This has been one fearsomely vertically-integrated military engagement. As Quincy Institute senior adviser Eli Clifton pointed out, “The weapons biz also had ties to 2/3rds of the Afghanistan Study Group, currently being cited by The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal editorial boards as offering an alternative to Biden’s withdrawal.” Dig into, if you will, this week’s Politico story about “Biden’s two tragic Afghanistan missteps,” which was “presented by” Lockheed Martin. So if it seems like this week the media has abandoned its pretensions of objectivity and neutrality to fervently plump the Forever Wars, you’re not wrong. It’s little wonder: The mainstream media is flush with ex-generals and Pentagon habitués, who took refuge in cable news green rooms during the war, where they enjoyed lucrative second careers as the war industry’s “ message force multipliers. But a significant portion of the teeth-gnashing is in fact emanating from those furious at the slaying of a sacred cash cow. There’s a lot of anger and angst in Washington over the Afghanistan withdrawal at the moment, as lawmakers of all stripes decry the treatment of those who have been left to face the Taliban no small amount of effort is being expended to get would-be refugees out of the country. Hardly any of this largesse was trickling down to the actual soldiers fighting the war, by the way. arms expenditure”-all on “ Donald the Dove’s ” watch. As Pacific Standard’s Catherine Lutz noted in 2017, “For many companies that have, for years, been cashing giant checks from the Pentagon’s trillion dollar war budget, there are still an extraordinary number of dollars to be made.” That same year, there was a “1.1 percent increase in global military spending,” driven in part by a “$9.6 billion hike in U.S. Just as the fossil fuels still buried underground represent future profits too dear for petrochemical companies to part with for the sake of saving the planet, the war in Afghanistan represented crucial future gains for Big War’s balance sheets. firms and individuals working in Afghanistan,” in which Afghans were, in many instances, straight-up defrauded. Christine Fair described the “bewildering corruption by U.S. As Harvard public policy professor Linda Bilmes told Marketplace this week, “the whole system was set up in a way to enable contractors to rip off the government.” And Foreign Policy’s C. As many have pointed out in recent days, the war in Afghanistan has been a colossal boom time for the military-industrial complex, mostly at the expense of the military operation’s ostensible goals. The Washington suburbs are far from the Vegas strip, but here, buildings adorned with the logos of military contractors are a monument to the timeless relationship between hustlers and marks.
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