The US Appears More Dumber Than Dumb – OpEd

When an ISIS-K fighter managed to go pass the Taliban’s check points and get within five meters of the American soldiers ending up killing 13 of them and some 170 Afghanis, the blame fell squarely and immediately on ISIS-K. But it doesn’t take a CIA or Mosad agent to know that it is in the interest of the Taliban to use the Americans as a tool against ISIS-K. It is simply dumb to think that the Taliban didn’t intentionally allow the bomber to pass through. Do the Americans know that? It is possible they do and are keeping quiet just to appease the victors, the Taliban. But it is just as possible that they don’t.

Just as not all of the Taliban fighters believe that women should wear full Burka, not all of them were responsible for harbouring Bin Laden. It would have made more sense to go after Taliban leadership rather than the whole of the Taliban when the towers came down. Why? Simply because with a full invasion the cost would far outweigh the benefits as it has indeed played out over the past twenty years.

So when the US resorted to invading Afghanistan as revenge against the Taliban refusal to hand over Usama bin Laden, given Americas presumed long term vision, the world believed that the attack on America on 9/11 was in fact perpetrated by the US itself to be used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan for other long term strategic considerations. 

It turns out as demonstrated by the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan; the US isn’t a long term visionary or anything of the sort. It is actually often times a whimsical force that has no idea what it jumps itself into. The Invasion of Afghanistan was nothing more than a dumb idea driven by the need to flex muscles by the then George W. Bush and his circle. A country of over 300 million people can in fact be driven into disaster after disaster by a whim of a few dumb people who happen to have been elected to power at any given point.

The only war that was dumber than the US-Taliban war is that between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969. It was caused by a football match. The difference is that that war was far shorter and far less costly in terms of lives and fortune.

While China and Russia were busy modernising their armies in the past two decades, the Americans were busy fighting a ghost-like force which is now once again firmly in control of Afghanistan and which ironically the US will need as an ally in its fight against ISIS.

Usama Bin Laden who ignited this two-decade war once said that: America has a powerful economy that sits on a fragile base. Perhaps what he meant to say is that the US is weak at its core and strategically bankrupt.

The fact that the military left its citizen on a battle field only to return and evacuate them chaotically and the fact that the war was started whimsically would indicate that Bin Laden was right. Where was the FBI, CIA, Congress, US strategists, academics, high tech satellites, etc, in allowing the war to start in the first place and worse yet allowing the military to flee and leave its citizens and Afghan allies stranded!?

One now wonders whether the US can even be trusted with the nuclear arsenal it has! After all you have a senile president with that power with a press of a button. The conclusion is that where the US is concerned, it is no longer the fact that what you see is what you get.