Dear Patriot,

Watching as the U.S. experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan over the weekend, it’s hard to not look at how things could have turned out very differently.

After a 20-year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets -- not to mention the thousands who lost their lives and countless others who are permanently injured -- the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight.

The corrupt Potemkin regime the U.S. had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military we had spent billions training just melted away.

The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame.

The authorization for use of military force (AUMF) that Congress granted in order to invade Afghanistan to take out those who were harboring Osama Bin Laden has been used as the justification for this war to continue for nearly 20 years.

But that justification expired at least 10 years ago when it was announced that Bin Laden had been killed in neighboring Pakistan.

The last ten years of the war were under Presidents Obama, Trump, and now Biden.

Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the U.S. out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan?

The U.S. war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attacks on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building.

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the U.S. war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war?

So who is to blame for the scenes from Afghanistan this weekend? There is plenty to go around.

Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood there was no point to the U.S. occupation. There were some efforts by some members to end the war, but most (on a bipartisan basis) just went along to get along.

Generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the U.S. intelligence agencies.

Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last U.S. dollar goes up in smoke.

The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters.

They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.

The mainstream media has uncritically repeated the propaganda about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the other pointless U.S. interventions. Many of these outlets are owned by defense industry-connected companies. The corruption is deep.

Until more Americans rise up and demand a pro-America, non-interventionist foreign policy, they will continue to get fleeced by war profiteers.

And what a shame it has been to let this continue for so long without a large enough political movement to stop it.

It has cost us more than $2 Trillion, the lives of thousands, and much more damage than can truly be added up in the form of broken families, long-term physical disabilities, and PTSD, which likely afflicts a lot more veterans than is understood.

Now there will be a transition in Afghanistan that the U.S. will have no control over, which is the fate of a foreign intervention that lasted too long, cost too much, and lost the mission over a decade ago.

Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but don’t expect it to be understood in Washington.

War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide.

But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the U.S. global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future.

For Liberty,

Ron Paul
Chairman

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The mission of Campaign for Liberty is to promote and defend the great American principles of individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a constitutional foreign policy, by means of education, issue advocacy, and grassroots mobilization.