...... But the fact is the civilian war architects were encouraged and enabled every step of the way by Pentagon bureaucrats (i.e., the generals), who were only more than happy to have an excuse to pad their budgets and increase their relevance on Capitol Hill. As Ron Paul put it this week:
The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.
And of course, the Pentagon allied itself with the “private” sector industries that supplied the materiel.
Paul continues:
The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.
Or, as Timothy Kudo describes it,
Across two decades, our military leaders presented rosy pictures of the Afghanistan War and its prospects to the president, Congress, and the American people, despite clear internal debate about the validity of those assessments and real-time contradictory information from those fighting and losing the daily battle against the Taliban. Or, to put it in the words of John Sopko, the inspector general who issued a series of reports known as the Afghanistan Papers: “The American people have constantly been lied to.”
Read it all: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-pentagon-generals-want-disastrous-war