aNewDomain — Three hundred twenty-one days after the United States formally announced the end of its war against Afghanistan, President Obama announced that the war would be “prolonged” until at least 2017.
The announcement follows the November 2013 announcement that thousands of American troops would remain in Afghanistan until at least 2024.
“U.S. troops and their NATO allies in Afghanistan have formally ended what became America’s longest war, furling their flag 13 years after a 2001 invasion to topple the country’s Taliban regime in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” NPR reported on December 28, 2014. “Afghans have mixed feelings about the departure of foreign troops,” said the network.
But then, on October 15, 2015, The New York Times reported:
President Obama halted the withdrawal of American military forces from Afghanistan on Thursday, announcing that the United States will keep thousands of troops in the country through the end of his term in 2017 and indefinitely prolonging the American role in a war that has already lasted 14 years.”
This naturally prompts the question: How is it possible to keep troops in a place after they have already left?
It also prompts that question’s corollary: How can one “prolong” a war that has already ended?
Answering the corollary first: Isn’t this technically the Second American Afghanistan War? Or Afghan War II?
Yet the question remains — and it raises serious scientific questions about issues of time and space.
According to official corporate media sources, which are permanent records and are never wrong, thousands of patriotic American soldiers were unaccounted for over 321 days. Where are the cries for a Congressional investigation?
President Jimmy Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid in large part because he lost 52 diplomats to Iranian hostage takers. Yet everyone knew where they were: Tehran.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton currently faces a Congressional inquiry over the deaths of four American consular staffers in Benghazi, Libya. Tragic, true.
But only four.
In Afghanistan, meanwhile, tens of thousands of American soldiers were missing from early winter through mid-fall.
Where were they?
Were these tens of thousands of missing soldiers, like Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, AWOL, possibly PTSD and definitely FUBAR — i.e., hanging out with the Haqqani Network, close allies of the Taliban with links to Al Qaeda?
If so, they are all traitors — and must then be court martialed and placed in the brig alongside Pfc. Chelsea Manning, who at least wasn’t missing or cold-chilling with the enemy when she leaked footage of U.S. helicopter gunships mowing down Iraqi civilians.
Or was physics the culprit? Did a quantum singularity associated with a wormhole open up near Bagram Airbase north of Kabul, Afghanistan, whisking tens of thousands of clueless soldiers into another galaxy or dimension? Given the history of avant garde Soviet scientific experimentation in Central Asia, any careful investigation of the missing troops during those crucial 321 days must include possible explanations involving theoretical physics.
Adding to the bizarre mass disappearance is the 2013 agreement stating that U.S. troops would remain until 2024, followed as it was by the ceremony marking the end of the war in late 2014.
Were those a different set of U.S. troops — like Spock with a beard, denizens of an alternate reality in the multiverse?
As American citizens and students of reality, we deserve a thorough independent investigation, followed by a classified report made available to select senators in a locked room in which note taking was not permitted.
For aNewDomain, I’m Ted Rall.
Cover image: TheHeralding.com, All Rights Reserved.
