Obama committed to a hopeless imperialist cause in Afghanistan
Obama is continuing George Bush’s policy almost to
the letter in Afghanistan – just as he always said he would. He criticises his
predecessor for not having organised an earlier ‘surge’ such as that which is
supposed to have ‘pacified’ Iraq, but in fact Bush had planned something of a
‘surge’, and Obama is implementing Bush’s plans. Obama is looking for ways to
establish a more effective puppet government than Karzai’s, which scarcely even
controls Kabul – as if Bush had not already been doing so. And Obama is facing
just the same logistical impossibility of US imperialism winning the war in Afghanistan as did his predecessor.
The purpose of the war is, for public consumption,
the elimination of the Taliban regime which fostered the ‘terrorists’
responsible for 9/11. The actual purpose is the unification of Afghanistan under a strong uncontested central government obedient to US imperialism in order that Afghanistan may become a safe, cheap, conduit for Caucasian oil and gas, by-passing Russia and Iran. One would have thought that even a person of Bush’s limited intelligence, let
alone a clever man like Obama, would realise that neither of these objectives
is attainable by the deployment of military force, not in a million years.
However, no US president wants to be the one to accept that all the
overwhelming military might of US imperialism, all its expensive and awesome
modern technology, can be defeated by peasants in flipflops. This is not a
lesson US imperialism can allow its subject peoples to witness. And so the war
drags on.
The ‘war on terror’ mobilises
worldwide against US imperialism
The so-called ‘war on terror’, starting with the
war against Iraq, is mobilising millions to rise up who would otherwise never
have done so, and the chaos of that war in Afghanistan has put the question of
pipelines on indefinite hold. Can anyone believe that, were it not for the
sheer injustice and cruelty of this unequal war, young people from Bradford and
Birmingham would be shaken out of the relative comfort of life in the UK to go to fight for the resistance in Afghanistan? Yet we are told: “in Afghanistan … British forces are now directly facing fellow Britons on the other side.
RAF Nimrod aircraft flying over Afghanistan at up to 40,000ft have been picking
up Taliban electronic ‘chatter’ in which voices can be heard in West Midlands
and Yorkshire accents. Worryingly for the military, this has increased in the
past few months, with communications picked up by both ground and air
surveillance, showing the presence of more British voices in the Taliban front
line”. (Kim Sengupta, ‘Top Army officers reveal surge in attacks by
radicalised Britons’, The Independent, 25 February 2009).
Since the start of the Iraq war, according to MI5
estimates, some 4,000 British people have travelled to Pakistan or Afghanistan for military training. The Independent sees this as training for
civil war against the British government in the UK, and even goes so far as to
suggest that the British fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan: “… are
now involved in a kind of surreal mini-British civil war a few thousand miles
away,” an Army officer is reported as saying! What an extraordinary way of
turning facts on their heads! The British government involves itself in an
ongoing illegal and unconscionable war against a foreign sovereign state, yet
those British people who travel to that state in order to defend it are
portrayed as doing so in order to conduct civil war against the British
government! The truth is that these people have gone to Afghanistan to fight
imperialist predatory forces in the same way that young people went to Spain to
fight Franco and his German and Italian backers.
Replacing
the Karzai government
Although there would not appear to be a more
convincing puppet at hand for the US to install in Afghanistan consequent upon
‘elections’ that it was announced were to be delayed from May (when they are
constitutionally required to be held) to August this year (giving the US time
to put extra troops in place to ensure the ‘election’ proceeds as planned), it
seems clear that the US is intending to replace Karzai.
“Charismatic and conciliatory, Mr Karzai was
once the darling of the West. … But as the fighting has intensified and
spread – insurgent attacks were up by a third and civilian casualties increased
by 40% last year over 2007 – opinion of Mr Karzai has darkened.” (‘Changing
the guard in Kabul’, The Economist, 12 February 2009.
Accusations that Afghanistan under Karzai has
become a “narco state” (Hillary Clinton’s words) certainly seem to
suggest that Karzai’s days are numbered. Already the jackals are fighting over
the bone:
According to the Sunday Telegraph, “In a
clash which showed how fragile the Western-backed government has become,
President Hamid Karzai was labelled a corrupt incompetent by his own
understudy, Ahmad Zia Massoud. He responded in kind, saying Mr Massoud was part
of an American conspiracy to oust him.
“The ferocity of the infighting reflects a
collapse in support for the Afghan president – both within the Afghan
coalitions who have supported him since his election in 2004, and among his
backers in Britain, the United States, the European Union and NATO. …
“Tensions erupted after Mr Massoud made a speech
blaming greed and corruption in the Karzai administration for the hunger and
poverty in the country. He also said that Mr Karzai’s plan to delay the May
election until August 20 and extend his term until then was unconstitutional.
