Afghanistan: a decade of war and the decline of US imperialism
Friday 7 October marked
the 10th anniversary of the US-led predatory war against the
people of Afghanistan. During these ten years, Afghanistan has been subjected
to wholesale destruction, with tens of thousands of Afghans losing their lives
at the hands of the imperialist occupation forces. Imperialism, too, had to
pay a heavy price for this unjust war, which has claimed the lives of 2,500
Nato troops, of whom 1,750 were US and 382 British soldiers. The Afghan war
has up to now cost the US $500bn and Britain £18bn; presently the US is spending $100bn a year ($2bn a week) on the war in Afghanistan.
War for
domination on the pretext of 9/11
On the pretext of the 9/11 events in New York and
Washington, the US embarked on the path of a series of wars, dubbed as the
‘Global War On Terror’ (GWOT), shaped by the neo-con doctrines of pre-emption
and the ‘freedom agenda’. These doctrines, coined by the ideologues of the
most bellicose and reactionary sections of US finance capitalism, were
enshrined in the National Security Strategy (NSS) published in 2002, which
promised permanent US hegemony and showed complete contempt for its Nato
allies.
The initial easy victory of the US-led forces,
which ousted the Taliban Afghan government with the aid of the warlords of the
Northern Alliance, only whetted the US appetite and paved the way for the
invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The invasion of Iraq, and the resultant regime
change in Baghdad, was regarded by the Bush administration as merely a prelude
to dealing with an “axis of evil”, including
the DPRK, Iran and other governments deemed hostile to the US, or standing in
the way of its total domination of the world. Not surprisingly, then, the US forces went to war against Iraq without the support of Germany, France and Canada. Even Nato was ignored, with the US asserting that the “Mission
determines the coalition”. That being the case, it works the other way
round just as well and enables other Nato members to decline to join the US in
military action they deem harmful to their interests – thus rendering Nato more
and more irrelevant.
US
increases troops to avoid defeat
As the US got stuck in the mire of the Iraq war, the Afghan resistance to occupation grew in strength and, by the beginning of
2006, had become a veritable threat to the presence of the imperialist armies
of occupation. When Barack Obama assumed the US presidency in January 2009,
the military situation in Afghanistan had deteriorated to such an extent that
he had to decide either to pull out of Afghanistan or to send further
reinforcements in a desperate attempt to reverse the gains of the Afghan
resistance. Under pressure from the US military-industrial complex, he opted
for the latter course. Within a year of becoming president, Obama oversaw the
tripling of US troop numbers in Afghanistan. On 1 December 2009, he announced
the latest surge, whereby 33,000 additional troops were to be sent to
Afghanistan, with the promise that they would be brought home by July 2011, a
promise which has been honoured in the breach – just like many of Obama’s other
promises. Now it turns out that 5,000 US troops have been withdrawn from Afghanistan this summer and another 5,000 are to be withdrawn by the end of the year. The
remaining 23,000 of the additional troops are scheduled to return to the US by September 2012. Even after this, however, around 67,000 US troops – twice the number who were
in place at the time Obama took office – will continue to be stationed in Afghanistan.
Night raids
and air strikes
At the same time as the US put in place the
increased troop numbers, it intensified air strikes and special forces raids.
Under this strategy, initiated by General Stanley McChrystal, and further
escalated by his successor, General David Petraeus, special forces operations
have increased 6-fold during the past two years, and presently, on average, 20
attacks take place every night. The soldiers taking part in these operations
are allowed under the rules of engagement to kill ‘enemy combatants’ even if
unarmed and presenting therefore no obvious threat. As a result, thousands of
innocent men, women and children, have been categorised as ‘enemy combatants’
and murdered in cold blood.
The striving for domination has forced the
imperialist powers into such a state of degeneration that troops are given a
free hand to commit murders of innocent people on an industrial scale in lands
far away. Nearly 6,000 members of the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC),
with the help of special forces from Britain and other countries in the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), aided by the notorious
mercenary organisation, Blackwater, now re-named XE, are active in Afghanistan. These forces, with their routine indulgence in extra-judicial assassinations,
systematic torture, bombing of civilians and search and destroy missions, are
the ultimate incarnation of savage brutality, and arouse the wrath and anger of
the Afghan masses. According to Nato figures, the Special Forces conducted
2,832 night raids in the second quarter of 2011, twice as many as in the same
period a year ago, killing 834 ‘insurgents’ and capturing 2,941. As a result,
the US is claiming that the resistance is “on the run” and that its “momentum has been reversed”. Nato’s
secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, made the boastful claim in May that
the “Taliban is finding it harder to launch complex attacks”. The
reality on the ground, however, belies such wishful thinking.
