If Liz Cheney's Assigning Blame For An "Epic Failure" In Afghanistan, She Can Start With Her Father
Dick Cheney created the mess Joe Biden is cleaning up.
By John Nichols

"This has been an epic failure across the board, one we're going to pay for for years to come," declared Representative Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, as she denounced Joe Biden's decision to complete the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

Cheney spewed most of her vitriol at Biden. But she did not stop there. Rejecting "the notion of we're going to end endless war," Cheney complained Sunday on ABC's This Week that "the Rand Paul, Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden view of the world here is fundamentally dangerous and irresponsible and wrong."

But the Republican representative neglected to identify the most dangerous, irresponsible, and wrong player of all. She had no criticism for her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The US military presence in Afghanistan did not begin with Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, or Barack Obama. It began with the flailing co-presidency of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney. It was the Bush-Cheney administration (for which Liz Cheney served as the nepotistic deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs) that responded to the September 11, 2001, attacks with a boundless "war on terror" that first targeted Afghanistan but quickly evolved to include the primary project of the Cheneys: the invasion and occupation of oil-rich Iraq.

Through it all, Dick Cheney made outlandish claims about the Afghan project. While he did not pull on a flight suit and appear before a "Mission Accomplished" banner-as did a hapless Bush on May 1, 2003-Cheney regularly made inflated pronouncements about the "success" of the Afghan mission. As early as November 2001, the vice president was taking a victory lap on the CBS News program 60 Minutes. That's when he announced that "we've provided the kind of air support and logistic support and intelligence and so forth that was needed for [Afghan forces aligned with the United States] to be successful in their campaign against the Taliban."

Recalling the long history of conflicts in the region where empires have repeatedly failed to impose their will upon Afghanistan, Dick Cheney declared, "When all is said and done and the dust settles, this one will probably have occurred with less loss of life than in any prior conflict."

Two years later, in September 2003, Cheney appeared on NBC's Meet the Press to chirp about "what we've accomplished in terms of taking Afghanistan-we had a total of 30 killed in action in Afghanistan-taking down the Taliban and destroying the capacity of al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base to attack the United States." Yes, he acknowledged, there had been casualties in Afghanistan-and in Iraq. Yet, Cheney told Tim Russert, "the price that we've had to pay is not out of line, and certainly wouldn't lead me to suggest or think that the strategy is flawed or needs to be changed."

Four years later, the supposedly taken-down Taliban learned that Cheney was visiting Bagram air base in Afghanistan and targeted it with a suicide-bomb attack. Cheney survived, but, as Craig Whitlock recounts in The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, "The blast killed 20 Afghan laborers who came to the base that day looking for work. It also claimed the lives of two Americans and a South Korean assigned to the international military coalition: Army Pfc. Daniel Zizumbo, a 27-year-old from Chicago; Geraldine Marquez, an American contractor for Lockheed Martin who had just celebrated her 31st birthday; and Staff Sgt. Yoon Jang-ho, the first South Korean soldier to die in a foreign conflict since the Vietnam War."

When the Taliban announced that it had targeted Cheney, US officials said that it was and "absurd" claim. But, notes Whitlock, "the U.S. military officials were the ones hiding the truth."

Cheney wasn't the only manufacturer of fabrications regarding the "success" of the longest war in US history. But the steady expansion of the mission in Afghanistan as an exercise in nation building began with Cheney and Bush. "Had the United States caught and killed Osama bin Laden in December 2001, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan would have faded away almost immediately afterward. I cannot prove that. It's only an opinion from my vantage point as one of President George W. Bush's speechwriters in 2001 and 2002," wrote David Frum in a recent essay for The Atlantic. "Yet I strongly believe it. The U.S. stayed for 20 years in Afghanistan because first Bush and then his successors got trapped in a pattern of responding to past failures by redoubling future efforts. In the fall of 2001, the U.S. mission in Afghanistan was clear, limited, and achievable: find and kill bin Laden. After bin Laden escaped, that mission escalated into something hazy and impossibly difficult: to rebuild Afghanistan's society and remodel the Afghan state."

In his speech on Monday, Biden said, "Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be nation building." But that is what it became.

