[R-G] Make Way for Field Marshall Obama: Hunkering Down in Afghanistan

[Anthony Fenton]

Weekend Edition
July 5 / 6, 2008
http://counterpunch.org/whitney07062008.html

Make Way for Field Marshall Obama: Hunkering Down in Afghanistan

By MIKE WHITNEY

Afghanistan was supposed to be the "good war"; a "just response" to  
the attacks of September 11. It was supposed to bring Bin Laden to  
justice "dead or alive" and quash terrorism wherever it originated. 95  
per cent of the American people supported the invasion of Afghanistan.  
Now less than half think the U.S. will prevail. The war was promoted  
as a way to replace a repressive fundamentalist regime with a  
democratic government based on western values. The Bush administration  
promised to rebuild war-torn Afghanistan, transform its feudal system  
into a free market economy, and liberate its women from the oppression  
of Islamic extremism.

It was all hogwash. None of the promises have been kept and none of  
the goals have been achieved. Besides, war isn't an instrument for  
positive social change; it's about killing people and blowing up  
things. Dolling-up military aggression as "preemption" can work for a  
while, but eventually the truth comes out. Democracy and modernity  
don't come from the barrel of a gun.

Far from being the "good war", Afghanistan has turned out to be a  
brutal war of revenge. Three decades of fighting has left the country  
in ruins and the violence is only getting worse. As victory becomes  
more elusive, the US has stepped up its bombing campaign making 2008  
the most deadly year on record. Civilian casualties have skyrocketed  
and millions of Afghans have become refugees. At the same time, the  
Taliban have regrouped and taken over strategically vital areas in the  
south disrupting US supply lines from Pakistan. Khost has fallen into  
the hands of the Afghan resistance just as it did before the Soviet  
Army was defeated in the 1980s. The Taliban are moving inexorably  
towards Kabul and a battle for the capital now seems unavoidable.

For the second month in a row, the number of foreign troops killed in  
Afghanistan has exceeded Iraq. The fighting has intensified while  
security has steadily deteriorated. The Taliban's numbers are growing,  
but the total allied commitment is still under 60,000 troops for a  
country of 32 million. This makes it impossible to capture and hold  
territory. The military is limited to "hit and run" operations. The  
ground belongs to the Taliban.

Michael Scheuer, former CIA chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station, made  
this statement at a recent conference at the Middle East Institute in  
Washington, DC: "Afghanistan is lost for the United States and its  
allies. To use Kipling's term, 'We are watching NATO bleed to death on  
the Afghan plains.' But what are we going to do. There are 20 million  
Pashtuns; are we going to invade? We don't have enough troops to even  
form a constabulary that would control the country. The disaster  
occurred at the beginning. The fools that run our country thought that  
a few hundreds CIA officers and a few hundred special forces officers  
could take a country the size of Texas and hold it, were quite  
literally fools. And now we are paying the price."

Scheuer added, "We are closer to defeat in Afghanistan than Iraq at  
the moment."

Scheuer's pessimism is widely shared among military and political  
elites. The situation on the ground is hopeless; there is no light in  
the tunnel. Author Anatol Lieven put it like this in an article in the  
Financial Times, "The Dream of Afghan Democracy is Dead": "The first  
step in rethinking Afghan strategy is to think seriously about the  
lessons of a recent opinion survey of ordinary Taliban fighters  
commissioned by the Toronto Globe and Mail. Two results are striking:  
the widespread lack of any strong expression of allegiance to Mullah  
Omar and the Taliban leadership; and the reasons given by most for  
joining the Taliban -- namely, the presence of western troops in  
Afghanistan. The deaths of relatives or neighbors at the hands of  
those forces was also stated by many as a motive. This raises the  
question of whether Afghanistan is not becoming a sort of surreal  
hunting estate, in which the US and Nato breed the very “terrorists”  
they then track down. "

Lieven is right. The occupation and the careless killing of civilians  
has only strengthened the Taliban and swollen their ranks. The US has  
lost the struggle for hearts and minds and they don't have the troops  
to establish security. The mission has failed; the Afghan people have  
grown tired of foreign occupation and support on the homefront is  
rapidly eroding. The US is just digging a deeper hole by staying.

By every objective standard, conditions are worse now than they were  
before the invasion in 2001. The economy is in shambles, unemployment  
is soaring, reconstruction is minimal, security is non-existent and  
malnutrition is at levels that rival sub-Saharan Africa. Afghanistan  
not safer, more prosperous, or freer. The vast majority of Afghans are  
still living in grinding poverty exacerbated by the constant threat of  
violence. The Karzai government has no popular mandate nor any power  
beyond the capital. The regime is a sham maintained by a small army of  
foreign mercenaries and a collaborative media which promotes it as a  
sign of budding democracy. But there is no democracy or sovereignty.  
Afghanistan is occupied by foreign troops. Occupation and sovereignty  
are mutually exclusive.

