Gates' busy week making war

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has had a busy February, and it’s only half over. In Vilnius, Lithuania; in Munich, Germany; in Baghdad, Iraq; and back in Washington, he has been pumping for more war. He wants more allied troops in Afghanistan, and he overruled himself to support a “pause” in withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. He even warned Pakistan that its government might be a target of al-Qaida forces operating in its more remote regions, part of the Bush gang’s moves to intervene directly in those areas.

There’s a lesson in all this belligerence, and maybe two or three. The first one is that those occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are not going well for the U.S. and NATO armed forces. All boasting of the alleged gains of the “surge” aside, it looks like the Pentagon is in the same position in Iraq it was two summers ago—with just that many more deaths, injuries and refugees and just that much more psychological pain later.

In 2006, the U.S. population voted for Democrats hoping that would bring some peace, at least regarding Iraq. The Democrats haven’t even put up a decent fight on this, except maybe in election rhetoric.

The number of attacks by the Afghan resistance against the NATO occupation has been rising year by year. One report said these attacks had tripled. Casualties are growing among the occupation troops and of course among Afghan civilians, and Afghanistan has regained its place as a major exporter of opium. In other words, the occupation of Afghanistan too is a disaster.

Now that Bush’s Iraq program is obviously a fiasco for U.S. imperialist interests, many in the U.S. establishment are now critical regarding Iraq. But many of these same critics, from the New York Times to the Democratic candidates, find Afghanistan’s occupation acceptable and justifiable. Their justification is still based on the Sept. 11, 2001, events.

Never mind that the Taliban—however reactionary their program was compared to the progressive government of Afghanistan of the 1980s—had nothing to do with those attacks except that al-Qaida was their guest. Never mind that the U.S. had supplied the funds and weapons that aided the growth of both al-Qaida and the Taliban during the U.S.-funded war against the progressive Afghan regime. Never mind that six years of U.S./NATO occupation of Afghanistan have apparently done nothing to remove al-Qaida’s alleged threat, according to Gates himself.

Yet Gates’ only solution is to throw more troops into Afghanistan. He hopes they will be European troops, but he hasn’t worked that out yet. And there is no serious opposition to this strategy within the imperialist establishment, within either the Republican or Democratic parties.

These are hard lessons, but they spell out that a mass anti-war movement will have to confront the government and the military if the policies are to change.