Trillion in minerals driving criminal Afghan war

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, 'A criminal war is a criminal war...is a criminal war.' That certainly applies to our criminal war against people we don't like in Afghanistan, raging for 16 years now, thirty-two months after we declared end of combat operations on December 31, 2014. Hundreds of thousands dead, millions wounded and displaced and a trillion in treasure squandered.

The war might be summed up on one word for the uninformed: minerals. One of Trump's first conversations with Afghan president Ghani concerned how the two countries could work together on mineral development. Trump hinted the vast Afghan mineral trove, lusted for by American high tech product companies, could be one justification for continuing America's never ending Afghan war.
Chemical executive Michael Silver and billionaire financier Steven Feinberg are even in the mix of military hawks and neocon advisers that spun Trump 360 degrees from his sane campaign utterings we should get the hell out of Afghanistan.

Trump is merely mimicking his presidential warmongers. Bush the Son had Afghanistan's mineral deposits mapped out in 2006. Obama had a Pentagon task force attempt to establish a mineral industry there in 2010. Corruption, unremitting violence and lack of infrastructure have frustrated all efforts to exploit the mineral treasure.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump's criminal mendacity in continuing a grisly, senseless war is transparent. He trumpets US Afghan mineral development is a 'win-win' for America; creating American jobs, boosting the Afghan economy and chipping away at China's near monopoly on garnering rare earth minerals. The war without end is in Trump's view, a nuisance to be accepted as the ticket to Afghan's vast, undeveloped wealth. Trump has a history of using criminal war for the riches it has given war mongers for centuries. He publicly lamented the US leaving Iraq before grabbing its oil, telling CIA employees, "The old expression 'To the victor belong the spoils'. You remember?"

The man is sick...but so is our country when it comes to bringing war to this troubled world.