For the first 10 years, this budgetary system of emergency appropriations was used. It meant the details of where the money ended up was kept on a low profile. It also enabled officials to keep a false impression that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be over soon.

So after 20 years and nearly $5tn spent. Who benefited from the “war on terror”?

Firstly in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon sent an unprecedented number of private contractors. Some military bases resembled U.S. cities, packed with different fast-food chains.

The contractors ran almost every aspect of America’s military adventurism. They constructed the bases and catered for them while providing computer and logistic services. They supplied the chain of food and water, other drinks, trucks, warplanes, helicopters, warships, drones as well as keeping the ammunition and weapons flowing into both countries.

Most of the time, there were more contractors than troops. In July last year, the Pentagon had nearly 22,600 contractors in Afghanistan. That was about double the number of troops in the country.

In other words, the U.S. Department of Defense was on a spending spree.
It awarded the contracts, it made the decisions and it kept a percentage of the money spent in classified accounts.

Nothing stood in the way. Not even the 2008 financial crisis. When Congress imposed spending caps on all departments, the Department of Defense was the only exception as it used the emergency and contingency measures as pretext to avoid the cuts.

In fact, between 2001 and 2020 the Pentagon budget doubled.

Where was that money invested? The Pentagon spent, at a time when Americans were suffering, upgrading its military equipment, buying new military hardware, and servicing others. This is despite the fact most of these military hardware were not being using in the “war on terror” but rather being deployed elsewhere.

This is where the former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, described the whole process as a “culture of endless money”.

Military hardware manufacturers, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. The so-called big five were awarded the biggest contracts.

During the Afghanistan war, Defense stocks outperformed the stock market by nearly 60%.

On September 18, 2001, the day then-President George W. Bush authorized the invasion of Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks, if you bought $10,000 of stock among the “top five”, and reinvested now, it would be worth nearly $100,000.

Between the summer of 2019 and 2020, the “big five” accounted for nearly a third of the $480bn committed by the Pentagon to defense contractors. But only a fraction of these sales went specifically for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the “war on terror” was highly lucrative for the “big five”.

For example, Lockheed Martin manufactured the Black Hawk helicopters which were used widely in Afghanistan. Boeing sold warplanes and military combat vehicles. Raytheon got a major contract training the Afghan air force. This is while, thousands of subcontractors around the world made profit selling other military gear such as night-vision goggles, engines, sandbags, communications equipment.

With that said, everything just went to waste. After 20 years, Afghanistan’s government and its armed forces collapsed in two weeks.

The Wartime Contracting Commission and the Inspectors Generals for Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the Pentagon’s own inspector general all admitted it was all a waste. They documented the profiteering, corruption, and “ghost spending” (money spent on activities that did not exist at all).

“Ghost spending” was something seen in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S.-trained Afghan army collapsed because of “ghost spending”. The U.S.-trained Iraqi army collapsed in the face of Daesh because of “Ghost soldiers”. Soldiers that paid off their commanders to skip work and split their salaries 50-50 with senior commanders.

To justify the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. President Joe Biden, stressed the purpose behind the U.S. war had “always been preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland”.

It clearly contradicts his previous positions on the U.S. objective in Afghanistan. In 2001 when Biden was a senator, he outlined the long-term purpose of the American invasion as “a stable government in Afghanistan, one that… provides the foundation for future reconstruction of that country.”

Washington clearly had a duty to reconstruct Afghanistan. The reason for this is quite simple.

Congress created SIGAR (the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan) as an independent agency focused solely on Afghanistan and overseeing the “reconstruction” efforts.

SIGAR had jurisdiction over all programs and operations supported with “U.S. reconstruction dollars” over the last 20 years, regardless of the agency involved. SIGAR had the authority to review the entire reconstruction effort.

According to SIGAR: at various points, the U.S. government hoped to eliminate al-Qaeda, decimate the Taliban movement that hosted it, deny all terrorist groups a safe haven in Afghanistan, build Afghan security forces so they could deny terrorists a safe haven in the future, and help the civilian government become legitimate and capable enough to win the trust of Afghans.

