It is Official...America Has Lost the War in Afghanistan

They lost it before they even joined it... Stupidity flows out of ideology...

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression

America is just pulling out from another in a long long line of illegal invasions of sovereign nations.

You are out of date.

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You are out of date.

That's a new one, Hawk. Being opposed to war crimes/terrorism is out of date. Is that the same as out of fashion?

National sovereignty no longer exists

using what ever definition of the term that is convenient to the argument.

Really? It's a favorite argument advanced by the US.

It is of course no different than what would come out of the mouths of the most heinous of common gangsters.

You always run into that landmine, your inability to fairly compare Americans with the other peoples of this planet. We are pretty much average when it comes to our crimes against others, we are not thugs.

The CIA and the Gulf War
by John Stockwell
A speech delivered on 1991-02-20 at the
Louden Nelson Community Center, Santa Cruz, California

But first, how many people have read ..... The last time I was here, I asked you to ..... How many people actually read Howard Zinn's bookA People's History of the United States? ..... That's better! Everybody else: Tomorrow, call in sick. Don't go to class. Read this book! Quite simply, you will never understand the U.S. System as completely until you read it. And once you read it, you will be able to understand what's happening, broadly, for the rest of your life. It's extremely well-written, extremely well- documented, tremendously moving, with quotes on every page: every phase of our history, as viewed, not from the interests of the country and big business — as our high school textbooks are and as our college textbooks are — but from the viewpoint of the people who died in the wars, who fought in the wars, who paid for the wars, and who profited from the wars, of course.

This war we're going to talk about tonight is called the "Persian Gulf War" — the "SuperBowl War" — the "Made-for-Television War" — the "Pentagon-Edited War" — the "Women-Have-a-Right-to-Kill,-Die- and-Be-Captured-Too War" — "the Censored War" — the "Saddam Hussein-is-So-Evil-We-Have-to-Do-It War" — and the "I've-Got-to-Support-Our-Troops-Right-or-Wrong War".

Now this thing was thoroughly prepared for six months, overtly, by the United States Government, the Pentagon, and the Media — CNN [Cable News Network] getting into it many weeks ago with heavy coverage. We covered it so thoroughly that on January 14th ..... and I've been writing screenplays and things, trying to make a living, with CNN on ..... On the 14th, waiting for the kick-off, they had an Emory University professor on who gave us advice on how to play Wall Street to profit from the war before it happened. His advice is very simple — in case you're sitting on a bundle of money and you don't want to give it to the Christic Institute or to me — He said: "Jump now." That was on the 14th. He said: "Don't wait a few days because then, other people will be jumping. Go in right now!" And then, he said: "The U.S. dollar will go up temporarily, so buy Japanese yen. Wait `til it goes up, then buy Japanese yen because by the end of the year the dollar will be back down and the yen will have doubled in value again and you can make a bundle on that.

Every obscene coverage that we could possibly do!

And then the whole world waited, on the 15th and 16th, for the kickoff of this great modern war. Now, some people waited, or had been waiting, longer than others. I found myself in the position (albeit a country boy from Texas who grew up in Africa; but you know) reading books and having seen a little bit of this stuff from the National Security Council level, I had been able to predict, nine months ahead of time, that the U.S. would invade Panama. And this was not a shot in the dark. This was an analysis of the United States and George Bush — for whom I worked, at the end of the "Angola Secret War", where I was the task force commander for a subcommittee of the National Security Council, and he was the CIA Director responsible for fending off the Congress.

Let me hasten to say that this is a very nice man to be around. He's considerate. He's personable. He has high positive energy. If your child gets sick, even if you're way down on his staff, you'll get a postcard in the mail very promptly, saying:

"Very sorry about Johnny ..."

shaking hands with people and remembering their names; a considerate, decent person at the human level. And then, of course, he has rationales for what he does, and we're going to be talking about these things. But I gave speeches at American University in November, and then at the House of Commons in England in early December. Again, C-SPAN managed to get a film of this, a video, and they played it on national television eight times when the invasion occurred, because in those speeches, I had predicted the invasion and analyzed why. Then, about a year ago, I predicted this war. And again, this was not a shot in the dark. This was a cold, sober, careful analysis of the United States: where it was, and why it would need a war; and of George Bush: and why he would take the nation into war.
Now that's what I want to go through tonight, if I possibly can, is to give you all the essential elements and understanding of how I was able to make those predictions, so that you will be able to predict the next war. Because there certainly will be another one after this one, unless we can intervene and break the cycles, and make a profound change in the United States System. My point is that we know how these things work. It isn't magic. It isn't classified. It isn't secret. Since the Vietnam War, the Establishment — the Military Establishment, as I call it — Eisenhower called it the Military-Industrial Complex — the Military Establishment, which is the very powerful central engine in our society, in our permanent War Complex, has been working to erase the stigma of the Vietnam War and has been telling us that it was doing that.

President Reagan came into office saying that he would teach the nation how to fight war again, to make us stand tall — and then, of course, pouring huge resources into the Military, and glamorizing the Military, bombing Libya, invading Grenada, and [waging] low-intensity warfare against Nicaragua, but rehearsing for the invasion of Nicaragua. Interestingly enough, they were prohibited by the Military, by the Pentagon, by the Defense Department, from invading Nicaragua, actually, because the [American] People were solidly against it. And so, the Secretary of Defense, in public speeches, said: "No, not with my Defense Department, unless you can persuade the People to support it." They couldn't make their sale, and we were spared the horror of our doing this thing on Nicaragua.


http://www.serendipity.li/cia/stock2.html

WASHINGTON — American officials sought to reassure both Afghanistan’s government and a domestic audience on Sunday that the United States remained committed to the war after the weekend killing of two American military officers inside the Afghan Interior Ministry and days of deadly anti-American protests.

But behind the public pronouncements, American officials described a growing concern, even at the highest levels of the Obama administration and Pentagon, about the challenges of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan that hinges on the close mentoring and training of army and police forces.

Despite an American-led training effort that has spanned years and cost tens of billions of dollars, the Afghan security forces are still widely seen as riddled with dangerously unreliable soldiers and police officers. The distrust has only deepened as a pattern of attacks by Afghan security forces on American and NATO service members, beginning years ago, has drastically worsened over the past few days. A grenade attack on Sunday, apparently by a protester, wounded at least six American soldiers.

Nearly a week of violent unrest after American personnel threw Korans into a pit of burning trash has brought into sharp relief the growing American and Afghan frustration — and, at times, open hostility — and the risks of a strategy that calls for American soldiers and civilians to work closely with Afghans.

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Really? It's a favorite argument advanced by the US.

This is the same america that I argue has lost Afghanistan and done another Vietnam in Iraq because we chose to indulge in our fantasies rather than deal with reality. Claims made by the American government are routinely not worthy of being taken seriously by those of us who choose to live in a reality based environment.

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It is of course no different than what would come out of the mouths of the most heinous of common gangsters.

You always run into that landmine, your inability to fairly compare Americans with the other peoples of this planet. We are pretty much average when it comes to our crimes against others, we are not thugs. It would be useful to know what happened to you that so twisted your perception, but you are not honest enough to tell us. Your morals are only actionable when it suits you.

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America is just pulling out from another in a long long line of illegal invasions of sovereign nations.

Please, very few global leaders give a **** about national sovereignty at the end of the day. China gets all kinds of hell for routinely standing up for national sovereignty at the UN, the latest example being a vote on squashing Syria.

You are out of date.