The US didn't lose Afghanistan and it also did not lose Iraq. We love to pretend that America stumbles from one foreign policy disaster to the next like an intellectually disabled golem tripping over its own shoelaces. You probably believe this, right?
You simply do not understand what the American intelligence apparatus, or as I like to call it, the Praetorian1, actually is, do you? Perhaps you are of the position that it is mister Drumpf at his cabinets making decisions aorund a big table, the thing you see on Twitter, CNN, Fox, generals saluting him and senators hoorahing and the whole fancy theatrics of it all. Yet, the reality is the the United States intelligence community is comprised of 18 agencies with a combined budget2 exceeding a hundred billion dollars. Remember Snowden? He showed us 52.6 billion in 20133, that is just what the government admits to privately. The Pentagon's own budget exceeds 800 billion4. The State Dept., the institution designated to run foreign policy... gets 60 billion. Why are the people who are in charge outspent fifteen to one by the people taking orders?
In 1975 the Church Committee hearings5 documented CIA assassinations, coups, and mass domestic spying conducted without presidential knowledge. Iran Contra demonstrated6 t hat elements of the national security state could run an entire parallel foreign policy, selling arms to Iran and funneling proceeds to Nicaraguan rebels, all the while Reagan just sits there not remembering and not recalling, so Mister North took the fall. Yet, all of the policy objectives were achieved. Nobody went to jail. The system learned that it should do these things... more carefully.
They literally talk about this stuff in their own words!
September 15th 1970, President Nixon orders the CIA director at the time Richard Helms7 to prevent Allende from taking power in Chile. The CIA director's notes from that meeting now declassified read and quote "1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!; worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,000 available, more if necessary; full-time job—best men we have; game plan; make the economy scream."
Three years later, September 11th (lol) 1973, Pinochet's coup overthrows Allende8. On that very same day, Nixon, in a since declassified call to Kissinger says and quote "Well, our hand doesn't show on this one though." to which Kissinger replied, "We didn't do it. We helped them. [REDACTED] created the conditions as great as possible." Create the conditions, they didn't execute the coup, they created the conditions. This is their vocabulary, and thus their psychology. It is not us who pulls the trigger, rather we create the conditions in which the trigger gets pulled. You will see this pattern over and over.
In 1982 a former Israeli Foreign Ministry official named Oded Yinon9 published a paper called "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s in the journal Kivunim. It was later translated to English by Israel Shahak. Yinon's argument was, plainly, that Israel's' security depended on the complete fragmentation and destabilization of surrounding Muslim states along ethnic and sectarian lines. Break Iraq into Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish zones10. Fracture Syria along Alawite and Sunni and Druze lines. Let Lebanon tear itself apart. Wondering whether this was official public policy is besides the point, the framework maps onto what actually happened in the subsequent 40 years since with an accuracy that should make you think.
The 2003 US invasion an de-Baathification of Iraq11 fractured the country exactly along sectarian lines like Yinon described. To this day it has never fully reconstituted, this is not the same state that held its own against Iran during the Iraq-Iran War. In Libya, 2011 to present, Nato toppled Gaddafi12 in an opportune moment of weakness, ever since the state has been a failed state with competing governments for over a decade. Syria also 2011 to the present, civil war with fragmented zones controlled by a weak coalition of Sunni groups, Druze (being supported by Israel) and Kurds (being supported by the US), and then also Turkish based factions, plus whatever random cells of ISIS still remain. In Yemen 2014 to present, a Saudi led coalition armed and supported by the US13 devastated the countries infrastructure into being nearly a failed state in their war agains the Houthis.
In every single case, especially Syria, Iraq, and Libya, a state could have theoretically consolidated regional power but has now been shattered into anarchic ungovernable fragments. Do you really think this is policy failure?
