Insider Afghan attacks should make US an outsider in Afghanistan

Two US soldiers were killed and 6 wounded yesterday in Afghanistan. The US is now on pace for about 40 deaths this year, up from 22 last year, which was the most since 2014. Yesterday’s deaths, like many previously, were not caused by our Taliban enemy. They died by Afghan soldiers who turn their guns on their US partners they increasingly see as their enemy. These attacks are euphemistically called ‘insider attacks’ by the US military. Over 3,500 US and allied soldiers have been killed since our illegal, immoral and senseless invasion of Afghanistan eighteen years and four months ago. We lost the war the day we invaded on October 7, 2001. No country, not England, not Soviet Russia, nor the world’s largest military United States can conquer and control Afghanistan. The Taliban and its insider allies within the Afghan military are inexorably pushing the US out.

Rather than acquiesce to the inevitable, the US desperately seeks a face saving exit. We’ve ramped up our slaughter of Afghans, mostly civilians, to give a veneer of victory to our inevitable exit. There is none. It’s called losing and rightly so as we never should have invaded two decades ago.

Some day a yet unidentified soldier will be the last to die in that utterly needless war. But before that day arrives, a lot of others who will not get his or her dubious recognition, wait in line to die for nothing.