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Understanding Imperialism

December 12, 2008
Sandra Bloodworth | Socialist Alternative

“I will never apologise for the United States.

I don’t care what the facts are.”

George Bush the First in 1988 when a US missile cruiser in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 people.

“We think the price is worth it.”

Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, in December 1996 when it was reported that UN sanctions had killed 576,000 Iraqi children under the age of five.

Today, in the name of “freedom” and “democracy” – hope-laden words – as many as 250,000 Iraqis lie dead, Iraqis and Afghanis live with the brutality of military occupation by the US and it allies and over 20,000 US soldiers are dead or maimed.

In a world where facts are irrelevant, and language is used as if we are living in a never-ending mad hatter’s party, the protests of millions keep alive some sense of human sanity. However, if we are to not just protest, but begin to challenge the source of the barbarity, we need to understand what we are up against.

The idea that Bush is a homicidal maniac surrounded by greedy bastards is appealing. But it implies we just need well-intentioned politicians and business people. As the Indian writer and activist Arundati Roy  said: “It’s true that [George Bush the Second] is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man himself.”

Understanding that machine provides us with the tools we need to disable it.

Capitalism breeds war

Two Russian revolutionaries – Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin – explained why war is an inevitable result of capitalism when they analysed the causes of World War I.

Capitalism is a system of competition, but there is an inbuilt contradiction: successful companies buy up those that go broke, getting ever bigger. Lenin wrote: “Marx had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly.” Ever-bigger capitalist corporations combine in cartels to keep rivals out of the market. Just think of OPEC, the modern cartel of oil exporting states. Their website sums it up: “OPEC’s mission is to … ensure the stabilisation of oil prices in order to secure … a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital to those investing in the petroleum industry.”

By the twentieth century, giant corporations had developed interests extending beyond the borders of their national state. They struggle to out-compete each other in an increasingly integrated world market (called globalisation today). Microsoft, Shell, Nike, BHP-Billiton are typical.

However, contrary to many anti-globalisation theories today, we are not just confronted with marauding multinational corporations. National states have to control “spheres of influence” in order to maximise access to raw materials, markets for goods and investment, trade routes and the like for their multinational corporations. They may use economic and political means, but “the mutual relations of those states – [are] in the final analysis the relations between their military forces”.

Lenin and Bukharin concluded that imperialism – the competition between powerful nations to dominate areas of the globe – defines modern capitalism and this makes war inevitable.

Twentieth century imperialism

As Lenin and Bukharin predicted, World War I did not end the drive to war; it only laid the basis for a further re-division of the world between the major powers. World War II was an imperialist war, not a war for democracy. “War for democracy” – sounds eerily familiar doesn’t it? That’s because the machine was the same – only the drivers were different.

The war ended with a new re-partitioning of the world – by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. The Cold War after 1945 was a stand-off between two new superpowers, the Stalinist USSR and the US. The massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction by both sides were justified by the lies that capitalism was defending freedom from the tyranny of communism, and conversely, that the “workers’ states” – which were in reality state-run capitalist states – were a bastion against vile capitalism. It finally ended when this madness brought on the collapse of the USSR’s imperialist bloc between 1989 and 1991.

However, the inbuilt contradictions of capitalism gave rise to a new balance of power. The lunacy of wasting billions of dollars on more than enough nuclear weapons to blow the earth away sustained the longest economic boom ever. Germany and Japan, forbidden to re-arm, gained an economic advantage, riding on the back of the boom to modernise their economies without the burden of military spending. By the end of the long boom in the mid-1970s, the US was no longer the supreme economic power it had been.

The dominance of the US ruling class rested more on military than economic might. Increasingly they needed to send a message to other rising powers such as China, Japan or a united Europe that the US could and would take on any states that challenged its status as the world’s superpower. But the defeat in Vietnam undermined US confidence.

When Saddam Hussein, their former bully boy in the Middle East, looked too independent, they seized the opportunity, not to rid the world of the “new Hitler” as they proclaimed in 1991, but to strike a blow for their future. “Humanitarian” interventions in places such as the Balkans and Somalia were used to put the “Vietnam syndrome” behind them. And they bamboozled even some on the left into believing US might could be humane.

