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Bush returns to West Point to defend doctrine of aggressive war

December 11, 2008
By Bill Van Auken  | World Socialist Web Site,  11 December 2008

President George W. Bush made a farewell appearance Tuesday at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, delivering an unrepentant defense of the doctrine of preventive war that he unveiled there six-and-a-half years ago.

When Bush spoke to West Point’s graduating class of 2002, the World Socialist Web Site warned that his remarks signaled “a historic shift in US foreign policy that is pregnant with catastrophic implications for the people of the United States and the entire world.” The doctrine of “preemptive”—or, more accurately, aggressive—war that he outlined, the WSWS said, represented the “culmination of a protracted turn by the US ruling elite toward reliance on military force as the solution to all challenges it confronts on the world arena.” (See “Bush speaks at West Point: from containment to ‘rollback’“)

In the intervening years, these warnings have been fully confirmed. Since Bush spoke to the Army’s newly minted officers in 2002, at least 70 West Point graduates have been killed in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with more than 4,750 other members of the US military.

For the countries where they were sent to fight, the doctrine produced catastrophes of historic proportions. In Iraq, the death toll has risen to well over a million. An estimated 2 million more have been wounded and at least 4 million have been forced to flee the country or turned into internal refugees. In short, nearly six years of war and occupation have left more than 20 percent of the nation’s pre-war population dead, maimed, expelled or homeless.

In Afghanistan, air strikes and ground operations, along with displacement, hunger and disease resulting from the war, have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians while the disintegration of society under the impact of foreign occupation has left the country’s population facing a humanitarian catastrophe.

At home, Bush’s war policies have turned him into the most reviled president in US history with a popularity rating that has plumbed depths not even reached by Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate crisis.

Yet, according to Bush’s speech Tuesday, the entire strategy has proved an immense success and constitutes his proud legacy.

He boasted of having “reshaped our approach to national security,” declaring that his administration had given “our national security professionals vital new tools like the Patriot Act and the ability to monitor terrorist communications.” These “tools” include torture, extraordinary rendition and secret prisons, the loathsome practices that turned the US into an international pariah. They also encompassed wholesale and illegal domestic spying and other methods associated with a police state.

Praising the results of his wars of aggression, Bush claimed to have “liberated 25 million Afghans,” but was forced to admit that more than seven years after the US invasion that “the battle is difficult.” This is an understatement, given reports that insurgents control up to 70 percent of the country.

Continued >>

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Pentagon sending thousands more soldiers to bolster UK forces in Afghanistan

December 11, 2008

• Long-term ‘uplift’ aims to halt Taliban resurgence
• Country is at tipping point, Nato commander warns

Hard-pressed British soldiers in southern Afghanistan will be reinforced by thousands of American troops early next year, under plans being drawn up by Nato and US commanders. Alarmed by a Taliban resurgence, Washington plans to send 10,000 troops to Helmand province, a force large enough to outnumber the 8,000-strong British contingent which has been struggling to keep the enemy at bay.

A further 10,000 American troops will be deployed elsewhere in southern and south-western Afghanistan, according to senior Pentagon officials. Commanders refer to the plan as a long-term troop “uplift”, as opposed to a short-term “surge”, such as that in Iraq last year.

British forces in southern Afghanistan are locked in a stalemate with Taliban insurgents, General David McKiernan, commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan said in Kabul yesterday. The insurgents were not winning, but the country was at a “tipping point”, he said.

He added: “2009 is going to be a critical year for this campaign. It’s elections here and a new administration in the US. It is a chance for the international community to stay committed and a window of opportunity to increase contributions.”

The US is transferring thousands of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. British military chiefs say pressure on UK armed forces means they will not be able to send the 4,000 British troops due to leave Basra by June next year to southern Afghanistan. However, they will come under strong pressure from the new Obama administration in Washington to reinforce Britain’s military presence in Helmand.

Military planners in London are drawing up contingency plans to deploy perhaps a battle group of 1,500 soldiers there – but only for a limited period around the Afghan presidential election in September next year. However, scores of SAS special forces are expected to be transferred early next year from Iraq, where they have been engaged in operations against insurgency leaders. They would reinforce US Special Boat Service soldiers who have targeted Taliban leaders in Afghanistan.

