BY RUPEN SAVOULIAN
& DOUG LORIMER
While the world's attention is focused on Iraq, the US-led war in Afghanistan is still raging. US and British elite troops are battling Afghan guerrillas, making a mockery of Washington's claim that its military operations in the country are over.
"We have officially been extended with no set return date", Major Mike Franzak, second in command of US Marine Attack Squadron No. 513, based at Bagram, Afghanistan, said in an email to the Yuma (Arizona) Sun. According to an April 30 report in the Sun: "Franzak said there is still 'very much' a war going on in Afghanistan. He said people are dying and there are sporadic enemy attacks throughout their area of operations."
Currently there are at least 8000 US troops in Afghanistan.
On March 29, four Afghan guerrilla fighters ambushed a US patrol, killing two soldiers near the southern Afghan town of Geresk.
The April 3 Washington Post reported that Afghan "villagers responding to a call to jihad, or holy war, have joined suspected Taliban fighters in a battle against Afghan soldiers and US Special Forces troops" south of Kandahar.
On April 9, a US warplane dropped a 1,000kg bomb on a house near a US Special Forces base, killing 11 Afghan civilians.
"In the past week alone in Afghanistan, rockets have been fired at an American base on the Pakistan border, four men, who were apparently planning a terrorist attack, died when a car full of explosives blew up, and gunmen ambushed the brother of Kandahar's powerful governor, killing two of his relatives", Carlotta Gall reported in the April 11 London Times. "Yesterday gunmen attacked a United Nations mine-clearing vehicle, injuring two Afghan workers", she added.
"A sharp increase in such attacks over the past two months", Gall wrote, "is being attributed to a resurgent Taliban movement and other opponents of the American military presence, such as supporters of the renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar."
Hekmatyar was funded and trained by the CIA and its ally, the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) directorate, in the 1980s. He was a key commander in the anti-Soviet mujaheddin ("holy warriers"). Now he has turned against the United States, collaborating with the Taliban.
Despite the grand promises by Western governments to provide large-scale assistance — at least US$300 million — for rebuilding the country after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan's social and economic infrastructure remain shattered. When Hamad Karzai, the head of the US-installed "interim" government in Kabul, recently went with the begging bowl to Washington, he was promised $50 million. Of this, $35 million is for building a hotel in Kabul for aid officials!
"People here don't like the Taliban, but they don't like President Karzai, either, and they say he is doing nothing for the people. And some are nostalgic for the Taliban times because there is more crime now", one UN official in Kandahar told Gall.
While there has been some improvement in the rights of women with the removal of the Taliban, the new regime has not substantially changed its treatment of women. The Washington-based Human Rights Watch reported in May last year that while the human rights situation has improved for women in Kabul, in the rest of the country they still face Taliban-era discrimination such as being denied education and health care.
Throughout Afghanistan, women still face violence for not adhering to restrictions on their dress, behaviour and movement, resulting in their practical invisibility from public life.
General Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator of Pakistan, allied himself with US policy after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Manhattan's Twin Towers, but the Pakistani military elite funded the rise of the Taliban in the early 1990s as a reliable proxy force in Afghanistan. The Pakistani ruling class planned on becoming Afghanistan's main trading partner, and the major economic power in Afghanistan.
After the US declared the Taliban to be an enemy, the Pakistani military rulers abandoned the Taliban. However, there is a great deal of sympathy with the Taliban inside the Pakistani military and the ISI.
The teaching of religious fundamentalism, which glorifies martyrdom and violent opposition to "infidels", is conducted openly in madrassas — religious schools — owned and funded by Pakistani leaders. It was in the largely Afghan-populated North West Frontier Province of Pakistan that the ISI and CIA trained tens of thousands of mujaheddin, or "holy warriors", to fight Soviet troops in the 1980s.
Why is the US backing Karzai and pinning its hopes on him?
In 1995, the Unocal oil company signed a tentative agreement with the Turkmenistan government to research the possibilities of constructing an oil pipeline to Pakistan by way of Afghanistan.
As the project developed, Unocal began to seek the agreement of the Taliban, who had seized power in Kabul in September 1996. On two separate occasions, in February and December 1997, Taliban officials were flown to the US to meet with, and be wined and dined by, Unocal executives.
Up until 1998, when it became clear that the Taliban were in alliance with the al Qaeda terrorist network, Clinton administration officials actively lobbied Taliban officials on behalf of Unocal.
In 1997, Zalmay Khalilzad, at that time a consultant with Cambridge Energy Research Associates, conducted risk assessments for Unocal on their proposed 1440 kilometre pipeline project to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan.
A member of the Project for a New American Century lobby group set up by current US Vice-President Dick Cheney and US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 1997, Khalilzad was appointed by President George Bush in December 2001 to be the US Special Envoy to Afghanistan, supervising the creation of Karzai's regime.
From Green Left Weekly, May 7, 2003.
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