Each goal, once accomplished, was thought to move the U.S. administration one step closer to being able to “withdraw from the country”.

The Strategy failed miserably.

Over the last decade that Congress established the “SIGAR” watchdog that gave an almost quarterly report. Each report was more damning than the previous one.

The watchdog puts the failure in Afghanistan down to several important points.

“The U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve.”

“The U.S. government consistently underestimated the amount of time required to rebuild Afghanistan and created unrealistic timelines and expectations that prioritized spending quickly. These choices increased corruption and reduced the effectiveness of programs.”

“Many of the institutions and infrastructure projects the United States built were not sustainable.”

“Counterproductive civilian and military personnel policies and practices thwarted the effort.”

“The U.S. government’s inability to get the right people into the right jobs at the right times was one of the most significant failures.”

“Effectively rebuilding Afghanistan required a detailed understanding of the country’s social, economic, and political dynamics. However, U.S. officials were consistently operating in the dark, often because of the difficulty of collecting the necessary information.”

Here is one of the most important aspects of the failure:

“The U.S. government clumsily forced Western technocratic models onto Afghan economic institutions; trained security forces in advanced weapon systems they could not understand, much less maintain; imposed formal rule of law on a country that addressed 80 to 90 percent of its disputes through informal means; and often struggled to understand or mitigate the cultural and social barriers to supporting women and girls.”

“U.S. government agencies rarely conducted sufficient monitoring and evaluation to understand the impact of their efforts.”

That is the tip of the controversy.

THE BIG QUESTION is why didn’t Congress take any action on the assessments of its own watchdog?

Since 2001, the defense sector spent over $2.4bn lobbying Congress, making direct campaign contributions to the majority of its members.

Hence the silence over the past 20 years.

Corruption is at its absolute worst.

So who won?

The U.S. Defense Industry, the U.S. military-industrial complex were the only winners.

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In his first major policy speech on Friday, Austin stressed the need for the US military to move forward a faster and more innovative approach by harnessing emerging technological advancements and computing powers.

“The way we fight the next major war is going to look very different from the way we fought the last ones,” the Pentagon chief said during a trip to the US Pacific Command in Hawaii.

Austin did not mention any specific adversary by name but the impetus behind his speech was clearly a rapidly rising China, which has been increasingly intent on challenging the United States on multiple fronts including in cyberspace.

“Galloping advances in technology mean changes in the work we do to keep the United States secure across all five domains of potential conflict — not just air, land and sea, but also space and cyberspace,” Austin said.

Austin, who rose in the ranks fighting the conventional wars of the Middle East, put forward a competitive new model of deterrence consisting all domains of warfare.

“What we need is the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities — all woven together in a networked way that is so credible, flexible and formidable that it will give any adversary pause,” he said. “We need to create advantages for us and dilemmas for them.”

“We can’t predict the future,” Austin said. “So what we need is the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities – all woven together in a networked way that is so credible, so flexible and so formidable that it will give any adversary pause.”

The remarks come as the United States prepares to withdraw its remaining troops from Afghanistan by September 11 on orders from President Joe Biden, who seeks to score a political win by ending America’s longest war and resetting Pentagon priorities.

Austin acknowledged that he has spent “most of the past two decades executing the last of the old wars,” and said preventing a conflict in the future would mean creating “advantages for us and dilemmas” for the adversaries.

Austin’s speech underscored the fundamental shift in the Pentagon’s thinking from fighting conventional wars in the Middle East to getting ready for a more sophisticated future conflict against China or Russia.

Two weeks ago, the top US spy chief said China posed a great threat to the United States with cyber capabilities that can affect and disrupt the nation’s critical infrastructure.

In testimony before Congress, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said China was “an unparalleled priority for the intelligence community,” accusing Beijing of striving to change global norms through a variety of tactics.

The post Next major war very different from Middle East conflicts appeared first on Iran News Daily.

