The most fascinating part of the revelation that 3 Presidents purposely lied about so called progress in Afghanistan is the resounding silence from the mainstream media who helped create the lynch mob that demanded military action against Afghanistan for a terror attack carried out by Saudis.
The reality of the latest Afghanistan adventure by the West makes for grim reading…
Afghanistan papers detail US dysfunction: ‘We did not know what we were doing’
A key theme of the trove of documents published this week was the lack of coherence in Washington’s approach to Afghanistan from the outset
…the entire thing has been a $700billion dollar+ mistake driven by a foreign policy that reeks of late stage empire arrogance…
The Afghan war: A failure made in the USA
Last week, the Washington Post published a six-part investigative series on the United States‘ war in Afghanistan, based on thousands of government documents the newspaper procured.
The paper has shone a light on the disjuncture between what has been occurring on the ground in Afghanistan and what successive American governments have been saying about it. It has highlighted the strategic drift that has marked the US engagement with what was once considered the “good war” but is now the war that just will not end.
Most of all, these documents reveal that the failure of Afghanistan is mostly made in the US – something those who have closely observed the conflict knew all along.
…news that Afghanistan has been an enormous policy failure comes as NZ examines its own role in this tragedy with examples of soldiers handing Afghan civilians over to known torture units, gaining intel from the use of torture, recent allegations of dead children from old weapons ranges, desecrating bodies of dead soldiers, and an SAS revenge mission that killed and wounded 21 Afghan civilians all covered up by a military who have used every manipulation and lie to hide the truth…
Secret GCSB emails show Kiwi intelligence officers discussing a New Zealand military operation that could destroy a compound housing women and children in Afghanistan.
The emails are part of the latest public disclosure of confidential records from the Operation Burnham Inquiry, which is inspecting allegations that Afghan civilians were killed in an SAS-led raid in Afghanistan in 2010.
In the emails, which the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) now say do not meet professional standards, an intelligence officer discusses the planning of the now controversial night-time raid with a colleague: “There aint gonna be much of those compounds left once they’ve finished. [sic]”
Also discussed was the intelligence gathered – “a lot” of visual intelligence showing “women and kids and goats” coming in and out of the compound, which was raided a month later.
The Defence Force has asserted the SAS were not responsible for civilian deaths, and its soldiers acted professionally in targeting the insurgents held responsible for the death of New Zealand soldier Lieutenant Tim O’Donnell in the weeks before the raid.
…they knew that there were citizens there from the outset.
When we ask citizens to use force to impose our National interest, we must ensure the honour of those we ask of that task is unblemished by an unjust deployment.
Afghanistan has always been an unjust conflict and our participation has not brought about anything close to the promise of our righteousness when the West sought to destroy whoever had stilled our Globe with the actions of September 11th.
It is time to leave the battlefield and promote aid to a nation we broke. Afghanistan is so bad, history will damn us even if we write it.
Thank you Martyn, i was beginning to wonder if even this esteemed blog was going to cover the story.
The murderous mindless rampage through another sovereign country based on virtually no evidence of wrongdoing, enthusiastically supported by little old enzed beggars belief, when even the murrican generals had no idea why they were in Afghanistan or what they were supposed to be doing there?? Having followed these revelations for a number of weeks now, i was not at all surprised by the lack of reporting by our direct from cnn nsbc joke msm. But hey it’s all great for raytheon northrop grumman
and all the parasite arms dealers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/
PS
Let’s see how long it takes this one to get through, mailed at 11.55am 30/12/19
Hmm, interesting. I had thought the lack of comment on this blog was due to the holiday season, but obviously not judging by the replies to other articles. Let us cut to the chase here, the nz military’s involvement in america’s obscene wars of aggression and materials theft should concern nzildas but obviously doesn’t. The fact that the recipients of our largesse are poor brown people thousands of miles away may have something to do with that. That the washington post no less is pointing out (with documentation) that the invasion of Afghanistan has been a trillion dollar blunder with many many thousands of lives wasted should be front page news in nz, but if it doesn’t get transmitted direct from cnn nsbc voice of america etc. it aint news? Isn’t it about time we stopped this brave lads and ladeses defending democracy bullshit, as far as i am aware nz does not have conscription, any member of the nz military in Afghanistan is there voluntarily living out there war games fantasy’s. Anyone wanting to know what it is really like when the people who’s country you have invaded are trying to kill you, should take the time to watch Paula Penfold and Eugene Binghams “the valley”
https://interactives.stuff.co.nz/the-valley/
G.A.P. Many do know, often from reading Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson’s, “Hit & Run”, and they lobbied long for an inquiry into what the NZDF did in Afghanistan, and, with the complicit National Govt booted out of power, that has now come about.