The War of Terror

The supposed “war on terror” is nothing more than the US ruling class’s drive to shore up their empire. Saddam and Al Qaeda are just a convenient pretext for US military bases in the strategic Middle East and Afghanistan, a corridor for supplies of natural gas and oil from Central Asia.

But much more than control of that strategic commodity is at stake. It is about an increasingly belligerent capitalist class who rely on military might to prevent a challenge to their power. Bases in Afghanistan complete the encirclement of China, a potential rival. And the wars demonstrate the barbarity the US is willing to unleash.

Nuclear war – the logic of imperialism

Bush’s drive towards a nuclear strike against Iran is, from the point of view of the US rulers, not madness, but the most reliable way to ensure they remain top imperialist dog.

Australia, as a middle-ranking power, allies itself with the US as a central part of its own imperialist drive to dominate the area regarded as “our own backyard”. Howard and Australia’s capitalists want to go down the nuclear road because it gives them an entry into the nuclear imperialist club. Even if Australian capitalists are only minor players, they’re increasingly flexing their muscles on “their” block. And they have enough uranium to make themselves indispensable to that club.

During the Cold War even many on the left argued that nuclear weapons threatened all of humanity, so at least some capitalists could be anti-war allies. But capitalists take risks all the time. Short term gain far outweighs long term risks, and certainly wins out over humanitarianism.

How can we stop war?

Once we recognise that wars are inevitable in capitalist society, it follows that we can’t rely on parliamentary parties that want to run this system. The US Democrats, in the midst of a massive anti-war campaign, ran a pro-war candidate for President in 2004. The ALP government enthusiastically sent troops to the Persian Gulf in 1991. Even the Greens, who use anti-war rhetoric, don’t consistently campaign to mobilise demonstrations against war, and they actually support the use of imperialist Australian troops to interfere in states in “our neighbourhood”. The German Greens campaigned for years against war and the nuclear industry. Once in government, they attacked anti-nuke campaigners and sent troops to bomb the Balkans in the mid 1990s.

To end the wars we will have to build a movement that mobilises the strength of the mass of people to demonstrate, strike and organise so that governments and bosses know they will have no peace while they occupy, bomb or exploit other countries. That movement needs to be implacably opposed to imperialism, fighting every deployment of imperialist troops, whatever the “justification”.

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Britain leaves Iraq in shame. The US won’t go so quietly

December 12, 2008

Obama was elected on the back of revulsion at Bush’s war, but greater pressure will be needed to force a full withdrawal

If British troops are indeed withdrawn from Iraq by next June, it will signal the end of the most shameful and disastrous episode in modern British history. Branded only last month by Lord Bingham, until recently Britain’s most senior law lord, as a “serious violation of international law”, the aggression against Iraq has not only devastated an entire country and left hundreds of thousands dead – it has also been a political and military humiliation for the invading powers.

In the case of Britain, which marched into a sovereign state at the bidding of an extreme and reckless US administration, the war has been a national disgrace which has damaged the country’s international standing. Britain’s armed forces will withdraw from Iraq with dishonour. Not only were they driven from Basra city last summer under cover of darkness by determined resistance, just as British colonial troops were forced out of Aden 40 years ago – and Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, before that. But they leave behind them an accumulation of evidence of prisoner beatings, torture and killings, for which only one low-ranking soldier, Corporal Payne, has so far been singled out for punishment.

It’s necessary to spell out this brutal reality as a corrective to the official tendency to minimise or normalise the horror of what has evidently been a criminal enterprise – enthusiastically supported by David Cameron and William Hague, it should be remembered, as well as Tony Blair and his government – and a reminder of the dangers of escalating the war that can’t be won in Afghanistan. It was probably just as well that the timetable for British withdrawal from Iraq was given in a background military briefing, after Gordon Brown’s earlier schedule for troop reductions was vetoed by George Bush.

But in any case, in the wake of Barack Obama’s election on a partial withdrawal ticket, the latest plans look a good deal more credible. They are also welcome, of course, even if several hundred troops are to stay behind to train Iraqis. It would be far better both for Britain and Iraq if there were a clean break and a full withdrawal of all British forces in preparation for a comprehensive public inquiry into the Iraq catastrophe. Instead, and in a pointer to the shape of things to come, British troops at Basra airport are being replaced by US forces.