Cheney set the tone when it came to Afghanistan, and his choice to "rebuild it, put it back together again, whatever phrase you want" cost the lives of almost 2,500 American service members, almost 4,000 US contractors, and tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers and civilians. It also cost US taxpayers $2 trillion. When the military-industrial complex makes this kind of commitment, it's hard to end a nation-building exercise-even when its failing.

Biden knows this. "There is never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces," he acknowledged. What distinguished Biden from Cheney and Bush was his willingness to make the hard choice they had refused to make two decades earlier.

So, now, Liz Cheney, every bit the hawk her father was, and every bit the partisan hack her father was, is claiming, "We were able to prevent the Taliban from establishing safe havens with 2,500 to 3,500 troops on the ground."

That's a classic Cheney distortion of reality. If the Taliban hadn't established safe havens within Afghanistan, how were they so well prepared, so organized, and so efficient when the time came to seize power?

This is the sort of unfortunate truth about Afghanistan that the Cheneys have always refused to acknowledge.

(c) 2021 John Nichols writes about politics for The Capitol Times. His book on protests and politics, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, is published by Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.

Defining Evil In A Chaotic World
By James Donahue

Evil no longer seems to be what society says it is. The society in America, for example, strongly identifies such things as drugs, free sex, public cursing, robbery, murder, treason and now terrorism as evil things. Yet people in this country freely participate in everything on this list which is a contradiction in what we say we believe.

Because of the way we live, and the things we do to one another and to people of other nations in either the name of God, the interest of national security, or just because we can get away with them, many foreign nations view us as an evil society.

The Moslem world, which ironically has produced a radical sect of people willing to blow themselves up and kill as many people around them as possible for Allah, regards the United States as "the great Satan."

For those who might raise an eyebrow or two at this challenging proclamation, we make our case:

Most Americans consume alcohol, acquire prescriptions for pain medicine, sleeping pills and other "formula drugs" from our doctors, and many of us smoke marijuana. The sale of "over-the-counter" pills to treat everything from colds to headaches is a big business. A portion of our society also uses cocaine, hashish, LSD, amphetamine and other narcotics for recreational purposes. Everyone who does any of these things uses drugs, even though our society says this is evil to do so.

Many people engage in relatively free forms of sex. More and more couples just live together rather than get married. The rise in free sex among people of all age groups is reflected in the dramatic increase in sexually transmitted disease, including the dreaded AIDS virus. An apparent rise in homosexuality and pedophilia also is an indication that Americans are willing to do forbidden sexual acts, even though our society and even some state and local laws proclaim this behavior as sinful, illegal, and therefore evil.

Public cursing and use of four-letter bedroom and bathroom words has reached an all-time epidemic. Some women use these words as frequently as men. And the cursing is no longer refined to the factories, bars and men's locker rooms. You hear children using these words openly on the street. The words are freely used in television programming and especially in Hollywood movies. Yet our society identifies this kind of language as wrong.

Everybody steals. It seems to be ingrained in our cultural fabric to walk away with another person's property, especially if we find the item lying exposed and unguarded. Consequently we have locks on the doors to our homes, our cars and our suitcases. We lock up our bikes, our garages and especially our money. We cling to our possessions when out in crowds. The more we have, the more we worry about losing. We buy insurance to protect our investments from theft. We banter over prices in the stores, hoping to buy at a lower rate. A successful businessman is often a person who can outmaneuver his competition even if he has to cheat to do it. And we love to bring home pens, paper clips, paper supplies and other useful things from the place where we work. We use the boss's telephone to make personal long distance calls, and have no qualms about using the company copy machine or computer printer for personal business. Yet we all agree that stealing is evil.

Most of us refrain from killing other people. Yet we send our sons (and daughters) off to war where they are expected to kill soldiers (and now civilians) in other nations. Many of our states freely use the death penalty to punish people for certain crimes. There wasn't enough room to house all of the gawkers who wanted to watch the Timothy McVeigh execution. They had to furnish additional space and use closed circuit television to accommodate all of them. Some television stations wanted to televise the killing. Our movies and television programs are filled with stories of murder, war and death. Our leaders talk openly of murdering Osama bin Laden, the so-called leader of a group of terrorists that orchestrated the events of 9-11. Few Americans blinked when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hung after we invaded his country without provocation. Radical Christians have been murdering doctors and medical staff involved in operating abortion clinics, believing that they are doing "God's work" because the abortion of unborn human embryos is conceived as murder. We are a barbaric nation. Yet we know that "thou shalt not kill" is one of the Ten Commandments and therefore killing must be evil.

