Afghanistan:
The Other Lost War
By Stephen Lendman
30 September, 2006
Countercurrents.org
In
his important new book Freedom Next Time, dealing with "empire,
its facades and the enduring struggle of people for their freedom,"
John Pilger has a chapter on Afghanistan. In it he says that "Through
all the humanitarian crises in living memory, no country has been abused
and suffered more, and none has been helped less than Afghanistan."
He goes on to describe what he sees as something more like a moonscape
than a functioning nation. In the capitol, Kabul, there are "contours
of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed buildings,
like earthquake victims waiting for rescue....(with) no light or heat."
It seems like it's always been that way for these beleaguered people
who've had a long history of conflict and suffering with little relief.
In the 19th century, the Afghan people were victimized by the "Great
Game" struggle pitting the British empire against Tsarist Russia
for control of that part of the world. More recently in the 1980s, it
paid dearly again when a US recruited mjahideen guerrilla army battled
against a Soviet occupation. It forced the occupiers out but at the
cost of a ravaged country and one forced to endure still more suffering
and destruction from the brutal civil war in the 1990s that followed
the Soviet withdrawal. Then came 9/11, the US attack, invasion, occupation
and further devastation that's ongoing with no end in sight and now
intensifying in ferocity.
In his book, Pilger explains
that Afghanistan today is what the CIA once called Vietnam - "the
grand illusion of the American cause." There's no assured safety
even in most parts of the capitol now where for a brief time after the
US invasion the people of Kabul enjoyed a degree of freedom long denied
them by the Taliban. Now there's neither freedom nor safety almost anywhere
in the country as the brutal regional "warlords" rule most
parts of it, and the Taliban have begun a resurgence reigniting the
conflict that for a time subsided. Today the nation is once again a
war zone and narco-state with the "warlords" and drug kingpins
controlling everything outside the capitol and the Taliban gaining strength
and fighting back in the south trying to regain what they lost. In Kabul
itself, the country's selected and nominal president Hamid Karzai (a
former CIA asset and chief consultant to US oil giant UNOCAL) is a caricature
of a man and willing US stooge who functions as little more than the
mayor of the cit. Outside the capitol he has no mandate or support and
wouldn't last a day on his own without the round the clock protection
afforded him by the US military and the private contractor DynCorp.
When they ruled most of the
country in the 1990s, the Taliban at least kept order and wouldn't tolerate
banditry, rape or murder, despite their ultra-puritanical ways and harsh
treatment of the disobedient. They also virtually ended opium production.
Now all that's changed. The US - British invasion in 2001 ended the
ban on opium production, allowed the "warlords" to replant
as much of it as they wanted, and the result according to a report released
by the UN is that cultivation of this crop is spiraling out of control.
Antonio Maria Costa, the UN anti-drug chief, said this year's opium
harvest will be a record 6,100 tons (enough to make 610 tons of heroin)
or 92% of the total world supply and 30% more than the amount consumed
globally. Costa went much further in his comments saying southern Afghanistan
"display(s) the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse, with large-scale
drug cultivation and trafficking, insurgency and terrorism, crime and
corruption (because) opium cultivation is out of control. He directed
his comments at President Karzai for not acting forcefully to deal with
the problem saying provincial governors and police chiefs should be
sacked and held to account. He also accused government administrators
of corruption.
The reason why this is happening
is that elicit drug trafficking is big business with an annual UN estimate
gross of around $400 - 500 billion or double the sales revenue from
legal prescription drugs the US pharmaceutical giants reported in 2005.
Those profiting from it include more than the "kingpins" and
organized crime. The elicit trade has long been an important profit
center for many US and other banks including the giant international
money center ones. It's also well-documented that the CIA has been involved
in drug-trafficking (directly or indirectly) throughout its half century
existence and especially since the 1980s and the Contra wars in Nicaragua.
Today the CIA is partnered with the Afghan "warlords" and
criminal syndicates in the huge business of trafficking heroin. It guarantees
the crime bosses easy access to the lucrative US market and the CIA
a large and reliable revenue stream to augment its annual (heretofore
secret) budget disclosed by Mary Margaret Graham, Deputy Director of
Natinal Intelligence for Collection, to be $44 billion in 2005.
Why the US Attacked
and Invaded Afghanistan
The now famous (or infamous)
leaked Downing Street (or smoking-gun) memo on the secret July, 2002
UK Labor government meeting discussed how the Bush administration "wanted
to remove Saddam, through military action (and) had no patience with
the UN route. (So to justify it) the intelligence and facts were being
fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that,
and the high UK official (Richard Dearlove, head of British intelligence
MI6) had to know as he sat in on the high-level secret meetings in Washington
at which the plan was discussed. So to help out in serious damage-control,
the US corporate media, in its customary empire-supportive role, either
called the document a fake or ignored it altogether. It was no fake,
and as such, got front page coverage in the European press after the
Rupert Murdoch-owned London Sunday Times broke the story in their online
edition on May 1, 2005.
The US war on Afghanistan
was also planned well in advance (at least a year or more) of the 9/11
attack that provided the claimed justification for it. It was part of
the US strategic plan to control the vast oil and gas resources of Central
Asia that former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski under
President Carter explained the importance of in his 1997 book The Grand
Chessboard. In it he referred to Eurasia as the "center of world
power extending from Germany and Poland in the East through Russia and
China to the Pacific and including the Middle East and Indian subcontinent."
