Afghanistan – the war imperialism can never win
“The
news out of Afghanistan is truly alarming”, announced
the International Herald Tribune of 21 August 2008,[1] the
reason being that “the number of US and NATO casualties is mounting so
quickly that unless something happens soon, this could be the deadliest year of
the Afghan war. Kabul … is increasingly besieged, and Taliban and foreign
Qaeda fighters are consolidating control over an expanding swath of territory
sprawling across both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border”.
Afghanistan is on its way to becoming as deadly for
imperialist troops as is Iraq. 70,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan cannot prevent the surge of the resistance. “There were 10
times as many armed attacks on international troops and civilian contractors in
2007 as there were in 2004. Every other measure of violence, from roadside
bombs to suicide bombers is also up dramatically”.[2] The International Herald Tribune of 7 August[3] tells us that: “June was the second deadliest month for the [US]
military in Afghanistan since the war began, with 23 American deaths from
hostilities, compared with 22 in Iraq. July was less deadly [if you
discount the French and Canadian soldiers killed that month], with 20
deaths, compared with six in Iraq. On July 22, nearly seven years after the
conflict began [i.e., the US invasion] on October 7, 2000, the United States lost its 500th soldier in the Afghanistan war.
“In 2007, 111 American soldiers
were killed, the highest annual toll so far in the war. So far this year, 91
Americans have died, a rate faster than last year.”[4]
In fact, “Multi-direction attacks,
flawlessly executed ambushes and increasingly powerful roadside and suicide
bombs mean the US and … NATO-led force will in all likelihood suffer its
deadliest year in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.”[5]
When we factor in the deaths of soldiers from other
NATO invasion forces as well as Afghan puppet troops we can begin to see why
the Atlantic Council of the United States, in a report in January[6] that one should “make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan”. If 101 Americans have been killed this year in Afghanistan, the total number of NATO/US soldiers is approaching 200, with over a third of
the year still to go. It seems certain that the number of foreign invasion
troops killed will surpass the 222 (of which 111 were Americans) reported last
year. As for the puppet troops killed, it is hard to find information on this
since to the imperialists these ‘natives’ are expendable. Nevertheless the 7
August article mentioned above notes that “Though Afghan security forces
have suffered the vast majority of fatalities in the war, exact numbers are
hard to come by. The Defense Ministry said that nearly 600 Afghan soldiers
were killed from March 2005 to March 2006, the only period for which it
provided statistics. The Afghan Interior Ministry, which began recording
police deaths in March 2007, said 1119 police officers were killed from March
2007 to March 2008.”
As the number of fatalities begins to escalate from
year to year, it has become apparent that the Afghan resistance (always branded ‘The Taliban’ in western
bourgeois media, just as any resistance fighters lending fraternal support from
other countries are branded ‘Al Qaeda’) is going from strength to strength. “Karzai’s
influence barely extends outside the capital,” says the International
Herald Tribune of 25 August[7]. In fact, the Afghan
resistance is succeeding in its plan to cut off the capital, much as they did
in the early 1990’s as a prelude to defeating the forces of the Najibullah
government, and there is not very much that the imperialist invasion forces can
do to prevent this. The resistance has been able to render impassable the main
highway – built at huge imperialist expense – leading south from Kabul. Carlotta Gall in the International Herald Tribune of 14 August[8] says that:
“When it was built several years
ago, the Kabul-Kandahar highway was a demonstration of the US commitment to building a democratic Afghanistan. A critical artery, the highway quite literally
holds the country together …
“For the United States and the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, it is an important supply route for the war
effort, linking up the two most important foreign military bases in the
country, at Bagram and Kandahar, and a number of smaller bases on the way.
“But today the highway is a
dangerous gauntlet of mines and attacks from insurgents and criminals
pockmarked with bomb craters and blown-up bridges…
“The road has become the site of
excessive carnage in the past 6 years, disrupting supply lines for US and NATO
forces and tying down the Afghan Army forces. One of the worst attacks
occurred in Selar on June 24, when some 50 fuel tankers and food trucks
carrying supplies for the US military were ambushed…”
The Financial Times of 12 August[9] says that the “ten
largest fuel transport groups now have to spend $2 million a month in
protecting the 500 trucks they operate”. The article also quotes the
figure of $2,500 as the amount that is offered to truck drivers for EACH load
that they take to NATO bases in the south of the country – but there are not
many drivers prepared to risk their lives, even at that price.
