Long goodbye to America's longest war

Few Americans are even aware its leaders are negotiating furiously with the Afghan Taliban to achieve a September 1 target date for an agreement to pull out America's remaining 14,000 troops, ending the longest and one of its stupidest wars.

What a waste. A trillion dollars of squandered treasure and tons of dead, wounded and displaced. US and allied deaths total 3,509. Many thousands of US and allied troops are damaged in body and mind. Afghan casualties dwarf America and its allies: 45,000 police and troops dead just in the last 5 years; 32,000 civilians dead in the last decade.

All this for nothing. Afghanistan is as poor and insurgent ridden as when we stated the slaughter in October, 2001. We knew immediately Saudi Arabia was the country most responsible for the 911 attacks but said "Wait, wait, we can't attack our best weapons customer". So we pivoted to Afghanistan, the first step on the road to Iraq, Syria and the big prize Iran. It wasn't about avenging 911. It was about using 911 to remake the Middle East in our image at the point of a smart bomb fired by idiots. Failure, failure, failure followed; yet we're still angling to take out that missing big prize Iran. As a famed movie character surmised: "Stupid is as stupid does".

Our puppet Afghan government in Kabul is so irrelevant they're not even in the negotiations. We know very well the Taliban, which already controls 64% of Afghanistan, will brush aside our puppet once the US strings animating them are cut.

Seventy-five years on we still honor the Longest Day. We'll never honor the Longest War.