Australia Sends
Ttroops Back
To Afghanistan
By James Cogan
19 July 2005
World
Socialist Web
The
Australian government is sending troops back to Afghanistan some two-and-a-half
years after they were withdrawn. An elite force of 150 Special Air Service
(SAS) personnel and Army commandos will be dispatched in September for
a 12-month tour, following the deployment of 450 Australian troops to
southern Iraq in February. An additional 200-strong engineering unit
is likely to be sent to Afghanistan in April 2006.
Prime Minister Howard
made the decision with his trademark contempt for the widespread opposition
among Australian working people toward involvement in the US-led wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq. On July 11, with an announcement imminent,
the prime minister told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: When
you taken decisions of this kind you dont first do an opinion
poll. The Australian parliament was given no opportunity to debate
or discuss the deployment, which was discussed at a Coalition cabinet
meeting behind closed doors on July 12. Howard formally announced the
deployment at a press conference the following day.
The decision to
dispatch the SAS followed a public request the week before by the Afghanistan
ambassador to Australia. But it was clearly the product of months of
concerted pressure by Washington and the British government for a greater
Australian role in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The American military
and the Bush administration face a mounting crisis produced by the ever-escalating
resistance to the US takeover of the two countries. More than 130,000
US troops are tied down fighting an anti-occupation insurgency in Iraq,
with no end in sight. If anything, more troops will be required over
the next six months as Washingtons puppet government in Baghdad
attempts to finalise a new constitution and hold elections in December.
At the same time,
the last 12 months have seen a steady increase in resistance in Afghanistan,
to the point where the current force is insufficient to maintain occupation
control. Only 18,000 American troops and an 8,000-strong NATO force
are in the country, while fewer than 20,000 men have been recruited
and trained into the pro-US Afghan army. Entire regions are controlled
by warlords who have no loyalty to the Kabul government, and there is
widespread hostility to the presence of foreign troops.
The border provinces
with Pakistan have become the focus of the armed resistance. Armed groups,
with the active support of the regions ethnic Pashtun tribes,
are crossing back and forth over the 2,100-kilometre border, launching
attacks and taking control of villages and towns. On July 12, the main
airport in Kandahar, the major city in the south-west, was hit by rockets,
wounding two Canadian soldiers. Fighting has also taken place over recent
days in the provinces of Zabul, Paktika and Paktia. As well, the Pakistani
military, which has 70,000 troops deployed along the border to ostensibly
try and stop the flow of guerillas into Afghanistan, has been involved
in clashes in the province of North Waziristan.
American and government
troops have been forced to conduct a series of offensives this year
against the guerillas. At the end of June, one such operation resulted
in the shooting down of a Chinook helicopter and the loss of 19 American
soldiers. According to US military body counts, as many as 450 Afghan
fighters have been killed in the last three months, at the cost of 45
American lives and dozens wounded. US air strikes on villages alleged
to be guerilla bases have claimed the lives of scores of civilians and
fueled anger at the occupation and further support for the resistance.
Under US operational
command, the function of the Australian SASan elite unit trained
for counter-terrorism and long-range reconnaissancewill be to
assist in the suppression of the burgeoning opposition, which is expected
to intensify in the weeks leading up to the scheduled parliamentary
elections in September.
A general build-up
of foreign troops in Afghanistan is underway, with Britain assuming
a far more prominent role. The Blair government is sending an additional
3,000 British troops, along with new Spanish, Dutch and Romanian units,
to boost the total NATO force to over 10,000. An additional 800-strong
battalion of US paratroopers is also being deployed. According to British
Ministry of Defence documents leaked to the press, the British force
in southern Iraq will be reduced from 8,000 to just 1,000 by April 2007,
in order to sustain the stepped-up commitment in Afghanistan.
Deployment justified with lies
Howard has justified
the decision to send the SAS with a combination of lies and obfuscation.
He told the press on July 13: We have seen a situation where we,
we meaning the allies, had great initial success and the Taliban was
routed and a legitimate government was installed. And in recent months
there has been a resurgence and its very important in the war
on terror because of the obvious connection between Al Qaeda, the Taliban
and Afghanistan that those attempts of recent times, renewed attempts
to undermine the government of Afghanistan, are not successful.
Why there has been
a resurgence of fighting against the US-led forces, Howard
did not seek to explain. The main motivation for the resistance, however,
is the desperate backwardness, misery and poverty that face the mass
of the Afghan population, and the deep-going hostility toward the presence
of foreign troops.