By dominating this region including Afghanistan with its strategic location,
the US would assure it had access to and controlled the vast energy
resources there.
Early on the US was very
willing to work with the Taliban believing their authoritarian rule
would bring stability to the country without which any plan would be
in jeopardy. Their religious extremism, harsh treatment of women and
the disobedient, and overall human rights abuses were of no concern
and never are anywhere else despite the pious rhetoric from Washington
to the contrary. It was only in 1999 when the Taliban failed to stabilize
the areas they controlled and negotiations broke down trying to convince
them to bow to US interests that official policy changed and the decision
was made to remove them. Initially the plan to do it was to be a joint
US - Russia operation, and at the time, meetings were held between US
officials and those from Russia and India to discuss what kind of government
should be installed. The US needs stability in Afghanistan and control
of the country for the oil and gas pipelines it wants built from the
landlocked Caspian Basin to warm water ports in the south. It wants
hem gotten there through Pakistan and Afghanistan as the prime transhipment
route to avoid having them cross Russia or Iran.
September 11, 2001 provided
the US with the pretext it needed to begin the war it intended to wage
using whatever reason it decided to pick to justify it. It began a scant
four weeks later on October 7 as a joint US - British intensive aerial
assault against a country unable to put up any kind of defense against
it. It then ended a second scant 5 weeks after that on November 12 when
the Taliban fled from Kabul allowing the Northern Alliance forces the
US had recruited to replace them to enter the city the following day.
The intense but brief conflict
came at an enormous cost to the Afghan people already devastated by
the effects of almost endless war and internal turmoil for over two
decades. It displaced as many as about six million or more people fleeing
to neighboring countries or becoming internally displaced persons and
being categorized as IDPs. About half to two-thirds of those refugees
have now returned home but most are unable to find much relief from
where they'd been. Refugees International interviewed returnees to Kabul
in 2002, where conditions are much more stable than elsewhere, and learned
that while people were happy to be back they found conditions there
to be terrible - no shelter, no schools, no work, no medical care, no
security, and for many little or no food.
Things are no better today,
and according to UK-based Christian Aid are likely to become worse.
It recently assessed conditions in 66 villages in the west and northwest
of the country and learned millions of Afghans face hunger because because
draught caused complete crop failures in the worst hit areas. It reported
people are already going hungry and without considerable aid famine
is a real possibility. Things are all the harder because the internal
conflict resumed beginning with the resurgent Taliban (discussed below)
that began slowly in late 2002, grew significantly by mid-2003 and has
been building in intensity since.
It all began with the US-led
attack on Afghanistan that from the start took a great toll in injuries
and deaths, mostly affecting innocent civilians. Marc Herold of the
University of New Hampshire estimated between 3,100 - 3,600 deaths resulted
from the 5 week conflict or as many as over 600 more than those killed
on 9/11 in the US which was the pretext used to go to war. Herold continues
estimating deaths and injuries to Afghans and occupying forces since
and believes as of July, 2004 about 12,000 Afghan troops and civilians
have been killed in the conflict and about 32,000 seriously injured.
As things have intensified since, those numbers increase daily and are
now considerably higher but it's not known to what level. And what's
not included in any of the estimates is the many unknown number of thousands
who've died since October, 2001 from the crushing poverty causing starvation
and disease.
US "Liberation"
Brought No Relief
For a brief time after mid-November,
2001, the Afghan people were free from the repression forced on them
under Taliban rule, but what replaced them was no improvement nor did
the US "liberator" intend it to be. The US-installed so-called
Northern Alliance is terminology used to identify the United Islamic
Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan that prior to October 7, 2001
controlled less than one-third of the country. They never were in the
past or were they to be now the "salvation" of anything but
their own self-interest. The Alliance is comprised of about five dominant
mujahideen factions each led by a thugish "warlord" ruling
over a band of murderers, brutes and rapists whose criminal acts Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch have condemned.
As a result, the brief respite
from conflict the Afghan people enjoyed was short-lived under their
new rulers. With them back in charge in the regions their respective
"warlords" controlled, murder, rape and mayhem became common
again as it was under their previous rule that gave rise to the Taliban
in the first place. So while the Taliban initially faded away after
mid-November, 2001, defenseless against the US-led onslaught against
them, growing anger and discontent with the present rule has allowed
them to regroup and begin a campaign of resurgence. That campaign is
gaining strength and looking more all the time like it may turn Afghanistan
into a Central Asian version of the conflict in Iraq that cooler civilian
heads in Washington and at the Pentagon know is out of control, a lost
cause and only will end when the occupation does under a future US administration.
The Bush administration, that's usually wrong but never in doubt, makes
it clear it will "stay the course" and not "cut and run."
Conditions In Afghanistan
Today
Life in Afghanistan today
is surreal. In parts of Kabul an opulent elite has emerged many of whom
have grown rich from rampant corruption and drug trafficking, and the
city actually has an upscale shopping area catering to them offering
for sale specialty products like expensive Swiss watches and other luxury
goods. They can be found at the Roshan Plaza shopping mall and Kabul
City Center plaza that has three floors of heated shops, a cappuccino
bar and the country's first escalator. The rutted streets are locked
down and deserted at night, but during the day luxury jeeps and four-wheel
drive limousines are seen on them. There are also upscale hotels including
the five-star Serena, built and run by the Aga Khan Development Network
(AKDN), offering luxury accommodations for visiting dignitaries, Western
businessmen and others able to afford what they cost in an otherwise
impoverished city still devastated by years of conflict and destruction.
