Question: Who Won the Afghanistan War? Answer: Osama bin Laden
by John Lawrence
Bin Laden's stated purpose for attacking the US was to attract the US into a protracted war in the Middle East that would fritter away US blood and treasure. If bin Laden were alive today, after American expenditures of $2 trillion and 2000 American lives in Afghanistan, I think he would say "Mission Accomplished". However, most of that money never left the US. It was snatched up by the military-industrial complex - by the likes of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. According to a tape released by Al-Jazeera and reported by CNN, Osama said:
"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript. He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers." "We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said. He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration." "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
Well, bin Laden is only partially correct. It's impossible to bankrupt the US as Modern Monetary Theory has made clear. As a nation with a sovereign currency, the US can just have the Federal Reserve print as much money as needed to fight wars or for any other purpose. Actually, the $2 trillion spent by US taxpayers largely on weapons supplied by the military-industrial complex kept the economy humming quite nicely because war spending as well as selling weapons to other countries is contributive to the US economy.
The US should never have invaded the "nation" of Afghanistan at all. When bin Laden was based there, Afghanistan was only a partially governed country. Large parts of it were ungoverned and ungovernable. This is the space Al Qaeda occupied. The Taliban only governed part of the country. As President Obama demonstrated, it was possible to track bin Laden down and kill him in a special operation without having ever invaded a country and for very little cost. But that wasn't good enough for George W Bush. He wanted to be a war time President. Now 20 years later, the Taliban are in a position to rule over all of Afghanistan. It's Vietnam all over again. The US goes into a country, sets up a puppet government and leaves at some time at which the puppet government and its fighting force collapse after much expenditure of blood and treasure. Will we ever learn that indigenous forces will eventually win out?
The good news is that the US, having lost the war in Vietnam, is now one if its largest trading partners. Vietnam is currently our 13th largest goods trading partner with $77.5 billion in total (two way) goods trade during 2019. Goods exports totaled $10.9 billion; goods imports totaled $66.6 billion. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Vietnam was $55.8 billion in 2019. Perhaps, after the US loses the war in Afghanistan, Afghanistan can also normalize itself and become a trading partner with the US. This is the much preferred outcome compared to a war the US didn't lose in Korea which resulted in a stalemate. The result there is a nightmare for the US in the North which has nuclear weapons and missiles capable of reaching the US. If the US had lost that war as well, things would probably have normalized there without a northern dictator with a vendetta against the US and weapons pointed at us
Now the job for Biden is to get Americans and Afghanis who cooperated with us out of Afghanistan safely and discreetly. That's the purpose of the forces he recently sent back in. We don't want to repeat the humiliating hasty exit from Vietnam, and we owe it to those who cooperated with us to give them a safe harbor. Expect Little Afghanistans to sprout up in major American cities perhaps right next door to all the little Vietnams and Little Iraqs. Afghani restaurants will provide even more cultural diversity for the American palate.
