Comments by "Geoffrey Lyons" (@granatmof) on "U.S Weapons Smuggled Out of Afghanistan" video.

  1. Is Pakistan an ally or enemy to America and is India an ally or enemy? Also how was the Intel for the executive so bad about the efficacy of the Afghan Army? Like the failure of America in Afghanistan is a burden shared among 4 sitting Presidents, not not necessarily caused solely by the most recent administration. Presidents often have a rough transition period early in their term where military Intel and operations are more or less the problem of the outgoing administration. A goodexample of this is the Bay of Pigs invasion planned under Ike, but carried out under Kennedy. The biggest lesson to take from Afghanistan is and always will be that the US Army is not in the business of nation building. It never has and never will be. None of the American military branches is in the business of nation building. The failure in Afghanistan started the day the US planned to invade. The American people were scared and hurt and mourning, and the politicians thought the need was to strike out. Once the money started flowing and ready political capital of supporting the invasion started rising their was no hope of ever establishing conditions for success or any achievable goals. It was a quagmire. America squandered its best international support on diving into quicksand. But there were many legislative failures following 9/11. The Patriot Act tops the list, as does the TSA, but I digress. Al-qaida achieved their goals far greater than they ever could have imagined.America spent $2 trillion over 20 years on nothing, when in the early 90 the President was forced to choose to cut either scientific funding for the international space station or the superconducting supercollider, a collide based in Texas far larger than the large Hadron Collider that would discover the Higgs Bison in 2010. If President Bush, from Texas, had invested the multiple billions to complete the collider in Texas, Texas would have been the center or world wide high energy physics research, which in turn would have also made it the center of high end computational and networking developement. Imagine if Dallas had the tech companies instead of Silicon Valley, imagine how political life would be different today. $2T instead went to alienating a third of the world, and enriching arms companies instead of funding Scholls and infrastructure. It went to training troops to risk life and limb instead of skilled workers to build the economy and innovate further, all while civil rights were down trodden. Afghanistan represents not just a failure by the US government abroad, but a failure of the US government domestically.
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