The arriviste class there can, mansions are being built for tem, foreign
branch banks are there to service their needs, and an array of other
amenities are there to accommodate their extravagant tastes and wishes.
In a country where drug trafficking is the leading industry and corruption
is systemic, there's a ready market for those able to afford most anything,
even in a place as unlikely as Afghanistan.
There's also a ready market
provided by the array of well-off foreign ex-pats, a well-cared for
NGO community (with their own guest houses for their staff), colonial
administrators, commercial developers, mercenaries, fortune-hunters,
highly-paid enforcers and assorted other hangers-on looking to suck
out of this exploited country whatever they can while they're able to
do it. So far at least, there's nothing stopping them except the threat
of angry and desperate people ready to erupt on any pretext and the
growing resistance gaining strength and support from the resurgent Taliban.
There's also no shortage of alcohol in a fundamentalist Muslim country
where it's not allowed, high-priced prostitutes are available on demand
with plenty of ready cash around to buy their services, a reported 80
brothels operate in the city, and imported Thai masseuses are at the
luxury Mustafa Hotel where the owner is called a Mr. Fix It, an Internet
Cafe is located on the bottom floor offering ethernet and wireless connectivty,
and the restaurant fare ranges from traditional Afghan to steaks, pizza
and "the best burger in all of Kabul." The impoverished local
population would surely not be amused or pleased comparing their daily
plight to the luxury living afforded the elite few able to afford it.
Their city is in ruins, and desperation, neglect, despair and growing
anger characterize their daily lives.
This Potemkin facade of opulence
doesn't represent what that daily life is like in the city and throughout
the country for the vast majority of the approximate 26 million or so
Afghans. For them life is harsh and dangerous, and they show their frustration
and impatience in their anger ready to boil over on any pretext. As
in Iraq, there's been little reconstruction providing little relief
from the devastation and making what work there is hard to find and
offering little pay. The result makes depressing reading:
-- Unemployment is soaring
at about 45% of those wanting work.
--The half of the working
population getting it earns on average about a meager $200 a year or
a little over $300 for those involved in the opium trade which is the
main industry in the country.
--The poverty overall is
overwhelming and about one-fourth of the population depends on scarce
and hard to find food aid creating a serious risk of famine.
-- The life expectancy in
the country at 44.5 years is one of the lowest in the world.
--The infant mortality rate
is the highest in the world at 161 per 1,000 births
-- One-fifth of children
die before age five.
-- An Afghan woman dies in
childbirth every 30 minutes.
--In Kabul alone an estimated
500,000 people are homeless or living in makeshift and deplorable conditions.
-- Only one-fourth of the
population has access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.
-- Only one doctor is available
per 6,000 people and one nurse per 2,500 people.
--100 or more people are
killed or wounded each month by unexploded ordnance.
--Children are being kidnapped
and sold into slavery or murdered to harvest their organs that bring
a high price.
-- Less than 6% of Afghans
have access to electricity available only sporadically.
-- Women's literacy rate
is about 19%, and schools are being burned in the south of the country
and teachers beheaded in front of their students.
--Many women are also forced
to beg in the streets or turn to prostitution to survive.
In addition, lawlessness
is back, Sharia law has been reinstated, the internal conflict has resumed,
and no one is safe either from the country's warring factions or from
the hostile occupying force making life intolerable for the vast majority
of the Afghan people.
Afghanistan, Inc.
- The Lucrative
Business of War-Profiteering
Those wondering why the US
engages in so many conflicts (aside from the geopolitical reasons) and
is always ready for another might consider the fact that wars are so
good for business. Corporate America, Wall Street and large insider
investors love them because they're so profitable. It shows up noticeably
on the bottom line of all contractors the Bush administration choose
to "rebuild" Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also been a bonanza
for the many consultants, engineers and mercenaries working for them
who can pocket up to $1,000 a day compared to Afghan employees lucky
to earn $5 for a day's work when they can find it.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan,
huge open-ended, no-bid contracts amounting to many billions of dollars
were awarded to about 70 US firms including the usual array of politically
connected ones whose names have now become familiar to many - Bechtel,
Fluor, Parsons, Shaw Group, SAIC, CH2M Hill, DynCorp, Blackwater, The
Louis Berger Group, The Rendon Group and many more including the one
that nearly always tops the list, Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg,
Brown and Root. Since 2001, this arguably best-connected of all war-profiteers
was awarded $20 billion in war-related contracts the company then exploited
to the fullest by doing shoddy work, running up massive cost-overruns
and then submitting fraudulent billings.
Halliburton and other contractors
have managed to build permanent military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan
for the Pentagon and prisons to house and torture whomever US authorities
choose to arrest and for whatever reason. But their work is nothing
short of shoddy and sloppy when it comes to assessing the job they've
done rebuilding both countries. In Iraq Halliburton did such a poor
job repairing the country's oil fields the US Army estimates it's cost
the country $8 billion in lost production. It also botched the simple
job of installing metering systems at ports in southern Iraq to assure
oil wasn't being smuggled out of the country.