In 1997 Brzezinski, Carter's natiuonal security advisor and Obama's foreign policy mentor, and one of the architects of the Afghan Mujahadeen operation that bled the Soviet Union to death and, ultimately, I don't think is a point of contention, led to her eventual collapse. He published a book called The Grand Chessboard14: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. This book is so central to American strategic thinking that a pdf of it is literally hosted on the CIA's own website
From the book, quote "For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia ... It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America." The idea he wrote, is to manage conflicts and relationships across the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Asia, so that no rival superpower or bloc arises. He called Central Asia the "Eurasian Balkans"" and described the region of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all sit as the zone of maximum and utmost strategic importance. He wrote all of this in 1997. Over the next three decades this strategy was executed, Afghanistan invaded, Libya destroyed, Syria fragmented, and now Iran. Every single country he identified as strategically critical to turn into a failed state has been turned into a failed state.
In 1953, the CIA and MI6 orchestrated Operation Ajax15, the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected PM because he nationalized Iran's oil industry. The declassified operational history describes in detail how CIA operatives funded newspapers to run propaganda discrediting him, staged false flag attacks attributed to communists to stoke fear, paid individuals to pose as pro-Shah protestors in the streets of Tehran and coordinated with sympathetic military officers to execute the final coup.
On February 28th 2026 nearly 73 years later, American and Israeli bombs fell on Iran16 again, this time without the pretense of democracy.
The US-Israel intelligence relationship is one and the same. The NSA's relationship with Israel's Unit 820017 involves raw intelligence sharing SHOWN BY SNOWDEN'S LEAKS to bypass the minimization procedures applied to EVERY SINGLE OTHER ALLY... even the 5 Eyes Nations. The join Stuxnet operation18 which was a cyberweapon deployed against Iranian nuclear facilities demonstrated operational integration so deep you basically cannot meaningfully separate American and Israeli strategic planning in the Middle East. They are one thing wearing two hats. Operation "Epic Fury" was a joint US-Israeli venture from the first minute. CENTCOM announced partner forces had begun airstrikes simultaneously with the Israeli's strikes that killed Khamenei. This is a beast with two heads.
You saw the greatest trick that America and Isreal play today. Israel struck the South Pars gas field19 which is the largest natural gas reserve on the planet, and Trump immediately posted that the US "knew nothing about this particular attack". He said "Israel acted alone". This is obviously, a lie. The United States has more intelligence integration with Israel than it has with the 5 Eyes. The NSA shares raw unminimized intelligence with Unit 8200, need I reiterate that point. American Satellite tech watches every square inch of Iranian soil in real time. American AWACs coordinate with Israeli sorties. American tankers refuel Israeli jets. The preposterous idea that Israel could launch strikes on the largest gas field on earth, in the middle of a joint war that they both started, without America knowing, is so fucking stupid that it insults the intelligence of everyone who hears it. Yet these lies are repeated because they work.
I call this the "Golem Strategy". In Jewish folklore a golem is a creature of clay20 animated by its master, but uncontrollable, rampaging every which way destroying the town while its creator says "I never meant for this to happen!" America plays the "Golem Master" and Israel plays the golem.
This dynamic duo has been running for decades, and it always works the same way. Israel does something completely fucking insane and escalatory, bombs a nuclear reactor, assasinates a scientist, levels a neighborhood, or strikes the largest gas field during active "deescalation negotiations" and America with a dramatic shock says, gasping, "We had no idea, we didn't know, we're very concerned about our rogue ally, we urge restraint". Meanwhile the intelligence between both hemispheres is flowing freely. This theater serves a critical function by positioning America as the reasonable party whom is willing to negotiation and who might just very well be willing to restrain the mad dog Israel... if you make the right concessions.
Nixon had a term for this, the "Madman Theory21" and he used it explicitly with the Soviets. Make them think I'm crazy enough to actually start a nuclear war and they'll give us whatever we want. The US-Israel version is far more elegant because it is distributed across two actors, you see? Every single negotiation in the Middle East for the last 50 years has operated under the implicit threat of "Make a deal with us now or we cannot guarantee what Israel will do, we want peace, we're trying to restrain them, but yknow how they are!"
