never opened but received more
than $45.5 million in federal start-up funding.”
Apparently
we’re funding ghost schools and ghost soldiers, and almost nobody in our
government seems to give a shit! I guess you could say they give a ghost
shit—it’s not really there.
Yet the
problems in our forever war don’t stop at the walking dead. The Post says, “The US has spent $9 billion to fight the
problem [of opium] over the past 18 years, but Afghan farmers are cultivating
more opium poppies than ever. Last year, Afghanistan was responsible for 82
percent of global opium production.”
But
what The Washington Post doesn’t tell you is that a lot of that opium was for
use inside the U.S., to fuel our opioid epidemic.
An
American becomes a number every
11 minutes from an opioid overdose.
So how
does our government respond when revelations like the Afghanistan Papers come
out? A few senators pause in the middle of their T-bone steaks and red wine to
say, “This needs to be looked into, I daresay.” But then a few days pass and
they just give the Pentagon more money to sink into a black hole.
The
spending bill just passed by Congress sends $738 billion to the Pentagon.
And, as RootsAction stated, it contains “almost
nothing to constrain the Trump administration’s erratic and reckless foreign
policy. It is a blank check for endless wars, fuel for the further
militarization of U.S. foreign policy, and a gift to Donald Trump.”
To put
it mildly, asking the Democrats to stand up against endless war is like asking
Anne Hathaway to bench-press a Chevy Tahoe. It’s not going to happen, and she
has no interest in even trying.
42,000 Taliban and insurgents have been
numberized.
That
may sound like a successful war to some, but keep in mind that the U.S.
military likes to categorize anyone it kills “an insurgent.” The Pentagon goes
by the theory that if it kills you, then you’re an insurgent—because if you
weren’t an insurgent, then why did it kill you? A great many of the 42,000 were
truly innocent civilians.
If
there’s one thing we should learn from the Afghanistan Papers, which the
mainstream corporate media have already ceased talking about, it’s that ending
these immoral, illegal, repulsive wars cannot be left to our breathtakingly
incompetent and corrupt ruling elite, who have provably been lying to us about
them for decades. So it’s up to you and me to stop them.
Lee
Camp’s new book “Bullet Points and Punch Lines” with a foreword by Chris Hedges
is available for pre-sale at LeeCampBook.com.
This column is based on a
monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show “Redacted
Tonight.”