Why is America and the rest of the world so awestruck by the Afghan debacle? Bribem has been in politics for over 50 years. His 'notoriety', claim to fame, if you will stems from his stupidity and the countless gaffes he has made over the years. Remember when Barry had bin Laden in the crosshairs? Bribem admitted he told Barry not to take him out. That would've been another disaster had he been president!To top that off he's also a crook.
Yet he sits in the oval office.
If this isn't an impeachable offense I don't know what it is!
Biden’s 'Insane' Story About Afghans Who Helped U.S. Doesn’t Fly
One day after the Taliban seized control of the Afghan government, the Biden administration found itself struggling to explain why local allies like interpreters, drivers, security guards and fixers had been left behind.
The Biden administration’s justification—that many of the Afghans who had risked their lives to aid the U.S. military actually wanted to stay—left aid workers, refugee advocates and members of Congress gobsmacked.
The truth, those advocates have told The Daily Beast, is simple and stark: that they simply can’t pay for it.
“We don’t know of any SIV recipients that wanted to stay in Afghanistan,” said James Miervaldis, chairman of No One Left Behind, a group that works to aid Afghan and Iraqi interpreters as they resettle in the United States. “The reason they haven’t quote-unquote ‘exercised the right’ is because they don’t have the money.”
That fact was wholly absent from President Joe Biden’s speech on Monday, when he attributed the lack of evacuation to some kind of hopeful, last-ditch Afghan nationalism.
“I know that there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner,” Biden said in a speech on Monday that largely laid the blame for the fall of Afghanistan at the feet of the country’s own security forces. “Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it was because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, ‘a crisis of confidence.’”
Advocates, members of Congress, and nonprofit organizations that work on behalf of translators and interpreters in conflict zones were baffled by the president’s contention, telling The Daily Beast that they had never encountered any successful SIV applicants who turned down a chance to leave the country—thereby escaping potentially deadly retribution from the Taliban—voluntarily.
“The administration’s claim that many Afghans did not want to leave the country earlier is inconsistent with our experience,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, who said that the Afghans her organization was working with were “desperate” to leave Afghanistan and were being blocked by a visa backlog that now tops nearly 70,000 applicants.
“Since the moment that we announced we were fully withdrawing, I have not heard of a single human being that was like, ‘Oh no, I want to stay and hedge my bets with the Taliban,’” said one congressional aide whose boss has been lobbying the administration to bring SIV applicants to safety. “That’s insane.”
There are an estimated 18,000 Afghans seeking a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), which is provided to Afghan nationals who worked on behalf of the U.S. government in Afghanistan or served as interpreters for American military personnel. Of those who have been granted the visa, only half were able to exercise their right to come to the United States before the Afghan government collapsed—mostly, advocates say, because most of them just can’t afford to leave.
Under normal circumstances, once successful applicants for an SIV receive their visas from the U.S. embassy for themselves and their family, they either purchase airline tickets for a commercial flight out of Afghanistan. But those flights can cost upwards of $2,000 per ticket, in a country where the median household income is barely $4,100 per year. Even for a lone SIV applicant, the price of safety is often out of reach. For a family of five, it’s nearly impossible to leave without obtaining a loan—meaning that even upon reaching safety in the United States, they are burdened with enormous debt.
Even American citizens are being stuck with an extraordinary bill upon being airlifted out of Afghanistan. On Aug. 14, as Kabul fell to the Taliban, the State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council released a security alertinforming Americans abroad that “repatriation flights are not free, and passengers will be required to sign a promissory loan agreement and may not be eligible to renew their U.S. passports until the loan is repaid.”
For successful SIV applicants who cannot afford commercial flights—all of which have now been grounded anyway—they must apply for a seat on flights organized by the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations affiliate that provides migration services for refugees and displaced peoples. That process, Miervaldis said, can take up to five months—and that was before Afghanistan’s government collapsed.
“I guess it’s not enough for this administration to blame Afghans for losing the country because they just didn’t want it badly enough,” another congressional aide said caustically. “Now we have to blame people we fucking left there for us leaving them, too.”