I have commented more than once how I bought ‘Hit&Run’ on the Thursday after it came out, read it, then read it straight through again, then went online on the Saturday night and saw that Bill English was up in Auckland attending an Adele (of all things) concert, and that is seared forever in my brain, as much as the shock engendered by the book, and I thought, “How can he ?” and “What a little shit.” I was deeply shocked about what I had read, and it seemed that the politicians and media were occupying a parallel universe. I know that Brit troops left Afghanistan cynical and disillusioned about what they had been doing there. One is whanau.
The Hager/Stephenson report is patently true and even if politicians are too lazy or too brainless to do their own reading, their minions would have been pouring over it, seen the truth, lied, and said,”Nothing to see here.”
In fact, many of us knew that when politicians gabbled on about the war on terror, that we were the terror.
We have heard pious glibness from politicians about humanitarian work being carried out, and all readers of outside sources have been cynical for years about what has gone on ; the SAS sharing quarters with the CIA in Kabul is ‘Jesus wept’ territory – but not to the craven politicians getting their jollies tripping off to the beautiful Hindu Kush, happy that when the USA clicked its fingers, we asked,”How low do you want us to go?”
Public interest-inertia is because that is who we are here – isolated from the mainstream world both physically – and deliberately by the owners of the MSM. Someone must have written something though, because a denizen of Lower Hutt wrote to the Dom-Post saying that Nicky Hager should be doing something about the NZ road toll, instead of concerning himself with foreigners in another country.
I think Vietnam may have been much the same – I recall going to the UK and finding much more public and media awareness about Vietnam than here in NZ, and ditto Apartheid in Sth Africa, where we tailed others in coming to the party, although we finally did.
And with Afghanistan – Armies like wars, they seek them out, that’s their core business, keeps them fit for their purpose – fighting wars. The munitions and armaments manufacturers like them even more – they all have big pockets.
Snow White: I agree with your comments. Though I recall more anti-Vietnam war and anti-apartheid activism here in my youth. That, of course, may just have been the milieu in which I worked and socialised. A while ago, I remarked to somebody that during our time in Auckland, I’d marched down the middle of Queen St more often than I ever walked its footpaths.
D’Esterre – We had more dispassionate and fairly objective political commentators and analysts back then – Austin Mitchell is the only one I recall – maybe they were all Poms and pushed off back to Pommieland – but now they are largely partisan opinionated gits, whopping us with their own prejudices- and it works – hence creeps like Key. Bennett !!
Koestler again – ” evil…groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality” – hence the creeps etc etc
G.A.P.: ” Let us cut to the chase here, the nz military’s involvement in america’s obscene wars of aggression and materials theft should concern nzildas but obviously doesn’t.”
I, too, don’t understand why there haven’t been more comments on this story. I wonder if time and tide have caught up with large numbers of my generation, who protested about this. Maybe younger people are so propagandised by the msm and successive governments that they don’t understand the extent of the damage done in that part of the world by the west in general, and the US in particular.
It greatly concerns me, my family and all of us still alive, who marched on Parliament all those years ago, to implore our government of the time not to commit troops to GW Bush’s insane adventure in Iraq.
By that time, we’d seen reportage of the already unfolding catastrophe in Afghanistan; there was also the “Not in Our Name” protest, which originated in the US, I think. Many of us were horrified at what was happening in Afghanistan, along with what was proposed for Iraq. We foresaw that none of it would end well: sadly, we were proved right.
Meantime, I’ve read Nicky Hager; in particular “Other People’s Wars”. It’s a well-researched book, which documents the fact that Osama bin Laden had crossed the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan before NZ troops arrived. Moreover, the US knew that he’d gone; I’ve seen US documents supporting this fact.
If I remember rightly, Hager adduces evidence to support the fact that it was the NZDF which leaned on the government to send troops to Afghanistan, not the other way about. And the government allowed itself to be leaned on. Altogether a shameful episode.
At the time of the US invasion of Afghanistan, I was just prepared to tolerate NZ participation, on the basis of a) Osama bin Laden having been directly involved in the 9/11 attacks and b) his still being in Afghanistan. Now we know that he’d gone, before our troops even got there; and there have for some years been doubts in many quarters about the extent to which – or even whether – he was involved in 9/11.
