U.S., UK push for more troops to Afghanistan

Afghanistan is far from the cold waters of the North Atlantic. A land-locked country in central Asia, it is thousands of miles from Europe or North America. But as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization gathers for its biennial summit meeting this week, Afghanistan is the main topic on the agenda.

U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan are facing some of the fiercest resistance since the 2001 invasion. Insurgent attacks, particularly in the southern region, have increased fourfold this year.

The stark reality facing the NATO imperialists is that after five years of intervention against one of the poorest countries in the world, their combined military might has been unable to subdue the country. Rather, the occupation has devastated the economy, restored to power a ruling clique of landlords and their private armies, and wreaked havoc on the countryside.

“For us, the number one issue is Afghanistan,” said R. Nicholas Burns, U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs, in a news briefing before the NATO summit. Burns’ comments came as part of coordinated efforts by U.S. and British officials that portend an escalation of the war.

On the same day as Burns’s statement, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, told reporters that Washington should increase the amount of military equipment—helicopters, Humvees, fighter aircraft—it sends to Afghanistan.

While Eikenberry was talking at the Pentagon, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander James Jones was trying to drum up support for more troops. “I continue to insist we need an additional 15 percent,” he said.

There are currently 32,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, 20,000 of them from the U.S.

The fourth horseman of the apocalypse was British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who descended on the Afghan capital for a “surprise visit” to rally the troops. Often ridiculed in the British press as “Bush’s poodle,” Blair lived up to expectations by announcing that Britain would “stay the course” in Afghanistan. He offered a future of decades of military intervention. “I think we are wiser now to the fact that this is a generation-long struggle,” Blair said. “Here is where the future of world security in the early 21st century is going to be played out.”

The “security” he has in mind was seen two days later when NATO troops attacked four locations in southern Afghanistan, leaving at least 12 civilians dead.

Afghanistan has seen a huge number of civilian deaths due, in part, to the massive U.S.-NATO air war there. According to the Nov. 17 New York Times, “The 2,095 attacks by American aircraft since June is many times greater than the number of air strikes in Iraq. ... The increase in total munitions dropped has also been substantial. This year in Afghanistan, American aircraft have dropped 987 bombs and fired more than 146,000 cannon rounds and bullets in strafing runs, more than was expended in both categories from the beginning of the American-led invasion in 2001 through 2004.”

Just this year, the AP wire service reported the following: Between 30 and 80 civilians were killed during NATO air strikes in Panjwayi in the midst of a religious holiday (Oct. 25). At least 13 people died when NATO helicopters incinerated three dried-mud homes in Ashogho (Oct. 18). More than 16 civilians were killed when U.S. warplanes bombed a religious school and mud-brick homes in Azizi village (May 21). Seven died after an air strike in eastern Kunar (April 15).

The air war, however, is a universe away from Kabul City Center, the newly built shopping mall in the Afghan capital. Here the rich can shop for silk shirts, $200 shoes and a Big Mac with fries in a nine-story, marble and glass, heavily guarded luxury enclave. Most of the foreign “reconstruction” money flowing into Afghanistan is going to such projects, which benefit the rich.

“Many of Afghanistan’s wealthy few,” reports the Nov. 27 Washington Post, “are citizens who returned from abroad after the U.S.-led invasion, eager to invest. ... Some have grown rich on corruption or the illegal trade in opium, which some estimates say accounts for 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product.”

A few miles from the shopping mall, Afghanis live in shocking poverty. Most city residents receive about 14 hours of electricity a week. Over 70 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day.

Such is the “freedom” that imperialism is bringing to Afghanistan.

The fierce resistance inside Afghanistan to foreign occupation is starting to expose significant cracks in the NATO war alliance.

On the eve of the NATO summit, Belgian Defense Minister Andre Flahaut called for NATO to “reflect on an exit strategy” from Afghanistan. In an interview with Le Vif-L’Express magazine, reported in the Nov. 27 Independent, Flauhaut said, “The situation is deteriorating and, over time, NATO forces risk appearing like an army of occupation.”

The Independent notes that the minister’s comments “will alarm senior figures at the alliance’s headquarters where there is already concern that France is getting cold feet about its role in Afghanistan. ... NATO sources are concerned about the possibility of an eventual French withdrawal.”

Even Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, one of Washington’s most important allies in the Muslim world and a brutal military dictator, cannot afford being seen as merely accepting the dictates of Washington and London.

Speaking at a joint news conference with Tony Blair before the latter’s Afghanistan visit, Musharraf said that Afghanistan “was in deep turmoil” and thus NATO “could not rely solely on military might but also had to make political settlements.” He called for a “Marshall Plan” for development in southern Afghanistan.

The Marshall Plan was enacted under President Harry S. Truman after World War II. Under the Marshall Plan, the U.S. poured $20 billion—a huge sum in those days—into Europe to rebuild the economies, revive European capitalism and avoid workers’ revolutions. The plan also enriched U.S. corporations, since the money was used to buy U.S. goods and had to be shipped across the Atlantic on U.S. merchant vessels.

What drives U.S. imperialism and its junior partners in Afghanistan is not the vision of building a thriving independent economy and raising the living standards of the masses. Their sights are set on the vast oil and gas reserves of Central Asia and the Middle East. Afghanistan for them is an outpost, a military base, a filling station for their hallucinatory dream of global empire.

Such a dream, however, is crashing against the daily reality of widespread, stubborn and increasing resistance, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, against foreign occupation and aggression.