US presidential candidate Barack Obama calls the tragedy in Afghanistan a ‘good war’, adding ‘we must win…there is no other option’. He has promised to send 10,000 extra troops to ‘finish the job in Afghanistan’. Far from winning, the imperialist occupation forces are stuck in quicksand and the more forces they throw in the more they will sink. Jim Craven reports.
A poll carried out by the Canadian Globe and Mail earlier this year showed that only 14% of Afghans wanted the occupying forces to leave the country immediately. However, more than half wanted them out within three to five years, 74% wanted negotiations with the Taliban and 54% would support a coalition government with the Taliban, indicating that a majority of the Afghan people does not see the war as Obama does; as a war to be won by the invaders. Furthermore, only a small minority of Afghans in the poll saw the Taliban as a united political force. The Globe and Mail concluded that, ‘The typical Taliban foot soldier … is not a global jihadist’… but a young man who has had someone he ‘knows or loves …killed by a bomb dropped from the sky’ and ‘fervently believes that expelling the foreigners will set things right in his troubled country’.
Sonali Kolhatkan of the Afghan Women’s Mission agrees with this characterisation of the resistance forces, saying, ‘Many (of the fighters that are called the Taliban) are just disgruntled Afghan citizens whose families and loved ones have been killed and/or tortured by US/NATO forces. In parts of the country with the heaviest concentrations of NATO troops Afghans are frequently rounded-up, detained, tortured, bombed or shot by foreign troops just as in Iraq’. (Counterpunch 20 August 2008). Kolhatkan maintains that the occupation forces are killing more civilians than the Taliban and ‘that a majority of Afghans now want the US and NATO to leave as soon as possible’.
Kolhatkan, whose organisation works in solidarity with the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan, says, ‘No matter where you go in Afghanistan, there is utter grinding poverty. People are very frustrated, particularly with the US puppet Hamid Karzai. Those areas controlled by warlords are ruled with an iron hand, where extreme interpretations of Sharia law rule the day, and women suffer rape and degradation’. However, she warns against ‘glorifying the resistance’, saying, ‘Where the Taliban are strong, girls’ schools are blown up, civilians killed in suicide bombings, and journalists, teachers and elected officials are harassed and murdered. The vast majority of Afghans are moderate Muslims who strongly disagree with the Taliban’s extremist ideology, but they have joined the struggle to bring an end to the occupation.’
The imperialist forces are intensifying their war in the face of advances by the Afghan resistance. Earlier this year the US sent 3,200 of its top marines to fight in the south-east region and moved an aircraft carrier group into the Gulf of Oman to support them. Now the US is set to increase its forces in Afghanistan by over a third by sending another two combat brigades of 12,000 men. The US ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ on the border with Pakistan and the NATO campaign in western Afghanistan will be merged under the command of US General David McKiernan. The British force, at more than 8,000, is already twice the size of that originally deployed to Helmand province in 2006. It will be supplemented by a further 4,000, if and when British troops can be withdrawn from Iraq. In the meantime, British special forces, serving as death squads, are planning to assassinate Afghan resistance leaders. The imperialists plan to double the size of the Afghan national army and spend $20 billion arming it over the next five years.
Pakistan threatened
While expanding their forces in Afghanistan the imperialists are openly extending the war into Pakistan. Both US presidential candidates, together with Hamid Karzai, support this escalation. In fact, the US and NATO have been attacking Pakistan for some time with unmanned drones and artillery. Many civilians have been massacred in these attacks. US special services also have bases just inside the Afghan border from which they carry out clandestine missions into Pakistan. For political reasons these are usually attributed to Pakistani forces.
This July, without seeking Pakistan’s authorisation, President Bush authorised cross-border attacks on Pakistan from Afghanistan. On 3 September US troops, accompanied by an AC-30 gunship, killed up to 20 civilians in the Pakistani village of Angoor Adda. The Pakistan Army registered its ‘strong objection’. Pakistani soldiers exchanged fire with US troops on 25 August when they said two US helicopters crossed into Pakistan. Pakistani army spokesperson General Abbas explained, ‘But after the [3 September] incident the orders are clear. In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire.’