As a matter of fact, US tactics have had the
opposite effect to that intended by their perpetrators. Far from pacifying the
resistance, they have only managed further to galvanise the masses into
supporting the forces fighting against the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan. Ninety percent of the Afghan people are opposed to the occupation, and more
than 50% said that their attitude had become negative since the surge in US
troops, according to a survey by the International Council on Security and
Development earlier this year.
Response of
the resistance
To the intensified air strikes and night raids by
US special forces, the resistance has responded by intensifying its attacks on
the occupation and assassinations of high-profile Afghan officials. Nearly 700
Nato troops were killed in 2010, surpassing the number killed in 2009. July
2010 was the deadliest month for the occupation forces: during that month, 66 US soldiers were killed. Nearly 200 imperialist soldiers were killed during June and July 2010,
including 38 British soldiers.
According to the US Defence Department figures,
between October 2010 and May 2011, resistance attacks had increased by 54%,
while US troop casualties had gone up by 56% as compared to the same period in
the previous year.
The ‘Ring of Steel’ set up by the American army
round the capital, Kabul, has been regularly breached by the resistance. On 28
June, the eve of a meeting of provincial governors to discuss the handover in
July of security to Afghan forces, anti-occupation fighters wearing suicide
vests stormed the Intercontinental Hotel and held off Nato and Afghan forces
until air strikes killed the last of the attackers.
The 5-hour gun battle at the hotel between Nato and
Afghan forces on the one hand and the resistance on the other was a stunning
reminder of the reality just as the US prepares itself to start withdrawing
most of its troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Far from disappearing,
the resistance is gathering strength.
In this, one of the most audacious attacks in the capital,
the resistance squad carried tape recorders blaring forth the war songs of the
resistance as it stormed the hotel lobby. The attack was clear evidence of
growing confidence on the part of the resistance as it operates over a larger
swathe of eastern Afghanistan, including Kabul, which accounts for 20% of the
country’s population, building a shadow government in the vacuum left by a weak
or non-existent state.
In a blow to number 10, Cameron’s attempt to
trumpet military triumphs in Afghanistan was shattered on Monday 10 July after
the disappearance of Scott McLaren, a British soldier later confirmed dead,
obliging the British prime minister to cancel his trip to Helmand city, which
had been singled out by the defence chiefs as an example of the success of
British troops in transferring control of security to Afghan forces.
Contrast this with the boastful and blood-curdling
threats issued by Lt-General Sir Graeme Lamb, a special advisor to General
Stanley McChrystal, 18 months earlier. On 1 December 2009, revealing that
operations involving crack commandos – including the SAS – had increased
five-fold over the previous months, Sir Graeme said that British troops in Afghanistan would hit the resistance “until their eyeballs bleed”. Notwithstanding the brutal treatment meted out to the Afghan
combatants and civilians alike, obviously it is the imperialist soldiery who
are suffering from the affliction of bleeding eyeballs.
On 18 August, suicide bombers belonging to the
resistance stormed a British Council compound, killing 8 people during an
8-hour armed confrontation.
On 13 September, the resistance lobbed rockets at
the US embassy, fought the police and detonated suicide vests in a series of
highly-coordinated attacks in Kabul aimed at undermining the faith of the
Afghan people in the Karzai government and its imperialist masters’ ability to
secure the capital. This sophisticated attack exposed the total helplessness
of the Afghan government and its inability to guarantee security in the most
heavily-guarded districts. The attack was launched from the upper floors of a
half-completed high-rise block, from where members of the resistance fired
rockets at the heavily fortified US embassy, the Nato headquarters and the
offices of the Afghan intelligence agency, the NDS.
Although Nato attempted to dismiss the incident as
a propaganda ploy that had failed to inflict casualties on its intended target,
this highly coordinated attack was the third spectacular assault on the capital
in as many months and displayed the ability of the resistance to launch
sophisticated and deadly attacks in the heart of the city. If this is the
situation now, with 140,000 ISAF troops and their 100,000 mercenaries, how will
the Afghan forces cope with the resistance by the end of 2014 when the bulk of
Nato forces are due to leave?
A few months earlier, in April, 500 resistance
fighters escaped from the high-security Sarpaza prison, preceded by the killing
of Haji Khan Mojayed, the Kandahar police chief. A Government unable to protect
its police chief inside his headquarters and keep prisoners in prison cannot be
relied upon to bring stability to the country.
In May, 15,000 people chanting “Death to America” attacked the Nato Reconstruction Team base at Taloqan with rocks and grenades
following a special forces raid which killed several civilians. Security
forces fired on and killed a dozen demonstrators in a corner of the country
considered to be the most stable.
