Americans Were a Great People Until We Learned to Love The Bomb

There’s an old adage: If one only has a hammer, everything else looks to be a nail. For those who are career military or law enforcement, they only know how to impose force on others with a gun, bullets or bomb.

Mike Pratt, career military officer, provided his professional opinion about what went wrong in Afghanistan. I show how his entire world paradigm went horribly wrong a long, long time ago when we learned to love the bomb.

Many people have asked me what could have been done differently in Afghanistan to prevent the tragedy we left behind and it’s very simple. We should have left a strategic presence there to protect what we built. 5 places: Bagram, Mazar-e-Sherif, Jalalabad, Kandahar and Kabul.

We should have kept those strategic locations FOR EVER. Like we have in Germany, Japan and South Korea. FOR EVER.

Unilaterally leaving Afghanistan was like pulling every tooth in your mouth. Keeping 5 strategic locations gave us the ability to project forces and enforce the peace.

We have strategic locations throughout the entire world. And we have nuclear powered deterrence in every ocean in the world.

The good thing is that we’re the good guys and we do so at great expense to ourselves, asking nothing but peace in return. That is why the United States of America is a global force for good because we keep evil in its place.

Response

Some people will never learn. Americans were a GREAT People until the end of WWII. Then we fell in love with the bomb, and bullets, and the imposition of power on others. 

There is absolutely NO strategic value in Afghanistan. There are trillions of dollars in rare earth minerals, gems and stones. We set up military bases to FORCE Afghans to live our way. We did not win the Hearts & Minds. After 20 years of American blood and US taxpayer dollars, the government we created fell in 11 days. 

My Muslim Afghan brothers educated me in 2001: “You can rent an Afghan but never buy one.” The cowardly Afghan President Ghani and 300,000+ troops dropped their weapons and walked away when the Taliban came — leaving our forces and allies in crisis. 

The Afghan war cost $2 Trillion (not counting blood); the Iraq war cost $5 Trillion; the War on Drugs in America cost over $1 Trillion.

We now have over 70 Million felons in America, most related to the war on drugs. That is 1 of 5 Americans with a felony record. But as 90% are male, that is 1 of 4 men in America. Sadly, as the war on drugs disproportionately targeted Black men, 1 of 3 Black males in America have a felony record. Our inner cities are imploding. 

We shed tears and honor the 13 fallen heroes in Afghanistan. We routinely lose more than this number weekly in Chicago. Most of our inner cities are more violent than Afghanistan. 

Counting the dollars, $2T, $5T, $1T, that’s $8 TRILLION on three wars — and what did America and the world get in return?

When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in the ’80s, we ended up creating Al Qaeda, which led the 9.11 attacks. Our invasion of Iraq created ISIS. Our invasion of Afghanistan turned the prehistoric Taliban into Islamic heroes. There now exists ISIS-K in the nation. They will hunt around the world now.

Americans FELL in love with the bomb. Bombs and bullets do not win Hearts & Minds. Prisons do not change people’s recreational drug habits. 

One cannot force people to change at the point of a gun. All who played the Great Game in Afghanistan have lost: Britain, India, USSR, and now, USA. 

However, China will soon partner with the Taliban to provide the education and technical knowledge so they can extract the rare earth minerals. China wins Hearts & Minds by playing the Long Game. We wasted our blood and tax dollars on bombs and bullets and strategic military bases. China sweeps in to reap the riches and grow their nation through commerce. 

We got the bomb. China gets the world.

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Ko’olau of Kaua’i. I am the Defiant One
“I Believe We Can”