No Serious US-Directed
Effort To
Rebuild Two War-Torn Countries
Far more important for most
Iraqis and Afghans, there's been no serious effort to rebuild these
war-torn countries across the board. That effort is desperately needed
to restore the essential infrastructure destroyed in both conflicts
like power generating stations and water and sewage facilities, but
the funding for them has been poorly directed, lost in a black hole
of corruption or wasted because of inefficiency, design flaws, construction
errors or deliberate unwillingness to do much more than hand out big
contracts to US chosen companies then able to pocket big profits while
doing little for the people in return for them. It also shows in the
state of the countries' basic facilities like schools, health clinics
and hospitals that are in deplorable condition with little being done
to improve them despite lofty promises otherwise. One example is the
US pledge of $17.7 million in 2005 for education in Afghanistan that
turned out, in fact, to be for a private for-profit American University
of Afghanista only available to Afghans who can afford its cost - meaning
none of them but the privileged few.
It's clear the US occupier
has no interest in helping the people it said it came to "liberate"
unless by "liberate" it meant from their freedom to be able
to exploit and abuse them in service to the interests of capital which
is all the Bush administration ever has in mind. Just as Iraq has the
misfortune of having a vast oil reserve beneath its sand the US wants
to control, so too Afghanistan happens to be strategically located as
part of a prime transhipment route over which the Caspian Basin's great
oil and gas reserves can be transported by pipeline to the warm water
southern ports the US wants to ship it out from to countries it will
allow it to be shipped to. These are the reasons the US invaded both
countries, and that's why no serious effort is being made to do any
reconstruction or redevelopment to help the people. There are also reports,
unconfirmed for this article, that hydrocarbon reserves have been discovered
in the northeast of Afghanistan amounting to an estimated 1.5 billion
barrels of ol and from 15 - 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. If
this proves accurate, it will be one more curse for the Afghan people
who already have an unbearable number of others to deal with.
There isn't likely to be
relief for them in reconstruction or anything else as long as the US
occupies the country and remains its de facto ruler. It's sole funding
priority (besides what it ignores lost to corruption) is to its chosen
contractors and the bottom line boosting profits they get from being
on the corporate welfare dole. A revealing window into this and how
reality diverges from rhetoric is seen in a June, 2005 report by the
well-respected Johannesburg based NGO Action Aid. It documents what
it calls phantom aid that's pledged by the US and other countries but
never shows up. At most, maybe 40% of it does while the rest never leaves
the home country. It goes to pay so-called American "experts"
who overprice their services but provide ineffective "technical
assistance" for it. It also obliges recipient countries to buy
US products and services even when cheaper and more accessible ones
are available locally. The report goes on to accuse the US to be one
of the two greatest serial offendercountries (France being the other
one) with 70% of what it calls aid requiring receiving countries to
get from US companies (and much of that is for US-made weapons) and
that 86% of all the US pledges turn out to be phantom aid. So, in fact,
so-called US donor aid to rebuild a war-torn country is just another
scam to enrich politically-connected American corporations by developing
new export markets for them. Iraq, Afghanistan and other recipient countries
get nothing more than the right to have their nations, resources, and
people exploited by predatory US corporations as one of the spoils of
war or one-way trade agreements.
All of this has caused deep-seated
mostly repressed anger that erupted in Kabul this past May in the worst
street violence seen in the capitol since the fall of the Taliban in
2001. It happened after a US military truck speeding recklessly smashed
into about a dozen civilian vehicles at a busy intersection killing
five people in the collision. It touched off mass rioting in angry protest
against an already hated occupier with crowds of men and boys shouting
"death to America, death to Karzai" and blaming the government
and US military for what happened. People set fires to cars, shops,
restaurants and dozens of police posts. They also attacked buildings
and clashed with US forces and Afghan police on the scene throwing rocks
at their vehicles. US troops responded by opening fire on unarmed civilians
killing at least 4 and leaving many others injured. When it finally
ended, eight people were reported dead and 107 injured. This uprising
in the Kabul streets showed the great anger and frustration of thepeople
breaking out in mass rage in response to one dramatic incident that
symbolized for them everything gone wrong in the country now under an
unwanted occupier, the oppressive US-installed Northern Alliance "warlord"
rule, and the deprivation of the people suffering greatly as a result.
There's no end of this in sight, and it's almost certain the resistance
will only intensify in response as it's now doing.
Growing Resistance
Against
Repression and War Crimes
Like the mythological phoenix
rising from the ashes, the Taliban have capitalized on the turmoil and
discontent and have reemerged to reclaim most parts of southern Afghanistan.
This part country has long been ungovernable and is known as an area
too dangerous even for aid agencies. The Taliban now openly control
some districts there, have set up shadow administrations in others,
and have moved into the province of Logar located just 25 miles from
Kabul where they have easy access to the capitol. For the British who
know their history, it should be no surprise. Sir Olaf Caroe, the last
British governor of North West Frontier Province in bordering Pakistan
spoke of it when he said: "Unlike other wars, Afghan wars become
serious only when they are over." Surely the former Soviet occupiers
also could have told George Bush in 2001 what he'd be up against. The
Brits could have as well.