In the last week of May this year, Mohamed Daud
Daud, the police chief in charge of northern Afghanistan and the commander of
the elite 303 Pamir Corps was killed by the resistance in a roadside bomb
attack; on 12 July, Ahmed Wali Karzai, younger brother of president Karzai, a
notorious drug baron, was shot dead by one of his security detail who is
believed to have been acting on behalf of the resistance, depriving the US of a
linchpin in its strategy for containing the resistance and sending shock waves
through Kabul at the vulnerability of the inner circle of the puppet ruling
clique. 17 July witnessed the killing of Jan Mohammed Khan, a top presidential
advisor. On 27 July, Ghulam Haider Hameedi, the mayor of Kandahar, was
eliminated, as was the city’s police chief, Abdul Razia; and on 20 September
Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president, chair of the High Peace Council,
charged with negotiating with the Taliban, was killed in a suicide attack in
his house in Kabul. President Karzai himself has survived four serious
attempts on his life. During the first six months of 2011, an estimated 191
government officials and government figures were eliminated, and quite a few
since then. In addition, Afghan army and police personnel have often turned
their guns on their Nato patrons. According to Nato figures, between March 2009
and June 2011, 57 foreign troops were killed in 19 such attacks.
On 28 July, the resistance stormed the Tarin Kowt
office of RTA state broadcaster in Uruzgan province, which left 22 killed,
including Ahmed Khpalwak, a BBC reporter shot dead by US troops in a case of
alleged mistaken identity when they were counter-attacking against the
resistance. Ten days earlier, on 18 July, in an attack on a checkpoint in the
southern city of Lashkar Gal, the capital of Helmand province, seven policemen
were killed. This incident took place just two days before the Nato-led troops
handed over security to the Afghan forces – one of the first seven areas to be
given over to them notwithstanding their documented incompetence, characterised
by a high defection rate.
On 6 August, the resistance shot down a Chinook
helicopter in eastern Afghanistan, resulting in the worst toll in a single day
for US soldiers since the start of the predatory war against Afghanistan 10 years ago. 31 US special forces (Navy Seals) personnel were killed. The US soldiers in question belonged to the same unit which, in blatant violation of Pakistan’s national sovereignty, had intruded deep into Pakistan and killed Osama Bin Laden on 2 May
this year.
Resistance
unbeatable
All the above attacks show that the resistance can
penetrate even Kabul’s ‘Green Zone’ with ease and at will. The killings of
senior political and security officials, as well as attacks on heavily-guarded
and high-profile targets, such as the US embassy, Nato headquarters, the British
Council and the Intercontinental Hotel, have exploded the myth about the Afghan
security forces’ ability to provide adequate safety and security, and thus
driven a coach and horses through Nato’s strategy of withdrawal of the bulk of
its forces by training the Afghan police and security forces and handing over
control to them – for it is abundantly clear that the resistance can penetrate
even the most secure strongholds of the capital, through a combination of
frontal assaults and internal assistance, in order to effect a series of
carefully selected, methodically planned and professionally executed
eliminations of government officials and security personnel. The killing of
Rabbani delivered a shattering blow to another aspect of Nato’s strategy, namely,
to negotiate with the resistance so as to provide the occupation imperialist
forces with a face-saving formula for a not-too-humiliating exist by making
provision for the continuation of parts of the puppet administration it has
created since the invasion in 2001.
Matthew Green, writing in the Financial
Times of 25 September 2011, sated: “The ease with
which suicide bombers can infiltrate the Kabul police’s so-called ring of steel
to attack hotels, lob rocket-propelled grenades at the US embassy or kill prominent Afghans intensifies the increasing impression that this is a city up
for grabs. The situation is far worse in provincial towns where senior
officials keep being assassinated”.
Continues Mr Green: “Can the slide
to civil war be stopped? Nato has failed. There was nothing more striking
about a three-week stint I spent embedded with US ‘surge’ forces last summer
than watching three men with spades, AK47s and fertiliser calmly plant a
roadside bomb while an F-18 Hornet circled overhead. Armoured vehicles were
scrambled, but to no avail – the men vanished”.
He ends with the obvious conclusion: “The insurgency cannot be beaten on the battlefield. Nor can the
Taliban be forced into a deal” (‘Hurtling down Afghanistan’s road to perdition’).
