THE AFGHANISTAN ERROR
R. A. Schultz
On the afternoon of October 7, 2001, I was en route from my home in Norfolk, Virginia to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Suitland, Maryland, location of my duty station, the U. S. Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center. As a Senior Chief Port Security Specialist, I was Production Manager of the CoastWatch Project, monitoring the locations of commercial vessels of interest (VOI) all over the planet, and reporting their movements to our “customers” throughout the U. S. and allied maritime intelligence agencies.
Traveling northward on US-17, I had already lost the WAVY-AM radio signal from Norfolk and had switched to WTOP-AM from Washington, D. C. I was listening to whatever talk show came on after Limbaugh when a news flash came over. We were bombing the living piss out of Afghanistan. “Damned well about time” was my first thought.
The discussion very shortly commenced throughout the American intelligence community, not about whether or not to send troops to Afghanistan, but when. My personal opinion was that we should put boots on the ground in Afghanistan precisely NEVER, and that we should carpet bomb the entire country into total submission, civilian casualties be damned. But nobody asked me, so the Wizards of Smart inside the Beltway walked into yet another major f*ck-up.
I’ve found that many general officers have their own special way of ignoring history, a subject which I know they had to have been taught somewhere in their military education. Either the lessons of the history they were taught never sunk in, or perhaps their arrogance and egotism overruled their historical knowledge. In any event, the United States sent a goodly percentage of its military personnel into what has always been likened to a giant meatgrinder.
Obviously, our most brilliant military minds completely lost cognizance of the British and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan. The Soviets were in the Afghan meatgrinder for ten years, from 1979 to 1989, an experience that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its becoming the Russian Federation. Long before that, the British simply gave up on the place as not really being worth the effort. To my mind, not a single American life should have been lost in what has turned out to be a futile effort to pacify a royal sh*thole. Even more futile was the numbskull-neo-con-inspired effort to turn the place into an enlightened “democracy.” Talk about pipe dreams and other Efforts in Futility.
What had started out as an effort to defeat the Taliban government that was harboring Islamofascist terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, whom Bill Clinton had spent the better part of eight years trying to ignore, quickly devolved into another unwinnable and worthless war with virtually nothing to show for it.
Now with President Trump gradually edging out of service the leftover general officers who seem to think that going to war is a good idea no matter where or for whatever reason, there’s some light at the end of an overly-long tunnel.
