U.S. air strikes spark angry Afghan response

Both the McCain and Obama campaigns have made “winning in Afghanistan” a campaign issue. However, Afghanistan is spinning out of U.S. control so quickly that the troops the politicians want to withdraw from Iraq and send there are likely to find themselves in an even more precarious situation than the imperialist occupation they’d be leaving.

The NATO coalition in Afghanistan, operating as the so-called International Security Assistance Force, has significant contingents from the United States (29,000), Great Britain (7,800), Germany (3,200), Italy (2,800), France (2,600) and Canada (2,500). Counting these and some smaller contingents, about 53,000 NATO soldiers are there. (Figures are from March 2008 on www.foreignpolicy.com.) But NATO commanders know that even this number is not enough “boots on the ground,” so they have been relying on airpower.

High-tech air strikes have been killing many Afghan civilians and turning their friends and families into active opponents of the NATO occupation—so much so that even the U.S.-installed government in Kabul has been complaining vociferously, especially about a bombing in western Afghanistan carried out on Aug. 22.

The state-owned Afghan newspaper Anis said, “The fact that the coalition forces again martyred 80 people, including women, children and men, in an arbitrary military operation” in Herat province “shows that contrary to our people’s expectations, the role of these forces has now shifted from ensuring security ... to taking the lives of civilians. The coalition forces have repeatedly carried out uncoordinated military operations in different parts of the country and caused civilian casualties.” (BBC Worldwide Monitoring, Aug. 23)

Since then, even U.S.-installed President Hamid Karzai has admitted that even more people—95, some 60 of them children—died as a result of the air raid. Karzai is feeling the heat of the people’s anger, which is being expressed in militant anti-U.S. demonstrations held despite the military occupation of their country.

Haji Tor Jan Noorzai, a survivor of this massacre, told a reporter: “The Americans are foreigners and they do not understand. These people they killed were enemies of the Taliban.’’ (New York Times, Aug. 23) While the NATO war in Afghanistan is supposedly against the Taliban, its neocolonial character is becoming clearer every day.

Atrocities like the bombing in Herat are clearly aimed at breaking the people’s support for those resisting occupation. The resistance has become stronger in recent months. Three Polish soldiers, three Canadian combat engineers and one British soldier died in combat in the middle of August.

The most significant attacks on occupation forces took place Aug. 18-19 on French paratroopers about 30 miles east of Kabul in the Surobi district and on the Pentagon’s Camp Salerno near the Pakistan border.

Camp Salerno is the second-largest U.S. base in Afghanistan. The attacks began after midnight on Aug. 18 with waves of commandos attempting to blast holes in its defensive perimeter. Reportedly, they didn’t succeed.

The ambush of the French troops seems to have been much more successful for the resistance. Ten French soldiers died and 21 were seriously wounded, the largest number of casualties for the French army in a single incident since the Algerian war—another colonial catastrophe. However, Le Monde, a major French daily respected for its accuracy, published an interview with survivors who claimed that the French patrol was hit by “friendly fire”—that is, by forces led by the U.S.

The French government was afraid that this stinging defeat would further shred its standing, since President Nicolas Sarkozy has been a strong ally of George W. Bush but polls show that just 35 percent of French people support the deployment of their troops to Afghanistan.

Sarkozy left for Kabul the next day and attended the military ceremony for the dead soldiers. He arranged for their caskets to lie in state in the Invalides, the most hallowed military chapel in France, and awarded them all France’s highest decoration.

This ceremony and the funerals of the soldiers were major news in France. But when Aurore Buil, the widow of a sergeant killed in the ambush, was asked on France’s National TV2 just after her husband’s funeral why she wasn’t going to accept Sarkozy’s invitation to attend a briefing at the presidential palace, she replied, “For what? To give him publicity?”

Earlier she had told the French press that she held Sarkozy “responsible for the death of these 10 men, of my husband.” She continued, “For me, we have nothing to do in Afghanistan. ... It is necessary to let them fight it out among themselves.”

The French imperialists learned the hard way that the unconquerable will of both the Algerian and the Vietnamese people to be independent would erode their colonial army. U.S. commanders ran into the same lesson when the U.S. ruling class thought it would replace the French in Southeast Asia. Now the Afghan and Iraqi people are showing once again that no amount of high-tech military hardware can force a people to submit to foreign domination and exploitation.

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