BY LESLIE FEINBERG
General John Abizaid, top gun in charge of Pentagon forces in the Middle East, summoned his senior commanders to a meeting the week of November 18 at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to discuss strategy for combating resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Abizaid admitted at a Pentagon media briefing a week earlier that daily combat operations in Afghanistan "are every bit as much and every bit as difficult as those that go on in Iraq". Clashes between US-led forces and insurgents reportedly take place daily in the south and east of the country.
At least one US special forces soldier was killed and another injured on November 14 when their vehicle was hit by explosives in north-eastern Afghanistan. The same day, at least three US soldiers were killed when their vehicle struck a mine in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar.
US military bases in the south-eastern provinces of Paktia and Paktika have been hit with repeated rocket attacks. The outgoing Pentagon spokesperson in Afghanistan, Colonel Rodney Davis, said that on November 14 alone two US military bases were under siege more than six times in 24 hours from long-range rocket fire. David declined to discuss possible casualties.
A US military base near the city of Khost in eastern Afghanistan was hit with a barrage of rocket and machine gun fire on November 16. While the number of dead or wounded was not announced, Deutsche Press-Agentur reported that, "Witnesses reported seeing helicopters landing inside the base, possibly to airlift casualties".
US soldiers on patrol in the centre of Kandahar, the country's main southern city, came under fire on November 16.
Many of the roughly 11,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan are highly trained special forces commandos. Eleven soldiers have been killed by hostile fire since August — almost a third of the 35 shot down since the Pentagon unleashed war against this impoverished country in October 2001.
"The situation is much more serious than a year ago", concluded Vikram Parekh, a Kabul-based senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, in an interview in the Washington Post on November 16.
United Nations leaves
The United Nations has pulled most of its staff out of Afghanistan after three attacks on the organisation's employees and officials over the period of one week. The withdrawal followed the killing of a French official of the UN refugee agency in the city of Ghazni, 96 kilometres south-west of the capital.
The same day, a bomb blew up a UN vehicle in eastern Paktia province. And on November 11, a car bomb detonated outside UN offices in the southern city of Khandahar as a delegation from the Security Council was visiting Afghanistan.
A Western security official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity said on November 18 there were strong indications the three attacks were coordinated, marking a sea change in resistance.
The 15-member UN Security Council voted unanimously in mid-October to authorise deployment of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) beyond the capital city of Kabul, to which its jurisdiction has been restricted since the Taliban's ouster two years ago.
"But the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which is leading ISAF, has failed to persuade member countries to add to the 5,500-strong force", according to Asia Times Online.
Germany and Norway have agreed on paper to send troops to a few specific areas outside Kabul. But the fragile Karzai government, hunkered down in Kabul, is still dependent on US combat troops to keep it from being overwhelmed by the insurgency.
Who turned back the clock?
The Pentagon is still relying on sheer terror and overwhelming high-tech force to maintain its strategic position in Afghanistan.
The most recent casualties of US special forces resulted during the second week of an offensive in the eastern province of Kunar and neighbouring Nuristan province that includes searching homes.
Six Afghan civilians, including children, lost their lives on November 16 when a US warplane bombed their home in eastern Afghanistan.
US troops also killed six Afghan men in eastern Afghanistan on November 15. Provincial police chief Dawlat Khan said the men were unarmed and died when US aircraft bombed their truck.
US military commanders have begun to acknowledge that, despite this brutal campaign, the Taliban and other anti-occupation forces have made significant gains in recent months, according to the November 16 Asia Times Online.
Despite the military and political challenges that its occupation faces, US Secretary of State Colin Powell vowed that the US would "stay the course" in Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq.
Powell charged that supporters of the Taliban "want to turn the clock back" in Afghanistan. Actually, it was the CIA that "turned back the clock".
Afghanistan had a progressive revolution in 1978 that tried to carry out land reform and to free women from feudal bondage. In the early [northern] summer of 1979 the CIA began covertly financing and arming landlord bands against it, according to admissions by former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.