“The fact that the recipients of our largesse are poor brown people thousands of miles away….”
Not much in the way of largesse, sadly. And the fact that members of the NZDF are disproportionately Maori is surely the definition of irony? Brown people – uninvited and unwanted – invading the country of other brown people. Certainly ironic in light of recent political shifts here in NZ – not least the revisionism about Cook and the first settlers.
D’Esterre – “If I remember rightly, Hager adduces evidence to support the fact that it was the NZDF which leaned on the government to send troops to Afghanistan, not the other way about.”
If I remember rightly, the SAS travelled to the USA offering their services – that they shopped themselves around, courtesy of the NZ taxpayer.
There has been an online Afghanistan activist group here, which seemed to be largely run by and sustained by young NZ’ers, beavering away in the background for an inquiry, I had a couple of exchanges with them; I can’t remember the timeline, but when Bill English was accepting the fox’s version of the raid on the fowl house, this group was undeterred, as would be anyone who had read the Hager/Stephenson account, and further, there seemed to be a lot of people who knew someone from the NZDF sworn to secrecy about what happened in the Tirigan Valley – two separate tradies said this to me in the period following the publication of the book.
Bush’s intervention in Afghanistan, and later invasion of Iraq, likely also had another domestic nationalist agenda; the last US troops didn’t leave Afghanistan until 2014; in addition to hundreds of thousands of civilian lives, the former claimed over 4,000 American soldiers’ lives, the latter more than 2300 – which is how costs should be measured, and had each of those lost lives been avenged the way that Tim O’Donnell’s was, there would have been a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions.
USA streets are littered with homeless damaged vets; our guys go up north and top themselves, and as manfred staab writes, Afghanistan is an absolute mess; how easily our lot seemed to dehumanise and depersonalise peasants eking out a subsistence existence may testify to the efficacy of their military trainers, but yep, we have blood on our hands, and negotiated solutions requiring our version of democracy stamped upon an historically traumatised country, may be too big an ask.
Just because we think that we’re goodies doesn’t mean everybody sees us that way.
Maybe i should have put sarc after largesse D’Esterre. Believe me the irony occurred to me, but i thought it may be a little close to the bone.
posted for the second time in two days?
An unexpected light.
The situation created in Afghanistan is an absolute mess, and no realistic solution is in sight. Strategic and tactical interests of directly intervening neighbours and the more distant invaders, coupled with the usual exploitative money-making opportunities in a war-zone, will probably maintain a devastating status quo for many further years to come.
Besides demonstrating being a willing US-companion, utterly no reason does exist why NZ military is engaged in a Central-Asian combat area.
Having said this, there is a substantial lack of political initiatives aiming to support some sort of peaceful, workable arrangement among parties, also including the very large number of Afghans in the diaspora, a considerable political force to be involved.
NZ foreign policy could certainly play a role as ‘honest broker’, building on the positive impression perceived by the Muslim world after the Christchurch massacre.
….. somehow, compensation for the participation in the war, perhaps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2SuqvA6674
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBfvuvel_oo
He Toki Huna: NZ in Afghanistan
manfred staab: “NZ foreign policy could certainly play a role as ‘honest broker’, building on the positive impression perceived by the Muslim world after the Christchurch massacre.”
I disagree with this. In the first instance, I doubt that NZ could be any sort of honest broker in respect of any of the players in the Afghan situation; this country has blood on its hands. And we must be clear-eyed about this.
Secondly, the dynamic there is politics, not religion. Afghans are concerned about their sovereignty: its return and its preservation. They want the foreigners out of their country. We’d feel exactly the same, were the boot on the other foot. It doesn’t matter a damn what any of us in the west thinks about the political arrangements there, or of the role of Islam in those political arrangements. It’s none of our business; that’s for the Afghan people themselves to decide.
The best thing that NZ can do – in fact the only thing it ought to do – is to get the hell out of Afghanistan and to stay out. The only relationship our country ought to have with Afghanistan is that of trade. Nothing else at all.
Just a rely to an american blog that took my fancy, but probably fits equally here.
Washington never sleeps in its campaigns to improve the lives of people whose most fervent wish is that America stop improving their lives. To give the Afghans democracy, human rights, and American values, the US has for eighteen years been bombing, bombing, bombing a largely illiterate population in a nation where America has no business. It is a coward’s war with warplanes butchering peasants who have no defenses. The pilots and drone operators who do this deserve contempt, as does the country that sends them. How many more years? For what purpose? And how were the German Nazis different?
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