US commanders have said they would like to almost double the number of American troops in Afghanistan, an increase from about 32,000 to 60,000. Most of the extra 20,000 already committed will be deployed in Helmand and neighbouring Kandahar province.

The first US reinforcements of 3,500 marines will be deployed through southern Afghanistan, followed early next year by deployments south of Kabul and on the northern fringes of Helmand. Later in the year more US troops will be deployed in the thinly populated areas of southern Helmand, close to the Pakistan border. Others will spread out east into Kandahar province, where Canadian troops have been based, the Guardian has learned.

British troops, meanwhile, will continue to be responsible for the more heavily populated areas of middle Helmand, sometimes referred to as the “central Helmand belt”. US troops would provide a kind of “wrap” around British troops, a Nato military source said yesterday.

If US commanders had their way, another 10,000 or so American troops would be deployed to eastern Afghanistan to concentrate on fighting Taliban and al-Qaida supporters crossing the border from the tribal areas of north-west Pakistan where they have been congregating.

British commanders say Taliban raids have been disrupted by the killing – often by special forces – of their leaders. That has led them to resort more to improvised roadside bombs, which damage the Taliban cause by sometimes killing civilians.

Defence officials recognise that UK troops are too thin on the ground to mount military operations to control Helmand’s rural hinterland. They compare the task to squashing balloons or squeezing jelly – meaning that as Taliban groups are forced out of one area, they move into another one. The idea is that US reinforcements will squeeze them out altogether.

More effective and longer lasting military activity is needed in the next year, Nato commanders say. Only then will civil agencies and economic and political progress, combined with a bigger, trained Afghan national army, come into their own, putting the Afghan government in a strong enough position to pursue effective negotiations with the Taliban.

Timeline

December 2008 An extra 3,500 US marines deployed in southern Afghanistan

January 2009 3,500 US troops deployed south of Kabul. 1,500 deployed elsewhere in southern Afghanistan

During 2009 Up to 10,000 US troops deployed in Helmand province, the bulk in the south and south-west close to the Pakistan border

Autumn 2009 An extra 1,500 British troops deployed to Helmand province during the Afghan presidential election campaign

Late 2009/early 2010 An extra 10,000 US troops deployed to eastern Afghanistan to control border with Pakistan.

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Kinzer: Surge Diplomacy, Not Troops, in Afghanistan

December 10, 2008

CommonDreams.org, Dec 9, 2008

by Robert Naiman

USA Today reports that Gen. McKiernan – top U.S. commander in Afghanistan – “has asked the Pentagon for more than 20,000 soldiers, Marines and airmen” to augment U.S. forces. McKiernan says U.S. troop levels of 55,000 to 60,000 in Afghanistan will be needed for “at least three or four more years.” He added: “If we put these additional forces in here, it’s going to be for the next few years. It’s not a temporary increase of combat strength.”

We should have a vigorous national debate before embarking on this course. Contrary to what one might think from a quick scan of the newspapers, there are knowledgeable voices questioning whether increasing the deployment of U.S. troops to Afghanistan is in our interest, or is in the interest of the Afghan people.

Bestselling author and former longtime New York Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer argues the opposite in this five minute video:

Kinzer argues that sending more U.S. troops is likely to be counterproductive. It’s likely to produce more anger in Afghanistan, and more anger is likely to produce more recruits for the Taliban. A better alternative would surge diplomacy instead, reaching out to people who are now supporting the Taliban.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban are very different forces, argues Kinzer. The Taliban has deep roots in Afghan society. Many of the warlords allied with the Taliban are not fanatic ideologues.

Afghanistan is a place of fluid loyalties, Kinzer notes. A warlord allied with the Taliban may not be anti-American, or if he is today, he need not be tomorrow. We should take advantage of these fluid loyalties, and try to follow the diplomatic solution that Afghans and Afghan leaders are advocating.

Almost all the money in Afghanistan fueling the insurgency comes from the Afghan poppy crop, the source of most of the world’s heroin, Kinzer notes. We’re trying to crush that poppy-growing culture in an impossible way, Kinzer says. Burning and spraying poppy fields will never achieve that goal. All that does is impoverish Afghans and make them more angry at us.

