THE media seem so shocked by the predictable failure of the Afghanistan occupation that they are doing their best to avoid reporting how it happened.

The Afghan government and army completely collapsed in the face of the Taliban, but the British press don’t want to examine how this house of cards was built — and instead blame everything on the final breath of wind that knocked it down.

I was struck by the self-delusion of “serious” media when listening to Radio 4 this week.

It had General Jack Keane on as its unquestioned expert on Afghanistan.

Keane told them the US “did accomplish its mission in Afghanistan for 20 years” until Joe Biden had ruined it all with the “most serious foreign policy and national security blunders the US has made in maybe 40 or 50 years.”

Keane assured Radio 4 that Biden could have maintained troops and CIA bases in Afghanistan and said of the withdrawal: “I’m ashamed of it, I think it’s a fundamental betrayal and a stain on America’s national honour.”

That’s pretty strong stuff. The BBC did not question Keane as to how the US could keep bases in Afghanistan without further fighting, or if there had been any problems in the occupation, which was kept in place with a war that killed 241,000 people, including around 6,000 US troops and contractors.

The BBC was strongly trusting Keane’s judgement and not asking him very obvious questions.

So — who is he? The Today programme introduced him as “a former vice-chief of staff of the United States army.”

But Keane actually left the army in 2003, so that’s old news.

Keane is currently the chairman of AM General, a job he accepted in 2016.

AM General is the Indiana-based company that makes the Humvee — the military truck which has been one of the core vehicles in the Afghan and Iraq occupations: in 2017 AM General got a $417 million contract to supply more Humvees for Afghanistan.

It’s hardly a surprise he is keen on US military bases in hostile territory — it’s how his company makes its money.

Aside from running the Humvee firm, General Jack is a military commentator on Rupert Murdoch’s war-happy Fox News.

He was a military adviser to George Bush in 2007, during the Iraq occupation.

Had the Today programme told its listeners that the guy saying Biden was wrong and the US could have stayed in Afghanistan was a former Bush adviser who now ran the Humvee firm, they would have taken him a lot less seriously.

But like much of the media, Today doesn’t want basic facts to get in the way of its public grief and anger about the exposure of US and British national weakness — because that’s what’s really upsetting them, not the deaths of Afghans.

It’s not like you have to dig deep into the history of the conflict: what happened at the end followed the pattern of the occupation.

As the Taliban marched into Kabul, the US boasted about its “self-defence” drone strike against another terrorist group, “eliminating an imminent Isis-K threat.”

Within a day it turned out the US drone attack on a car in Kabul actually  killed a family of 10, including seven children and one former translator for US forces.

Meanwhile the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, fled Kabul before the Taliban arrived, driving to Uzbekistan with four cars allegedly stuffed with millions of dollars.

That’s the occupation in a nutshell: it was kept in place by military attacks, through drone strikes, bombing and “night raids” that turned the population against the occupiers.

The supposed “democracy” meant hiring corrupt warlords to pretend to be a government. The Afghan army was a puppet army serving a puppet government. Once the strings were cut, both collapsed.

The US poured $2 trillion into Afghanistan, but most Afghans stayed poor as much  of this cash just flowed out again to Western contractors or corrupt officials.

A minority of Afghans were able to eke out a better life under the occupation, but they were mostly betrayed and left behind when the US left. That’s how imperial occupations treat their loyal subjects.

None of this is secret, but Western media are determined not to learn — or even to unlearn — the lessons of Afghanistan, because they are shocked by what one Labour MP called an “absolutely humiliating situation.”

The shock is the national humiliation, the revelation that Britain can’t fight the Taliban and depended entirely on the US, which can’t face the losing battle either.

This is not about Afghans — it’s about pundits and MPs realising the big national power they thought made them important wasn’t one.

The issue they consistently raise about Afghanistan is the education of Afghan girls: while there has been some progress here, it is wildly overstated.

According to the UN, on average Afghan schoolgirls get 1.9 years of education — less than half the level in neighbouring Pakistan. In reality this means most Afghan girls get no education.

Human Rights Watch estimated two-thirds of girls didn’t go to school in 2017 and the situation was getting worse.

School investment, like everything else in Afghanistan, became a way for money to reach warlords and Western contractors.  

I don’t know how many deaths can be used to judge this a success, but it was certainly not sustainable: British troops largely withdrew from Afghanistan in 2014, because too many were being killed. 

US casualties only dropped in recent years because they were ceding territory and signing deals with the Taliban.

The Taliban are a reactionary, nationalist force, their rule of the country will be harsh — but instead of complaining about “national humiliation,” the liberal media and MPs might want to reflect on why their massively funded occupation was so unpopular that it could not resist them.

They generally avoid looking into this, preferring to pretend the guy who runs the Humvee business is an independent voice making a judgement that the final withdrawal, ugly as it is, was not inevitable.