In another show of Trump’s unclear foreign policy and an incomplete diplomatic infrastructure, Afghanistan could be surrendered to one or another kind of warlord, including the Russian backed Taliban.
The ultimate neoliberal war, fought by mercenary troops in Afghanistan was pitched in July by the same group of bagmen (Bannon, Anton, Gorka) who will be pitching regime change in Iran.
Dog-wagging will happen one way or another soon. there are a couple dozen more MOAB munitions to drop somewhere, even if they don’t do any good.
A month after Trump gave his defense secretary authority to raise troop levels in Afghanistan, The Wall Street Journal’s Dion Nissenbaum got a peek at the very different internal deliberations from White House insiders July 31:
Unable to agree on a plan to send up to 3,900 more American forces to help turn back Taliban advances in Afghanistan, the White House is taking a new look at what would happen if the U.S. decided to scale back its military presence instead, according to current and former Trump administration officials.
“It’s a macro question as to whether the U.S., this administration, and this president are committed to staying,” one senior administration official said. “It doesn’t work unless we are there for a long time, and if we don’t have the appetite to be there a long time, we should just leave. It’s an unanswered question.”
The news came as ISIS took credit for an orchestrated attack on the Iraqi embassy in Kabul that roiled the Afghan capital Monday morning. It also came on the heels of a months-long strategy review within the White House that reportedly culminated in a “shitshow” meeting two weeks ago, in which Trump nixed a proposal to expand the U.S. troop presence on the ground…
An Afghanistan withdrawal could also represent a golden financial opportunity for at least one well-positioned friend of the president: Blackwater founder and military contracting maven Erik Prince.
Earlier in July, the New York Times reported that Stephen Bannon, the ultranationalist former Breitbart CEO and a presidential adviser, tried unsuccessfully to push Prince’s plan for privatizing the Afghanistan war onto Mattis.
That plan, which basically would appoint a colonial “viceroy” to “quickly replace most U.S. troops with contractors who would help carry out airstrikes,” hasn’t been taken seriously by McMaster or Mattis. One senior military official who spoke with WSJ called withdrawal from Afghanistan a “low minority view,” adding that it was a bad idea “because it doesn’t address the primary concerns of getting to a point where Afghanistan is able to secure itself.”
All of which makes the Trump administration's newfound interest in dredging up Afghanistan's rare-earth supplies misguided. The hope seems to be that leaving American troops in the country would allow U.S. mining companies to exploit its deposits and thus reduce China's near-monopoly. The plan is still a bit hazy, but it's of a piece with some unfortunate alarmism among Republicans about China's dominance of rare-earth production.
In truth, there's little reason for the U.S. to fear a shortage of rare earths any time soon. Even if China wanted to squeeze the market again, the forces of competition and innovation would likely be enough to ensure that supply meets demand. Americans who champion the free market should have a lot more faith in it.