On 18 July, General Petraeus handed over the
command of UN and Nato forces in Afghanistan to General John Allen, a former
deputy director of Central Command, which handles US operations in the Middle
East and Central Asia. During his posting in Afghanistan, Petraeus presided
over a three-fold increase in pursuing ruthlessly the policy of killing or
capturing members of the resistance through night raids and air strikes, in
which thousands of innocent civilians, in addition to actual combatants
belonging to the resistance, were killed. But he nevertheless failed miserably
to reverse the perception that Afghanistan today is far more dangerous for the
imperialist occupation and its puppets than it was even a year earlier when he
took over command from General McChrystal after the latter was sacked by
President Obama. Petraeus has since returned to the US to become the director
of the CIA, from where he is sure to assist in the continued implementation of
the very policy which palpably failed to bring any joy to the occupation
forces.
Dissension
in the reactionary camp
What is more, this policy so enraged and alienated
the Afghan people that even Karzai, a creation of the occupying powers, was
compelled to raise his voice against it. He infuriated Nato officials when, on
the eve of the Lisbon Nato Summit held on the weekend of 20-21 November 2010,
he called for an end to night raids and the intrusive presence of foreign
troops in Afghan daily life. Reflecting the rage of the Afghan people and the
utter failure of the Nato forces in overcoming the resistance, Karzai’s views
on global events, US intervention in Afghanistan, the future political course
for his country, and Nato’s role and stance, it would appear, have undergone
dramatic change. He has become critical of the ability of the US to bring peace or secure Pakistani compliance with Afghan and Nato demands that it cease giving
sanctuary to the Haqqani group. The late Richard Holbrook, Obama’s AfPak
representative, and Petraeus, had a heated discussion with Karzai at the time.
Some western officials even went to the extent of briefing the media that
Karzai was mentally unbalanced, suggesting that he was on drugs.
Karzai’s statements caused much anger in Nato
circles, especially as they were preceded 6 months earlier by his visits to China and Iran in the course of a single week (March 2010) – visits which set alarm bells ringing
in Washington. Before visiting Iran, Karzai had, a few days earlier, received
the Iranian president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, with visible warmth, while the then US defence secretary, Robert Gates, was also on a visit to Afghanistan. Washington made its
displeasure known, while Obama hurriedly flew unannounced into Kabul on Sunday 28 March 2010 for an “on the ground update” from Karzai.
Again, in June this year (2011), Karzai and
Pakistani president Zardari visited Tehran at the invitation of Iranian
president Ahmadinejad. Their talks covered the completion of the planned
Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline through Afghanistan, following which an agreement for
security cooperation between Iran and Afghanistan was concluded.
Karzai angered the occupying forces yet again when,
speaking at the funerals of civilians murdered in recent Nato raids, he
criticised them in the following strong terms: “They [the occupiers] are here for their own purposes … and they’re
using our soil for that. Our demand is that the war be stopped. This is the
voice of Afghanistan. History is witness to how Afghanistan deals with
occupiers”.
Undoubtedly Karzai is speaking with a forked
tongue, with the hope of convincing the resistance that it can have a peace
deal with him which would be mutually beneficial. All the same, it is clear
that Karzai no longer fully supports the ‘war on terror’ as defined by Washington. He further alarmed and infuriated Nato by saying that there was a political
alternative to it, that is, to depend more on regional countries, especially Iran and Pakistan, to end the war and reach a settlement with the resistance. The rift between Nato
and Karzai, although papered over, cannot fail to furnish an added boost to the
resistance in the latter’s struggle to force the US out and bring down the
Karzai administration.
Shifting
rationale for the war
For obvious reasons, the imperialist powers waging
war against Afghanistan, unable to openly and honestly state what drives this,
as other, imperialist wars – the striving for domination – have provided a
shifting set of rationales for the war, which has been seen through even by the
bourgeois political commentators. To begin with, it was to kill or capture
Osama Bin Laden, the alleged mastermind behind the events of 9/11, and to
eradicate Afghanistan as a “haven for terrorists”. Until Afghanistan is stable, the argument went, the west cannot risk
withdrawal. It is reliably estimated that there are no more than 100 al-Qaeda
affiliated people, and most of those are in Pakistan, which hardly warrants the
presence of 140,000 imperialist troops and 100,000 mercenaries in Afghanistan.
In any case, despite the presence of a vast number
of soldiers from the US, Britain, Germany, France and other countries, as
Gideon Rachman correctly pointed out in the Financial Times of 27 July 2010, “… there is very little evidence that Afghanistan is becoming more stable. On the contrary, the fighting is intensifying,
casualties are mounting and the Taliban is becoming more confident.
“So perhaps it is time to rephrase
the question. Rather than asking, ‘Why are we in Afghanistan?’, we should ask,
‘If we are in Afghanistan, why are we not also in Somalia, Yemen or Pakistan?’ All three countries are now plausible bases for potential terrorists.” (‘Somali lessons for Afghanistan’).