“The row lasted for ten minutes and had to be
broken up by cabinet colleagues, who eventually moved the men onto the
meeting’s business agenda.” (Ben Farmer and Dean Nelson, Karzai is US stooge says Afghan deputy president, 22 February 2009).
Nevertheless, weak though Karzai is, he is probably
the most influential of the stooges at US imperialism’s command, the reason
being that he has a half-brother, Ahmed Wali, who reputedly holds together a
strong network among the Pashtun tribes of southern Afghanistan, keeping them
on the US side or at least neutral. Obviously his influence is weakening,
hence the increasing US willingness to expose his dealings in the narcotics
which remain the backbone of the Afghan economy.
Yet who could be expected to be a more effective
stooge that Karzai? The Economist is not optimistic:
“The conventional wisdom is that Afghanistan needs to be led by a Pushtun with credibility among the southern tribes (Mr Karzai’s
Popolzai are linked to royalty) and, ideally, acceptable to Pakistan.
“Mr Qanuni, who came second in the last
presidential ballot, and the former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, are
regarded as able. But the former is a Tajik and the latter, although claiming
some Pushtun roots, is closely associated with the Tajiks. Other names that are
often mentioned include Ashraf Ghani and Ali Jalali, both Pushtuns living in America who once served under Mr Karzai, as finance and interior ministers respectively.
But many believe that Afghan exiles, no matter how able as technocrats, lack
credibility; Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, calls them ‘dog-washers’.
Such misgivings would be even more true of a man the subject of much intriguing
speculation: Zalmay Khalilzad, a former American ambassador to Afghanistan,
Iraq and the United Nations, who is said to have put out feelers about running.
Would any of these have what it takes to play the tribal game and, as a
businessman puts it, ‘kiss bearded guys who have never brushed their teeth’?
“One who certainly could is Gul Agha Sherzai, a
former warlord and governor of Kandahar, a successful governor of Nangarhar,
now largely free of opium poppy. When Mr Obama visited Afghanistan last year, Mr Sherzai was the first Afghan leader he met. But the governor
would be a brave choice. Diplomats describe him as a controversial figure, and
speak of many (unproven) lurid stories about him.” In fact his rule over Kandahar in the early 1990s was notorious for bribery, extortion, drug dealing, and
widespread theft, exactly the conditions that were cleaned up by the Taliban.
However, in view of the fact that he was brought back to Kandahar by US imperialism, he could no doubt be seen as just the person to serve its interests in the central
Afghan puppet government, from which position he can resume his career as
recruiting sergeant for the Taliban!
As we go to press, however, it has just been
announced that Karzai is threatening to hold the election at the time required
by the Constitution, namely, April – i.e., before any of his opponents is able
to get any kind of campaign off the ground – and before US imperialist troops
have cleared the ground for voter registration …
No money, no troops
Obama has pledged to send 17,000 extra troops to Afghanistan immediately, whose job will be to make nationwide elections seem plausible!
The plan had been to send another 30,000. However, the US is running out of troops to send. It would like to redeploy troops from Iraq, which we are asked to believe the US has succeeded in pacifying. But 35,000 US troops appear to be set to remain in Iraq indefinitely – certainly for at least the next 6
years. The US has been begging for other countries to increase their troops,
but hardly any have agreed to do so, and those like Britain which have agreed
have only offered a few hundred. The Canadians are to withdraw their troops.
The plan was to train sufficient local troops to be able to do the US’s job for it, but this plan would necessitate winning over enough hearts and minds in Afghanistan to create a supply of troops willing to die for America. Imperialism, however, is a
paper tiger precisely because it can never do that. As a result, there is
always the threat that any troops trained will immediately offer their services
and weaponry to the resistance.
It is generally agreed that winning hearts and
minds requires delivering a better standard of living to the masses of the
people. As the Financial Times – with a Guardianesque disregard
of imperialist reality – put in (‘The AfPak envoy’, 16 February 2009), “wars
like this are won through the patient accumulation of popular support, not by
stacking up corpses”. In Afghanistan this “patient accumulation of
popular support” certainly has not happened. “In a country where seven
out of 10 citizens live on about a dollar a day, the average family each year
must pay about $100 in baksheesh, or bribes … Foreign aid is, after
narcotics, the readiest source of income in Afghanistan. But it has been widely
estimated that because of stealing and mismanagement in Kabul, the capital,
less than half of the money actually finds its way into projects, and only a
quarter of that makes it to the countryside, where 70 percent of the people
live… ‘What have the people of Afghanistan received from the Coalition?’ asks
Zamir Kabulov, the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan. ‘They lived very poorly
before, and they still live poorly- but sometimes they also get bombed by
mistake.’” (John Barry and Evan Thomas, ‘Obama’s Vietnam’, Newsweek, 9
February 2009). This quotation is valuable in that it shows that nothing in
the way of economic benefits is coming the way of the ordinary Afghan masses.