Meanwhile, the real meaning of last month’s security agreement between the US and Iraqi governments is becoming clearer, as Obama’s administration-in-waiting briefs the press and officials highlight the small print. This “status of forces agreement”, which replaces the UN’s shotgun mandate for the occupation forces at the end of this month, had been hailed by some as an unequivocal deal to end the occupation within three years.

There’s no doubt that Iraq’s Green Zone government, under heavy pressure from its own people and neighbours such as Iran, extracted significant concessions from US negotiators to the blanket occupation licence in the original text. The final agreement does indeed stipulate that US forces will withdraw by the end of 2011, that combat troops will leave urban areas by July next year, contractors and off-duty US soldiers will be subject to Iraqi law and that Iraqi territory cannot be used to attack other countries.

The fact that the US was forced to make such commitments reflects the intensity of both Iraqi and American public opposition to the occupation, the continuing Iraqi resistance war of attrition against US forces, and Obama’s tumultuous election on a commitment to pull out all combat troops in 16 months. Even so, the deal was denounced as treason – for legitimising foreign occupation and bases – by the supporters of the popular Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, resistance groups and the influential Association of Muslim Scholars.

And since his November triumph, Obama has gone out of his way to emphasise his commitment to maintaining a “residual force” for fighting “terrorism”, training and protection of US civilians – which his security adviser Richard Danzig estimated could amount to between 30,000 and 55,000 troops.

Briefings by Pentagon officials have also made clear this residual force could remain long after 2011. It turns out that the new security agreement can be ditched by either side, while the Iraqi government is fully entitled to invite US troops to remain, as explained in the accompanying “strategic framework agreement”, so long as its bases or presence are not defined as “permanent”. And given that the current Iraqi government would be unlikely to survive a week without US protection, such a request is a fair bet. Combat troops can also be “re-missioned” as “support units”, it transpires, and even the last-minute concession of a referendum on the agreement next year will not, the Iraqi government now says, be binding.

None of this means there won’t be a substantial withdrawal of troops from Iraq after Obama takes over the White House next month. But how far that withdrawal goes will depend on the kind of pressure he faces both at home and in Iraq. The US establishment clearly remains committed to a long-term stewardship of Iraq. The Iraqi government is at this moment negotiating secret 20-year contracts with US and British oil majors to manage 90% of the country’s oil production. The struggle to end US occupation and control of the country is far from won.

The same goes for the wider shadow of the war on terror, of which Iraq has been the grisly centrepiece. Its legacy has been strategic overreach and failure for the US: from the rise of Iran as a regional power, the deepening imbroglio of the Afghan war, the advance of Hamas and Hizbullah and threat of implosion in Pakistan – quite apart from the advance of the nationalist left in Latin America and the growing challenge from Russia and China. But at its heart has been the demonstration of American weakness in Iraq, the three trillion-dollar war that helped drive the US economy into crisis.

No wonder the US elite has wanted a complete change of direction and Bush was last week reduced to mumbling his regrets about the “intelligence failure in Iraq”. For Obama, the immediate foreign policy tests are clear: if he delivers on Iraq, negotiates in Afghanistan and engages with Iran, he will start to justify the global hopes that have been invested in him. If not, he will lay the ground for a new phase of conflict with the rest of the world.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

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US Drone Strike Kill Seven in South Waziristan

December 12, 2008

Missile Hit a House Near a Madrasa

Antiwar.com, December 11, 2008

A US drone struck a South Waziristan village today, killing seven militants according to Pakistani officials. Most of those killed were reportedly Punjabis, but the officials speculated that foreigners may also be among the dead.

The details of the attack, the second US drone attack this month, are difficult to ascertain as local militants have surrounded the destroyed house and are not letting officials get close to it. The US has launched over 30 such attacks in North and South Waziristan over the past few months as part of its “gloves have come off” strategy.