The primary aim
of the US-led invasion in November 2001 was to exploit the September
11, 2001 terror attacks to put into motion long-standing plans for intervention
into Central Asiaone of the most resource-rich areas of the world.
The overthrow of the Taliban has enabled the Bush administration to
establish a compliant regime in Kabul, as well as military bases in
Afghanistan and a number of other Central Asian states. US imperialism
is seeking to use its geopolitical dominance to dictate the manner in
which lucrative oil and gas fields are exploited, at the expense of
its main rivals in Europe and Japan, and regional powers such as Iran,
China and Russia.
The plight of the
Afghan population has been a matter of complete indifference. While
US and allied military operations against alleged Al Qaeda and Taliban
targets have killed or maimed thousands, at least five million people
still live on the verge of starvation. Life expectancy in Afghanistan
is just 44 years, and social and educational infrastructure barely exists.
The bulk of the so-called reconstruction work is geared
toward meeting the military and economic interests of the occupying
powers.
Drought and desperation
have led several million Afghan peasant farmers to turn back to growing
opium poppies in order to live. In a UN-organised survey in 2003, 31
percent of farmers said they would grow poppy to alleviate poverty,
with another 30 percent declaring they would do so due to high
prices. Afghanistans poppy harvest reached close to 4,000
metric tons in 2004, valued at over $2.3 billion and representing nearly
75 percent of world opium production. Before the US invasion, the flow
of opium and heroin out of Afghanistan had begun to dry up, due to a
prohibition by the Taliban regime in 2000 on poppy crops.
For many rural people,
their only contact with the occupation forces and the Kabul government
has been when they have come to destroy fields or demand that other
crops are grown. While there are plans to eradicate more than 50 percent
of the poppy crop this year, farmers complain they have not been given
promised compensation, alternate seed or finances for irrigation systems.
The predominantly Pashtun Kandahar province, which was the focus of
eradication operations last year, is now one of the centres of the resurgent
fighting.
With next to no
evidence, all Afghan resistance is being labeled by the Australian and
US governments as the work of remnants of the former Taliban regime
or members of Osama bin Ladens Al Qaeda network. But the people
of Afghanistan, a complex tapestry of ethnic and linguistic groups and
tribal loyalties, have a 200-hundred year tradition of opposing great
power domination.
Like the Soviet
Union in the 1980s, US imperialism has embroiled itself in an intractable
war against a hostile population. As part of the sordid quid pro quos
that have accompanied Howards backing for the Bush administration,
the Australian government is being called upon to supply an increasing
number of the troops to fight it.
Domestically, this
provides Canberra with certain temporary advantages. Whereas millions
of people view Iraq as a dirty war for oil, sending forces to Afghanistan
can be more easily packaged as a struggle against Al Qaeda, terrorism
and Taliban obscurantism.
Howard, however,
has only been able to get away with his propaganda and lies due to the
support he has received from virtually the entire Australian political
and media establishment.
The Labor Party
opposition supported the troop deployment in identical language to Howards.
Labor leader Kim Beazley declared Afghanistan was terror central
and there is a direct Australian national interest in ensuring the success
of the struggle against the remnants of the former Taliban regime and
Al Qaeda. His only criticism was that troops should have been
sent earlier. Labor has been calling for more troops to Afghanistan
since the beginning of 2004.
The deployment was
also endorsed by media commentators, who have backed the Howard governments
support for the Bush administration since day one. It was also hailed,
however, by one of the more prominent media critics of the Iraq occupation,
the Sydney Morning Heralds Paul McGeough. The journalist wrote
on July 13 that a genuine frontline role in the pursuit of bin
Laden and the Taliban would be a money-where-our mouth-is use of Australian
military resources that has been absent in post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan.
The reality is that
the Australian government is using its military forces to provide the
Bush administrations predatory, neo-colonial activities with a
veneer of international support. In return, Howard has secured American
backing for a series of Australian interventions in the South Pacific,
certain trade concessions and a share, however small, in the post-invasion
carve-up of Iraqs resources.
A genuine struggle
by the working class against this imperialist agenda can only be developed
through a complete break with the Labor Party and the entire official
establishment, and the construction of an independent political movement
based on a socialist and internationalist perspective.
The Socialist Equality
Party of Australia and the World Socialist Web Site demand the immediate
and unconditional withdrawal of all Australian, American and other foreign
forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. In the face of imperialist militarism,
the working class internationally has the responsibility to uphold the
right of the Afghan and Iraqi people to determine their own political
future.