The imperialists say that there are up to 80 training camps for resistance fighters inside the Pakistan border. North and South Waziristan are strongholds of the Pakistani Taliban and provide a base for the Afghan Taliban. Together they have between 20,000 and 30,000 fighters. The Bazaur agency in Pakistan is a base for the Afghan Hezb-e-Islami movement led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which provides the main resistance force fighting in the east of Afghanistan.
Although there are tens of thousands of Pakistani troops operating in the border region, the imperialists say the Pakistan government is not doing enough to root out the Taliban and blame it for making peace deals with local tribal leaders. They also claim that sections of the Pakistan army and the intelligence service (ISI) co-operate with the Taliban and that the ISI were responsible for the bomb attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul earlier this year. Andrew Cordesman of the Centre for International Strategic Studies stated, ‘Pakistan may officially be an ally, but much of its conduct has made it a major threat to US strategic interests … [The US] will have to treat Pakistani territory as a combat zone if Pakistan does not act … The Afghanistan-Pakistan war is a two-country war that cannot be won in Afghanistan alone … At this time US-NATO/ISAF-Afghan forces are too weak to deal with a multi-faceted insurgency with a de-facto sanctuary along the entire Afghan-Pakistan border … It seems likely that [the war] will play out over a decade or more.’ This carries echoes of the Vietnam war that the US extended into Cambodia.
US pressure on Pakistan
When Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani visited the US in July, President Bush demanded that Pakistan stop the border region being used as a safe haven for resistance fighters. In return he offered to persuade Pakistan’s President Musharraf to stand down. On 18 August Musharraf resigned. The following day General Ashfaq Kayani, head of the Pakistan military, flew to Kabul for talks with General McKiernan and General Bismillah Khan, Afghanistan’s chief of general staff. Later Bush phoned Gilani to insist on an intensification of the border campaign. The next day Pakistan forces launched a massive aerial and artillery bombardment together with helicopter gunships to gain control of the border crossing near Loyesan. Reports claimed that civilians were directly targeted and that there were hundreds of dead and wounded. Some 300,000 people had to flee their homes and whole villages were deserted.
Crisis grows for Pakistan
Such actions harden local opinion against the imperialists and those in the Pakistan government who help them. Polls in Pakistan indicate that 55% of the population blame the US for violence in the border region and 71% oppose Pakistani co-operation with the US in Afghanistan. Suicide bombings against Pakistani police and military targets now occur every two or three days.
The forced resignation of Musharraf was followed by the break up of the already tenuous coalition between Gilani’s Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League led by Nawraz Sharif. The ensuing struggle for power will create further openings for the pro-Afghan resistance forces in Pakistan and more problems for the imperialists.
The resistance forces’ strategy appears to be to establish areas of control and cut the supply routes of the imperialist forces, setting up their own corridor to the Pakistan border. They could then encircle key towns such as Kabul and Kandahar. NATO officials admitted they were witnessing the highest levels of violence across Afghanistan since the imperialist invasion in 2001. Attacks by the Afghan resistance were up by more than 50% overall on the same time last year and by 70% in the area around Kabul. The threat from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) was four times higher than in April.
NATO ‘treading water’
With the planned reinforcements the imperialist forces in Afghanistan would total around 80,000. But the US military’s own counter-insurgency manual calculates that a force of 400,000 would be needed to maintain control of the country. The Afghan national army at present has 70,000 members but they have little armour and no air power or medical support. Only two brigades and one headquarters are capable of operating on their own. No one expects the Afghan army to be capable of independent action for several years.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Sean Rayment described the NATO campaign as ‘treading water’. He cited one British officer’s summary of the prospects, ‘If the size of the force was increased to 200,000 troops, and the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan became the main foreign policy objective of every NATO country for the next three decades, and if the Taliban could be persuaded to give up their arms, then, in 30 years’ time Afghanistan might reach a level equivalent to Bangladesh – if we are lucky’.