The Taliban are now gaining
supporters among the people fed up with the misery inflicted on them
by the US and multinational force invaders and the Northern Alliance
rule that's even more repressive than the Taliban were during their
years in power. It led to their 1990s rise and conquest of over two-thirds
of the country in the first place. It happened in the wake of the vacuum
created in the country following the withdrawal of the defeated Soviet
forces. During the decade-long conflict while they were there, the Afghan
resistance fought the West's war with its funding and arms. It was heroic
and the darling of the US media. But once the war ended and the Soviet
Union collapsed, Afghans were abandoned and left on their own to deal
with the ravages of their war-torn country and the chaos of warlordism
and civil war that erupted in its aftermath. Out of that despair and
with considerable aid from Pakistan, the Taliban fighters emerged and
by 1996 had defeated the competing warlords to control most of te country.
Today it looks like de jeva
vu all over again as many Afghans apparently prefer Taliban rule again
they see as the lesser of the only choices they now have. The result
is that daily violence has erupted into a growing catastrophic resistance
guerrilla war, slowly becoming more like the one in Iraq, that's intensifying
and making the country unsafe and ungovernable. It's led the international
policy Senlis Council think tank, that does extensive monitoring of
Afghanistan, to issue a damning report called: Afghanistan Five Years
Later: The Return Of The Taliban. The report blamed the occupying forces
for doing nothing to address the crushing poverty, failing to achieve
stability and security, and claims Afghanistan "is falling back
into the hands of the Taliban (and their) frontline now cuts halfway
through the country encompassing all of the southern provinces"
(that have) limited or no central government control." Emmanuel
Reinert, Executive Director, concluded "The Taliban community are
winning contro of Afghanistan (and) the international community is progressively
losing control of the country." He added that Afghanistan today
is a humanitarian disaster, and that there's a hunger crisis with children
starving in makeshift unregistered refugee camps because of lack of
donor interest.
It's fueling the Taliban
guerrilla resistance that's close to critical mass, and, despite official
reports to the contrary, the US-led occupying force won't likely be
able to contain it. It's what always happens in one form or other eventually
under any kind of foreign occupation and system of governance unwilling
to address the basic needs of the people - extreme poverty and desperation
demanding relief, without which people can't even survive. It's also
a response to the brutality of this occupation where war crimes are
just standard operating procedure and an outrageous strategy used to
contain the growing resistance. One example of it, most people in the
West wouldn't understand, was the public burning of supposed Taliban
fighters killed by US soldiers. This is forbidden under Islamic law,
and the images of it provoked outrage in Afghanistan and throughout
the Muslim world that views the US occupiers as barbarians. This is
just one of many instances of deliberately inflicted offenses against
Islam ncluding defiling the Koran, arbitrary and unlawful indefinite
detentions as well as humiliations, torture and other atrocities committed
routinely against Afghans taken prisoner for any reason. The same things
happen in most parts of Iraq as well.
Amnesty International documented
some of the crimes and abuses it learned from former detainees. Just
like in Iraq they reported being made to kneel, stand or maintain painful
positions for long periods, being hooded, deprived of sleep, stripped
and humiliated. They were also held without charge and denied access
to family, legal counsel or any kind of due process. In December, 2004,
US officials acknowledged eight prisoners died in US military custody
with little detail as to why. Earlier in October, the US Army's Criminal
Investigation Division recommended that 28 US soldiers be charged with
beating to death two prisoners at the Bagram air base after autopsies
found "blunt force injuries." At year end only one of the
soldiers was charged with any offense, and it was just for assault,
maltreatment and dereliction of duty.
One other report in September
showed US Special Forces beat and tortured eight Afghan soldiers for
over two weeks at a base near Gardez killing one of them. The US military
refused calls for independent investigations of torture and deaths of
those held in custody and instead went through the motions of conducting
them under the auspices of the US Department of Defense (DOD) - meaning,
of course, they were whitewashed. US authorities also routinely refuse
requests by human rights groups, NGOs, and the Afghanistan Independent
Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) for access to detainees to assess their
condition and treatment. Amnesty also reported on death sentences being
meted out, secret trials in a special court held without the right to
counsel or any form of due process, and many cases of Afghan refugees
returning home and being unable to recover land or property stolen from
them.
Amnesty also reported on
the many civilian deaths resulting from randomly targeted US air strikes
supposedly directed at "armed militants." These attacks are
frequent killing many hundreds of innocent Afghans and always claimed
by the US military only to have been directed against Al Queda or Taliban
fighters. The evidence shows otherwise. On one dramatic occasion early
in the conflict in December, 2001, US airstrikes against the village
of Niazi Kala in eastern Afghanistan killed dozens of civilians resulting
in the London Guardian and Independent each running front page stories
with headlines: "US Accused of Killing Over 100 Villagers in Airstrike"
in the Guardian and "US Accused of Killing 100 Civilians in Afghan
Bombing Raid" in the Independent. Even the Rupert Murdoch-owned
London Times reported "100 Villagers Killed in US Airstrike."
In contrast, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reported the
New York Times (known as the nation's newspaper of record) could barely
get itself to headline "fghan Leader Warily Backs US Bombing."
