Old Bonespurs Spits on Graves of European NATO Soldiers who gave Lives for US in Afghanistan

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In an interview with Fox “News” in Davos, Switzerland, President Donald J. Trump a.k.a. “Old Bonespurs” and “Five-time-Deferment,” smeared the European NATO soldiers who gave their lives in Afghanistan to defend the United States.

The president said,

“I’ve always said, ‘Will they be there, if we ever needed them?’ And that’s really the ultimate test. And I’m not sure of that. I know that we would have been there, or we would be there, but will they be there? We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that. And they did – they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in 1949, is pledged by Article 5 of its charter to consider an attack on one as an attack on all. Ironically, since the group was marshaled against the Soviet Union, Article 5 was never invoked during the Cold War, when US and Soviet nuclear capabilities led both powers to respect each others’ sphere of influence. The Soviets invaded their own satellites in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, to which NATO did not react with force, but they never marched into a NATO country.

It was the 9/11 attacks that caused NATO member states to swing into action, invoking Article 5 for the first time.

We can argue about whether that reaction was a good thing. French President Jacques Chirac attempted to convince George W. Bush not to frame 9/11 as a military attack but as an act of criminality. We would have been better off if Bush had listened. Al-Qaeda was a small organization with a few thousand members, and while it had cells in many countries, most of them were tiny. These operatives were more like outlaws or pirates than they were like enemy soldiers of an organized army.

Bush’s “Global War on Terror” or GWOT scooped up Iraq and Afghanistan into a Napoleonic campaign to change the face of the Middle East. The Baath government of Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, had nothing to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda, and in fact put out an all points bulletin for the arrest of the only al-Qaeda member known to have infiltrated into Iraq, linking him to the “Saudi terrorist Usamah Bin Laden.” The Taliban leaders likely did not know that al-Qaeda, foreigners in Afghanistan, were planning to hit the United States.

However unwise and costly it was in blood and treasure, Bush went to war. He did not in fact substantially change the governance of the Middle East toward democratization. That pretext was in any case an afterthought.

In Afghanistan, the US waged a twenty-year war that it lost. It did not wage the war alone. NATO explains:

NATO Allies went into Afghanistan in 2001. From August 2003, NATO led the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which aimed to create the conditions whereby the Afghan government could exercise its authority throughout the country and build the capacity of the Afghan national security forces, including in the fight against international terrorism. ISAF was completed in December 2014 when the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces assumed full responsibility for security across their country.

In January 2015, NATO launched the Resolute Support Mission (RSM) to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces and institutions to fight terrorism and secure their country. Following the completion of the withdrawal of all RSM forces in August 2021, the Mission was terminated in early September 2021.

“ISAF Commander U.S. Marine Gen. Joseph H. Dunford and RC-North Commander German Army Maj. Gen. Jorg Vollmer, visit the Afghan National Army Engineers School at Camp Shaheen in Mazar-e Sharif March 18, 2013.” Public Domain. Via Picryl.

The number of NATO troops killed in Afghanistan was 3,486.

2,461 of them were US service personnel.

457 British troops were killed.

165 Canadian troops were killed.

Here is a chart of coalition killed in Afghanistan (including non-NATO allies):

USA      2461
UK      457
Canada      159
France      90
Germany      62
Italy      53
Poland      44
Denmark      43
Australia      41
Spain      35*
Georgia      32
Romania      27
Netherlands      25
Turkey      15
Czech Republic      14
New Zealand      10
Norway      10
Estonia      9
Hungary      7
Sweden      5
Latvia      4
Slovakia      3
Finland      2
Jordan      2
Portugal      2
South Korea      2
Albania      2
Belgium      1
Bulgaria      1
Croatia      1
Lithuania      1
Montenegro      1
Total      3621

The British, with 457 men killed, are so furious that even the nondescript Keir Starmer grew enough of a spine to protest mildly. That is more than he ever did for the tens of thousands killed in Gaza.

But there are lots of ways to look at the numbers. Denmark only has 6 million people, so its 43 dead make its sacrifice greater per capita than any country other than the United States.

The Danish are doubly aggrieved, since the slur comes atop Trump’s attempt to muscle his way into Danish Greenland. AP quotes Danish Platoon Commander Martin Tamm Andersen, who fought in Afghanistan and lost men there, as saying, “It feels surreal. It feels like it’s a bad joke somehow,” Andersen said. “I mean, you can’t really fathom that this is actually something that is being said out loud. It just seems too crazy.”

If it seems that way, it is because it is.