The inability to pay for a flight out of Afghanistan, advocates said angrily, is not the same as choosing to stay—and is certainly different from doing so out of misplaced confidence that the Afghan central government would be able to beat back the Taliban.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) says the Biden administration is “trying to blame everybody but themselves when the only people that they have to blame is themselves.”
Over the course of several days, the White House repeatedly declined to provide the number of successful SIV applicants who it claims turned down the opportunity to leave Afghanistan because they believed that the now-collapsed government would protect them, although White House press secretary Jen Psaki doubled down on the president’s assertion that many SIV applicants chose to remain in the country rather than leave for safety.
“Of the initial numbers of SIV applicants that were granted visas, there was a good chunk of that number who did not take advantage of those visas and depart,” Psaki told reporters on Tuesday, adding that while that didn’t change the government’s obligation to protect those Afghans from a vengeful Taliban, it was “an important component of the story of the last six months.”
(Yes and it was the Republicans that want to defund the police not the Democrats)
In the days since Biden first pushed the “still hopeful” message, the administration has tentatively retreated from that argument, instead emphasizing that a large-scale evacuation of the estimated 18,000 SIV applicants and their 53,000 family members could have further destabilized a tottering Afghan government, leading to an even swifter collapse.
“There was a concern that if we moved too quickly that it would undermine the confidence of the Afghan government and it would lead to a collapse even faster,” Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said during a State Department press briefing on Wednesday. “I appreciate that in hindsight people are saying: ‘Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that? Why didn’t you do this?’… The focus now today is getting all those SIVs out. We are working day and night to make that happen.”
The administration’s primary concern, Sherman said, is in getting SIV applicants and American citizens out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible. In a briefing with reporters on Thursday, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby noted that since August 14, the United States has evacuated 7,000 noncombatants, with roughly 2,000 of those having been airlifted out over the previous 24 hours.
But refugee advocates note that many of America’s NATO allies had begun evacuating their own interpreters and vulnerable Afghans months before the United States’ withdrawal kickstarted the government’s collapse, with no apparent “crisis of confidence” that hastened the country’s fall into Taliban hands.
“Germany was the first—one month, maybe two months before everything went bad, saying ‘Hey we’re gonna evacuate 300 interpreters and staff.’ Italy had more people, and they flew their people out. Then Britain came along and said ‘Hey we’re gonna move as many interpreters out as possible,“ said Miervaldis. “NATO allies started this process earlier and the question is, why hasn’t the United States jumped on that effort, or followed their lead?”
“Our administration didn’t listen to their own DOD, their own IC and both Republicans and Democrats in Congress who have been warning for months about growing threats to our Afghan partners,” said McCaul. “I am grateful to our NATO allies who are doing all they can to get these people to safety and hope they continue to do so. But we cannot place the full weight of this burden on our NATO allies.”
International organizations that advocate on behalf of interpreters in conflict zones have called on the United States to bear most of the burden in rescuing Afghan allies from the crisis that the United States itself created. Growing political opposition to increasing refugee admissions, however, has forced those groups to reach out to Western allies to bridge the gap between Afghan need for safe haven and American willingness to provide it.
“The legislation for the SIV program has always been bipartisan; however, its implementation is too dependent on the political winds, even aside from its inherent dysfunctionalities,” said
Maya Hess, founder and CEO of Red T., a nonprofit that works to protect translators and interpreters in conflict zones. “We hope that the U.S. (and other NATO member states) will step up and honor their commitments.”
Story from The Daily Beast probably one of the bluest most progressive websites you'll ever find
Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane gives his take on the collapse of Afghanistan and bringing Americans home on 'The Story'
As the U.S. military and State Department rush to evacuate American citizens and Afghan allies from Kabul’s airport, Taliban checkpoints are cutting off many from freedom and safety – and reports on the ground indicate the militants are summarily executing people who helped U.S. forces over the years.
Ryan Rogers, a retired Marine sergeant, told Fox News Thursday that the interpreter he worked with during the bloody 2010 battle of Marjah in Helmand province is currently trapped in Kabul, prevented from reaching the airport as Taliban fighters seek out and murder former Afghan commandoes and interpreters.
