A Fool Lies Here

In a "revelation" that should surprise no one, the Washington Post published a 2014 report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction that makes clear the ridiculous impossibility of what Rudyard Kipling warned us of in 1891.

What is also clear is that the United States learned only one lesson from the loss of the war in Southeast Asia; that if you draft random people and random people's kids to fight idiotic imperial wars in the global hustings you will be made to pay for it politically because the random people will fight to expose your lies and stupidity.

If you let them draft themselves, nobody will give a shit.

So, despite this voluminous mass of evidence that three successive U.S. administrations have been cluelessly, grossly, lying to themselves and the U.S. public and have, somehow, managed to take a grotesquely mismanaged Central Asian failed state and turn it into a worse grotesquely mismanaged Central Asian failed state, not a single one of the people involved will so much as go shy half a slug or miss a meal. No Bushie, no Obamite, no Trumpkin...nobody will pay.

Read the whole thing; the most obvious "lessons learned" were the things that a bunch of us already knew and were howling about back in the Intel Dump days; that, even if there ever had been a hope after choosing to break into the joint, the choice to bolt to Iraq as soon as possible left Afghanistan to go to hell. That the Afghan corruption that was endemic wasn't - and, probably, could never be - addressed. That the idea of trying to set up a central "government" in Kabul was nonsensical, and became a toxic kleptocracy as soon as it could. That...aw, hell, go read it. The whole damn thing was a clusterfuck from the get go and probably always would have been. But it was certainly mismanaged about as badly as possible, too.

And so, just as in Iraq, now all that's left is to spell out in black ink that all the blood and treasure spent in Afghanistan has been utterly wasted, good for nothing but ruin and delusion and merciless hatred.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.

There is pleasure in the wet, wet clay
When the artist's hand is potting it.
There is pleasure in the wet, wet lay --
When the poet's pad is blotting it.
There is pleasure in the shine of your picture on the line
At the Royal Acade-my;
But the pleasure felt in these is as chalk to Cheddar cheese
When it comes to a well-made Lie--

To a quite unwreckable Lie,
To a most impeccable Lie!
To a water-right, fire-proof, angle-iron, sunk-hinge, time-lock, steel-faced Lie!
Not a private handsome Lie,
But a pair-and-brougham Lie,
Not a little-place-at-Tooting, but a country-house-with-shooting
And a ring-fence-deer-park Lie.