The 'Anonymous Sources' Are Engaged in a Monumental Ass-Covering Campaign on Afghanistan

 
US soldier in Afghanistan. (photo: Hoshang Hashimi/Getty)

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

19 August 21

readersupportednews.org

Almost everything you’re reading on this topic in elite publications is an effort by somebody somewhere to duck out of their responsibility for 20 years of fantasy and illusion and outright lies.

here are a number of stories in your major news outlets on the subject of “the blame game” playing out within the administration as regards Afghanistan. There is no winning side to this game because everybody involved got Afghanistan wrong through ignorance, malice, or venality. 

The only one who got it right was the president. 

And the more stories I read from anonymous sources at the Pentagon or in what is laughingly called the intelligence “community,” the more I think that what’s driving this heated C-Y-A effort is that the president called bullshit on what everybody was telling him and acted on what was right there before his eyes. He pulled the emergency brake on the damn gravy train.

Believe this. Almost everything you’re reading on this topic in elite publications is an effort by somebody somewhere to duck out of their responsibility for 20 years of fantasy and illusion and outright lies. Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post called all of them out when he printed the so-called “Afghanistan Papers.” Anything that is attributed to the various anonymous sources that is in any way contradicted by Whitlock’s work is simply not to be trusted.

I caution regulars here at the shebeen to read any of the stories on this theme with a small bucket of salt handy. Almost all of them are vehicles for bureaucratic ass-covering, knife-fighting, and the manufacture of scarcely believable alibis. Lay over these the usual journalistic frosting of Dems In Disarray and a mysterious impulse to pull this president down to the level of the previous one for the love of a good horserace, and you get a three-layer fudge cake. 

Most of the country still believes the president did the right thing. A great many of the others are partisan hypocrites, outright liars, or undersecretaries of something who’d like to keep their jobs. Caveat lector, y’all.

2,443 Americans have lost their lives fighting in Afghanistan during the 20-year conflict.