Iran, Syria, Iraq, the Palestinians have all spent decades trying to figure out who the fuck is actually in charge. Is America controlling Israel? Is Israel controlling America? Is there a secret third hand? Who do you negotiate with? Who do you threaten? The nonsense is the point, the psychosis it induces, the paranoid pattern matching, the sense that you are always being manipulated (and you are indeed, always being manipulated in -some- way) but never quite fully sure exactly how and at how many layers of abstraction. This makes our enemies irrational, it makes them miscalculate, and it makes them waste insane amounts of energy trying to decipher the relationship and goals instead of countering the policy. Both heads of the beast are feasting.
What does the beast want?
It does not want a stable democratic secular Iran capable of projecting power across the Shia crescent22. It does not want a Pakistan capable of forming a nuclear-backed axis with China through the Belt and Road initiate. It does not want a Russia comfortably on its southern periphery. It absolutely, 100% does not want any of these country capable of coordinating against American-Israel hegemony in the Middle East.
Now, let me circle back to the original point. We are told that America lost Afghanistan. The withdrawal was a humiliation, the Taliban swept to power faster than anyone expected, and the intelligence community was caught with her pants down, embarrassing, shameful, a disaster. You saw the images right? Desperate civilians clinging to airplanes departing, bombings and chaos at the airport. This is the narrative. Afghanistan was a failure.
What did the failure produce?
The Taliban took power armed with approximately 7 billion in US military hardware23 by the DOW's own estimate. Black Hawk helis, armored vehicles, comm equipment, hundreds of thousands of American made weapons. The Taliban upon ascension immediately became the most heavily armed non-state turned state actor in the entire region. They are ideologically hostile to Iran (the Taliban killed Iranian diplomats and a journalist24 in 1998, nearly starting a war) and sit on their 921km eastern border.
Then we have Pakistan, which expected a compliant client state because the ISI had backed the Taliban for decades, yet instead they are getting a neighbor that harbors the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan25, its deadliest insurgent enemy in Pakistan's history, which CNN reported carry outr attacks almost entirely with American weapons left behind during the withdrawal. Over 1200 people killed in militant attacks across Pakistan in 2025, nearly double the figure from 2021. China's 62-65 billion dollar Belt and Road investments26 are looking a lot riskier, and now Russia's southern flank is destabilized through the Central Asian republics.
One act and one withdrawal and four major US adversaries destabalized simultaneously. "Created the conditions as great as possible", as Kissinger would say27.
But what about the Opium? For 20 years, American troops occupied Afghanistan while it produced over 80% of the world's opium supply28. The Taliban were earning an estimated 400 million a year from the poppy trade, the US-backed Afghan government's own forces were also neck deep in it. The corruption was so insane that SIGAR reports read like satire, go look them up. The United States spent 8.6 billion dollars on counternarcotics29 over 20 years and opium production SOARED. The poppies grew and the heroin flowed and the Sackler family made billions30 while pill pushers rotted American towns from the inside out and nobody in Washington seemed capable of stopping any of it. Isn't that odd? Isn't it a bit strange? The most powerful military in human history occupying a country for two decades with total air superiority and they couldn't stop farmers from growing flowers?
In 2022 when the Taliban took over, they banned poppy cultivation31. By 2023 a UN report showed that Afghan production had dropped by 95%32. The largest producing province, Helmand, went from 129k hectares to 740. Seemingly, the Taliban was able to accomplish what 20 years of American occupation and 8.6 billion dollars in funding for "counternarcotics" couldn't figure out.