The entire Afghan poppy crop is worth four billion dollars a year. We’re now spending $4 billion a month on our war in Afghanistan. Let’s take one of those months, and buy the entire poppy crop, suggests Kinzer. That way we’re not impoverishing Afghans, we’re putting money in their pockets instead of shooting them and burning down their houses. We’d use some of that to make morphine for medical use and we could burn the rest.

If we continue to act as if there’s a military solution in Afghanistan, we’re just going to get further dragged down into quagmire. There is a way out, Kinzer says. We can follow a much more sophisticated diplomatic and political strategy in a way that will reduce the ability of the Taliban to attract young recruits. What we’re doing now is the opposite, fueling the insurgency. Sending fewer troops to Afghanistan, not more, is needed to stabilize Afghanistan.

If you agree with Stephen Kinzer, why not send a note to that effect to President-elect Obama?

Robert Naiman is Senior Policy Analyst and National Coordinator at Just Foreign Policy.

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Mulla Omar asks foreign forces to chalk out exit plan

December 9, 2008

The News International, December 08, 2008

PESHAWAR: Linking the peace to troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban supreme leader Mulla Muhammad Omar Sunday urged foreign forces to prepare an exit strategy as early as possible.

“Today the world’s economy is facing growing risk from meltdown owing to the belligerent and expansionist policies of US. This has left its negative impact on the globe and it is the collective duty of all to work for a lasting peace in the world,” the Afghan Islamic Press quoted Mulla Omar as saying in his message on the occasion of Eidul Azha.

“You should understand that no puppet regime will ever stand up to the current resistance movement. Nor you will justify the occupation of the Islamic countries under the so-called slogan of rehabilitation anymore,” he added.

The Taliban leader said deployment of more troops would lead to battles everywhere. “The current armed clashes will spiral and your current casualties of hundreds will jack up to thousands,” he warned.

Mulla Omar said the US had imposed the war on the Afghan nation and the followers of the path of Islamic resistance would never abandon their legitimate struggle.

He said the invading forces wrongly contemplate that they would be able to pit the Afghans against the mujahideen under the so-called label of tribal militias. “No Afghan will play into the hands of the aliens and fight against his own brothers for worldly pleasure.”

Mulla Omar also felicitated the Muslims on the auspicious occasion of Eidul Azha.

“I would like to extend my warmest felicitation on Eidul Azha to all the Muslims of the world; to the oppressed, suffering but committed and brave people of Afghanistan, especially my heartfelt felicitation goes to all the Mujahideen on this auspicious day. May Allah Almighty bless the Islamic Ummah, and particularly the families of the prisoners and martyrs to pass this auspicious day with patience, happiness and pride. May Allah, the Almighty bestow on our wealthy men and women the willpower to share their amenities with all the miserable people, particularly with the families, widows and orphans of the heroic martyrs, the oppressed prisoners and the Mujahideen.”

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Shambles in Afghanistan: Why Are They Dying?

December 7, 2008

Brian Cloughley | The Smirking Chimp,  December 6, 2008

There can be few things more shameful or degrading for a head of state to have to admit than “I wish I could intercept the [US] planes that are going to bomb Afghan villages, but that’s not in my hands.” But Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai was forced to say this last week. In 2008, so far, at least 190 Afghan civilians have been killed by air strikes; about the same number as died in the atrocious slaughter in Mumbai. But there haven’t been any protests about the killing of civilians in Afghanistan, except by Afghans, of course. But who listens to Afghans?

No, it’s not in Karzai’s hands to rule his country, as he was elected to do. It is in the hands — or fists — of the occupying powers, who, through a pathetic combination of arrogance, ignorance and incompetence, are, in Karzai’s words, “still…not able to defeat the Taliban”.

The Taliban (or whatever one might call them — crazy criminal barbarians, many of them) thrive and kill because there was no viable political plan to administer Afghanistan after the invasion, and the country was thus doomed to chaos. First to arrive at the end of 2001 were American B-52 bombers, laying waste the land until their Strangelove-like controllers ran out of targets.

