By Debra Sweet

As of today, the U.S. military has ended its formal presence on the ground in Afghanistan, not before killing a family of 10, including children, in Kabul in a drone strike on a car, which the US claims was filled with explosives intended for the airport. Family members say the car was driven by a man who has worked for a US-based non-profit for years, with no connection to ISIS, and that there was no secondary blast indicating explosives in the car. See interview with Danish-Afghan journalist Nagieb Khaja who calls for investigation into the matter. It is unclear whether the car was collateral damage, or was a primary target.

This has been the 20 year story of the US in Afghanistan. So many civilians killed at the hands of the U.S., the Taliban and other Islamist fundamentalists, that it's impossible to know. BUT you'd never know that from the U.S. government and major media who have focused singularly on "American" deaths. From revcom.us:

When ISIS set off its barbarous suicide bomb near the Afghan airport, the U.S. media didn’t make the main story about the scores of Afghans killed, but about the U.S. soldiers—and especially the one who left behind a pregnant widow.

They are trying to play you, to program you to think only or at least first and foremost about American lives. You wouldn’t know from the headlines and pictures of the U.S. soldiers who died that are splashed across the front pages that while 2,400 U.S. troops have died in the American invasion of and war against Afghanistan, at least 240,000 Afghans, and perhaps more, have been killed.¹ In other words, in the past 20 years of war, at least 100 times as many Afghans have died as Americans. And underneath that, even more, is the larger message they are pushing: their fiction that “America is a force for good in the world,” with its “noble troops” willing to lay down their lives to “help others.”

The Biden administration, the fourth grappling with U.S. defeat on the ground in Afghanistan, is funding $10 billion in "over the horizon" strike capability for Afghanistan and the region, shifting to air war to enforce US global domination. Marjorie Cohn reminds us: As Biden Threatens More War, Don’t Forget the Afghanistan Invasion Was Illegal.

Sam Goldman interviews Matthew Hoh for the RefuseFascism podcast. A former Marine and also former State Department official, he served in and then was the first to resign over the unjust war in Afghanistan all the way back in 2009.
>> Afghanistan & the End of an Unjust War.

Matthew Hoh: "What’s occurring is, I think the inevitable consequence of the US policy in Afghanistan, not just in the last 20 years, but over the last 40 years… Going into Afghanistan was not about protecting the American people, it was about preserving the dignity of the American Empire. It was about making sure no one else would rise up against the American Empire. It was about protecting the credibility of the American Empire… The level of devastation for the Afghan people is unimaginable. The suffering is unimaginable… You don’t think a catastrophe can get much worse, and then you see what has occurred..."

Listen here and/or read the transcript.

"...The tragedy of these last days suffered by the people of Afghanistan and the families of 13 U.S. soldiers should not be exploited as a call for more war. We oppose any threat of further attacks on Afghanistan, “over the horizon” or by troops on the ground. Over the past 20 years, fficial counts indicate that more than 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zones and the actual number is likely many times more. This has to stop. We demand all U.S. threats and aggression cease."