This weekend’s momentous events cry-out for a reformulation of Earnest Hemingway’s famous five word quip in “The Sun Also Rises”. Per his description of the route to bankruptcy: How did the dismal Afghan outpost of Washington’s Potemkin Empire collapse? “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Less than three months ago, Afghanistan’s puppet President, Ashraf Ghani, inadvertently crystalized 20-years worth of lies, delusions, misdirection and malfeasance by Imperial Washington’s policy-makers and proconsuls in response to a question from the press: Q: How long can your government last without US support? A: Forever. Yet by midday Sunday Ghani had fled the presidential palace … Continue reading →
This weekend’s momentous events cry-out for a reformulation of Earnest Hemingway’s famous five word quip in “The Sun Also Rises”. - David Stockman for Antiwar.com Original
what enables the fertility of the area fed by the river for the farmers and taliban to grow this elicit crop. kevin, is this what makes this region so particularly interesting, the helmand province so significant about this incident? these are also the home of the taliban. the border of pakistan. areas that always have been heavily controlled or at least desired by the taliban. it s where if not american losses were. we were flying with secretary gates, three secretaries ago and when the americans going through obama s afghan surge. so this is where if the taliban were to come back, they start there and make the way to kabul. interesting thing now is same time there are bombings in kabul and new waves last few weeks and not just trying to get to the citiment there s violence going on all over the place. not looking good. today the first american casualty of 2016.
resistant to outside influence. that is one of the greatest lessons here. this is a tough country and one that is sort of immune to outside pressure. chris i would ask you this question, one of the things built into the question that joe posed to his first question to you. president obama is now we re talking about out of afghanistan. we re talking out of iraq. those are two big things that people will in the history of his presidency was written, people will look back and say this is the president who ended those two big wars but in the middle there was that period where president obama did increase the war in afghanistan to a large degree. so we do we look when president obama s administration is over we we look back on him primarily as a peacemaker? or is the record much more mixed because of that period where he had the big afghan surge? well, i think joe biden was actually right in that case saying fighting for antiterrorism and counterinsurgency.
idealistic, pragmatic, tough minded, funny, very valuable colleague and superb representative of the united states all over the world. so that s a pretty categorical statement of approval. sure. in that regard. but then when you look at where he was kind of draw drop, i can t believe the president of the united states and hillary clinton both admitted that they opposed the surge which ultimately turned out to be effective for political reasons. well, i don t think the public is going to be shocked that sometimes people take political positions. i don t know if it happened or didn t happen and i don t know the context but i will say this. that those two cabinet members have the closest alliance of any members in the cabinet and they appeared together before congress to sell the second surge, afghan surge. when he left i know she was extremely concerned about losing the ultimate ally in all of her discussions with the white