Then the brutal northern warlords surfaced, bought with millions of US dollars, and wreaked unspeakable atrocities upon their tribal and personal enemies whom they dubbed ‘Taliban’ while laughing at their paymasters’ ingenuousness at believing their vicious deceptions.

Last came a combination of international agencies, bless their well-meaning hearts, and American troops who have caused so much disruption, alienation and hatred. In the middle are the Brits, the Canadians, the Dutch, the Australians and a few other nations whose soldiers are being killed.

For what, exactly?

As I write this, there is news that two British Marines and an Australian officer have been killed in Afghanistan. They were in 42 Royal Marine Commando and 4th Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment, with both of which I was an artillery forward observer in Borneo when we were defending Malaysia against the Indonesian army in the mid-1960s. As anyone who has worn uniform knows, every soldier has lasting loyalty to his regiment and to other units with which he has had served. And I grieve for those who died almost as much as do their immediate comrades.

But I ask: Why did they die? For what reason do their comrades and families mourn their loss? For what cause did they give up their lives?

Did they die for democracy? Hardly. Because Afghanistan will never — ever — be a democracy in Western terms. This is an unattainable and therefore stupid objective.

Did they die for honesty in government? Hardly. Because the British and Australian governments joined the illegal invasion of Iraq, and lied at the time and forever after about the reasons they did so. (The real reason they helped invade Iraq was that they didn’t want to offend Bush and his cabal of demented warniks.)

It goes deeper than this in military terms. The British defence minister, a clever political animal called David Miliband (I met him once, when he was a junior education minister, and never have I witnessed such an unintentionally side-splitting parody of the main character in the BBC’s wonderful “Yes, Minister”), last week announced that “If there are requests [by the US for more British troops in Afghanistan], we’ll look at them hard… We have never been in blanket refusal.”

No, you poor fellow, you’ve been wrapped in a blanket of ignorance. Because numbers of troops in a campaign do not — must not — depend on political machinations. What happens (or should happen) is this:

A government decides that there should be military action of some sort. The defence minister then calls for his military chief and tells him the precise objective of the proposed campaign. The chief goes away and has his staff do the calculations. He goes back to the minister and says we need X thousand troops to do this, and we must have such-and-such equipment.

And if the politicians won’t give him that number of troops and the equipment he asks for, he resigns. Well, no, he doesn’t, of course, because he’s looking forward to retirement directorships and so forth. What he does is defer to the ignorant politicians, whereupon he commits his soldiers to a war for which they are ill equipped and appallingly under-strength.

Soldiers die in wars. That’s taken for granted. We all took our chances. But soldiers are dying in Afghanistan because politicians were silly enough to get their countries involved without proper planning, and because of the spinelessness of their military leaders. This is no way to fight a war. Not only is it being fought with too few troops, but every national contingent has different rules of engagement. Some can’t fight at night; some aren’t permitted to fight at all; some are reluctant to cooperate with other foreign forces. The two US contingents operate entirely separately, and US Special Forces are tasked from their HQ in the States. There is no unified joint and combined command that has a single clear military mission. It’s a martial shambles.

As I’ve written before: If a young officer at any staff college in the world was presented with the Afghanistan problem and came up with a military solution such as in now in place, he would be sent packing.

Either foreign forces in Afghanistan are given proper military direction and provided with the troop numbers and equipment they need, or the whole dismal campaign should be abandoned. It is extremely stupid — indeed it is monstrously wicked — to place soldiers in danger without the basic necessities to carry out their duties. There should be very many guilty consciences among western politicians and senior officers. But if they had consciences, they wouldn’t have got into this mess in the first place.

Brian Cloughley’s book about the Pakistan army, War, Coups and Terror, has just been published by Pen & Sword Books (UK). His email is beecluff@gmail.com.

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Afghanistan: A rise in civilian deaths and foreign troop fatalities

December 7, 2008
By Harvey Thompson | World Socialist Web Site, Dec 6, 2008

During the month of November, a further seven British soldiers—including two Ghurkhas—were killed in fighting resulting from the US-led military occupation of Afghanistan.