"He told me yesterday they hung three [Afghan National Army] commanders that they had found," he said. "And that close to the place that he’s hiding, they’re going house-to-house and that they sent a transmission out saying they had plans for the people that operated with America."
The interpreter, who is not being identified due to concerns about his safety, was OK as of Thursday afternoon.
Afghans take selfie wit Taliban fighters during patrol in the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021. The Taliban celebrated Afghanistan's Independence Day on Thursday by declaring they beat the United States, but challenges to their rule ranging from running a country severely short on cash and bureaucrats to potentially facing an armed opposition began to emerge. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
"I said, hey, did you see any of this stuff with your eyes? He said yes," Rogers said. "They're not showing this stuff because the people are cheering, but they're scared to death, and they're hanging these people. And he said they're going house to house and their priorities are Afghan National Army Special Forces, the police special forces and the interpreters."
The Biden administration on Thursday finally acknowledged reports that evacuees were having trouble reaching the international airport and Kabul, which is surrounded by Taliban checkpoints.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said during a Thursday news briefing that the government had received a "small handful of reports" of American citizens who were unable to reach the airport. But he also said that though U.S. officials were aware of reports that interpreters and former Afghan military officers were being hunted and killed by the Taliban forces, he could not confirm their veracity.
"I'm just not in a position to confirm those details," he said. "Every time we see a detail like this, we take it extraordinarily seriously, and we do what we can."
In this photo provided by the U.S. Marine Corps, a boy is processed through an Evacuee Control Checkpoint during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. (Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla/U.S. Marine Corps via AP)
Over the past two weeks, as Taliban forces swept across the country, there were reports of the militants executing surrendering Afghan soldiers. And Fox News has received video showing gunmen in pickup trucks, firing bullets in the streets of Kabul.
"In a bipartisan fashion, there's extreme disappointment, especially by those that have served," Rep. Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican and Army Reserve officer, told Fox News. "And we have lost on this our moral standing in the world, and it’s a sign of weakness rather than strength."Wenstrup pointed to bipartisan legislation passed months ago designed to lessen the red tape U.S. allies would need to get through to safely leave the country as the American military withdrew. But the rushed withdrawal left thousands of people stranded anyway.
"I find it hard to believe that our military and intelligence community would have recommended it this way," he said, faulting the Biden administration’s leadership. "But those are some of the questions that we need to have answered."
Wenstrup, who served in the Army in Iraq, said he helped more than one interpreter relocate from there. One of them, now an American citizen and physician at Ohio State, called the Afghanistan situation "disheartening," the congressman said.
But despite the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, Wenstrup had a message for veterans of the War on Terror.
"We have not had another attack in 20 years," he said. "We must praise all those that have sacrificed so much in the last 20 years because they did keep us safe, and they should be applauded for that."
And so did their coalition partners.
"I hope and pray that that interpreter, we find a way to get them out," Wenstrup said. "My experience is if we get them here, they do everything right to become good U.S. citizens."
The Pentagon sent thousands of additional troops to the airport this week to help with the evacuations, but defense officials stopped short of saying they would leave the base to rescue Americans or Afghan allies – even as UK paratroopers have been doing so to secure their own people.
Fox News also learned from a credible source Thursday that the State Department is looking into non-military ways to stage and move Americans and others who are in Kabul, as an alternative to sending troops into the city.
But Rogers worries that his interpreter friend could have just hours left if things go south.
Taliban fighters pose for a photograph in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021. The Taliban celebrated Afghanistan's Independence Day on Thursday by declaring they beat the United States, but challenges to their rule ranging from running a country severely short on cash and bureaucrats to potentially facing an armed opposition began to emerge. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
Rogers, who is originally from Ohio and now lives in North Carolina, was medically retired from the Marine Corps due to injuries sustained in Marjah. In April, he published a book on his experiences there – which featured the same interpreter trapped in Kabul today.
The interpreter told Rogers he tried to make it to the airport’s fortified east gate Wednesday – along with thousands of other people seeking to escape Taliban control. But he encountered Taliban checkpoints, heard gunshots and turned back.