By the time the Taliban banned poppies, America didn't need them anymore. The opioid crisis had already transitioned from prescription pills to heroin to synthetic fentanyl, which is primarily manufactured in labs in China and Mexico, not requiring a single poppy. The Sackler family has been sued into settlement and the pharmaceutical families have extracted their billions. The lawsuits were wrapping up and the poppy supply chain which had been protected for 20 years of occupation was no longer commercially necessary. Thus the Taliban armed with American weapons and American permission shut it down.
If a head strategist sat down and designed this outcome consciously, what would they have done differently?
You need to fundamentally understand how America wins her wars. Ronald Reagan was mocked as an "amiable dunce" in the words of Clark Clifford33. He was portrayed as a simpleton, a befuddled senile old actor who didn't really understand what was going on. Yet, behind that mask, his administration expanded the largest covert operation in CIA history, Operation Cyclone34, which funneled an estimated 630 million USD per year by 1987 to Afghan Mujahadeens fighting the Russians, bleeding them out, causing the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was all done whilst America was maintaining a posture of limited involvement. The Strategic Defense Initiative35 was dismissed as fantasy by every single serious American scientist, yet it didn't matter if it worked, by doubling down on it, it forced the Soviet Union into a ruinous arms race trying to counter a system that may never have been technically feasible, the naivety was the strategy.
When Iran Contra blew up36 and they found out NSC had been running a parallel foreign policy selling arms to Iran and funding Nicaraguan rebels the dominant narrative was incompetence, corruption, and confusion, not calculated strategy. All policy objectives were achieved. The public sees the dysfunction, the press reports failure, and the enemies at the gate get cocky.
Observe the timeline:
February 26: the Taliban announces "large-scale offensive operations" against Pakistani military positions along the Durand Line.
February 27: Pakistan's defense minister declares37 "open war" with Afghanistan. Airstrikes hit Kabul, Kandahar, Bagram.
February 28: the United States and Israel launch Operation Epic Fury against Iran. Khamenei is killed in the opening hours.
Pakistan is the only nuclear armed majority Muslim country. It has the most sophisticated military in the entire Islamic world, and it is the country most capable of complicating a US-Israel led invasion of Iran. Yet here they are fully occupied in an existential border war at the precise moment the Iran operation launched fighting mujahadeens with American weaponry. Even Sultan Ahmad Baheen, the former Afghan ambassador to China, stated publicly that Pakistan's strikes coincided with the Iran war to minimize international attention, the inverse of the truth.
The US had been building up her military assets in the Middle East since January, Trump announced the US armada heading to the reigion on Jan 23rd, admidst the very obviously CIA fueled protests all throughout the country, which got tens of thousands of people mercilessly slaughtered by the Iranian terror regime. The USS Gerald Ford was ordered out on Feb 13th. The operational planning for Le Epic Fury was months, years, decades, in the making. The intelligence community was -fully aware- of the Pakistan-Afghanistan escalation trajectory during this entire period. The condition was understood as useful, perhaps even necessary.
Now, a Pakistani might say, "But Pakistan is an American ally! Why would America destabilize her own ally? This is where you must stop being naive about what the word... "ally" means in the vocabulary of an Empire.
Yes, Pakistan, our "ally" that hid Osama bin LAden in a compound38 a mile from its premier military academy in Abbottabad. Pakistan was an "ally" whose ISI was funding and directing the very Taliban insurgents who were killing American soldiers! Pakistan is an "ally" that has repeatedly warned the United States against military action in Iran, not out of love for Iran, but because Pakistan is secular and big-tent minded enough to see the "Muslim world" as whole, beyond Shia this and Sunni that lens that US and Israel much prefer everyone to use. Pakistan has nukes. Pakistan has a major relationship with China through the belt and road that runs directly counter to American containment strategy wrt China. Pakistan, our "ally", has shown a degree of autonomy in its foreign policy that makes it unpredictable, which is to say, a liability and more dangerous than a predictable enemy.