On November 27, Tony Evans aged 20 and Georgie Sparks aged 19, both of J Company, 42 Commando Royal Marines, were on foot patrol north-west of Lashkar Gah, in Helmand province, when they came under attack from insurgent fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades. Both marines died later from their injuries.

Their deaths brought the number of UK fatalities in Afghanistan to 128 since the British military joined the US-led invasion of the country in November 2001. Of these, 43 have been killed during 2008.

Over 1,000 service personnel in the occupation forces have now been killed in Afghanistan (the majority of these being US soldiers), according to the icasualties.org website. Significantly, more foreign troops have died in Afghanistan since May than in Iraq.

November also saw a continued rise in the numbers of Afghan civilians killed and injured as a result of US airstrikes. This year has seen the biggest rise in civilian casualties since the occupation began. Conservative estimates put the numbers of Afghans killed in violence related to the occupation in 2008 at around 4,000. At least one-third of these were civilians.

The deaths of civilians and the high-profile presence of occupying troops are bringing social and political resentments to a boiling point.

On November 28, protesters in the Afghan capital of Kabul pelted police with stones after British troops shot dead a local civilian and injured three others. An eyewitness told Reuters that British soldiers opened fire on a minibus. Kabul’s police chief, Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, stated blithely that “A convoy of British Isaf troops were passing here and they had a misunderstanding with a civilian vehicle.”

The body was wrapped in white cloth and put into the back of a taxi and driven away from the scene as the crowd chanted, “Death to Bush, death to America.”

People then threw stones at local police before being dispersed.

In a separate protest the day before, a crowd of Afghans gathered outside the United Nations headquarters in Kabul to demonstrate against civilian deaths in air strikes.

Such is the anger over the mounting civilian causalities from the air-strikes that Afghan President Hamid Karzai felt compelled to denounce the actions of the occupation forces. On November 26, he told a news conference that he would bring down US planes bombing villages if it were in his power.

“We have no other choice, we have no power to stop the planes, if we could, if I could … we would stop them and bring them down,” he said. “We have no radar to stop them in the sky, we have no planes… I wish I could intercept the planes that are going to bomb Afghan villages, but that’s not in my hands.”

Continued >>

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Afghanistan: Another Untold Story

December 7, 2008

By Michael Parenti | Information Clearing House, Dec 5, 2008

Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghan history and the role played by the United States.

Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.

Some Real History

Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.

The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.
The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.

The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.

A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”

The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”

But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.

Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.

A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.

It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted–months before Soviet troops entered the country–that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.

In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.

Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style

The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.

After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.

Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as “a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.’”

Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.

Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption.”

In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban—heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan—fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.

The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of “immorality” that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.

The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed “immoral” were stoned to death or buried alive.

None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban’s oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.

If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.

The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.

Continued >>

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Putting a human mask on imperialism

December 3, 2008

Politicians and historians may argue that the U.S. is a force for good around the world, but the facts show the opposite.

Socialist Worker, December 3, 2008 | Issue 686

MAINSTREAM AND liberal opposition to the Iraq war is based on accepting the aims of the war, but criticizing its lack of success, its “excesses” or its tactical or strategic mistakes.

Columnist: Paul D’Amato

Paul D'Amato Paul D’Amato is managing editor of the International Socialist Review and author of The Meaning of Marxism, a lively and accessible introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx and the tradition he founded.

The argument of people who hold this view is that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, not because it denied the sovereignty of the Iraqi people, or that it has led to the deaths of tens of thousands, the displacement of millions and the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. It was a mistake because it failed to achieve U.S. objectives.

Barack Obama, for example, criticizes the Iraq war because it has weakened U.S. power–it has emboldened its enemies, such as Iran and North Korea–and created a crisis of U.S. credibility abroad. Instead, he argues, the U.S. should shift troops to Afghanistan, organize a phased withdrawal from Iraq (but leave a “residual force”) and maintain an “over the horizon” military presence to intervene when necessary.

Obama is fully committed to the idea that the U.S. should continue to be the world’s unchallenged global military power; he merely believes that there are better ways to achieve that goal.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

AHMED RASHID, in his new book on Afghanistan, Descent into Chaos, offers a tortured variation of this argument.