As we reported in FRFI 202, most NATO countries are refusing to send extra forces to combat areas since they see nothing to be gained by helping the US without any prospect that they might benefit strategically or economically. Only France, pursuing a more pro-US policy under President Sarkozy than it did under Chirac, reluctantly agreed in April to send an extra 700 fighters to the east of Afghanistan. Even this deal was wrapped round in conditions and went very much against French public opinion. On 19 August, ten of these French troops were killed and 21 injured in an ambush at Surobi, 30 miles east of Kabul. It was the single biggest loss of life for French forces since the 1980s. Sarkozy rushed to Afghanistan and promised not to abandon the NATO mission but the incident will make it even more unlikely that NATO countries, other than the US and Britain, will commit more combat troops.
The decision to launch new offensives relying mainly on extra US and British troops was an attempt to settle the political challenges to US hegemony within NATO by ‘facts on the ground’. Should these initiatives fail it will be a major blow to US authority over its global rivals at a time when Russia is asserting its own power in Georgia and in the Middle East where it recently signed a weapons deal with Syria. Russia now plans to send a contingent of soldiers to train the Afghan police.
Civilian deaths rise
In August, General McKiernan said, ‘There is no magic number of soldiers needed on the ground to win this campaign. What we need is security of the people. We need governance, reconstruction and development, then we shall see results’. The rate at which Afghan civilians are being killed continues to rise. More than 260 were killed in July, the worst month for six years, bringing the total for the year to around 1,000. Given the imperialists’ refusal to admit civilian casualties, the true total is likely to be much higher.
Many of the civilian deaths have been caused by the increased reliance on air power by imperialist forces. The US and British attempt to solve problems by technology – weapons, weapons of increasingly destructive power. Air strikes are up 40% on last year. On 22 August, 90 people, including 60 children, were killed in an air attack on Azizabad in Herat. They were attending a religious ceremony at the time. As usual the imperialists claimed at first that 30 Taliban had been killed. When the truth emerged, Karzai sacked the Afghan military commander in West Afghanistan and the commander of the Afghan commando unit that had called in the US strike. Such incidents are rapidly strengthening Afghan public opinion against the occupation. Ghulan Azrat, the school head teacher in Azizabad told western journalists, ‘We don’t need your food. We don’t need your clothes. We want our children. We want our relatives. Can you give it to us? You cannot, so go away’. When resistance fighters attacked a US base near the Pakistan border, local people are said to have joined the attack in outrage at a nearby air strike in July that killed 22 civilians.
McKiernan’s hopes of governance and reconstruction are as distant as security for the people. 80% of the Afghan parliament are corrupt northern warlords and/or drug barons in league with the imperialists. President Karzai’s own brother is said to be among the dealers. There are claims that the imperialist forces themselves are involved in the drugs trade. Most of the money supposedly provided for aid and reconstruction in Afghanistan has been stolen by the warlords.
President Karzai recently pardoned three men convicted of rape. The men worked for Mawlawi Islam, a warlord who had been a Taliban governor in the 1990s and became an Afghan MP in 2005. Malalai Joya, a woman MP, has been physically attacked, threatened with rape and suspended from the Afghan parliament for describing the ‘war on terror’ as a mockery and calling for the warlords to be tried. Another MP, Mir Ahmed Jayenda, stated the police and courts were under the sway of the warlords, claiming ‘Karzai, the Americans, the British sit down with them. They have impunity … and can do whatever crimes they like.’ Resentment of the US and NATO occupation forces, their Karzai government and the warlords will increase and ensure that the guerrilla resistance is sustained and grows. Get British and all NATO troops out of Afghanistan now!
FRFI 205 October / November 2008