As I write this today, 20 days into Operation Epic Bacon, more than 7800 US strikes on Iranian targets, more than 8000 aerial sorties, over 120 Iranian vessels destroyed. Israel is striking targets in the Caspian Sea. Israel just hit the South Pars gas field, as I said previously, the largest on Earth, and Iran retaliated by firing missiles at energy infrastructure across Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Oil is 115 a barrel. The Pentagon is requesting an additional 200 billion in funding. Three million Iranians are already said to have been displaced. Former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy said it all, like I've been saying, Israel's quote is to bring about quote "regime collapse and state collapse to implode Iran". Regime collapse and state collapse.
A few days ago, on March 15th 2026, the National Security Archive released newly declassified documents from December 2002, assesments prepared before the Iraq invasion showing that US intelligence analysts concluded that military intervention was unlikely to achieve regime change in Iran, even through Iraq. The analysts wrote that Khamenei and the existing cadre of radicals would likely survive any intervention, knowing this, the Bush admin invaded Iraq anyway. The documents suggest that Iran was amplified as a threat not because the US believed it could topple the regime through Iraq, but because Iraq itself was the strategic foothold, a permanent base of instability from which to contain the Mullah's influence.
Maybe you remain unconvinced, "But they said the goal was to create a functioning democracy, a stable partner like Japan, isn't that what we tried to do in Iraq and Libya?" Are you insane? When has the United States ever turned one of these countries into a functioning state, when Saddam was running Iraq it was a functioning state, yes a brutal one, but a functioning and brutal one, one that was trying to unite Arab oil power into a bloc that could negotiate with the West as equals. When Qaddafi was running Libya it was the most developed country in Africa, with free education, free healthcare39, and a longterm plan to create a gold-backed African-Arab petro currency that would have undercut the dollar's dominance.
These men were not destroyed because they were dictators, America loves friendly dictators, they were destroyed because they were competent adversarial dictators who were openly trying to consolidate regional power in ways that directly intended to oppose and threaten American hegemony. The goal was not Le Democracie, the goal was destruction, rubble, and factions fighting over the ruins. This is what happened. This is the plan for Iran.
One did not have to be a genius to know a war with Iran was -inevitable-. Anyone who was paying attention knew it simply as a fact, the only question was when. It was always going to be Iran because Iran was the last domino before the two giants, Russia and China. Iraq was first because it was the easiest to justify post 911. Libya was next because Qaddafi made himself vulnerable like a moron. Syria was destabilized by proxies and strategically funding and aiding both sides to create chaos and stalemates. Iran is the big one, it is the prize, the jewel of the Middle East.
Iran had to be last because she required the most preparation, it required Afghanistan to be handed over to the Taliban to destabilize Pakistan and put a hostile force on Iran's eastern border. It needed the 12 day war in June 202540 to degrade Iran's air defenses and gain critical intel. It required the Jan 2026 protests to "create the conditions" and weaken the regime internally. It required the phony nuclear negotiations in February as cover, as it always does, so the strike would come as a complete surprise while diplomats were still shaking hands in Switzerland. Every domino here had to fall in this sequence!
The purpose of a system is what it does. A system that consistently produces a particular outcome is a system designed to produce that outcome regardless of what its operators claim they intended.
The United States national security apparatus has, for 40 years, across administrations from both parties, across Republican and Democrat, neocon and liberal, interventionist and non, consistently produced fragmented warring states across the Middle East and Central Asia. The stated reasons change, but the output is the same. Weak states can NEVER project power, they cannot form coherent blocs, chaos demands attention and resources from every regional competitor. A perpetual war economy that justifies the perpetual expansion of the security apparatus itself. If a system consistently produces fragmentation then fragmentation is what the system is for. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Maybe you will still dismiss, you will call this conspiratorial, you will say I am connecting dots where there are none to connect. You will feel a.. comfortable certainty that your government, while imperfect, is not capable of this level of calculated misdirection, and you will continue living your life. I need you to please understand that this very reaction, this dismissal, the reflexive nose turning and looking away, is not your critical thinking protecting you. It is the propaganda working. You are not immune to it. Nobody is. You are NOT immune to propaganda. Manufacturing consent41 is not accomplished by teaching you what to think, that is a critical misunderstanding, it is accomplished by teaching you what to reflexively dismiss, by obscuring patterns until they become invisible, and ensuring the analytical framework you use to evaluate the machiavellian empires of history is never ever EVER the same one you use to evaluate your own.