"It was desperate," Rogers said. "He said, ‘I have my pistol, and they're never going to take me. There's no way it can end like this. It can only end one way -- glory be to God.’ I mean, he was scared."In response to President Biden’s claim in an ABC News interview that there was no way to leave Afghanistan without "chaos ensuing," Rogers said the government could have come up with a plan to secure Americans and allies before the Taliban took Kabul.
"If somebody is going to help us for 20 years, and we're going to make a bunch of promises to them, we need to fulfill those promises," Rogers said. "And yesterday, it sounded like they weren't going to go outside the airport. And that's where a lot of those promises are hiding right now."
Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.
Michael Ruiz is a U.S. and World Reporter for Fox News.
So much for the Taliban promised 'peaceful transition'
Billions of dollars of U.S. weapons are now in the hands of the Taliban following the quick collapse of Afghan security forces that were trained to use the military equipment.
Among the items seized by the Taliban are Black Hawk helicopters and A-29 Super Tucano attack aircraft.
Photos have also circulated of Taliban fighters clutching U.S.-made M4 carbines and M16 rifles instead of their iconic AK-47s. And the militants have been spotted with U.S. Humvees and mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles.
While it's virtually impossible to operate advanced aircraft without training, seizing the hardware gives the militants a propaganda boost and underscores the amount of wasted funds on U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan over the last 20 years.
"When an armed group gets their hands on American-made weaponry, it's sort of a status symbol. It's a psychological win," said Elias Yousif, deputy director of the Center for International Policy's Security Assistance Monitor.
"Clearly, this is an indictment of the U.S. security cooperation enterprise broadly," he added. "It really should raise a lot of concerns about what is the wider enterprise that is going on every single day, whether that's in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia."
The United States spent an estimated $83 billion training and equipping Afghan security forces over the last two decades.
Between 2003 and 2016, the United States transferred 75,898 vehicles, 599,690 weapons, 162,643 pieces of communications equipment, 208 aircraft, and 16,191 pieces of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment to Afghan forces, according to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report.
From 2017 to 2019, the United States also gave Afghan forces 7,035 machine guns, 4,702 Humvees, 20,040 hand grenades, 2,520 bombs and 1,394 grenade launchers, among other equipment, according to a report last year from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
As of June 30, Afghan forces had 211 U.S.-supplied aircraft in their inventory, a separate SIGAR report said.
At least 46 of those aircraft are now in Uzbekistan after more than 500 Afghan troops used them to flee as the government in Kabul collapsed over the weekend.
Video: Violence escalates as Afghan Taliban carries out revenge killings (CNBC)
Violence escalates as Afghan Taliban carries out revenge killings
It is unclear exactly how many weapons have fallen into the hands of the Taliban, but the Biden administration has acknowledged it's a "fair amount."
"We don't have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban," White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday. "And obviously, we don't have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport."
Still, Sullivan defended President Biden's decisionmaking in leaving the Afghan forces with high-end equipment.
Even as the U.S. military was withdrawing from Afghanistan, the United States kept aircraft flowing to the Afghans, in July touting plans to send 35 Black Hawk helicopters and three A-29s.
"Those Black Hawks were not given to the Taliban. They were given to the Afghan National Security Forces to be able to defend themselves at the specific request of [Afghan] President [Ashraf] Ghani, who came to the Oval Office and asked for additional air capability, among other things," Sullivan said.
"So the president had a choice. He could not give it to them with the risk that it would fall into the Taliban's hands eventually, or he could give it to them with the hope that they could deploy it in service of defending their country," Sullivan continued. "Both of those options had risks. He had to choose. And he made a choice."
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby on Wednesday also held there was a "very deliberate" process as U.S. forces withdrew in deciding what equipment to destroy, give to Afghan forces or redeploy elsewhere in the Middle East.
While the Taliban may be "keen" to use some of the more advanced U.S. weaponry, including the aircraft, the militants likely would not be able to keep them in the air for long even if they could coax former Afghan pilots into flying for them, said Yousif of the Center for International Policy.
"They may be able to manage a flight or two or to operate them in some really limited capacity in the short term, but without long-term sustainment, maintenance, servicing, that sort of thing, it wouldn't turn into a robust or useful military capability," he said. "It took the Afghans and the United States a long time to develop an indigenous air capability, and even then, they were reliant on the United States to keep those planes in the sky."
