U.S.-led occupation falters in Afghanistan

The offensive that the Afghan resistance began last spring as soon as the weather was warm enough to fight has seriously shaken the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Washington has been trying to shift the burden of most of the fighting onto NATO, but the European imperialists appear reluctant to insert more of their soldiers into the meat-grinder of combat in Afghanistan.

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, the supreme commander of NATO, in a press conference given at the Pentagon Sept. 20, said he was surprised at “the ferocity of the Taliban resurgence” in the past few months.

The 18,500 soldiers in the NATO force average about five fatalities per week. The U.S. has about the same number of troops as NATO has contributed and just put 12,000 of them in eastern Afghanistan under NATO command.

The United States is so short of troops in the Middle East that, on Sept. 25, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went to Montenegro, a small country of 650,000 people whose government split it from Serbia a few months ago, and offered it significant military aid if it would supply troops for Afghanistan. (Asia Times online, Sept. 30)

Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic’s government had just ended the draft and was cutting Montenegro’s 4,000-troops army down to 2,500. He made no commitment.

The current Afghan army is a ramshackle collection of at most 40,000 troops. The government of Hamid Karzai, which seems barely able to control Kabul, the capital, is so split that the U.S. State Department oversees Karzai’s personal security.

A rumor floating around the Afghan community in New York is that Karzai is going to be replaced before the end of the year in a shakeup of the whole Afghani government. Bush nevertheless praised Karzai as an “invaluable ally” in a speech he gave to the Reserve Officers Association Sept. 29.

In connection with his appearance at the U.N. General Assembly in September, Karzai made a 10-day trip, including a speech to a joint session of the Canadian parliament, in which he thanked Canada for its soldiers having “given their life” for Afghanistan. British and Canadian troops have recently taken relatively heavy losses in Afghanistan, increasing popular resentment against the intervention there.

Karzai’s visit was marked by the state dinner he shared with U.S. President George Bush and Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan. There has been tension between Karzai and Musharraf, with Musharraf accusing Afghanistan of not doing enough to end the Taliban threat. The Taliban has been linked to Islamic parties inside Pakistan that oppose Musharraf and his close, subservient connection to the United States.

Karzai says that Pakistan played a significant role in the creation and the formation of the Taliban as a counterweight to factions in Afghanistan supported by India and Russia and is now giving support to the Taliban under the table.(The role that Pakistan allegedly played in the creation of the Taliban is described in the book, “Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia,” by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who writes for the Far Eastern Economic Review and from time to time for the Washington Post.)

The day after the state dinner, a report started circulating in the British press that Taliban officials have opened an office in the bus station of the capital of North Waziristan—the area in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden allegedly has his headquarters. (The Australian, Sept. 30)

Taliban officials have distributed leaflets calling on the people of North Waziristan to contact them on all matters relating to law and order.

Pakistan was forced to give substantial internal autonomy to both North and South Waziristan a few months ago after its army was unable to suppress a local uprising.

All these charges and countercharges on the issue of troop levels, the ability of the Taliban to maintain reasonably secure rear bases in Pakistan, and the inefficient and insufficient organization of the U.S.-installed Afghani regime ignore the ability of the Afghan resistance to express the anger of the people over being occupied by a foreign power. The resistance includes an unarmed, civilian movement that has started to show its face in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat.

According to Syed Saleem Shahzad, a Pakistani journalist writing in the September Le Monde Diplomatique, Mullah Dadullah, a seasoned Taliban military commander with good diplomatic skills, helped obtain political unity among Taliban factions in Waziristan that had previously been divided. Dadullah was able to connect with two significant factions of resistance fighters opposed to the Karzai government, writes Shahzad, and to work out strategic alliances with some Uzbek and Tadjik opponents of Karzai’s puppet government.