TEHRAN (Iran News) – In recent years and specially since the victory of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, nations in the world and especially in the Middle East have awakened and have realized that they can overcome the world arrogance as a proverb says “if there is a will, there is a way” and the U.S. has been humiliated in recent decades repeatedly.
Their U.S. latest humiliation dates back to their unwise and hurried exit from Afghanistan which caused a backlash both at home and abroad for leaving Afghanistan government alone to collapse against the Taliban forces.
On Wednesday, one of the top U.S. military officials in his remarks accepted this humiliation. U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley admitted that the U.S. “lost” the 20-year-long war in Afghanistan, weeks after American forces chaotically withdrew from the war-ravaged country and the Taliban militant group overthrew the Afghan government.
Milley made the stark admission before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, a day after he described the two-decade-long war as a “strategic failure” in his first congressional testimony before members of the US Senate Committee on Armed Services.
“It is clear. It is obvious to all of us, that the war in Afghanistan did not end on the terms we wanted, with the Taliban in power in Kabul. The war was a strategic failure,” the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff told the hearing of the committee about the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and the disastrous evacuation from Kabul.
Milley stressed that the US-imposed war on Afghanistan “wasn’t lost in the last 20 days or even 20 months,” but it was “lost” through decisions spanning 20 years.
“There’s a cumulative effect to a series of strategic decisions that go way back,” said the 63-year-old general, the top military advisor to President Joe Biden, who ordered an end to the two-decade US troop presence in Afghanistan.
The government of Afghanistan collapsed on August 15 and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country in the face of the lightning advances of the Taliban, which followed Biden’s decision to withdraw the American troops in a chaotic pullout.
According to the Cost of War Project at Brown University, the war has resulted in the death of 2,324 US military personnel, 4,007 U.S. contractors, and 46,319 Afghan civilians.
“Whenever you get some phenomenon like a war that is lost — and it has been, in the sense of we accomplished our strategic task of protecting America against al-Qaeda, but certainly the end state is a whole lot different than what we wanted,” Milley added.
“So whenever a phenomenon like that happens, there’s an awful lot of causal factors. And we’re going to have to figure that out. A lot of lessons learned here,” he further said.
The head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff also listed a number of factors purportedly responsible for the U.S. defeat going back to a missed opportunity to capture or kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan soon after the US invasion of the country.
Milley, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, and General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), were summoned to Congress on Tuesday to testify on American military forces’ humiliating defeat in Afghanistan.
Milley described the war as a “strategic failure and Austin admitted that the Afghan army’s sudden collapse caught the Pentagon off guard as he acknowledged US miscalculations in the war.
McKenzie, as well as Milley, also said that they had recommended 2,500 US troops remain in Afghanistan, contradicting comments made by Biden earlier this year.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that it was Biden who made the ultimate decision based on “split” advice he revived about what to do in Afghanistan.
“Ultimately, it’s up to the commander-in-chief to make a decision. He made a decision that it was time to end a 20-year war,” she added.
Milley’s confession comes while the U.S. forces have to leave Iraq and actually the Middle East because the U.S. is not in a condition to suffer more casualties or spend more money for the countries in the region. They have realized that their power is declining and the nations are not any longer ready to give in their bully or fake claims of supporting democracy and nations.
It is expected the U.S. forces to flee the region very soon and countries in the region can rely on themselves and cooperation with each other rather than reliance on the world arrogance support because the U.S. has shown the world and especially to the governments and nations that it is unreliable during the tough times.
The U.S. unwise pullout of forces from Afghanistan has been so controversial and humiliating that the Joe Biden Administration has faced backlash from friends and foes. Of course, Biden should not be blamed because the U.S. decline process has started since years ago and in the near future it may have the fate like the former Soviet Union.
So the Islamic Republic of Iran has emboldened the nations in the region that if they are determined to expel foreign forces from their countries to gain full independence, they can do it and now the countdown has begun for full expulsion of the U.S. forces from Iraq to register another humiliation for the U.S.
