On Tuesday, Trump Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a comprehensive review of the failed pullout campaign from the war in Afghanistan that occurred under former President Joe Biden.

The Biden administration plan infamously handed the entire nation to the Taliban overnight, put those troops and civilians who were on the ground in harm's way, and gave the Taliban access to U.S. military weaponry and equipment used to empower Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.

"On August 26, 2021, President Biden's administration led a chaotic withdrawal of U.S. military and embassy officials from Afghanistan that led to the deaths of 13 U.S. Service members and 170 civilians in a suicide bombing at the Kabul International Airport's Abbey Gate. President Trump and I have formally pledged full transparency for what transpired during our military withdrawal from Afghanistan," Hegseth wrote in a Pentagon memorandum.

"I have concluded that we need to conduct a comprehensive review to ensure that accountability for this event is met and that the complete picture is provided to the American people," Hegseth continued, adding that the review will include "findings of fact, sources, witnesses, and analyze the decision making that led to one of America's darkest and deadliest international moments."

The Trump administration is already getting results on achieving justice for the Gold Star families affected by terrorism caused by Biden's botched pullout. Trump officials recently apprehended Mohammad Sharifullah, the terrorist accused of plotting the Abbey Gate suicide bombing. The families of the service members killed in that attack have been in frequent contact with the Trump administration, as opposed to the Biden administration, which ignored them almost completely. 

An honest investigation into what happened during the Afghanistan pullout is essential for providing justice for these families. The Biden administration's investigation into the matter was predictably bogus, as the administration investigated itself and found nothing improper. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) was revealed as ignoring repeated instances of gunfire in the lead up to the attack and stonewalling key evidence from one of their principal investigators to clear the Biden administration from any malfeasance in their inability to prevent the attack.

The decision by Hegseth will be critical for achieving accountability regarding the failed pullout. The Pentagon must conduct a substantial investigation that address the big picture of what went wrong in Afghanistan. Focusing on the disastrous troop pullout will not be enough to restore sanity within the Pentagon. The larger issue is the entirety of the war effort, how it was doomed to fail from its earliest stages, and how U.S. Defense officials willingly lied to the people to protect the bureaucracy and defense contractors' profits. 

While the Trump/Russia collusion hoax was dominating headlines, an actual bombshell story was released to far lesser fanfare. A tranche of government documents regarding the Afghanistan war effort came to light and was released as the "Afghanistan Papers" by the Washington Post in 2019. These documents showed irrefutable evidence that top Pentagon officials deliberately lied to the public for years while knowing that the Afghanistan war was a doomed effort, lacking the courage to stand up to the military-industrial complex and sending countless more men to their needless deaths with their craven deceptions.

"Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible," said Army Colonel Bob Crowley, who worked as a senior counterinsurgency adviser in the military in 2013 and 2014. "Surveys, for instance, were unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right, and we became a self-licking ice cream cone."

The Afghanistan Papers also revealed that the U.S. government spent exorbitant sums of money, laundered through agencies like USAID, to promote corrupt puppet officials who would do the bidding of U.S. occupying forces, and how the U.S. invasion allowed the opium trade in Afghanistan to flourish. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate this week that for every dollar spent by USAID, only 12 cents of it went to the intended recipients.

"Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption," said Ryan Crocker, a leading U.S. diplomat in Kabul from 2011-12.  "Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it's between unbelievably hard and impossible to fix it."

"We stated that our goal is to establish a 'flourishing market economy,'" said Douglas Lute, who worked as the U.S. Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013. "I thought we should have specified a flourishing drug trade — this is the only part of the working market."

The goal of the Trump administration must be to expose the criminal nature of the Afghanistan war from its inception, which will likely implicate deep state officials connected to both Republican and Democratic administrations. Focusing only on Biden's failed troop withdrawal misses the forest for the trees and would allow complicit officials to get off the hook. The veil must be pulled back on the entire rotten system, or otherwise, history will continue repeating itself, and the War Party will continue its course of senseless death and destruction in the future.