Instead of accurately reporting what happened, the NYT instead merely
mentioned these villagers had been killed as background information
in an article about whether the nominal Afghan leader (and former CIA
asset) Harmid Karzai was holding firm in "his support for the war
against terrorism." As it usually does, the NYT plays the lead
role in directing the rest of the US corporate media away from any disturbing
truths replacing them with a sanitized version acceptable to US authorities.
They call it "All The News That's Fit To Print."
There was also no account
at all in the US corporate media, beyond the usual distorted version,
of the killing of about 800 captured Taliban prisoners in November,
2001 at Mazar-i-Sharif by Northern Alliance soldiers shooting down from
the walls of the fortress-like prison at the helpless Taliban fighters
trapped below. It was never explained in the US corporate-run media
it was in response to a revolt they staged because they were subjected
to torture and severe maltreatment. US Special Forces and CIA personal
were on the ground assisting in the slaughter by directing supportive
air strikes by helicopter gunships and fighter-bombers in an act of
butchery. It recalled many like it earlier in Vietnam at My Lai, the
many thousands murdered by the infamous Phoenix assassination program
in that war, the CIA organized and financed Salvadoran death squads
in the 1980s and earlier that killed many thousands more, or the later
many thousands of Fallujah residents killed along with mass destruction
inflicted on his Iraqi city in November, 2004 in a savage act of vengeance
and butchery following the killing of four Blackwater USA paramilitary
hired-gun enforcers earlier in the year. There was also no report on
3,000 other Taliban and innocent civilian non-combatant prisoners who
were separated from 8,000 others who'd surrendered or had been picked
up randomly. They were then transported in what was later called a convoy
of death to the town of Shibarghan in closed containers lacking any
ventilation. Half of them suffocated to death en route and others were
killed inside them when a US commander ordered a Northern Alliance soldier
to fire into the containers supposedly to provide air but clearly to
kill or wound those inside who couldn't avoid the incoming fire.
The response from people
suffering the effects of these attacks and atrocities or knowing about
them is what would be expected anywhere but especially in a country
known for its history of determined resistance by any means to free
itself from an oppressive occupier. It happened in Afghanistan during
the 19th century "Great Game" period and then during the decade
of Soviet occupation in the 1980s. It's now happening again and getting
especially intense as described by General David Richards, the British
commander of NATO forces in the country. In early August he described
the fighting as some of the worst, most prolonged and ferocious he knew
of in 60 years with his forces coming under repeated "hit-and-run"
and other attacks by Taliban guerrilla fighters engaging in machine
gun and grenade battles before dispersing and later regrouping for more
attacks. He said: "This sort of thing hasn't really happened so
consistently, I don't think, since the Korean War or the Second World
War. It happened for perids in the Falklands, obviously, and it happened
for short periods in the Gulf on both occasions. But this is persistent,
low-level, dirty fighting." One has to wonder if the general thinks
cluster-bombing and using other terror weapons from 30,000 feet to kill
innocent civilians in villages is fighting clean.
The kind of intense fighting
the general is talking about was reported in the London Observer on
September 17 on what relatives of British troops serving in Afghanistan's
southern Helmand province have to say. They're raising grave concerns
for their loved ones safety claiming they face "intolerable"
pressures and dangers, relentless fighting, inadequate supplies of rations
and water, having to get by on three hours sleep a night, having no
body armour, and so shattered and exhausted by the experience they can't
function properly. With this to expect, why would any sensible foreign
leader heed NATO's request for more troops to help a failed mission
guaranteed to get numbers of them killed and wounded and frighten and
anger their own people at home in the process. So far only Poland, likely
under intense pressure, agreed to do it in any meaningful numbers in
a high-level decision it may end up regretting.
The result of recent fighting
on the British alone is that 33 of their soldiers have been reported
killed in the last two months up to late-September - including 14 killed
on September 2 in a warplane the Taliban claim they downed over Banjwai
and Kandahar province and 22 known killed since September 1. The reported
number of deaths and injuries are likely understated as a good many
of the wounded later die but aren't added to the official count. It's
known and documented this kind of sanitized casualty reporting is the
way it's done in Iraq. No doubt it's handled the same way in Afghanistan
as well.
It's happening because the
Taliban resistance is gaining strength fueled by the repressive occupation
and brutality of the Northern Alliance "warlords," making
a growing number of Afghans determined to fight back. It's also because
of the extreme level of desperation and deprivation Afghans now experience
resulting from the so-called neoliberal Washington Consensus model the
US has imposed on the country just like it wants to do everywhere else
it can get away with it. It's a model solely beholden to the interests
of capital, ignores the essential needs of the people desperate for
relief and help, but in an impoverished country like Afghanistan, that's
a recipe for pushing people toward Islamic fundamentalist leaders promising
something better than their current state of immiseration. It makes
it easy for them to get recruits to join the struggle to end it. Apparently
growing numbers of them are doing just that as they have been for the
past three years in Iraq to fight back relentlessly refusing to qui
until the occupation ends which it likely will eventually in both countries.
The US Plan to Pacify
Afghanistan
and Control It As A Neocolonial State
The Bush administration has
no sense of history judging by its plan to control Afghanistan by neutralizing
any resistance in it to make the country one more de facto pacified
US colony. It failed to heed the lessons learned in Vietnam where the
US was defeated or even in Korea before it where the war there ended
in a standoff. It's proceeding anyway in spite of the information from
the Pentagon's latest quarterly progress report on Iraq to the Congress.