Treason is something most of us would say rarely happens in the United States. But are you sure? The Trump-led assault on the nation's Capital on June 6 is clearly shown to be a collective act of treason. In recent years numerous people in high security positions have been arrested and charged with selling information to foreign nations. Now that we are fighting a vague war against a people many of us aren't even sure are guilty of any wrongdoing, there are murmurings on the Internet and even in some of our daily newspapers about the truthfulness of our leaders. That our president is constantly protected by armed guards and rides around in a car protected by bullet proof glass suggests that he is in constant danger when among the people. That we have a national militia movement filled with members who believe they may someday have to rise up to protect the Constitution by force is troublesome. The government perceives the militia groups as treasonous. After the terrible events at Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, and 9-11, we have no doubt the militia groups think certain people in high government and military positions are treasonous.

Americans say they are appalled at terrorism and we want this practice stopped. Yet this nation is considered by much of the world to be a master of terrorism. Our bombing campaigns against Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Libya in recent years killed a lot of innocent civilians and left many others wounded, homeless and without food. To make it even worse, we laced our bombs with metals poisoned with depleted uranium. People in these countries surely consider us terrorists. News reports say the people of North Korea are currently terrified of the United States and are preparing to defend themselves against us. Earlier campaigns against the Mexican government to gain territory in the Southwest, and the American Indians were no less than early acts of American terrorism. Our fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, during World War II destroyed the entire city which was not a military target. We did it on purpose just to terrify the Germans. Thousands of innocent people died. We did these things willfully, making up slogans like "manifest destiny" and "God is on our side" to help us justify our actions. Yet we say terrorism is evil and the United States government is heavily involved in a strange "war against terrorism" launched by former President George W. Bush.

The people in the United States seem to be forgetting who they once were. Instead of a great nation of free people, we are behaving like we are residents of a second class society and living under tyranny. Those not seduced by football games and their nightly six-pack are stockpiling guns and bullets because they are afraid of their government. People are packing away so many bullets, and our military is putting such a demand on ammunition that the bullet manufacturers can't meet the demand. Our government, in turn, appears to be afraid of the people. The courts have all but thrown the Bill of Rights out of the window and authorized police, FBI and CIA agents to listen in on private telephone, fax and Internet conversations, just in case we have would-be terrorists at large. Insanity is running amuck.

Indeed, we are a nation divided. Many believe (and there is supporting date) that we were tricked into waging war on innocent people of Iraq and Afghanistan for the sake of big oil interests. The story is that the oil companies have an eye on newly found oil in former providences of Southeastern Russia and Iran. That Russia suddenly has become a world competitor in the oil market is strong evidence that this story might be true. It is said there were plans to build an oil pipeline across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the sea, but the Taliban was in the way. This might help explain why U.S. soldiers are dying in a war against the Taliban, a radical Islamic group that was not involved in the 9-11 attack against America. It might explain why former President George W. Bush invaded Iraq, a major oil supplier to the world, and why the United States is doing some saber rattling over Iranian nuclear policies that to date do not appear to be a threat to anyone. It has all been for big oil and of course, the American military industrial machine that feeds on war.

Some say 9-11 was a conspiracy generated from within the Bush Administration to give us an excuse to attack key nations in the Middle East. But would our own government stage an event so terrible as the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon just to get Americans to support such warfare?

It will be up to historians to judge Mr. Bush and the key figures involved in the events that occurred during his term. It is only recently that the story about how Winston Churchill appears to have targeted the liner Lusitania for a German U-boat torpedo to help get America involved in World War I. There is evidence that top military officials in the Roosevelt Administration set up the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to get America involved in World War II. And some are now suggesting that John F. Kennedy may have been murdered because he was contemplating shutting down the Vietnam conflict, which was against the wishes of the national military powers.

Whether these stories are true is not for us to say. Our policy is to question everything and accept nothing as truth. We are all trapped in a third dimensional existence where everything we think is true is only an illusion anyway.

This is a nation of confused people. We are confused by the conflicting teachings of the church, our schools, our government, our society and our collective memory.

Alastair Crowley was perceived in his day by many to be an evil person. Crowley, a magnificent writer and brilliant scholar as well as magician, once penned a strange brief work called The Book of the Law. He claims it was dictated to him by a spiritual entity named Aiwass.

