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America Is Out of Ideas in Afghanistan



President Donald Trump proved one thing beyond the shadow of a doubt in his Afghanistan strategy speech Monday night: After nearly 16 years of fighting America’s longest war, there are no new ideas. He called his plan “dramatically different.” It wasn’t. The only thing that seemed a striking change from his two presidential predecessors’ approach to the war launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was Trump’s escalatory rhetoric. He repeatedly vowed to “win” a conflict that his Defense Secretary James Mattis told Congress recently “we are not winning” and sharply criticized Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan, a troublesome ally Trump excoriated for offering “safe haven” to terrorists.

But beyond the scathing language and an open-ended pledge to “fight to win,” Trump offered few details about a plan that administration sources have said involves the sending of a few thousand more troops to Afghanistan.
The Pentagon deems such a move necessary to avoid the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul but it would hardly be a force capable of dramatically changing facts on the ground a few years after a surge to some 100,000 American troops at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency failed to do so.






On 7 October 2001, the US launched Operation Enduring Freedom with a bombing campaign that began at 12:30 pm EDT. A chart for this event at Washington DC can be used for the war in Afghanistan. Notice that the horizon axis is aligned with the Saturn-Pluto opposition. This combination has been associated by several astrologers to the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing and the war that followed primarily because in the US Sibly, the opposition was aligned with the Ascendant-Descendant axis. Fast forward 16 years and we now have Neptune squaring the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2001. Neptune is linked to failures arising out of confusion, loss of vitality or weakening of effort.


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