He says he supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a “just war and not an imperialist intervention, because only external intervention could save the Afghan people from the Taliban and al-Qaeda and prevent the spread of al-Qaeda.”

Rashid himself admits, however, that none of these aims have been achieved:

Instead, the U.S.-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001…Afghanistan is once again staring down the abyss of state collapse, despite billions of dollars in aid, 45,000 Western troops and the deaths of thousands of people. The Taliban have made a dramatic comeback, enlisting the help of al-Qaeda and Islamic extremists in Pakistan, and getting a boost from the explosion of heroin production that has helped fund their movement.

Rashid’s logic boils down to this: because I supported the stated aims of the invasion, it cannot be imperialist.

This is a bad method. Better to look at the facts of the case: The biggest military power in the world invaded a country halfway around the world that had never threatened the U.S. It proceeded to occupy the country, remove the existing government from power and install a government to its own liking, which it maintains through a military occupation. Pardon me for concluding that this is imperialism.

What galls Rashid is not that a great power violated Afghanistan’s sovereignty, but that it wasn’t done with sufficient tact. “Above all, arrogance and ignorance were on display,” he complains, when the Bush administration “invaded two countries in the Muslim world without any attempt to understand the history, culture, society or traditions of those countries.”

In other words, it’s not arrogant to invade and conquer another country; it’s arrogant to not learn more about it first.

The Bush administration wanted to “declare victory” after removing the Taliban, “get out, and move on to Iraq,” when it should have had a longer-term commitment, according to Rashid. By his own account, Afghanistan was primarily a stepping-stone to the war in Iraq, and both wars were part of a long-term plan to reshape the Middle East and the wider region under the rubric of an open-ended “war on terror.”

Part of the Bush and Rumsfeld Doctrine was the idea that regimes could be changed on the cheap by swift, decisive invasions, after which things could quickly be wrapped up, and messy, long wars of occupation could be avoided. That is why security in Afghanistan was handed over to “warlords and drug barons.”

What the U.S. should have done, he explains, is commit itself to “nation-building” in Afghanistan–a decades-long plan involving “massive aid, internal economic reforms, democratization and literacy.”

To believe in this paternalistic fantasy, one must ignore America’s long history of genocide and conquest in North America; its brutal occupations, annexations and colonizations in the Caribbean and Pacific; its destruction of Korea and Vietnam; its sanctions against Iraq that killed a million people; and finally, one must ignore what Rashid admits to be true–that the U.S. has wrecked both Iraq and Afghanistan over the past several years.

Rashid is either naïve or is trying to deliberately put a human mask over the ugly face of U.S. imperialism.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

RASHID IS a kind of utopian imperialist, who looks at what is and can only counterpose to it a kinder, gentler version. To counter this neocon fantasy, Rashid offers a fantasy of his own: the revival of British-style colonialism. I must quote him at length here to give the reader the full flavor of his argument:

The neocons seemed to have no knowledge of what history had taught us about empires. The great empire builders quickly learned that when it came to ruling newly conquered lands, they had to put back in almost as much as they took out. If the conqueror was to extract raw materials, taxes, manpower he needed from the colony, he had to establish a system of security and law and order over the conquered and help his subjects maintain their economic livelihoods.

Most significantly, empire builders from Alexander the Great to Queen Victoria had to learn about their subjects if they want to rule over them with any authority. At the very least, they had to be curious about them. In the 19th century, the British epitomized a colonialism that exploited with responsibility, used force judiciously and yet learned about its subject peoples.

History might beg to differ. At its height, the British Empire covered a quarter of the world’s land surface and ruled over 400 million people. It ruled first by conquest, then by dividing up the populations and pitting them against one other. It “learned” about its subjects in order to better dominate them.

When it could not cow its subjects into believing in their own innate inferiority, it resorted to unstinting force. The history of British colonialism begins with the brutal conquest and partition of Ireland, moves through the enslavement of Black Africans to work the great plantations of the Caribbean, on to the conquest of India and China, and ends with the carving up, with the other great powers, of Africa in order to get at its diamonds, gold and other precious resources. The bones of those who resisted the British are strewn across several continents.

