Roanoke Times Op-Ed
Death, taxes and whatever the US does in Afghanistan will fail |
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By John Freivalds
Roanoke Times, Roanoke Virginia
Published 9/22/2021
It was Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) who first said” in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” If he were alive today, he certainly would have added the abject failure of everything the US tried in twenty years of war in Afghanistan would fail. Hey, that’s not just my opinion but the conclusion of Craig Whitlock in his new book The Afghanistan Papers. Whitlock, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post interviewed 1,000 people in a “lesson learned “project who were involved with the Afghan war. What an exhausting tale of woe and very expensive cultural blindness! Whitlock examined the military efforts, the geopolitical strategies, the nation building, the economic efforts to try to find something, anything, that the US could be proud of. Results: Nope. Nada. No way José. And now Congress will try to figure out what went wrong-and who to blame.