In December 1979, the Afghan government asked the Soviet Union for troops. Washington could now claim it was helping the Afghans against a "Soviet invasion" and forked out billions of dollars to create an army of fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden, that finally overturned the revolutionary government in 1992.
After four years of warfare among competing Afghan factions, the Taliban won out in 1996. Now these former allies of Washington are in its crosshairs.
Today, as winter strengthens its grip on Afghanistan, two years of US-led war have left the country ravaged. Hunger, homelessness and disease are rampant. Its infrastructure is destroyed. Some 2.5 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan — an estimated 1 million more are still in Pakistan — and an estimated 500,000 people are still classified as "internally displaced".
Sovereigns, not sovereignty
On November 17, the European Union publicly welcomed the adoption of a draft constitution in Afghanistan, saying it was "essential that the international community continue fully to support the Afghan authorities and enable them to exercise effective power over the entire Afghan territory and to meet the immense challenge of reconstruction and peace".
Afghanistan enjoys no independence. When 500 delegates from the grand assembly meet in Kabul on December 10 to debate the draft constitution, Canadian troops will provide their security. The hand-picked president, Hamid Karzai, doesn't rely on Afghan bodyguards — it's the job of US private military contractor DynCorp to keep him alive.
Karzai is a former consultant with Unocal, the US-based energy giant, that had planned a multi-billion dollar, 1424km-long natural gas pipeline project across Afghanistan from Central Asia to Pakistan.
Karzai is a royalist from the same clan as the country's former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah. "Mr. Karzai's critics have accused him of being an American stooge", observed a November 18 BBC report, "particularly after the way in which the US intervened ahead of the recent loya jirga (grand council) to announce that the former king would not oppose Mr. Karzai as a candidate for head of state."
That announcement was made by Zalmay Khalilzad — at that time the special US envoy, and today the US ambassador to the country — the "Paul Bremer" of the imperial occupation of Afghanistan, and another former Unocal consultant.
"As things stand now", a November 17 New York Times editorial laments, the draft constitution "is no more than the Kabul City Charter."
Who will keep the boot heel on the necks of 25 million people who do not want to be US colonial "possessions"?
Some 11,000 US troops with unlimited firepower haven't been enough. Nor have some 5000 NATO troops huddled in Kabul.
The Pentagon brass say they and their allies are training a national Afghan army and police force. But that "national" army still numbers little more than 5000.
"The army's first US-trained battalion, meant to have about 600 soldiers, has shrunk to just over 200", reported the November 18 hollandsentinel.com web site. Low pay and poor equipment and morale have been cited.
Meanwhile, a UN-backed program is attempting to disarm former combatants or mujaheddin. But there are an estimated 1 million weapons among the population, according to a November MSNBC report. And powerful Afghan narco-landlords all have their own well-trained, heavily armed local militia.
In the two years since the 2001 US invasion began raining ordnance on the cities and countryside, opium production has skyrocketed 19-fold and the country has become the major source of the world's heroin, according to Nicholas Kristof, writing in the November 15 New York Times.
After the Taliban banned opium production in 2000, the 2001 crop was only 185 tonnes. The UN estimates that this year's crop weighed in at 3600 tonnes — the second largest in the country's history.
The Karzai government is a fig leaf for the colonial-style occupation of Afghanistan.
Gary Leupp, an associate professor in Tufts University's department of history, offers a lesson on imperial design. "Way back in 1857", he wrote on the August 7 counterpunch.org web site, "Friedrich Engels (who made some very interesting observations about Afghanistan, then central to 'the Great Game' played out in Central Asia between Britain and Russia) described 'the attempt of the British to set up a prince of their own making in Afghanistan' in 1842, linking its failure to the Afghans' 'indomitable hatred of rule, and their love of independence.'
"Like most of Marx and Engels' stuff", Leupp concluded, "it's probably on the net now; in his leisure time, in his Kabul office, surrounded by his Swiss Guard, Mr. Karzai might want to peruse it."
[From Workers World, weekly paper of the US Workers World Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 3, 2003.
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