And, continues the article, “The
security companies are circumspect about how many tankers they lose, but …
‘multiple dozens have been lost in the south each month during the summer.”
Hearts and
minds
The imperialist press and petty-bourgeois toadies
of US imperialism like the Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid[10] refuse to
recognise that the resistance in Afghanistan, as indeed in Iraq, represents the
hearts and minds of the masses of the people, which is what make them
unbeatable. They like to claim that it is the harshness of the treatment meted
out by the resistance to all those who oppose them, along with the murder of
all rivals, that makes them such an effective opponent. However, if brutality
were the key to victory, it is obvious that the Afghan resistance would not
stand a chance against Anglo-American imperialism. All sane commentators on
the situation in Afghanistan recognise that because the invading forces offer
nothing to the Afghan masses other than repression, recruitment to the
resistance is brisker by the day. Bartle Breese Bull, the foreign editor of Prospect magazine, writing in the International
Herald Tribune of 15 August[11] makes the point
that is obvious to anybody other than an imperialist lusting after superprofits
that “Liberal democracies [i.e., imperialist powers] cannot win
counterinsurgencies against the wills of local populations, and denying a
livelihood to poor farmers of southern and eastern Afghanistan [or anywhere
else!] is no way to persuade them to side with the West.” Although
Breese Bull is arguing against the destruction of poppy crops, the whole point
is that this is the ONLY crop that has been producing any kind of a livelihood
for the Afghan farmers. Such is the exploitative relationship between
imperialism on the one hand and Afghanistan on the other, that broad sections of
ordinary people are unable to make any kind of a living. What has led the
masses of the people to support the resistance is that submission to
imperialism offers them no hope for the future.
Of course, the masses of the people are also aware
of the sheer hypocrisy of imperialism which, while claiming to be fighting for
their human rights, is detaining “hundreds of suspects for
years without trial at the Bagram air base and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba”,[12] where, one might add, they are subjected to torture and degrading
treatment.
Imperialist forces casually unleash bombing raids
which kill hundreds of civilians in the hope that there might be a freedom
fighter or two among them. In recent weeks there have been raids in Herat, Laghman, Kapisa, Paktika, Kunar and Nurestan, all resulting in civilian casualties
and air strikes in western Afghanistan on Friday 22 August, reported by US
media as having killed 5 civilians and 25 militants, in fact killed over 90
people, mostly women and children. These “have stirred up
Afghans’ strong independent streak and ancient dislike of foreigners”[13] – as well they might! Even the puppet Karzai has had to put on a show
of protesting against such activity, probably quite sincerely since it is so
effectively undermining his position in the country.
500,000
troops needed
Such are the logical difficulties of overcoming a
hostile population that a former Australian Major General, Jim Molan, has
estimated that it would require 500,000 troops to subdue Afghanistan (as opposed to the 70,000 foreign troops and 62,000 Afghanistan ‘National Army’ soldiers
that are there at this time)!! At one time Major General Molan was Chief of
Operations for the US-led multinational force in 2004 and 2005, in command of
300,000 troops – so since that number was unable to subdue Iraq, he assumes
that a larger number than this would be needed to subdue Afghanistan. For
imperialists who are already being bankrupted by the wars that they are losing
in Iraq and Afghanistan, to increase forces to 500,000 (even assuming they
could find that number, which seems unlikely in view of the existing strong
trend for NATO members – under pressure from electorates at home – to pull out
their troops from Afghanistan or confine them to barracks), to undertake the considerable
cost of training them and equipping them,[14] would be the desperate last throw of
the gambler destined to lose everything. On the one hand, to achieve those
numbers the imperialist powers would need to resort to conscription, a move
that would more than likely sooner or later jolt the populations of the
imperialist countries concerned out of complacent toleration of their rulers’
wars and actually put bourgeois rule at risk; on the other hand, it is highly
unlikely that conscripted troops would be at all effective against the
battle-hardened and determined Afghan resistance that is fighting a just war.
In any event, as Thomas L Friedman quite rightly says, “The
main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few US soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of
government we want.”[15] It
really would not matter how many troops the imperialists threw at Afghanistan, the fact of the matter is that the local people do not want the kind of government that
US imperialism wants. For the resistance, guerrilla warfare is relatively
cheap, and it holds up against all the technological wizardry at the disposal
of the imperialist troops. The writer John Masters served with the British army
facing the Afghan resistance, and concluded that it was difficult to secure
victory: “The core of our problem was to force battle on an elusive and
mobile enemy [who] tried to avoid battle, and instead fight us with
pinpricking hit-and-run tactics … [When they] sniped, rushed, and ran
away, we felt as if we were using a crowbar to swat wasps.” By their
guerrilla warfare, the Afghan resistance has succeeded in neutralising the
technological advantages of their foes.
