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The focus was shifted to 2014, which NATO designated as the
year in which Afghan puppet security forces could be entrusted
with the suppression of resistance nationwide. More candid
statements from NATO allies and military commanders, however,
intimated that the real expectation is for the war and
occupation to continue for another decade or more.
Nonetheless, it was extraordinary that Admiral Michael Mullen,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted this week
that the military has yet to even make a recommendation as to
how many of the nearly 100,000 US troops deployed in
Afghanistan will be pulled out next month.
General David Petraeus, the senior US commander in
Afghanistan, has not, as of this week, provided the
administration with any proposal. Ostensibly, Petraeus’s
recommendation would be the first step in a process that would
involve discussion within the administration and a final
decision by Obama.
It seems clear that any withdrawal will be of a minimal and
largely symbolic character. Petraeus himself has joined the
top British commander in Afghanistan and the secretary-general
of NATO in warning against any precipitous drawdown of troops.
In an interview with USA Today earlier this week, the
US commander stressed that any withdrawal would be
“responsible” and “at a pace determined by conditions on the
ground.”
Having named Petraeus, a political general, as his new
director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Obama is hardly
likely to overrule his recommendation.
Petraeus, who invariably describes purported progress in
Afghanistan as “fragile and reversible,” issued a memorandum
to his subordinates in mid-May declaring that the nearly
decade-old war had reached a “pivotal moment.”
The nature of this “moment” has been brought sharply into
focus by the events of the past week.
First, there was Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s public
denunciation last Tuesday of the slaughter of civilians in US
military operations. While Karzai has made similar
condemnations in the past, this time he issued an order -
promptly rejected by US-NATO spokesmen - for a halt to air
strikes and night raids by special forces against Afghan
homes. And he warned that if such actions continued, the
US-led forces would seen as occupiers, adding that history
showed “how Afghanistan deals with occupiers.”
This invocation of armed resistance by a puppet president
installed by the US military nearly a decade ago and utterly
dependent upon foreign troops for his survival is a pale
reflection of the mass popular hostility to the American-led
occupation.
This has been fueled by a series of bloody massacres of
Afghan men, women and children. Two airstrikes a week ago
claimed the lives of at least 126 Afghans. In Nuristan, 22
policemen and 20 civilians died in an attack on alleged
Taliban insurgents, 70 of whom were reportedly killed as well.
In Helmand, 14 civilians lost their lives in the US bombing of
two homes. The dead included two women and 10 children. Images
of Afghan villagers carrying the broken bodies of children as
young as two triggered widespread outrage.
These attacks followed the killing of civilians last month
in special forces night raids carried out in southeastern
Khost and northern Takhar provinces. The latter incident, in
which four members of one family were slaughtered, provoked a
mass demonstration in which another 12 Afghans were shot to
death and scores wounded. Such outbursts of popular anger are
becoming ever larger and more frequent.
Meanwhile, a series of attacks attributed to the Taliban
have called into question the US strategy for the gradual
“Afghanization” of the nearly 10-year-old war. Last Monday,
armed fighters attempted to storm the main NATO base in the
western city of Herat, using a car bomb to blast a hole in the
compound’s wall and waging a pitched battle with Italian and
Afghan troops.
Barely 72 hours earlier, insurgents bombed a high-level
security meeting in the Takhar governor’s compound, killing
the top Afghan police commander for northern Afghanistan and
wounding the German general who commands all NATO forces in
the region. The two areas had been described as among
Afghanistan’s most secure, with Herat supposedly ready to be
turned over to Afghan security forces next month.
With Obama’s July deadline approaching, the US
administration is pursuing talks with the Karzai regime on a
long-term “strategic partnership” agreement that would grant
the Pentagon control of permanent bases in Afghanistan.
There has been virtually no media coverage of this, the
real objective of Washington’s war in Afghanistan, masked by
the pretense that US troops are engaged in a “war against
terrorism”. From the beginning, Washington’s aim has been to
assert its military hegemony over the strategic region of
Central Asia and its rich energy reserves.
According to conservative estimates, this war has cost the
American people some half a trillion dollars, even as federal,
state and local governments insist that there is “no money”
for jobs, education, health care and vital social services.
Over 1,600 US troops, drawn overwhelmingly from the working
class, have been killed in this war (together with 900 more
from Britain, Canada, Germany, Australia and other countries).
Tens of thousands more have been wounded, many of them
grievously. Meanwhile, the US-led occupation force has killed
and maimed countless Afghans over the past decade, while
turning hundreds of thousands into refugees.
The war continues with little media attention and virtually
no public debate. Repeated polls indicate that a large
majority of the American people wants an end to the war and a
withdrawal of US troops now, but these antiwar sentiments find
no real reflection in the political establishment and its two
parties.
Bringing an end to the war in Afghanistan and to the global
operations of American militarism requires the building of a
new movement against war based upon the working class and
joined with the struggle to defend jobs and living standards
and defeat the sweeping attacks on social conditions and basic
rights by the financial aristocracy and its government.
Bill Van Auken
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