Britain drained India of its wealth. Under the first 120 years of British rule, there were 31 famines in India in which at least 15 million people died, all during which Britain drained tribute from India and exported grain from its ports.

Historian Irfan Habib calculates the average annual drain at about 9 percent of India’s GNP. At the time just before the British conquest, 1750, India accounted for about one quarter of the world’s manufacturing output. By 1900, India accounted for only 1.7 percent.

Clearly, the British did not “put back in almost as much as they took out,” either in India or in Africa, which to this day remains, despite being resource-rich, the poorest continent on the planet.

“History does not record a single instance,” remarked the Indian nationalist Romesh Dutt, “of one people ruling another in the interests of the subject nation.” When politicians and apologists for U.S. intervention talk about “saving” another country by invading it, we should remember Dutt’s words.

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Half of Afghan prisoners have not faced trial-U.N.

December 2, 2008
AlertNet, 01 Dec 2008 12:18:37 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Jonathon Burch
KABUL, Dec 1 (Reuters) – More Afghans are being detained without trial, with poor people or those without powerful connections, the most common victims, unable to pay bribes to secure their release, the United Nations said on Monday.
Afghanistan is emerging from nearly 30 years of war and its judicial and law enforcement systems are still very much in their infancy. Corruption is endemic at all levels of the police force, experts say, who often milk the populace for bribes.
“Pre-trial detention is supposed to be the exception and not the rule, but in this country it is more the rule, especially if you are poor and without powerful friends,” said Christina Oguz, head of the U.N.’s drug and crime agency in Afghanistan.
Speaking at a news conference in Kabul on Monday, Oguz talked about the prevalence of what she called, “telephone justice”, whereby a phonecall to the right police officer or judge was sometimes all that was needed to be released.
“If you have powerful friends and commit a crime you may not even face a trial because a phonecall to the police or to the prosecutor can be made to release you,” said Oguz.
“If you don’t have these powerful friends you may end up behind bars even if you are a child,” she said.
While the number of prisoners in Afghanistan remains relatively low, the figure has has more than doubled in the last three years, says the U.N., with 12,500 prisoners in the country compared with 6,000 in January 2006.
In December 2007, the U.N. estimated that around 50 percent of prisoners were pre-trial detainees.
Another problem facing prisoners in Afghanistan, said Oguz, is that many often remain in jail long after their sentence has expired, in effect serving “double” sentences as they are unable to pay the additional fine.
“If you are poor, again, you may end up staying in prison even though your prison sentence has ended because you cannot pay your fund or you cannot bribe yourself out,” said Oguz. “We have found many cases of people who are still in prison after their time has been served,” she said. Oguz said that Afghanistan needed to look to alternatives to imprisonment, such as suspended sentences, house arrests and fines but not on top of any prison sentence.
“Prison should not be the first sentence that comes to your mind for the majority of cases,” she said. “Prison is often a very expensive way of making a bad situation worse.” (Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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Robert Fisk: ‘Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government’

December 2, 2008

“Robert Fisk: ‘Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government'”;

As he leaves Afghanistan, our correspondent reflects on a failed state cursed by brutal fundamentalism and rampant corruption

The Independent, Thursday, 27 November 2008

Taliban fighters in Maydan Shahr, west of Kabul

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Taliban fighters in Maydan Shahr, west of Kabul

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The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes. Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles from Kabul. Hamid Karzai’s deeply corrupted government is almost as powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad’s “Green Zone”; lorry drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.

The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and about 30 aid workers. Both the Taliban and Mr Karzai’s government are executing their prisoners in ever greater numbers. The Afghan authorities hanged five men this month for murder, kidnap or rape – one prisoner, a distant relative of Mr Karzai, predictably had his sentence commuted – and more than 100 others are now on Kabul’s death row.

This is not the democratic, peaceful, resurgent, “gender-sensitive” Afghanistan that the world promised to create after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Outside the capital and the far north of the country, almost every woman wears the all-enshrouding burkha, while fighters are now joining the Taliban’s ranks from Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and even Turkey. More than 300 Turkish fighters are now believed to be in Afghanistan, many of them holding European passports.

