Brad is almost certainly a 13 year old with an active imagination. For one thing, I seriously doubt that someone capable of leaking tens of thousands of top-secret documents is going to "confess" to some random internet chat guy.
They've arrested the guy, so he does exist. It's not at all uncommon for very young people to have seemingly high-value jobs in the military; he was probably fresh out of officer training or something.
Anyway, I was going to make a big bitch-post about how saying "hey, war sucks, people should stop being surprised by that, nothing to see here", does not make you tough, cool, manly, experienced, or in any other way more qualified about the issue at hand. But I'll just drop that sentence and move on.
I think the most important "revelation" here is the reams of internal discussion about what people in the know already suspected for years: The Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) is taking billions of dollars in aid from the US to help fight the Taliban, and are instead helping the Taliban. At this point, the big-picture rationale for why America still gives a shit about Afghanistan is to supposedly build a stable enough government that the Taliban can't roar back in and make a terrorist state to destabilize Pakistan. So America has to prop up Pakistan as an ally to fight the nascent Taliban. But the military intelligence apparatus that effectively runs Pakistan is on better terms with the nascent Taliban than it is with America.
Ergo, America is funding the ISI to fight the Taliban, but they're funding the Taliban, as America is fighting the Taliban.
America is funding a war against itself, by trying to pretend that a nation needs protection against the same insurgency it's effectively allied with.
America's two options on the table are 1) stay in Afghanistan or 2) leave Afghanistan. Option 1 supposedly contains the Taliban until Afghanistan can stand on it's own and Pakistan can hold off their own side of the "insurgency". All three of those goals quite demonstrably have as much to do with strategic reality as Candyland; the first is not working, the second is a joke, the third is the exact opposite of what's happening. Option 2 supposedly entails a Cambodia-style bloodbath, followed by a reconstituted Taliban storming Pakistan and taking its nukes or some shit. The ISI is banking on America eventually choosing this option, because they expect America won't station a 100,000 man garrison in Afghanistan until the end of time, which is the core logic of Option 1. And lo and behold, they're now on working terms with the nascent Taliban, as Afghanistan slides back into anarchy despite the US military's presence. (Banking on Afghan militants blew up in the ISI's face in the 70's and 90's when they tried that before, but current facts are current facts.)
So, that's where we stand. The heavy American presence in Afghanistan is not accomplishing any military objective of note no matter the numbers, is fueling the systemic corruption of the Afghan government while the Afghan military fails to materialize, is not weakening the Taliban in any meaningful sense, and is funneling money through Pakistan into the very enemy it's supposed to be fighting, strengthening that relationship in the process. Leaving Afghanistan, by the common wisdom, would cause a range of internal violence and discord that's happening already in spite of the continued presence, or would lead to a Taliban-vs-Pakistan fight that by all present accounts, is the exact opposite of the working relationship that we are giving them cause to have. If anything, us leaving would cause them to turn against each other, which might actually be the better option, instead of them starting to like each other.
With all that in mind,
why the fuck are we still doing this? Is it going to take another nine years before America can finally take its dick out its hand and admit we screwed up the hunt for bin-Laden (remember him?), and everything since was doomed to failure from the start?
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Topic: How is the war going on? Wikileak really inform you. (Read 5755 times)