Four months before Operation Epic Bacon, Tulsi Gabbard the US Diractor of Nat Intel stood at the Manama Dialogue security summit in Bahrain42 and announced, publicly, that America's former strategy of "regime change or nation building" had ended under Trump. She said this while knowing that Trump was deploying warships off Venezuela, ordering CIA covert operations against their government, and four months before launching the largest regime change operation since Iraq. The press reported her statements at face value, because that is how the system works. They tell you what they are not doing, while they are doing it.
When Russia does something you see it clearly, same for China, same for Iran. You see the state media, the manufactured pretexts, the strategic deceptions, the false flags, the intelligence operations disguised as accidents. You have no trouble identifying propaganda when it comes from them. Yet, suspiciously, when your own country does the same things, the same exact structural things, the same patterns, with the same "unexpected" outcomes, suddenly you become an empiricist, you demand absolute proof, correlation is no longer causation. Suddenly you become very sophisticated, very measured, very careful and very reluctant to draw wide overarching conclusions. This asymmetry in your analytical standards is the manufacture of consent! It requires no censorship, it requires that you be trained psychologically via the media & culture from birth to extend the benefit of the doubt to your own institutions and deny it to everyone else's.
America is a one party state with two parties. This is not a novel observation, everyone from Chomsky to Zizek has said it, but very few people truly appreciate the strategic genius of this arrangement and the reason it makes America nearly impervious to the very forces of destabilization that it deploys against her enemies.
When the Islamic Republic does something people hate, they hate the Islamic Republic. There is one face, one aesthetic, one ruling structure, and all of the rage and grievances land on that single face.. The regime absorbs the full force of popular anger for every policy foreign and domestic, that is the only head there is to hate. This is why single party states are so fragile, and why revolutions are so easy to provoke.
Consider America. America has two faces. The Democrats start a war and the Republicans hate the Democrats for it. The Republicans start a war and hate the Democrats for it. The rage is -always divided-. Half of the country is culpable for half the sins, so neither half accumulates enough anger to actually threaten the system itself. You hate the president, not the presidency. You hate the party, not the state. The wars continue across administrations, the anger resets every four years because there is always a new face to blame and a new face to find hope in, the valve opens, the steam escapes, and the machine keeps running.
At the end of the day, Iran, Russia, China, all move the way America moves, at least, as all empires do. They run intelligence ops, destabilize rivals, wage proxy wars, manufacture pretexts. America has learned a piece of technology that no other power on Earth has figured out, how to make your own population participate in the misdirection. Not through fear, nor censorship, but through the theater or controlled oppositional disagreement. The two party system is the most sophisticated propaganda technology ever devised to control a populace. It lets you wage permanent war abroad while maintaining permanent stability at home because the people are too busy squabbling over culture war nonsense to notice the actual foreign policy never changes no matter who wins.
Saddam had once face. Qaddafi had one face. Assad had one face. Khamenei had one face. Every country America has shattered was shattered in part because it lacked this valve. When the pressure built there was nowhere to go except through a bullet in their one face. America has two faces, and when the pressure builds it simply flows from one to the other, back and forth, forever.
The question is not whether American institutions are capable of this kind of misdirection. The Cold War proves they are, rather I believe the question is whether you are willing to apply the same analytical lens to events within living memory. The question whether you, dear reader, can look at the pattern and call it what it is.
The purpose of a system is what it does43. You are not immune to propaganda.
As a wise Englishman once said, "Let the whole word wag44"