While Crowley insists that the text of this short work is not his own, he wrote an amazingly prophetic introduction that appears in every copy of the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis) published book. It was about 100 years ago that he wrote this warning of the future:

"Liberty stirs once more in the womb of Time.

"Evolution makes its changes by anti-Socialistic ways. The 'abnormal' man who foresees the trend of the times and adapts circumstance intelligently, is laughed at, persecuted, often destroyed by the herd; but he and his heirs, when the crisis comes, are survivors.

"Above us today hangs a danger never yet paralleled in history. We suppress the individual in more and more ways. We think in terms of the herd. War no longer kills soldiers; it kills all indiscriminately. Every new measure of the most democratic and autocratic governments is Communistic in essence. It is always restriction. We are all treated as imbecile children. Dora, the Shops Act, the Motoring Laws, Sunday suffocation, the Censorship--they won't trust us to cross the roads at will.

"Fascism is like Communism, and dishonest into the bargain. The dictators suppress all art, literature, theatre, music, news that does not meet their requirements; yet the world only moves by the light of genius. The herd will be destroyed en masse."

Lies, Damn Lies, And What We've Been Told About Afghanistan
By David Swanson

It's far from the longest U.S. war. There was no peace before or after it. There is no after it until they end it - and bombing has always been most of what it is. It has had nothing to do with opposing terrorism. It has been a one-sided slaughter, a mass killing over two decades by a single invading army and air force dragging along token mascots from dozens of vassal states. After 20 years Afghanistan was one of the worst places to be on Earth, and the Earth as a whole was a worse place to be - the rule of law, the state of nature, the refugee crises, the spread of terrorism, the militarization of governments all worsened. Then the Taliban took over.

When the U.S. armed the Afghan military with weapons costing enough to cause panic attacks in U.S. Senators had the expense been for anything other than murder, and predicted a happy little civil war, and then the Afghans refused to fight each other, the President of the United States denounced such reprehensible restraint, blaming the victims, instead of acknowledging the massive gift of yet more weaponry to the Taliban, instead of recognizing - after 20 years - anything about what Afghanistan is like. (Of course he still calls the war a "civil war" as U.S. voices have done for years and years because unless the U.S. military is regretfully helping out in a civil war waged by primitive people, it will be understood to be, you know, waging wars, smack in the middle of what U.S. academics call The Great Peace.)

The puppet government was never a government outside of the capital. The people were never loyal to the Taliban or the invaders, but merely to whichever set of lunatics was nearby waving guns. First the Taliban collapsed, then the Muppets in Kabul, and for 20 years in between every home and village switched sides as needed, with the U.S. developing permanent enemies, the Taliban making practical alliances, and people persistently noticing that they lived where they lived, while the strange-looking foreigners who killed, imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, urinated on, and threatened them for "human rights" lived somewhere else.

But millions of them were made homeless. Children froze to death in refugee camps. Approximately half the victims of the U.S. war were women. The puppet government passed a law to legalize spousal rape. Yet the hypocritical screech of "Women's Rights" was heard over the agonized moaning of the injured, even as the U.S. government blissfully armed and supported the brutal militaries of such bastions of women's rights as Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Ethiopia, Gabon, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Oman, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen.

The death, injury, trauma, homelessness, environmental destruction, governmental corruption, renewed drug dealing, and general catastrophe were kept quiet by an obsessive focus on the tiny percentage of deaths that were U.S. troops - but excluding the majority even of those deaths because they were suicides.

"There is no military solution" the generals and weapons-funded presidents and Congress members chanted for decades while pushing more militarism. Yet nobody asked what "solution" even meant. "We're winning" they lied for decades until everyone announced that they'd "lost." Yet nobody asked what "winning" would have been. What was the goal? What was the purpose?

The rhetoric, official and amateur, that launched the war was about bombing a nation full of people as revenge for the crimes of a small number of individuals who had spent some time in the place. "Hey Mr. Taliban" song lyrics were racist, hateful, and genocidal celebrations of bombing the homes of people who dressed in pajamas. But this was pure murderous bullshit. Crimes can and should be prosecuted, not used as excuses to commit worse crimes. The Taliban was willing to turn Bin Laden over to a third country to be put on trial, but the U.S. government wanted a war. It had long-since planned the war. Its motivations included base construction, weapons placement, pipeline routing, and the launching of a war on Iraq as a continuation of an easier-to-start war on Afghanistan (a war that Tony Blair insisted on starting prior to a war on Iraq).