In the words of the late Richard Holbrook, “the enemy are al-Qaeda in Pakistan, so why are we fighting the Taliban
in Afghanistan?”.
David Cameron says, as did his predecessors, Blair
and Brown, that British troops are in Afghanistan to make British streets safe
by bringing stability to Afghanistan and thus ensure that it does not become a
base from which to launch terrorist attacks on the streets of Britain. Yet Mr Cameron contradicts himself by saying that British troops will return home
by the end of 2014 come what may, that is, regardless of the situation in the
battlefields of Afghanistan! What is more, far from reducing the danger to the
security of citizens in the imperialist countries, the presence of foreign
troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya only serves to increase it, as was
clearly demonstrated by the bombings in Madrid and London. That is the
considered view even of people like Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former
head of MI5. Only the likes of Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone and David Cameron
can mindlessly assert otherwise. If 70% of the British people want British
troops withdrawn from Afghanistan “immediately” or “soon”, they surely must know, even if instinctively, that
their security is in no way enhanced by the bloodletting of which the British,
American and other foreign troops are the instruments.
All the previous guff about improving the position
of Afghan women, bringing democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights
and instituting good governance, have been quietly dropped.
New
strategy
The imperialist powers have come to realise that
they cannot win in Afghanistan. So they have devised a twin-track strategy, if
it can be called that, whereby they would, on the one hand, negotiate with the
resistance and, on the other hand, they would build up the puppet army and
police in sufficient numbers to be able to assume responsibility for security
at the end of 2014. This strategy exposes the hollowness and hypocrisy of the
claim by the imperialist powers that they are waging the war against the
Taliban ‘terrorists’, for they have been holding face-to-face meetings with
these same ‘terrorists’. The first such meeting between Taliban
representatives and US officials took place in a village outside Munich on 28 November 2010, chaired by a German diplomat. The second encounter took place
in Doha, the capital of Qatar, on 15 February 2011. The third meeting was
again held in Germany on 7-8 May.
On 17 June, the UNSC accepted a US request to treat al-Qaeda and the Taliban separately on a 13-year-old UN list of global
terrorists. From now on there are to be two separate lists, and the UN
sanctions against members of al-Qaeda will not necessarily apply to the
Taliban, thus making it easier to take them off the list – in an effort to
facilitate dialogue with them.
The problem for the US, however, is: why should the
Taliban negotiate if they are convinced, as surely they are, that they are
winning?
As far as they are concerned, the presence of
foreign forces is part of the problem; ridding Afghanistan of the foreign
occupation forces has been the most resounding cry of the resistance.
ANSF
As to building the Afghan security forces, the US has spent $22bn in 2010 and 2011 to train and equip the 300,000-strong Afghan security forces.
Obama has requested the Congress for an additional $12.8bn for next year to
build the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF). The problem with the Afghan
forces is that they attract very few recruits from the Pashtun areas. Despite
the US troop surge, Pashtun recruits are actually dwindling, though there is a
desperate need for such recruitment if the Afghan national army is to reflect
the ethnic and geographic reality of the country. Kandahar and Helmand provinces, with a combined population of 2 million, have since 2009 contributed a
mere 1,200 soldiers to the Afghan army, representing less than 1% of some
173,000 recruits in that period. Nobody from the Pashtun heartlands dare join,
even if they were so inclined, for the resistance and its intelligence are
stronger than the government.
Another problem is that most of the new recruits to
the Afghan army are illiterate, incompetent and unreliable, likely to desert at
the first whiff of gunpowder. As was shown during the resistance attacks on
the Intercontinental Hotel, the British Council, the US embassy and the Nato
headquarters, without the help of the occupation troops the Afghan soldiers
would simply not have been able to do much.
After 10 years of this predatory war, there is no
security in Afghanistan. It’s health, education provision and infrastructure
are a shambles. Opium production has increased 1,400%, the opium trade has
risen 40-fold, and income from narcotics accounts for 60% of the economy. Life
expectancy stands at a miserable 44 years, and infant mortality rates are the
worst in the world. And there is all-pervasive corruption that affects all levels
of the government and security services.
Such is the state of affairs in the sphere of
security that even the Kabul-Kandahar highway is strewn with checkpoints manned
by corrupt police, criminal gangs, warlords and members of the resistance – all
making it unsafe for ordinary Afghan travellers.
Turning the tide since the surge of US troops, the
resistance has stretched its grip on the north-east and west of the country.
