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U.S. war parties united on Afghanistan

Resistance to the U.S. military and political presence in Afghanistan took a dramatic form on Feb. 27. A suicide bomber detonated himself at the gate of a U.S. air base in Kabul while U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was staying there.

News sources on March 5 are reporting that U.S. soldiers were responsible for 17 civilian deaths in Afghanistan on March 4 alone. On that day U.S. soldiers fired indiscriminately on civilians after their convoy was attacked in eastern Afghanistan near Jalalabad.

District Chief Mohammad Kahn Katawazi and nine other witnesses said the U.S. soldiers fired wildly and “treated every car and person” riding or walking along a busy, six-mile stretch of highway as a “potential attacker.” (AP)

Zmarai Bashiri, a spokespersonn for Afghanistan’s interior ministry, bluntly indicted the U.S. forces as responsible. U.S. officials said 16 civilians died. (NY Times)

On the same day, U.S. planes dropped two 1,000-pound bombs on a house in Nijrab, north of Kabul, killing a family of nine, including small children. U.S. spokesperson Lt. Col. David Accetta blamed the deaths on Afghan fighters, saying they showed a “blatant disregard for human life” by militarily engaging U.S. forces in a “populated area.”

In response to these massacres, angry protesters gathered on the streets of Jalalabad to demand that U.S. troops get out of Afghanistan. This continued a series of anti-U.S. mass protests that have rocked the province, including one in May 2005 after 17 Afghani students were killed. (A World to Win News Service)

This resistance is not surprising, given the desperate conditions in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion. On March 1, a U.S. government report documented that opium production in the country has hit a record high, up 60 percent over past years. Afghanistan currently produces 90 per cent of the world’s opium. (International Narcotics Control Strategy Report)

This actually reveals how increasingly hard it is for Afghanis to support themselves through traditional farming and trading networks. Since the 2001 U.S. invasion, opium has re-emerged as profitable in a country that now ranks fourth from the bottom in the world for living standards and third from the bottom for gender inequities. (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan)

The impact of the U.S.-created catastrophe also exposes how dishonest it is to justify the invasion by calling it “liberation”—a pretext that has been endorsed by Democratic as well as Republican leaders.

Afghani girls and women are increasingly being sold and traded to settle opium-related debt. In 2006 there were 69 cases of self-immolation and opium-related murder of girls and women, and more than 20 suicides of girls and women in just the provinces around Kandahar. (Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission)

As conditions worsen in Afghanistan, here in the United States there is a push to sell Democratic politicians as the leaders who can end the unpopular U.S. wars. A February 2007 commentary by Richard Parry in Consortium News even resuscitated a talk by former Vice President Al Gore given five years ago, before Washington launched its war on Iraq.

Parry lauded Gore for stating doubts about that invasion. But what was Gore’s objection? He thought that “the Bush administration, rather than beating the drums for war with Iraq, should focus its efforts on winning the battle against terrorism.” (commondreams.org)

Gore specifically praised the U.S. assault on Afghanistan. He said of saying of President George W. Bush’s military policy there that “until the invasion of Iraq, I think he did a good job ... up until Tora Bora” when U.S. forces blasted mountain refuges of Afghan guerilla fighters but failed to capture Osama Bin Laden. (WIRED, May 2006)

Gore’s endorsement of U.S. intervention carries on the approach to destabilizing Afghanistan first launched through the CIA in the late 1970s during Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s administration.

The code phrase “battle against terrorism” sums up the Democratic leadership’s commitment to the overall aims of its capitalist ruling class—and their demonization of oppressed countries for any attempt at resistance or assertion of self-determination.

On March 1 the Democratic majority on the Senate Budget Committee overruled the committee chair, Sen. Kent Conrad, himself a Democrat, who had suggesting cutting $20 million from the Bush administration’s $142 billion war budget for 2008. This money is aimed at funding another year of U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq—and of Afghanistan. Democratic House leaders also said they wouldn’t cut funding.