According to The Senlis Council's report, "Stumbling into Chaos:  
Afghanistan on the brink": "The security situation in Afghanistan has  
reached crisis proportions. The Taliban's ability to establish a  
presence throughout the country is now proven beyond doubt; 54 per  
cent of Afghanistan’s landmass hosts a permanent Taliban presence,  
primarily in southern Afghanistan.

The Taliban are the de facto governing authority in significant  
portions of territory in the south and east, and are starting to  
control parts of the local economy and key infrastructure such as  
roads and energy supply. The insurgency also exercises a significant  
amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political  
legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people who have a long history  
of shifting alliances and regime change."

Journalist Eric Walberg further clarifies the role played by the  
Taliban in his article "The Princess and the Taliban": "Western  
readers have become numbed into accepting the code words 'enemy' and  
'insurgents', ignoring the underlying fact that the Taliban are still  
the legitimate government, that these so-called insurgents are in fact  
widely seen as freedom fighters battling the non-Muslim foreign  
occupiers — the real 'enemy' — who invaded the country illegally and  
have killed hundreds of thousands of resistance fighters and innocent  
civilians illegally. Rather than 'killed', the word 'murdered' might  
be more appropriate. For locals, the dead are 'martyred', as in Iraq  
and Palestine..... The country’s declining socioeconomic situation  
point to the Taliban as the only feasible force to control the  
situation."

It is not even clear that women are better off now than they were  
under Taliban rule. According to Afghan Parliament member, Malalai  
Joya: "Every month dozens of women commit self-immolation to end their  
desolation....The American war on terror is a mockery and so is the US  
support of the present government in Afghanistan which is dominated by  
Northern Alliance terrorists....Far more civilians have been killed by  
the US military in Afghanistan than were killed in the US in the  
tragedy of September 11. More Afghan civilians have been killed by the  
US than were ever killed by the Taliban.....The US should withdrawal  
as soon as possible. We need liberation not occupation." ("The War on  
Terror is a Mockery", Elsa Rassbach, Z Magazine Nov 2007)

The Taliban had effectively eradicated poppy cultivation before the  
invasion in 2001. Now, after six years of war, the opium trade is back  
with a vengeance and Afghanistan accounts for 93% of world's heroin  
production. 2007 was a particularly good year yielding 20% more opium  
than a year before. Heroin is now Afghanistan's number one export; the  
nation has become a US narco-colony.

Bush could care less about drug trafficking. What matters to him is  
stabilizing Afghanistan so that the myriad US bases that are built  
along pipeline corridors can provide a safe channel for oil and  
natural gas heading to markets in the Far East. That's what really  
counts. The administration has staked America's future on a risky  
strategy to establish a foothold in Central Asia to control the flow  
of energy from the Caspian to China and India.

But US policymakers are no longer confident of victory in Afghanistan.  
In fact, according to a Pentagon report: "Taliban militants have  
regrouped after their initial fall from power and 'coalesced into a  
resilient insurgency.' The report paints a grim picture of the  
conflict, concluding that Afghanistan's security conditions have  
deteriorated sharply while the fledgling national government in Kabul  
remains incapable of extending its reach throughout the country or  
taking effective counternarcotics measures."

The situation is dire and it's forcing Bush to decide whether to shift  
more troops from Iraq or face growing resistance in Afghanistan.  
Meanwhile the violence is spreading and combat deaths are on the rise.  
Pentagon chieftains now believe they can only defeat the Taliban by  
striking at bases in Pakistan, a reckless plan that could inflame  
passions in Pakistan and trigger a regional conflict. Gradually, the  
US is being lured into a bigger quagmire.


ONWARD FIELD-MARSHALL OBAMA

Presidential candidate Barak Obama, "The Peace Candidate", supports a  
stronger commitment to the war in Afghanistan and has proposed  
"sending at least two additional combat brigades -- or 7,000 to 10,000  
troops -- to Afghanistan, while deploying more Special Operations  
forces to the Afghan-Pakistan border. He has also proposed increasing  
non-military aid to Afghanistan by at least $1 billion per  
year." (Wall Street Journal) Obama, backed by Brzezinski and other  
Clinton foreign policy advisers, has focussed his attention on the  
"war on terror", that dismal public relations coup which conceals  
America's desire to become a major player in the Great Game, the  
battle for supremacy on the Asian continent. Obama appears to be even  
more eager to repeat history than his opponent, John McCain.

In November, voters will be asked to pick one of the two pro-war  
candidates. McCain has made his position clear; his focus is on Iraq.  
Now it is up to Obama to point out why it's more acceptable to kill a  
man who is fighting for his country in Afghanistan than it is in Iraq.  
If he can't answer that question, then he deserves to lose.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney at msn.com