In it Pentagon officials paint a grim assessment of a lost war where
the same tactics now used in Afghanistan have failed. Those facts, however,
don't deter US planners who won't admit they're wrong and intend to
keep repeating the same mistakes no matter how many times before they
haven't worked. It's part of the Bush administration's Messianic mission
of madness under which the thinking must be if at first you don't succeed,
try again by making things worse with another misadventure. It's also
part of the misbegotten belief that superior air power, hgh tech weapons,
and a little help mostly from a proxy force on the ground can solve
all problems. High-level military strategists once again intend to try
proving it in Afghanistan even though they know it hasn't worked in
Iraq.
The Afghanistan plan involves
the use of overwhelming US air power that can quickly send down a reign
of death and destruction against any area or resistance it wishes to
attack. It's to be done by concentrating its hub activities at two large,
permanent US-constructed bases, Bagram and Kandahar, while it wants
NATO forces to operate a large new base under construction in Herat
that can accommodate about 10,000 troops. In 2005, the US Air Force
spent about $83 million upgrading the two bases it will use in the country.
The plan is also to have
US forces maintain about 30 smaller, forward operating bases with 14
small airfields housing highly mobile air and ground forces secured
in fortified areas and only used for special search operations leaving
routine patrol missions for the local satraps to handle. The plan calls
for a reduction in US ground forces with NATO troops replacing them,
especially in the more volatile Kandahar, Helmand and Urzugan provinces.
In its "first (ever) mission outside the Euro-Atlantic area"
NATO forces took command of the International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF) in Afghanistan in August, 2003 "to assist the Government
of Afghanistan....in maintaining security....and in providing a safe
and secure environment (for) free and fair elections, the spread of
the rule of law, and the reconstruction of the country." This was
pious rhetoric belying the reality on the ground that all occupiers
are there only as enforcers to make Afghanistan safe for corporate predators
wanting to exploit the counry and its people for profit.
The US is also recruiting,
training and wants to employ a local proxy Afghan National Army and
Police to perform the same role by doing much of the routine patrolling
and to engage in ground combat when necessary. This is a common US tactic
to use a surrogate force of expendable locals to do as much of its fighting
and dying for it to keep its own casualties to a minimum. It intends
to support them with its tactical air strength mostly out of harm's
way and sell the whole package apparently to the Afghan people and US
public by using what the Bush administration calls "strategic communication"
- aka well-crafted propaganda, disinformation and carefully sanitized
versions of the truth to suppress an honest account of it from ever
coming out so that the perception they're able to craft replaces the
reality they wish to conceal.
When it comes to deploying
overwhelming conventional military superiority including the most highly
developed and destructive high-tech weapons and a vast array of almost
limitless air power, no competing force can challenge the US. The Pentagon
is now deploying those air assets round the clock across the country
using its most sophisticated bombers and other aircraft deployed from
its bases in Diego Garcia. They're on call at all times for tactical
support and heavy strike missions as needed. In addition, unmanned Predator
and Desert Hawk aerial drones are also airborne over the country at
all times, especially in areas thought to be most hostile. The Predator
is able to launch rocket attacks on targets while the tiny Desert Hawk
is a spy plane used for surveillance around US bases. Put it all together
and this is what an unwanted foreign occupier has to do to keep a population
in check after it "liberated" it. The plain fact is it hasn't
worked in Iraq and likely won't fare any better in Afghanistan
But there's more to this
story though as reported on September 5 in the online publication Capitol
Hill Blue titled Has Bush gone over the edge? It explains that Republican
and Bush family insiders including the President's father and former
President are worried George Bush may be heading for a "full-fledged
mental breakdown" judging by his bizarre behavior at times. Jeffrey
Steinberg writing in Executive Intelligence Review said G.H.W. Bush
fears G.W. is obsessed with his Messianic mission and is "unreachable"
even by some of his closest advisors like Secretary of State Rice. Prominent
psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, who wrote Bush on the Couch: Inside the
Mind of the President, agrees and believes: "With every passing
week, President Bush marches deeper and deeper into a world of his own
making. Central to Bush's world is an iron will which demands that external
reality be changed to conform to his personal view of how things are."
He goes on to say Bush needs psychiatric analysis and help. These obervations
explain a lot - that George Bush indeed has a Messianic mission and
intends to pursue it no matter how failed it is because he believes
it's the right thing to do. And apparently he has enough close advisors
around him reinforcing this view making it very likely there will be
no Middle East or Central Asian policy change as long as he's President.
It helps explain why the policy that's failed in Iraq is still being
followed, why it's the plan for Afghanistan as well even though it isn't
likely to succeed there either, and why this administration wants to
go even further and is willing to compound the disaster it already created.
George Bush announced his
policy intentions in a speech he made on September 5 to an association
of US military officers in which he virtually declared war against the
entire Muslim world. In it he used the kind of inflammatory language
that should give the senior Bush far greater cause to worry whether
his son has lost his senses entirely. The speech was more of the administration's
rhetoric to rebrand the "global war on terror" to what it
now calls the "long war with Islamic fascists" and the threat
of "Islamic fascism" that must be confronted by its reasoning
(and by implication) where it's centered in Tehran. It was also George
Bush's apparent attempt to rescue his failing presidency by appealing
to his most extremist backers, shore up his base, and scare everyone
else to death enough to support his "long war" agenda on November
7 by reelecting Republicans to Congress many of whom see him as radioactive
and keep their distance.