“Nobody I know wants to see the Taliban back in power,” a Kabul business executive says – anonymity is now as much demanded as it was before 2001 – “but people hate the government and the parliament which doesn’t care about their security. The government is useless. With so many internally displaced refugees pouring into Kabul from the countryside, there’s mass unemployment – but of course, there are no statistics.

“The ‘open market’ led many of us into financial disaster. Afghanistan is just a battlefield of ideology, opium and political corruption. Now you’ve got all these commercial outfits receiving contracts from people like USAID. First they skim off 30 to 50 per cent for their own profits – then they contract out and sub-contract to other companies and there’s only 10 per cent of the original amount left for the Afghans themselves.”

Afghans working for charitable organisations and for the UN are telling their employers that they are coming under increasing pressure to give information to the Taliban and provide them with safe houses. In the countryside, farmers live in fear of both sides in the war. A very senior NGO official in Kabul – again, anonymity was requested – says both the Taliban and the police regularly threaten villagers. “A Taliban group will arrive at a village headman’s door at night – maybe 15 or 16 of them – and say they need food and shelter. And the headman tells the villagers to give them food and let them stay at the mosque. Then the police or army arrive in the day and accuse the villagers of colluding with the Taliban, detain innocent men and threaten to withhold humanitarian aid. Then there’s the danger the village will be air-raided by the Americans.”

In the city of Ghazni, the Taliban ordered all mobile phones to be switched off from 5pm until 6am for fear that spies would use them to give away guerrilla locations. The mobile phone war may be one conflict the government is winning. With American help the Interior Ministry police can now track and triangulate calls. Once more, the Americans are talking about forming “tribal militias” to combat the Taliban, much as they did in Iraq and as the Pakistani authorities have tried to do on the North West Frontier. But the tribal lashkars of the Eighties were corrupted by the Russians and when the system was first tried out two years ago – it was called the Auxiliary Police Force – it was a fiasco. The newly-formed constabulary stopped showing up for work, stole weapons and turned themselves into private militias.

“Now every time a new Western ambassador arrives in Kabul, they dredge it all up again,” another NGO official says in near despair. “‘Oh,’ they proclaim, ‘let’s have local militias – what a bright idea.’ But that will not solve the problem. The country is subject to brigandage as well as the cruelty of the Taliban and the air raids which Afghans find so outrageous. The international community has got to stop spinning and do some fundamental thinking which should have been done four or five years ago.”

What this means to those Westerners who have spent years in Kabul is simple. Is it really the overriding ambition of Afghans to have “democracy”? Is a strong federal state possible in Afghanistan? Is the international community ready to take on the warlords and drug barons who are within Mr Karzai’s own government? And – most important of all – is development really about “securing the country”? The tired old American adage that “where the Tarmac ends, the Taliban begins” is untrue. The Taliban are mounting checkpoints on those very same newly-built roads.

The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops under his dubious command but says he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan. The Soviets failed to contain the country even when they had 100,000 troops here with 150,000 Afghan soldiers in support. And as Barack Obama prepares to send another 7,000 US soldiers into the pit of Afghanistan, the Spanish and Italians are talking of leaving while the Norwegians may pull their 500 troops out of the area north of Heart. Repeatedly, Western leaders talk of the “key” – of training more and more Afghans to fight in the army. But that was the same “key” which the Russians tried – and it did not fit the lock.

“We” are not winning in Afghanistan. Talk of crushing the Taliban seems as bleakly unrealistic as it has ever been. Indeed, when the President of Afghanistan tries to talk to Mullah Omar – one of America’s principal targets in this wretched war – you know the writing is on the wall. And even Mullah Omar didn’t want to talk to Mr Karzai.

Partition is the one option that no one will discuss – giving the southern part of Afghanistan to the Taliban and keeping the rest – but that will only open another crisis with Pakistan because the Pashtuns, who form most of the Taliban, would want all of what they regard as “Pashtunistan”; and that would have to include much of Pakistan’s own tribal territories. It will also be a return to the “Great Game” and the redrawing of borders in south-west Asia, something which – history shows – has always been accompanied by great bloodshed.

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