The US military, private security contractors, and arms manufacturers fed at what became a bottomless trough - and in the process were ever more deeply invested in maintaining the fiction of a winnable war. An endless, futile occupation with no clear objective swelled their budgets and ensured the military-industrial complex grew ever richer and more powerful.
Every indication is that the same war-industry juggernaut will simply change course now, playing up threats from China, Iran and Russia, to justify the continuation of budget increases that would otherwise be under threat.
Missing in actionThe motive for US officials and corporations to conspire in the grand deception is clear. But what about the mainstream media, the self-declared "fourth estate" and the public's supposed watchdog on abuses of state power? Why were they missing in action all this time?
It is not as though they did not have the information needed to expose the Pentagon's lies in Afghanistan, had they cared to. The clues were there, and even reported occasionally. But the media failed to sustain attention.
As far back as 2009, as the US was preparing a pointless surge of troops to tackle the Taliban, Karl Eikenberry, then ambassador to Afghanistan, sent a cable to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that was leaked to the New York Times. He wrote that additional US forces would only "delay the day when Afghans will take over". A decade later, the Washington Post published secret documents it called the Afghan Papers that highlighted the Pentagon's systematic deceptions and lying. The subtitle was "At war with the truth".
Bob Crowley, an army colonel who had advised US military commanders in Afghanistan, observed: "Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible." The Post concluded that the US government had made every effort to "deliberately mislead the public".
John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction appointed by Congress in 2012, had long detailed the waste and corruption in Afghanistan and the dismal state of the Afghan forces. But these reports were ignored or quickly disappeared without trace, leaving the Pentagon free to peddle yet more lies.
Cheerleading, not scrutinisingIn the summer, as he issued yet another report, Sopko made scathing comments about claims that lessons would be learnt: "Don't believe what you're told by the generals or the ambassadors or people in the administration saying we're never going to do this again. That's exactly what we said after Vietnam " Lo and behold, we did Iraq. And we did Afghanistan. We will do this again."
A good part of the reason the Pentagon can keep recycling its lies is because neither Congress or the media is holding it to account.
The US media have performed no better. In fact, they have had their own incentives to cheerlead rather than scrutinise recent wars. Not least, they benefit from the drama of war, as more viewers tune in, allowing them to hike their advertising rates.
The handful of companies that run the biggest TV channels, newspapers and websites in the US are also part of a network of transnational corporations whose relentless economic growth has been spurred on by the "war on terror" and the channelling of trillions of dollars from the public purse into corporate hands.
The cosy ties between the US media and the military are evident too in the endless parade of former Pentagon officials and retired generals who sit in TV studios commenting as "independent experts" and analysts on US wars. Their failures in Iraq, Libya and Syria have not apparently dented their credibility.
That rotten system was proudly on display again this week as the media uncritically shared the assessments of David Petraeus, the former US commander in Afghanistan. Although Petraeus shares an outsize chunk of responsibility for the past two decades of military failure and Pentagon deception, he called for the "might of the US military" to be restored for a final push against the Taliban.
Were it still possible to hold US officials to account, the Taliban's surge over the past few days would have silenced Petraeus and brought Washington's huge war scam crashing down.
Instead, the war industries will not even need to take a pause and regroup. They will carry on regardless, growing and prospering as though their defeat at the hands of the Taliban signifies nothing at all.
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