A more immediate concern, Yousif said, is that so many small arms were left behind.
"They are easy to maintain, easy to learn how to use, easy to transport," he said. "The concern for all small arms is that they are durable goods and they can be transferred, sold. We've seen this before where a conflict ends and the arms that stay there make their way to all parts of the world."
On Wednesday, more than two dozen Republican senators demanded a "full accounting" of U.S. military equipment given to Afghan forces over the past 12 months, what's been seized by the Taliban and what plans there are to either recapture or destroy the equipment.
"As we watched the images coming out of Afghanistan as the Taliban retook the country, we were horrified to see U.S. equipment - including UH-60 Black Hawks - in the hands of the Taliban," the 25 senators, led by Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
"It is unconscionable that high-tech military equipment paid for by U.S. taxpayers has fallen into the hands of the Taliban and their terrorist allies," they added. "Securing U.S. assets should have been among the top priorities for the U.S. Department of Defense prior to announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan."
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Wednesday declined to comment on the possibility of destroying equipment, saying the military's focus right now is on evacuation operations. Still, Milley told reporters that "we obviously have capabilities."
"We don't obviously want to see our equipment in the hands of those who would act against our interest or the interest of the Afghan people and increase violence and insecurity inside Afghanistan," Kirby said in his own briefing. "There are numerous policy choices that can be made, up to and including destruction, and what I would tell you at this point is those decisions about disposition of that level of equipment in Afghanistan haven't been made yet."
In essence the American taxpayer picked up the tab to provide weapons to the Taliban... talk about adding insult to injury!
Why didn't we take advantage of a bad situation?
These are all the high-ranking Taliban leaders in the Afghan president's office.
We should have dropped a MOAB on the son of a bitches. Then they'll kill the Afghan people you say? They're toast anyway!
This is just a prelude of things to come.
Taliban gunmen opened fire on crowds late Tuesday, with images showing a bloodied child being carried by a man while a woman lay wounded in the road
Only CNN could call this a peaceful transition!
One more thing. Every time I turned around they tried to impeach Trump. Remember when they try to impeach him over a phone call? After this catastrophic debacle why hasn't anybody brought articles of impeachment against Bribem? Everybody and their brother knew for decades Bribem is an idiotic moron but yet he sits in the oval office!
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.
The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.
A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.
The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are not unlike what happened in Iraq. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.
“Money can’t buy will. You cannot purchase leadership,” John Kirby, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said Monday.
Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who help direct Afghan war strategy during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that what the Afghans received in tangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles.
“The principle of war stands — moral factors dominate material factors,” he said. “Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. As outsiders in Afghanistan, we can provide materiel, but only Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors.”
By contrast, Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.
“If we wouldn’t have used hope as a course of action, ... we would have realized the rapid drawdown of U.S. forces sent a signal to the Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,” said Chris Miller, who saw combat in Afghanistan in 2001 and was acting secretary of defense at the end of President Donald Trump’s term.
Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden’s announcement set the final collapse in motion.
“The problem of the U.S. withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the jig is up — a sudden, nationwide signal that everyone read the same way,” Biddle said. Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war, he said. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”
The failures, however, go back much further and run much deeper. The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism.
Year after year, U.S. military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall. In 2015 a professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute wrote about the military’s failure to learn lessons from past wars; he subtitled his book, “Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold.”
“Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan,” Chris Mason wrote. He added, presciently: “Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.”
Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a “house of cards” whose collapse was driven as much by failures of U.S. civilian leaders as their military partners, according to Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Afghanistan war analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the misspent dollars coming.
Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.
The $83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year’s budget for the entire U.S. Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year for food stamp assistance for about 40 million Americans.
In his book, “The Afghanistan Papers,” journalist Craig Whitlock wrote that U.S. trainers tried to force Western ways on Afghan recruits and gave scant thought to whether U.S. taxpayers dollars were investing in a truly viable army.
“Given that the U.S. war strategy depended on the Afghan army’s performance, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to the question of whether Afghans were willing to die for their government,” he wrote.
Billions spent on Afghan army ultimately benefited Taliban