One region,
one struggle
There may be thoughts in imperialist circles that
significant strength will be added to the imperialist presence in Afghanistan if troops are withdrawn from Iraq. However, even if imperialist troops were withdrawn
from Iraq – something that US imperialism still has no intention of doing – all
that this would mean is the thousands of resistance fighters currently based in
that country would turn their attention to Afghanistan with a view to getting
imperialist troops out of there also. Thomas Friedman is also correct when he
says: “The truth is that Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Pakistan are just different fronts in the same war.”[16]
Throughout the Middle East, the struggle is
about control of oil. The imperialists are in no position to confine their
attentions to one country in the chain. It’s a case of win them all or lose
them all. And, as has been shown above, in the end the war cannot but be lost
by imperialism.
If imperialism admits defeat and pulls out of the
region altogether, it has nothing to show for expenditure of several hundred
billions. It will have emerged defeated, financially destabilised, all hopes
of achieving world domination having met an ignominious end. Imperialism
cannot afford to lose this war. And yet it cannot possibly win it. All this
led Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the revisionist French newspaper Libération, to utter the following banality by
way of encouragement to imperialism: the challenge for NATO in Afghanistan is “how to win a militarily unwinnable war”. All we can say is, M.
Joffrin, it’s not going to happen!
NOTES
1. Afghanistan on fire’ – author unnamed.
2. Bartle Breese Bull, ‘The wrong force for the “right
war”,’ International
Herald Tribune, 14 August 2008.
3. Keith Semple and Andrew W Lehren,
‘500: deadly US milestone in Afghan war’
4. Ibid. By 25 August, the figure
for US troops killed this year had risen to 101.
5. Kathy Gannon and Rahim Faiez (AP),
‘Taliban turns lethal: 101 deaths in Afghanistan’, International Herald
Tribune, 25 August 2008.
6. Quoted by Keith Semple and Andrew W
Lehren, op.cit.
7. Op.cit.
8. ‘An Afghan lifeline plagued by
insurgents’.
9. Jon Boone, ‘Taliban attack Nato by
choking supplies’
10. Author of an informative text called Taliban (I B Tauris & Co Limited,
2000) and a more recent offering entitled Descent into chaos (Allen
Lane, London, 2008) in which he takes the view that the US should have promoted
western civilisation in Afghanistan by channelling vast amounts of money into
the country via his friend Hamid Karzai so that the country as a whole would
have been happy to go along with anything the US asked of them. It would seem
that US imperialism is currently trying to buy peace in Iraq by means of paying
£165 a month to some 100,000 Sunni insurgents grouped in the so-called
Awakening Councils in order to buy off the resistance in the province of Anbar
(see Amit R Paley, ‘Iraqis take control of Anbar’, Financial Times, 2
September 2008). Imperialism, however, is never going to maintain handouts of
this magnitude indefinitely – much less is it going to extend them to cover all
the hungry and dispossessed people throughout the Middle East from among whom
the resistance recruits. There is, after all, the small question of turning a
profit. Imperialism seeks to dominate the Middle East (as indeed anywhere
else) in order to enrich itself, not in order to pour the contents of its
pockets into what would be for them the black hole of catering to the needs of
the masses of the people!
11. ‘The wrong force for the “right war”.’
12. Carlotta Gall, ‘Afghans want a deal on foreign
troops’, International
Herald Tribune, 26 August 2008.
13. Ibid.
14. According to Bartle Breese Bull (op.cit.), the US government is
contemplating a “surge” in Afghanistan (supported by both Barack Obama and John
McCain) and Defence Secretary Robert Gates has “endorsed a $20 billion plan
to increase substantially the size of Afghanistan’s army”. This refers to
a plan to increase the size of the Afghan puppet army from 63,000 to 80,000.
The $20 billion, however, is intended to finance two additional US combat brigades (totalling 6,000-10,000 soldiers). All this profligate spending will produce
only a tiny fraction of the personnel needed according to the military
calculations of Major General Jim Molan.
15. ‘Drilling in Afghanistan’, International Herald Tribune, 30 July 2008
16. Ibid.