Instead of subjugating Afghanistan, the imperialist war has managed to spread
anti-imperialist militancy across the border into Pakistan. No one doubts any
more that the Afghan resistance is on course to inflict a humiliating defeat on
the combined forces of imperialism. “So when I flee the
country, of course my son will join the Taliban”, said
recently Haji Mohammed Almas, a warlord and former Mujahideen commander who
fought against the Soviet forces, adding, “What will become of him?”
The US and its allies “are dressing up defeat as victory and heading hotfoot
for the exit” is how Philip Stephens, writing in the Financial Times
of 30 September 2011, described Nato’s strategy in Afghanistan. He added that,
a decade after the fall of Kabul to the US-backed Northern Alliance, “Afghanistan is an all-too-present source of grief and embarrassment”. “What on
earth”, he says, “the politicians can any longer say to the families of
those blown up in the deserts and bazaars of Kandahar and Helmand?” (‘An
indecent rush to the Afghan exit’).
But, of course, the Americans are not leaving
completely – not just yet. Afghanistan is too important for that. In the
words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security advisor, “Eurasia is the chessboard for global supremacy … [The US must] prevent the emergence of a dominant antagonistic
Eurasian power” – an obvious reference to China and Russia. The Americans are negotiating with the Afghan government to keep half a dozen
bases in the country for the foreseeable future, from which, after the
departure of the bulk of their forces at the end of 2014, the US and its allies would continue to deploy military trainers and special forces and use drones to
contain the resistance. While prolonging the agony of the Afghan people, such
a course would do no more than postpone the day of reckoning when, under
relentless assault from the resistance, imperialist forces will be compelled to
leave the country, lock, stock and barrel. A prolongation of the presence of
imperialist armies may possibly even result in the Pakistani state losing
control over the Pashtun population on both sides of the border to the Taliban
– giving rise to the emergence of a united Pashtunistan, 50 million-strong, and
threatening the integrity of Pakistan.
War brought
to Pakistan
As expected, the last surge of US troops, announced
by Obama at the end of 2009, has become a major source of destabilisation in Pakistan as it has led to the spill over of the Afghan fighters against the occupation into Pakistan, as the Pakistani premier, Yousuf Raza Gilani, had warned in late 2009. By its
increasingly frequent use of drone attacks on Pakistani targets, as well as
through coercing the Pakistani army to move against the Islamist militants, the
US has managed to rouse the wrath of the Pakistani people (who are
overwhelmingly opposed to the US war on Afghanistan) against the US and their own government alike. The drone attacks, which have killed thousands of Pakistanis,
the frequent US military incursions into Pakistan, and the collusion of the
Pakistani military in the US’s ‘war on terror’, have angered the Pakistani
people as nothing else.
The Pakistani military has long used religion as a
tool to keep its grip on Pakistani politics, especially on the country’s
defence and foreign policy. It has also since the early 1980s used religion as
an ideology to create militant organisations and train armed young men to fight
in Afghanistan and Kashmir to gain what it regards as “strategic depth”.
Begun under General Zia-ul-Haq’s military government, at the behest of US
imperialism desperate to secure a plentiful supply of trained Islamic holy
warriors to fight the Red Army in Afghanistan, this process, in which the
Pakistani Mullah-military alliance set about changing the political discourse
through the creation of a network of Madrassas funded by the US and Saudi
Arabia to instruct their pupils in the most bigoted version of Islam, has ended
up by creating over a period of three decades a veritable Frankenstein monster.
After the death of General Zia in 1988, this
process was kept up by the Pakistani establishment, even as its pernicious
ramifications began to spread in Pakistan. Then came the events of 9/11, which
found the US, the erstwhile progenitor and patron of Islamic Jihadis, fighting
its own progeny. With the US war against Afghanistan, the Pakistani military
establishment was faced with the stark choice of either deserting its assets,
the Taliban, in Afghanistan, or acting in open defiance of the US. Not unexpectedly, it decided to go along with the US demand that it stop its support for the
Taliban. All the same, while it took action against the Taliban in the border
regions with Afghanistan, the Pakistani military continued its support for the
militant Islamic groups which it believed were not harmful to Pakistani
interests, especially those openly against India.
However, the attempts of the military to maintain
this delicate balance have led only to complete failure, as is attested to by
the bloodshed over the last 10 years, which have claimed the lives of 35,000
people through acts of terror perpetrated by the Jihadis – giving clear proof
that the Jihadi groups are more than willing to bite the hand that feeds them.
