Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Pentagon Says It Only Left Behind $7,000,000,000 in Equipment to Terrorists By Daniel Greenfield
Sunday, May 01, 2022
Taliban Heliopter
Robert Spencer : Some arguments are not really worth having. The debate over how much
American military equipment had been left behind in Afghanistan is one
of those. The real answer is that we donāt know and by āweā, I donāt
just mean us, but the White House and the Pentagon donāt really know.
The sheer amount of corruption in the entire system means that anything
we gave the Afghans risked being sold. Equipment and material were
reported as destroyed that were actually sold. And so itās all but
impossible to know anything for sure except that we left too much
behind.
The right amount of equipment to leave behind for the Taliban was zero. The Pentagon claims that it was only $7 billion.
Approximately $7 billion of
military equipment the US transferred to the Afghan government over the
course of 16 years was left behind in Afghanistan after the US completed
its withdrawal from the country in August, according to a
congressionally mandated report from the US Department of Defense viewed
by CNN.
This equipment is now in a country that is controlled by
the very enemy the US was trying to drive out over the past two decades:
the Taliban. The Defense Department has no plans to return to
Afghanistan to āretrieve or destroyā the equipment, reads the report,
which has been provided to Congress.
The US gave a total of $18.6
billion of equipment to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces
(ANDSF) from 2005 to August 2021, according to the report. Of that
total, equipment worth $7.12 billion remained in Afghanistan after the
US withdrawal was completed on August 30, 2021. It included aircraft,
air-to-ground munitions, military vehicles, weapons, communications
equipment and other materials, according to the DoD report.
Weāve seen varied estimates that are all over the map. Most of those
begin with either a maximum total of all the money we spent on providing
weapons to Afghan forces (a number no one knows because government
accounting is also all but impossible to fully tabulate) or attempts at
minimizing it by government officials.
But what we do know is that the correct number should have been zero. Everything else is a matter of details.
