What's happening in Afghanistan is surely tragedy, it's also farce. The Upheaval nails it, and here's a snapshot:
But most of all, farce because our political leadership was somehow reportedly “stunned” by the speed with which the allegedly 350,000-strong Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), despite twenty years of training and almost $90 billion in U.S. security assistance, threw down their weapons and totally collapsed, letting the Taliban seize control of the country in less than a week, instead of the year and a half the military and intelligence establishment had assured them it would take.
But how, exactly, did this come as a shock? Why in the world did they seriously believe those estimates?
Did they somehow fail to read their own thousands of pages of government “lessons learned” reports, as obtained and published by the Washington Post in 2019 as “The Afghanistan Papers,” that described in minute detail how the vaunted ANSF was nothing more than a Potemkin paper army, inflated only by lies, corruption, and pederasty?
You must and should read the whole thing here. Again, words fail, other than "we became a self-licking ice cream cone." Exactly.
Your Pal,
LSP