Soon the U.S. president said that bin Laden didn't matter at all. Then another U.S. president said that bin Laden was dead. That didn't matter either, as anyone paying the slightest attention had known it wouldn't. In fact, that same president escalated the war on Afghanistan three-fold in terms of troop presence but more than that in bombing, principally because he was largely keeping his predecessor's deal to scale back the war on Iraq. One can't just end a war without backing a different one. That's part of why the world's worried about a war on China right now.

But, then what was the excuse for the unending war on Afghanistan? Well, one excuse was a new bin Laden. He would return in another form like Voldemort if ever the U.S. left Afghanistan. So, after 20 years of a global war on terrorism spreading anti-U.S. terrorism from a few Afghan caves to capitals across Africa and Asia, we're now told that the Taliban takeover may mean the "return" of terrorism - we're told this by the very same widely respected "experts" who just said the Taliban wouldn't take over.

You know who never believed that crap? The young men and women sent into Afghanistan from the United States year after year after year to become suicide risks and to . . . well, and to . . . to do what?

What passes for "winning" in the propaganda given the troops and everyone else is just the horrific wars with disastrous short- and long-term results that somebody had the sense to end more quickly than other wars: the Gulf War, the War on Libya. But they're not, of course, better than never having started them would have been.

On August 16, 2021, a U.S. military base at Niagara Falls posted this notice:

While President Joe Biden swears the nonsense about "nation building" was always nonsense, others cling to it. On August 17th an email from Lauren Mick, Senior Manager for Media Relations, Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), claimed "There is no doubt, however, that the lives of millions of Afghans had been improved by U.S. government interventions, including gains in life expectancy, the mortality of children under five, GDP per capita, and literacy rates, among others." Even if you believe that, imagine what doctors and teachers could have done in that regard. Hell, imagine what giving every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan some $600,000 or even a tiny fraction of that might have done rather than blowing over $1 trillion on war per year for 20 years. Afghanistan, under the benevolent occupation, was the third worst place to give birth in terms of newborn mortality, with the first being the neighboring and heavily impacted Pakistan.

The letter in the image above illustrates one of the points I elaborated on in War Is A Lie, namely that one can have contradictory war lies working simultaneously and certainly at different stages, especially before, during, and after a war. Let us count the lies in the notice above:

1. "progress" - no explanation given, so irrefutable, but vacuous

2. the war-making allowed people to vote, attend school, start a business, and live with basic necessities - by definition anyone not killed in the war lived with basic necessities, just as prior to the war only less so; the rest of this has been very weak for 20 years and in fact for 50 years going back to the initial U.S. provocation of the Soviets back when the bad guys were the good guys as they very well may soon be again

3. evidence-free prevention of imaginary attacks on the Fatherland - those have been made more likely, not less likely, by the war

4. saving fellow "service" members - not sending them would have saved more of them

5. planting small seeds of "Freedom's Cause" - what can I say except that people will reach for utter obnoxious nonsense to justify horrible things they've done?

Well, surely this harmless foolishness is better than veteran suicides? Not if it succeeds at its stated purpose of facilitating future warmaking it isn't, no. Guess what one of the minor results of those future wars will be? More veteran suicides!

At one point during the past 20 years, I sent some unsolicited advice to a young man who was considering offering the world the "service" of participating in wars. This was part of what I sent him:

Are you aware that the U.S. government repeatedly turned down offers to hand Bin Laden over to a third nation to be put on trial, preferring instead a war? Have you come into contact with the understanding that "if the CIA had not spent over a billion dollars arming Islamist militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, empowering jihadist godfathers like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden in the process, the 9/11 attacks would have almost certainly not taken place"? Are you familiar with the U.S. plans for war on Afghanistan that pre-dated September 11, 2001? Have you seen the predictable excuses that Bin Laden gave for his murderous crimes? They each involve revenge for other crimes committed by the U.S. military. Are you aware that war is a crime under, among other laws, the United Nations Charter? Are you aware that al Qaeda planned September 11th in numerous nations and U.S. states that, unlike Afghanistan, the United States chose not to bomb?