Pakistan’s government has condemned the strikes publicly, but is reported to have privately reached a “tacit agreement” with the United States regarding them. Pakistan has also claimed it is considering shooting down the drones, but once again there is no indication that they made any effort to do so.

compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]

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Babylon’s History Swept Away in US Army Sandbags

December 11, 2008


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The US invasion of Iraq caused irreparable damage to historic sites in Babylon. (Photo: British Museum)

By: Agence France-Presse, December 10, 2008


Babylon, Iraq – Fragments of bricks, engraved with cuneiform characters thousands of years old, lie mixed with the rubble and sandbags left by the US military on the ancient site of Babylon in Iraq.

In this place, one of the cradles of civilisation, US troops in 2003-2004 built embankments, dug ditches and spread gravel to hold the fuel reservoirs needed to supply the heliport of Camp Alpha.

Today, archaeologists say a year of terracing work and 18 months of military presence, with tanks and helicopters, have caused irreparable damage. The Americans remained five months in Babylon and then handed over to the Poles who pulled out 16 months later.

Hands on hips, and wearing a seemingly permanent air of dismay, Maithem Hamza, director of the – totally empty – museum on the site, points to the soil: “Look at this land, it is packed with remnants. They filled their bags with them.”

He pushes with his foot a fragment of raw brick, with cuneiform inscriptions plainly visible. To one side of it, on soil filthy with fuel oil, lies the broken door of a Hummer, the US army’s light vehicle.

Undoubtedly the palace built on the site and on an artificial hill in 1993 by then-president Saddam Hussein drew the US military to Babylon during its invasion in March 2003.

The palace, like elsewhere in Iraq, was requisitioned as a military headquarters.

On one wall, near the door of the monumental entrance, a black stencil proclaims: “Building No.1”. Further on, adorning a warehouse wall, graffiti reads: “Miss you, Smoothy!.”

From April 2003 to June 2004, huge gravelled avenues were gouged out around the ruins of the palaces of Nebuchadnezzer in order to set up prefabricated buildings which became home to up to 2,000 troops.

The heliport is only some 300 metres (yards) from the remains of the north palace, and according to Maithem Hamza, vibration from the aircraft caused the base of the temple of Ninmah – rebuilt by Saddam in the 1980s – to collapse.

In a report published in 2005, experts from the British Museum confirmed that damage visible on nine of the dragon casts on the temple’s Door of Ishtar, and those on the cobbles of the processional way, were due to vibration caused by the passage of heavy machinery.

“That which is broken is broken… We will try to repair what we can,” said Maryam Omran Mussa, director of the site, speaking in her office near the entrance to the site which has been closed to the public since 2003.

“Many of the relics were buried near the surface. Vibration from tanks and lorries caused irreversible damage, that’s for real… From the start, we told the Americans (their actions) were a mistake. I wrote letters…

“They finally understood, and left, but it took time.”

British Museum curator John Curtis was one of the first to sound the alarm over the ancient site.

“They understood when photographs started to be published on the World Wide Web, particularly aerial photographs showing the extent of the military camp there,” he said.

“It’s only because of that that the military authorities of the coalition started to be very nervous and decided that they had to leave.”

In the face of the protests, terracing and building work was interrupted in June 2004, six months before the troops left.

In its defence, the US military argued that if its presence there certainly had caused damage, it had also protected the site from looters who were running riot during the first weeks of the occupation.

Questioned in 2006 in a programme on the BBC, Marine Colonel John Coleman accepted the principle of an apology to the director of the Iraqi antiquities department.

“If it makes him feel good, I can certainly give him one,” he said.

But he added: “Is there a price for the presence? Sure. I’ll just say that the price had the presence not been there would have been far greater.”

For Curtis, however, the price of the military presence was extremely high.

“A lot of the damage done is permanent. For example digging these long trenches: 170 metres long and more than two metres deep, this is not reversible, this is permanent damage that will last forever.”

Another problem arrived in the earth brought from outside the site to fill sandbags. “It contaminates the record of Babylon for the next generations of archeologists,” said Curtis.

“Moving the gravel can be done, but it’s a very long and very expensive job. And in the process, more damage would be done.”

Despite the damage to such an historic site, Curtis accepted that the US military believed that “building a base there wouldn’t actually cause any damage.”

He commented: “I don’t think it’s malicious: it comes from ignorance and stupidity, definitely.”

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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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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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