Odds Are Irrelevant When the Game Is Rigged

The U.S. troop advantage in Afghanistan is 12 to 1 over the Taliban according to recent news reports. Apparently, despite all their casualties since the war began, the Taliban have managed to maintain a fighting force of about 25,000 strong. That’s 300 of American’s finest professional soldiers, armed to the teeth with the most expensive and sophisticated weaponry in the history of warfare, against 25 dedicated but ill equipped amateur thugs. Twelve to one seems like pretty good odds.

Meanwhile, NATO is busy with the task of training Afghan security forces to the tune of $20 billion dollars over 2 years, and plans to continue its mission after that for at least another 5 years, and billions more. So it seems that the Afghans will soon have a wonderful security force to protect their “democracy.”

But, wait a minute -- now we learn for sure that our Afghan friends, including the President’s family, big businessmen, and high placed officials, are… (Gasp)… corrupt!  They’re in league with the enemy! Our spies have discovered what they call “Malign Actor Networks,” intricate economic connections between the “good guys” and “bad guys,” all financed, of course, by the billions and billions of dollars in aid from the West.

The Afghan government is crumbling from rot while giving U.S. aid to the “enemy.” Now we know that neither side would benefit all that much by an end to the conflict.

The Afghan war has the unique distinction of being the longest running military campaign in the history of the United States of America – longer than the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and Korean War – longer than World War I and World War II combined and with no end in sight.

We have kicked the Taliban’s butt repeatedly from Kandahar to Kabul, but they just keep coming back in the same numbers as ever. If the U.S. left tomorrow, the “democracy” would instantly vaporize in Afghanistan. In short, things would go on as normal. As we stay longer and longer there will surely be much more of the same. Like Vietnam in the last generation, it comes down to another no win situation for the U.S.A. The only winners are the ones raking in the dough.

And the cruel irony of it all is that it was our government’s longstanding Middle East political and military meddling in the first place which got us into this mess. That’s what we get for trying to be the world’s Authority!