From 2001 to 2015, the number of U.S. servicemen and women in Afghanistan exceeded 100,000, although four secretaries of defense (Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel) conceded privately that the war was not winnable and that no strategy would alter our glide path to defeat.  In 2019, the last soldier to die in Afghanistan from Ft. Carson in Colorado was Sgt. Maj. James G. Sartor, who was on his seventh combat deployment in Afghanistan.  All four of these secretaries presumably signed at least one deployment order for Sgt. Sartor, one of many victims of deceit as the Pentagon played  Russian Roulette with military lives.   More

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

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