No doubt the Svengali hand
of Karl Rove is behind this. It can't be dismissed because it signals
another reckless step toward a widened "long war" crusade
against Islam. It further angered the nearly 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide
who were even more enraged by Pope Benedict's inflammatory September
12 quote of a 14th century Byzantine Christian emperor who said (during
the Crusades at that time) that the Prophet Muhammad had brought the
world only "evil and inhuman" things. Despite his disingenuous
claim of being misunderstood, Popes don't make accidental comments,
especially in an age of instant worldwide communication, so clearly
this one made his with another purpose in mind. It may relate to why
he disturbingly chose to withdraw from the interfaith initiatives begun
by his predecessor, John Paul II. He did it at a time when such efforts
are more needed than ever and tells Muslims he believes in the myth
that Islam is a violent faith, war and occupation of Muslim lands is
the way to counteract it, ad he's part of the West's new crusade against
them.
Put another way, Pope Benedict's
comment was a clear papal genuflection and declaration of fealty to
the exploitive and racist war on the Muslim world policies of the Bush
administration. He added resonance and, in effect, gave his blessing
to an out-of-control US President's belief in the same notion only made
worse by George Bush's further public pronouncement that dissent is
an act of terrorism, saying it solely on his own authority, and effectively
abrogating the First Amendment that prohibits the criminalization of
speech. This kind of assertion reinforces George Bush's earlier in the
year self-anointment as a "Unitary Executive" giving himself
absolute power to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law to
protect the national security any time he alone decides a "national
emergency" warrants it. Unless the public refuses to accept this
reckless endangerment of our sacred constitutional rights and enough
prominent public figures join in as well to denounce this kind of talk,
there's a real dager this administration is moving toward "crossing
the Rubicon" to tyranny on the false pretext of protecting us from
an Islamic terrorist threat that doesn't exist.
Looking Ahead In
Afghanistan
US directed repression of
the Afghan people aided by its brutal Northern Alliance regional "warlord"
proxies has led to the beginning of a growing insurrection against an
intolerable situation that's unsustainable. It has the upper hand in
Iraq and is fast becoming more of the same in Afghanistan. It's what
always happens because no unwanted occupier is ever accepted by the
people it subjugates, especially one whose prime mission is to terrorize
the civilian population to pacify it. The mission is doomed to fail
as eventually it becomes inefficient, ineffective and people back home
no longer will tolerate it. By now it would seem cooler heads in Washington
and at the Pentagon would have made some headway convincing the hard
line neocons behind this growing misadventure and the out-of-control
one in Iraq that it was time to cut losses, pull out, and go another
way. Those among them with enough good sense have to realize even the
most powerful military in the world has no chance to defeat a determined
gerilla force gaining strength because it has most of the people in
the country behind it. And there have to be at least a few high-level
mandarins with a sense of history to understand they saw this script
before, and it has a bad ending. It brought Rome to its knees a millennium
and a half ago and did the same thing more recently to the Nazis with
delusions of grandeur who thought their way would prevail for 1,000
years. They only missed by 988.
So it goes for the modern-day
Romans in charge in Washington led by a President who believes his cause
is just and the Almighty is directing him. They also feel with enough
super-weapons they can rule the world forever as long as they don't
miscalculate and blow it up instead (a very real and disturbing possibility).
It didn't work for the original rulers of ancient Rome, and it's also
not working now for those in charge in Israel apparently under the same
illusions, who also have no sense of history except their own false
version of it. It won't work for the US rulers either who want their
dominion to be all of planet earth.
It's high time some clear-thinking
high-level insiders went public convincingly to drive home this point
the ones in charge with "delusions of grandeur" won't ever
see without help and unless forced to. The plain fact is the war in
Iraq is lost militarily and politically. The longer US forces stay there
the greater their losses will be, the larger the number of alienated
countries no longer willing to support us will become, the more likely
the enormous and unsustainable cost will move the nation closer to economic
bankruptcy, and the harder it will be to reverse the mind-set of the
majority of countries that already see us as a moral pariah and terror
state. Conditions are no less true in Afghanistan where the resistance
is close to critical mass and the situation is fast becoming another
lost cause because the momentum carrying it there is almost irreversible.
It's never easy changing
the hearts and minds of the privileged elite riding high and mesmerized
by their own self-adulation and that heaped on them by the corporate
media, PR flacks, and assorted hangers-on portraying their cause as
just. Charting a new course with that kind of strong tailwind is like
trying to get a battleship to make a quick U-turn - darn-near impossible.
It makes for the same likely conclusion just as in the past. Empires
ruling the waves, and having it their own way, almost never spot the
time when the tide begins to turn and they're swimming against it. Sooner
or later, they're wrecked on the shoals of their own hubris, a new force
is rising to replace them, and an old familiar refrain is heard again
- the king is dead, long live the king.
Stephen Lendman
lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].
Also visit his blogspot at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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