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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