In all three of the countries where the Obama administration declared US wars “over” in the past few years - Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya - the US military is expanding its presence or dropping bombs at an ever-increasing rate. And the government seems to be keeping the American public in the dark on the matter more than ever.  Pentagon leaders suggested this week that the US military wants to keep remaining 9,800 troops in Afghanistan from withdrawing in 2016, despite the fact that the Obama administration declared combat operations in the country “over” six months ago. The gradual extension of the Afghanistan War hasn’t been a secret to anyone who’s been paying close attention, but sadly it has happened far away from the pomp and circumstance of Obama’s now embarrassingly false State of the Union announcement that the Afghanistan War had ended.  Shortly after his January speech, the president signed a secret order that would keep the military fighting and killing in the region through 2015, then delayed any troop pull-out through 2016. Last month, the US was still dropping more than three bombs a day in Afghanistan. That’s a 260% increase over the month prior.  As the Council on Foreign Relation’s Micah Zenko remarked: “First it was al Qaeda, then the Taliban, now ISIS will be reason US military remains in Afghanistan.” There’s always going to be someone. What unnamed group will be holding our attention in 2020 when we still have troops fighting and dying there for nebulous reasons?  Away from the headlines, Libya continues to deteriorate since the US and NATO allies bombed the region and deposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. “Many parts of Libya, particularly in the east, have been converted into jihadist training camps, attracting fighters from Tunisia to Iraq,” the Daily Beast reported a few days ago.  As a result, the US military to desperately look to build another drone base near Libya that they can start launching regular drone strikes from - targeting both Libya and “elsewhere in North Africa.” This news comes around the same time as yet another retired US general, former director of the Pentagon’s intelligence unit Michael Flynn, indicated last week that drone strikes are actually creating more terrorists than they’re killing. Flynn’s comments echo the same point that has been made over and over by former generals and many other smart people recently, yet has evoked no change in policy or even public debate.  This potential expansion of the Isis war to a third country has all happened without congressional approval. Hardly anyone seems to care that we’re engaged in a generational war spanning multiple continents that we haven’t legally declared, almost a year after it was started.  Meanwhile in Syria, after months of delay, the first US-trained rebels finally entered the Isis-controlled regions and the process is already being accused of “mission creep” by defense experts, given its further entrenching US into the war there (again, without so much as a formal announcement by the government).  The rebels also come at an astronomical price-tag for the US of $4m for each rebel, and there is no indication that it will have any effect on the chaos that now engulfs Syria, besides potentially causing more of it. Zenko called the program “one of the more poorly conceived and implausible foreign policy schemes in modern history.”  The Obama administration and CIA knew full well that funding rebel armies in foreign countries almost always ends in disaster, yet did it anyways - and hid the conclusions of a CIA study saying as much from Congress along the way.  What’s troubling about all of this is that it is happening with little debate in Congress and almost no input from public. The US is ramping up its war efforts across the Middle East and now North Africa. They want to increase drone strikes, continue to spend billions to train Afghanistan and Iraqi troops, despite the fact that the last decade of “training” has been a disaster where whole armies have deserted and billions of dollars in US weapons are now in the hands of Isis. And of course, the specter of adding more US ground troops always lurks in the background.  There is growing realization from experts that we’re not going to be able to bomb our way out of this. Is there no one in charge in Washington who is willing to admit that doubling down yet again on military force is only going to keep making matters worse?
The US military has no intention of withdrawing the remaining 9,000 troops from Afghanistan after 2016. We’ve seen this mission creep before — in Iraq