Of course, the blame is placed on the corruption of the local puppets, and
corruption there certainly is. If local bigwigs have sold out to imperialism,
it is because they expect a good price – and they get it. However, whereas
imperialism can be persuaded to hand out largesse to a handful of influential
bigwigs in order to keep the masses in order, it would not be imperialism if it
were capable of organising a better standard of life for the masses. The very
system of production for profit makes that an impossibility.
The result in Afghanistan is that imperialism is
unable to enrol the numbers it needs in its local military forces, and the
quality of those desperate enough to sell themselves is extremely low:
“As insurgents come under pressure from NATO in
the south, they may shift their attacks to areas that are less defended; the
Dutch in Uruzgan, a relative success story of late, worry that the Taliban will
move into their area as the Americans push into Helmand and Kandahar.
Counter-insurgency requires large numbers of troops and policemen (which in Afghanistan are weak, corrupt and often drug-addled). Abdul Rahim Wardak, Afghanistan’s
defence minister, says his army needs to be much bigger than the planned
134,000. Almost everybody would agree with him. Iraq, smaller than Afghanistan
in terms of land area and population, has over 267,000 troops.
“One problem, though, is that the Afghan army
cannot grow any faster because of a shortage of literate recruits for the
officer corps. Another problem is money; Afghanistan is too poor to afford even
the forces it now has.” (‘Boots on the ground’, The Economist, 19
February 2009).
It is quite clear that the subsidies US imperialism and its allies are prepared to pay the Afghanis to fight their fellow Afghanis are
far too meagre to attract either the quality or the quantity of troops that
would be needed to overwhelm the resistance that is fighting for Afghan
sovereignty and independence.
The Afghan police is even more shambolic than the
Afghan army. According to Ben Farmer writing in The Telegraph of 19
February, (‘Two-thirds of Afghan police take illegal drugs’), “The casualty
rate among police is several times higher than among the army and the daily
toll of casualties has been blamed for contributing to the high numbers going
absent without leave and turning to drugs”.
The sheer cost to the various imperialist countries
of continuing the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan is a heavy burden on
national economic budgets at a time when severe economic crisis is wiping out
the fortunes of rich and poor alike and bankrupting whole governments. The
mighty US imperialism is vulnerable, having lived way beyond its means for
decades. It is steadily aggravating its insolvency and weakening its
imperialist status with every billion that it fritters on its various wars of
aggression. According to the Newsweek article cited above, “Deploying
a U.S. force of 60,000 will cost about $70 billion a year. Training and
supporting the 130,000 to 200,000 troops required for a proper Afghan Army
would take another decade and could cost at least $20 billion”. The US population is losing all enthusiasm for war: “A recent NEWSWEEK Poll shows that while 71
percent of the people believe that Obama can turn around the cratering economy,
only 48 percent think he can make progress in Afghanistan. … Only 10 percent
put Afghanistan at the top of their list [of government priorities],
even fewer than nominate Iraq.” (ibid.).
Nor would it be rational to expect much in the way
of financial support from the US’s imperialist partners in crime: Jon Boone of
the Financial Times (‘Afghan donations fall billions short’, 19 February
2009) notes that: “Afghanistan’s international backers have left the country
billions short of money promised at June’s Paris aid conference…
“While some $21bn (€16.8bn, £14.8bn) in aid was
officially promised by world governments at the conference, nearly a third has
proved to be old money that has been ‘double pledged’…
As a result, “large parts of the National
Development Strategy laid out by the Afghan government will go unfunded.
“The NDS put a heavy emphasis on improving the
country’s agricultural base but the finance ministry report shows that rural
development will be underfunded by $412m in 2009 alone.
“Overall, there will be a $3.1bn shortfall for
this year, with other key sectors, including health, education and
infrastructure, all suffering for lack of funds.
“In a sign of where international priorities
lie, nearly half of all available money will be spent on building up Afghanistan’s security forces.
“The finance ministry forecasts that there will
be a total shortfall of $22.3bn for the NDS, which requires $50.1bn over the
next four years.” …
The Financial Times concludes with the
observation: “Time is running out and unless sufficient funding is
forthcoming for a strategy that goes beyond military solutions the
international community’s state building mission in Afghanistan will fail.”
For our part we consider it more
than likely that sufficient funding will never be forthcoming, largely because
bitter experience has taught at least some of the imperialist jackals and
hyenas (aka ‘the international community’) that US imperialism’s wars of
aggression are a black hole into which they have been pouring money with no
return and it is safe to assume that this would continue to be the case so long
as imperialism pursues its nefarious cause and the resistance continues to give
the imperialists a good run for their money.