The 22 May 2011 assault on the Pakistani Navy’s Mehran Airbase in Karachi by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is only the latest proof that Islamic
Jihadi outfits in Pakistan, including those formed to be deployed against India, such as Lashkar-i-Taiba, are willing and able to operate, not only independently of,
but also against, the Pakistani military. The assault on the Karachi Airbase
came in the wake of the US attack on a residential compound in the garrison
town of Abbottabad. This attack, resulting in the killing of Osama, humiliated
the Pakistani military, violated Pakistani sovereignty, and aroused widespread
anger among the Pakistani masses against, and hatred of, the US – continuing the fallout from the arrest and subsequent release of a CIA agent, Raymond Davis,
who had shot dead two Pakistanis in January.
The continued war in Afghanistan, the increasing US
interference in, and military intrusion into, Pakistan, with the resultant
growth of anti-imperialist sentiment in Pakistan, which in turn brings grist to
the Jihadi mill, the room for manoeuvre of the Pakistani army has gone, and its
ability to hunt with the hounds of US imperialism and run with the hares of
Jihadi militancy has reached the end of the road.
Deteriorating US-Pakistani relations
Relations between the US and Pakistan have
deteriorated to such an extent that senior US officials have begun openly to
accuse Pakistan’s military intelligence, the ISI, of fomenting terrorism in
Afghanistan. Admiral Mike Mullen, the then-outgoing chairman of the joint
chiefs of staff, told a Congressional Committee on 22 September that the
Haqqani network, responsible for killing US and Nato soldiers in Afghanistan, “planned and conducted” the assault on the
Intercontinental Hotel with the support of the ISI, characterising the Haqqanis
as a “veritable arm” of the ISI. Speaking before the Senate armed
services committee, Admiral Mullen said “We have credible evidence … that
the Haqqani network was responsible for the June 28 attacks on the
Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul” and a host of smaller operations. He
went on to say that Pakistan’s government has chosen to “use violent
extremism as an instrument of policy [something that the US would never contemplate, oh no!], adding that “by exporting violence, they have eroded their
internal security and their position in the region. They have undermined their
international credibility and threatened their economic wellbeing”.
This barely-veiled threat is designed to put
pressure on the Pakistani military to make its choice: back the US without reservation, or continue secretly to support the Taliban and other groups fighting US
soldiers in Afghanistan and risk losing US military and economic aid and
possible national disintegration. Pakistan is in a bind, for as long as it
sees India as its main enemy, and its security under threat from India, it is likely to continue to rely on the Jihadis.
Pakistan shares a 2,500km-long border with Afghanistan. So long as this border remains even partly open, the resistance in Afghanistan cannot be defeated – Pakistan and the Afghan resistance are joined at the hip. The
Afghan Taliban enjoy great popularity in Pakistan; most Pakistanis quite
correctly see the Afghan Taliban as freedom fighters resisting foreign
aggression. In this situation, if the Americans continue to attack targets in Pakistan with drones, if they continue to intrude into Pakistani territory, the result can only be
to turn Pakistan into a raging anti-American inferno, whose government and
military leadership will be at risk of being pushed aside if they continue
their collaboration with the US. For this reason, if for no other, the
Pakistani army and its espionage agency are likely to continue backing their
proxies, such as the Haqqanis. Besides, the Pakistani military would not find
a settlement which strengthens the position of India in Afghanistan at all appealing. It is up to the US to decide the extent to which it is
prepared to destabilise Pakistan further still.
After a decade-long costly and frustrating war in Afghanistan, it would not be very sensible for the US to get deeply embroiled in Pakistan. However, imperialism would not be imperialism if it could act in accordance with
such human reasoning. All we can be sure of at the moment is that the US has decided to scale down its war effort in Afghanistan.
US weakened
Ten years of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have seen the US emerge much weakened financially, and its prestige is at its nadir. During
these 10 years, US defence spending has doubled to $700bn a year (2011). The
cost of these two wars is likely to be $4tr when long-term veteran support costs
are included, according to a study by Brown University. Since 2001, the US has spent $3tr on homeland security. The American people have suffered a serious erosion of
their civil liberties under the Patriot Act, enacted in the wake of 9/11, which
gave the FBI, spies and police, the expansion in powers to search physical and
electronic records and detain ‘illegal’ immigrants that they had been seeking
for years.
Whereas in 2001, the US had a budget surplus, today
the projected deficit for 2011 stands at $1,580bn. If the price of Brent crude
then stood at $28 a barrel, today it oscillates around $115 a barrel. The US economy is in a mess following the worst-ever crisis of overproduction, the near-meltdown of the
financial system in 2008, and the continuing debt crisis. Admiral Mike Mullen
described the national debt as the greatest threat to US national security. Standard and Poor’s recent downgrade of America’s credit rating merely served
to confirm the steady decline of the US.
