Washington's crisis grows as
Terror bombing fuels Afghan resistance
By Fred Goldstein
As the cruel air war in Afghanistan goes into its fifth
week, Washington is escalating both its bombing and its
deception of the people in the U.S.
The Pentagon is carpet-bombing with B-1s and B-52s north of
Kabul, dropping tens of thousands of pounds of bombs. The
number of bombing missions flown daily, according to Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking to a press conference on
Nov. 6, is up to 120 in good weather from 80-100 daily
earlier.
Additionally, according to Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs
Gen. Pete Pace, the Air Force has introduced so-called Daisy
Cutter bombs into the conflict. These bombs were used in the
last years of the Vietnam War. They are 15,000-pound fuel-air
explosion bombs. They are pushed from a C-130 and dropped by
parachute. When their sensor gets three feet from the ground,
the 15,000 pounds of fuel explodes and incinerates everything
in a wide area until it exhausts the available oxygen.
This massive terror-bombing campaign-being carried out in
the name of stopping terrorism--is aimed not only at Kabul,
Kandahar, Heirat and other cities. It is also calculated to
pave the way for the Northern Alliance warlords to advance on
Mazar-i-Sharif and other northern areas.
But there is Pentagon desperation behind this escalation,
driven by the multiplying problems around the war.
Resistance prevents early victory
Washington expected that its overwhelming air power would
bring about the quick demise of the Taliban. But just as during
the war in Yugoslavia, which the Pentagon and NATO expected to
last a few days or a week, the U.S. military machine has
unexpectedly encountered mass popular resistance. Such
resistance on the ground against a U.S. imperialist invasion of
conquest has kept the air war from bringing about an early
victory and has compounded military, political and social
problems of the campaign for Washington.
The U.S. is unable to find the social forces in the region
that it requires to overrun the country. According to a New
York Times dispatch of Nov. 4 from the north of Afghanistan,
"Two months after the assassination of the alliance's
charismatic leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, none of his surviving
lieutenants appear able to unify the ethnically diverse
coalition of feuding warlords.
"While some soldiers speak of easy victories, others recount
in awe that fanatic Taliban soldiers ran through Northern
Alliance minefields in battles last year. The soldiers would
rather have the Americans bomb the Taliban longer. 'We want
America to send 100 planes a day, 200 planes a day ... then we
will attack.'
"Perhaps the alliance's biggest problem is its own nature as
a collection of warlords," continues the Times, "uncompromising
men with little vision beyond their own immediate
self-interest."
If the Pentagon is having trouble in the north, the CIA,
which is in charge of finding U.S. allies in the south where
the Pashtun people predominate, is having a worse time. They
sent one emissary, Abdul Haq, in to organize a pro-U.S. force
10 days ago and he was captured and killed by the Taliban.
Another agent, Hamid Karzai, went to the south. He had to be
rescued by U.S. military forces and evacuated to Pakistan "for
a consultation." Karzai had gone to Urzugan province in
Afghanistan trying to organize the former governor of the
province, Jan Muhammed, to defect. It was without success,
according to the New York Times of Nov. 3. Karzai also tried to
gain the defection of several other leaders in order to open up
a southern front in the war. He finally came under attack from
local forces and was saved by the U.S.
Special Forces in 'near disaster'
Equally important, one of the key elements of U.S. military
strategy has been completely blunted by the fierce national
resistance: the use of Special Forces operations for
search-and-destroy raids.
Journalist Seymour Hersh, who has a pipeline to the
military, exposed the Pentagon's lies about the so-called
"success" of the Oct. 20 Special Forces operation in an article
in the New Yorker magazine dated Nov. 12.
Referring to Gen. Richard B. Myers, Chair of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Hersh reported that "Myers did not tell the
press that, in the wake of a near disaster during the assault
on Mullah Omar's complex, the Pentagon was rethinking future
Special Forces Operations inside Afghanistan. Delta Force,
which prides itself on stealth, had been counterattacked by the
Taliban. ... Twelve Delta members were wounded, three of them
seriously."
Hersh continued, "The unexpectedness and the ferocity of the
Taliban response 'scared the crap out of everyone,' a senior
military officer told me, and triggered a review of commando
tactics at the United States Central Command ... at MacDill Air
Force Base in Florida, the headquarters for the war in
Afghanistan. 'This is no war for Special Operations,' one
officer said."
The Pentagon has, of course, denied Hersh's story, but this
debacle has put pressure on the military to intensify the
ground war. And behind the scenes the real debate is when to
send U.S. soldiers to kill and be killed trying to wipe out
Afghan national resistance to the destruction of their
homeland.