First, I recommend that he never use the words “win” and “winning” to describe any war. US history is filled with bitter experiences of war and losing. There is no need to remind the president of the United States the result of US wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and even its engagement in Yemen. None of these horrifying experiences—nor any other war for that matter—has ever achieved its goals.

As a veteran and a peace activist, I would like to suggest to the president of the United States that the first step in any combat is understanding the adversary. As an Iranian war veteran, I strongly suggest he study the culture and history of an old civilization like Iran’s. Iranians, those he labels as a “terrorist nation,” are proud and pleased at having not initiated a war in the past 250 years. We proudly have never invaded, intruded, and oppressed any other nations, either in our neighborhood or even in response to our revilers and foes.

Nonetheless, there is a delicacy in the sophisticated culture of Iran that separates the ancient nation of Iran from President Trump and his hawkish “B-Team.” That is the view we each have toward war. War, for us, is not an option. We never choose to go to war, we only respond to war.

In 1915, during World War I, Rais Ali Delvary, a young man from a tiny village near the Persian Gulf, defended Iran—along with his small group of men—from British invaders. They stopped the intruders, who ignored Iran’s neutrality during the war. Rais Ali’s slogan at the time has remained with the nation to this very day: “We are in this war not to win over invaders’ capital and assets; we are in this war to save our capital and assets from loss.” Rais Ali and his people won that war, as his successors did again almost a century later and will do yet again if they must.

Mr. President, Iran has never initiated any war. Iran has never seized others’ resources, belongings, means, lives, and existence to gain wealth and benefit for itself. Iran has and will only defend its belongings, resources, life, and identity. Iran has done that vigorously throughout its four thousand years of history and will do it again if forced. Rais Ali and his team did it in 1915. People in my generation did it in 1980-88. When the whole world stood behind Saddam Hussein throughout that eight-year war, Iranians stood firmly and defended their home.

While the world watched, Saddam dropped bombs and used chemical weapons against Iranian innocents. In the end, he proved unable to seize and hold a single inch of Iranian territory. Iranians became one body and stood and defended their home and their families.

The nation still mourns the far too many precious lives that were lost during that war. But, to this day and despite their differences, Iranians are proud of the eight years spent defending their homeland.

Mr. President, this is how Iranians define winning and losing a war. In our lexicon, the one who starts a war is the only loser. The one who plans to steal the happiness, the lives, and the well-being of others is the one who suffers true loss.

War is not our business, but negotiation and diplomacy are. War is not our purpose. Peace is our mission. Peace is our philosophy in life, and you are right: diplomacy is our art.

Iran has proved its mastery in the art of diplomacy.

Diplomacy, forbearance, and contentment are inclinations that cannot be achieved with billions of dollars in weapons. Your allies in the region, Mohammad bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu, can both attest to that. Despite the tens of billions of dollars they have devoted to their military budgets, they feel insecure and besieged by real or imagined threats. Their devotion to military power, often at the expense of diplomacy, carries serious risks. Like relying on checkers moves in a chess match.

Just be aware, Mr. President, that your friends, the B-Team, as we call them, are pushing you into the same dilemma which they have faced over the past several decades. Now they have persuaded you to censure and sanction Iran’s master-diplomat and his colleagues in order to undermine their effectiveness. But even so hobbled, Iran can still move its knights and bishops and other pieces around the global chessboard. Your friends must still learn that the game of diplomacy is far more like chess than checkers.

Habib Ahmadzadeh served in the Iranian military during the Iran-Iraq war, where he was wounded four times, including twice by chemical bombs dropped by Iraqi planes. He is the author of multiple books, including a book of short stories, A City Under Siege, and the novel, Chess with the Doomsday Machine. He is also a documentary filmmaker and a screenwriter. Dr. Ahmadzadeh is on the board of the Tehran Peace Museum and academic board of the University of Arts.

The post A Letter to Donald Trump from an Iranian war veteran appeared first on Iran News Daily.