The US is much diminished, Europe has been
sidelined, and Asia is in the ascendance. In purchasing power parity (PPP)
terms, Asia’s share of the global economy has risen steadily from 8% in 1980 to
24% in 2010. Asian stock markets now account for 31% of global market capitalisation,
ahead of Europe’s 25% and within a percentage point of the US at 32%.
China’s rise
Last year, China became the world’s second largest
economy, overtaking Japan, while at the same time surpassing Germany as the biggest exporter. This year China overtook the US as the number one
manufacturing country; Chinese banks now rank among the largest in the world by
market capitalisation; China has overtaken the US to become the largest market
for cars – a dubious distinction, but a distinction all the same – and China
surpassed the US to become Brazil’s largest trading partner.
The rise of Asia, especially China, the emergence
of Iran as the dominant regional power in the wake of the US war against Iraq,
the continuing stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the uprisings of
the Arab youth in Tunisia and Egypt, and the resultant decline in US influence,
of which the storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo and the expulsion of the
Israeli ambassador to Ankara are just two visible signs, have all served to
confirm a steep decline in the US’s standing in the world.
Conclusion
Nato, the instrument of the US’s military dominance, is a fractured alliance compared with what it was in 2001. Germany was not the only country to refuse to join the recent predatory war against Libya, for less than a third of Nato’s European members were involved in this war. No
wonder, then, that the former US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, in his
valedictory speech to his Nato allies in Brussels, warned that Europe faced a dim and possibly dismal future. In the face of budgetary restrictions and
shrinking defence budgets, Europe, he said, won’t be a priority for the US, the focus of whose defence attentions will be Asia and the geopolitical contest with an emerging
and assertive China. As a result, Nato would increasingly become an irrelevant
relic, to be replaced by the coalitions of the willing and available as
dictated by the needs of security challenges.
In the early days of the predatory war against
Afghanistan and Iraq, shock and awe intimidated the media and bourgeois
ideologues to paint the US as a 21st century Rome. This gentry did a bean count of the military hardware,
while ignoring the US’s vulnerability all too openly and readily on display
following 9/11.
Today, US power is contested as never before. The
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan only serve to obscure the much bigger story of the
last 10 years – the fast-rising economies of Asia and Latin America, and the
resultant shift in the balance of power away from the West towards the East.
The global order is no longer the patrimony of the imperialist powers. Instead
of, as predicted at the beginning of the present century, the Chinese economy
being of the same size as that of the US by 2050, it is expected to overtake
the latter before 2020.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the resistance
put up by the Iraqi and Afghan people against the imperialist plundering
hordes, combined with the mother of all capitalist crises of overproduction,
bringing in its wake the near-collapse of the financial structure of
imperialism, resulting in an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis, have stripped
away the remnants of the pretensions of European imperialist powers, denuded
the US of its top credit rating, and seen a demonstrable shift in global
economic and military power away from the principal imperialist countries. To
paraphrase Mr Philip Stephens of the Financial Times, these developments have shown that the old powers are no longer the
masters of globalisation and have buried the Washington consensus and the model
of market capitalism in the debris of Lehman Brothers.
Mr Stephens concludes by saying that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which cost the US much in both treasure and prestige, “have
ended up showing the limits, rather than the reach, of military might. Cruise
missiles do not work against improvised explosive devices.
“What we are left with is a world
betwixt and between. The sweep of history will record the past decade as a
parenthesis –separating a brief period of unparalleled US might from a new, and
chaotic, multipolar world. Al Qaeda had to be defeated. But for all the
horror he inflicted on 9/11, Bin Laden did not really change very much at all” (2 September 2011, ‘9/11 did not change he world’).
Lionel Barber comes to the same conclusion in the
following pithy paragraph:
“As for the legacy of 9/11, Gerard
Lyons, chief economist of Standard Chartered Bank, says the three most
important words in the past decade were not ‘war on terror’ but ‘made in China’. On present trends, he adds, the three most important words of this decade will be
‘owned by China’ (‘The end of US hegemony, the legacy of 9/11’, Financial Times, 6 September 2011).
For all the suffering that imperialism’s wars have
inflicted on the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and lately of Libya, we cannot fail to express our satisfaction with the turn of events as they have
unfolded in the past decade.
STOP PRESS
On Saturday 29 October there were a series of fatal
attacks on Nato forces in Afghanistan. In one attack a suicide bomber killed
17 people, including 12 Americans, and in another incident 3 Australian
soldiers were killed and many others injured when an Afghan military trainee
turned on them with a machine gun at an isolated patrol base.