A decision was made one fateful evening after school rather to do homework or watch YouTube in protest of my homework. The later was chosen, but instead of watching some mindless DIY video on how to organize my closet, “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” caught my attention and earned my six minutes of view time. The topic at hand on December 11 of last year was t

he on-going war in Afghanistan and how the American people were being lied to. Noah presents a news clip from CNN where retired Col. Cedric Leighton describes the cover up as a “rosy picture” and “is not the real picture on the ground”. In a clip from NBC News, retired General Douglas Lute is quoted saying in 2015, “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

Three minutes into the video and it feels like I’m watching a video about the Vietnam war in history class. Almost 45 years later, the government continues to hide information from the public and sacrificing the lives of proud Americans in an effort to accomplish a goal that has yet to be set. Beginning in 2001 (according to Council on Foreign Relations), after the 9/11 terrorist attacks President George W. Bush started the war on terrorism and headed straight for Afghanistan, even though none of the hijackers were from Afghanistan. Bush demanded that the Taliban hand over all the al-Qaeda leaders. With failure to comply began the longest war that America has ever been apart of.

Continuing with the video, now at four minutes, Noah uses sources such as FOX, CBS, and PBS News to expose the government for spending tax payers’ money on useless resources such as helicopters that are unable to be flown, soybean seeds in a country that is unable to grow soybeans nor eats them and, uniforms with camouflage that only covers about 2.1 percent of the country.

U.S. military officials, the last three presidents, and Congress have been falsifying the reports of the progress in Afghanistan for almost two decades. And with the possible war in Iran, America cannot afford to fight a country that sits right beside the one that we have been bombing for over a decade. Military spending consumes the most money of the national budget. On the one hand it is important to have a strong national security in case the worst happens, but at the same time, it is important when to know to fall back and focus on more important and president issues such as homelessness, drug addiction, and gun violence. What started out as a war to protect the citizens of the “Land of the Free” has become an aimless money dump.