As the high Muslim holy period of Ramadan approaches, and
winter is coming on, it is clear that the U.S. high command and
the White House are nearing a turning point in the war-a
turning point that could bring increased death and destruction,
not only to the peoples of Afghanistan but to workers and
oppressed people of the U.S.
The military correspondent of the New York Times, Michael
Gordon, wrote an article entitled "A Vigorous Debate on U.S.
War Tactics" that appeared in the Nov. 4 edition. He quoted
Senator Max Cleland, a prominent member of the Senate Armed
Services Committee "who has close ties to senior Army officers"
as saying: "We have been extremely cautious in hoarding our
precious personnel resources and that is wise and good. But
ultimately to obtain our objectives we will have to use ground
forces."
He advised the U.S. government to think soon about "using
thousands of Army troops, which would have the firepower that
small units of Special Operations forces lack. It could also
involve Marines, 2,200 of whom are currently off the Pakistan
coast."
This appeal was echoed by the militaristic Sen. John McCain
in a major column for the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 26. "We
cannot fight this from the air alone. We cannot fight it
without casualties. And we cannot fight it without risking
unintended damage to humanitarian and political interests."
Terror bombing increases hatred
Washington is waging this war in the name of protecting the
people of the U.S. from terrorism. But with each passing day
the war and the U.S. support for Israel bring more and more
hatred for the U.S. government around the world--particularly
in Central Asia and the Middle East.
On the front pages of the newspapers of the Middle East are
reports on Israel's latest attacks on Palestinian towns,
according to the New York Times of Oct. 28. "Funerals of
Palestinians killed ... are the first item on television news
programs." And "after three weeks of watching television
footage of American missiles streaking across the skies of
Afghanistan and seeing photographs of Afghan civilians in
bloody bandages, many Arabs remain skeptical about the war's
aim."
The spreading outrage at the monstrous scale of the bombing,
the massive destruction of cities, towns and villages, and the
mounting civilian casualties is spreading the resistance beyond
Afghanistan.
"Thousands of armed Pakistanis and other foreigners," wrote
a Washington Post correspondent from Aingari, Afghanistan, on
Nov. 4, "are pouring into Kabul and fanning out toward the
front lines to help the Taliban fight any U.S. ground offensive
or advance by the opposition Northern Alliance, according to
Afghans arriving here in alliance territory."
And two days later, on Nov. 6, the Post wrote about how
anti-U.S. sentiment was sweeping the northeast region of
Makaland, Pakistan. A resident was quoted as saying that "When
America attacks Afghanistan, people want to gather their
weapons and go for jihad. It is their obligation. No one can
stop them."
The Pakistani regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, which has
allied itself with the U.S. war, cannot stop the flow of the
masses into Afghanistan and the mounting anger over his support
of the war.
Rumsfeld's recent trip to secure the use of former Soviet
military bases in Tajikistan was dictated by the need to
shorten supply lines, move closer to targets and establish a
close base for Special Forces operations. But it was
undoubtedly made more urgent by the growing instability in
Pakistan and the need to quickly insure a nearby base of
operations in case the U.S. loses its four bases in that
country.
The anger of the hundreds of millions throughout the region
was captured in two long articles written by Indian novelist
Arundhati Roy, whose initial work has sold 6 million copies in
40 languages.
'A world laid to waste'
The articles, published in Outlook magazine in New Delhi and
reprinted in the British Guardian on Sept. 29 and Oct. 23,
cried out against "a world laid to waste by America's foreign
policy; its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its
vulgarly stated policy of 'full spectrum dominance,' its
chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous
military interventions, its support for despotic and
dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has
munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of
locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the
air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the
thoughts we think."
All of this is being kept from the masses of people in the
U.S. The Pentagon, the White House and the press corps of the
big business media are in a conspiracy to paint this as a war
against terrorism. In fact, it is a war being waged by terror
which will only increase terror.
War is politics by other means. The politics of the U.S. in
Central Asia and the Middle East has always been the politics
of domination; the politics of control over the vast oil riches
of the region; the politics of keeping strategic military
control of a region with over a billion oppressed people; the
politics which dictates support for the Israeli occupation;
support for despotic feudal monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Oman, the United Arab Emirates; military dictatorships in
Pakistan; reactionary regimes in Egypt and Jordan; and the
politics that led to a 10-year war, CIA financed and run,
against the only truly progressive regime that Afghanistan ever
had, which was supported by the Soviet Union.
This is the politics being expressed in the ruthless bombing
of Afghanistan. This is what is leading to an even bigger U.S.
military adventure in the region. This is what the anti-war
movement must organize against.
It is the anti-war movement, fighting to stop this war, that
is truly on the side of the people-the people of Afghanistan,
of the Middle East and the vast majority of the workers and
oppressed people in the United States.
Reprinted from the Nov. 15, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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