Afghanistan: the war the West can't win

[53fd]

The so-called ‘just war’ has brought a nightmare, not liberation, for Afghan people, says Judith Orr

Every night 40 raids take place. These attacks are led by the world’s richest nation deploying some of the most sophisticated weaponry ever invented. They are targetting one of the poorest nations on the globe. Yet after ten long years the wealth and weaponry is losing. This is Afghanistan in 2011.

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks in the US, president George W Bush argued that the Taliban in Afghanistan were sheltering the culprits—Al Qaida.

The call to war in Afghanistan won the support of Nato, with Tony Blair in the lead as the US’s most enthusiastic ally.

The war began on 8 October 2001. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have died—we’ll never know exactly how many because the occupiers refuse to count. Some 200,000 people are internally displaced and three million have become refugees.

Among the occupying troops there have been 2,670 casualties—including 1,717 from the US and 382 from Britain. Every year Britain spends £4.5 billion of public money on the war.

Pakistan, Afghanistan’s much bigger nuclear-armed neighbour, has been sucked into the conflict. The US systematically uses drones to bomb the border area.

Drones are unmanned planes dropping bombs controlled from a military base in the US. They have become Barack Obama’s weapon of choice. Up to 2,900 people have been killed by drones in the region.

Stormed

Afghanistan has become the forgotten war, the background noise. It only gets attention when something extraordinary happens.

Like in August when Taliban suicide bombers stormed the British Council in Kabul and held it for eight hours as staff hid in a panic room. There was shock this month when former Afghan president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was assassinated. He was key government official charged with negotiating peace with the Taliban,

Otherwise it’s no more than a roll call of casualties, with announcements from politicians of corners turned and land retaken.

The motives for war have been buried in ever-changing spin. We were once told it’s for women’s liberation.

United Nations general secretary, Kofi Annan, said the treatment of women under the Taliban was “an affront to all standards of dignity, equality and humanity”.

But Afghan feminist Malalai Joya denounced such talk as “dust in the eyes of the world” to win support for the war. She was right. This year Afghanistan was judged the world’s most dangerous place to be a woman.

All the reasons given over the past decade have been dust in our eyes. This was never a war to bring democracy, confront corruption, to stop heroin production or make the streets of Britain safe. Instead it is fought to impose the will of the West in a country that has the misfortune to lie on a faultline of imperialism for centuries.

The interests of the ordinary Afghans were never part of the motive for war. Coalition forces carry out lethal assaults every day. And try to cover it up. Nato finally admitted shooting dead five Afghan civilians in one night raid—having spent a month trying to cover up the murders in 2010.

Special forces soldiers pulled their bullets out of victims’ bodies and washed the wounds with alcohol, after shooting the three women and two men during a night raid.

They even plastered over bullet holes in the walls and repainted a hallway to cover their tracks.

The killings, near Gardez, south of Kabul, were exposed by Afghan investigators, who heard evidence from eyewitnesses. Nato had initially claimed that the people were found dead.

Much media coverage portrays Afghanistan as being a backward, almost medieval country. Its economy and infrastructure is shattered and 42 percent of its citizens live in appalling poverty, with income of £6.50 a month.

But the state of Afghanistan is not natural. It is a direct consequence of imperialist war and conflict. It has been a battleground for successive imperialist wars, invasions and occupations, from the British in the 19th century to the nine-year Russian occupation that ended in 1989.

Since Obama was elected he has tried to sell Afghanistan as the “good” war, as opposed to the “bad” one in Iraq. His distinction had a *resonance.

This war was not an illegal invasion based on lies like Iraq. But most people in the US and Britain are now against the war and our governments have resorted to calls to support “our troops”.

Yet there has been dissent among some soldiers and military families too. The army’s imprisonment of Joe Glenton for refusing to go to Afghanistan was a warning to others that may be ready to defy them.

The lives and welfare of soldiers, let alone ordinary Afghans, are not a concern for Western leaders. They are willing for others to pay any price for victory.

But victory is out of their reach and they want disguise the truth— that the war is a bloody and expensive quagmire. They have tried different military strategies—troop surges and diplomatic surges and counter-insurgency. And they have paid warlords not to fight them.

Their ally and president of the country, Hamid Karzai, and his various warlord allies have rigged elections and siphoned off aid. The regime is the fourth most corrupt in the world.

And now they want to negotiate with the Taliban—the group they have thrown everything at to try and defeat.

And as the occupation goes on the stronger the Taliban become. Just five British soldiers had died in Afghanistan up to 2005.

In 2006 the British went into Helmand province. Labour minister John Reid said they might not even have to fire a shot.

He could not have been more wrong. Of the 382 British soldiers who have died in the war 340 died in Helmand, which is half the size of England.

Endgame

The Taliban has come to embody resistance to foreign occupiers. Even 150,000 occupying troops can’t crush it.

This year is meant to be the beginning of the endgame. All the Nato forces are planning to draw down troops with the idea of handing over to Afghan forces in 2014.

Obama’s troop surge of 53,000 soldiers means there will be more troops there at the end of 2011 than at any time during the Bush years.

The plan to hand over is also slipping fast. Already there is talk of permanent Nato bases, of troops staying for “training and mentoring” of Afghan forces.

Only poverty and desperation drives Afghans to join up. Many escape after their first pay cheque. There is no enthusiasm for defending a corrupt regime.

There is no end in sight. The US is in a deep economic crisis and there is a fear that failure in a second war threatens to expose its weaknesses. That is one reason why Libya is so important to the West. The revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East have left the US and its allies reeling.

The intervention in Libya is an attempt to regain the initiative. Western leaders think by appearing to side with a revolt they can rehabilitate the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention”.

But there is never anything humanitarian about imperialist intervention as the history of Afghanistan shows. There is no hope of people in Afghanistan living in peace and rebuilding their lives until all foreign troops leave.

Drone wars

Air strikes using pilotless drones have increased four fold since Barak Obama was elected—up from 50 to more than 220.

Drones, used for both surveillance and bombing, fly from a base in Kandahar but are controlled by remote control from an air force base in the Nevada desert in the US.

Alongside the US air force and the CIA the RAF has a team of 90 to control the British fleet. Thousands of civilians have been killed by drone attacks.

Afghanistan: war West can't win|8Oct11|Socialist Worker

 

[53fd]

Afghanistan is losing time for a peaceful solution – and the Taliban know it:

Ten years ago, as the first American bombs fell on Afghanistan, a Pashtun tribal leader slipped across the Pakistani border riding a motorbike. He wore a loosely tied turban, was accompanied by three companions and carried a CIA-donated satellite phone. His name was Hamid Karzai.

US-backed militias were sweeping towards Kabul from the north; Karzai's job was to help rout the Taliban in the south. Using his CIA phone he called in a team of US special forces soldiers, who swooped in by helicopter with weapons for another 300 fighters. Together, they pushed towards the Taliban's spiritual home of Kandahar. Victory was at hand. But first, a momentous meeting.

On the morning of 5 December, Karzai received a Taliban delegation in Shah Wali Kot, 20 miles north of Kandahar. Things were moving fast. Hours earlier, Afghan tribal elders gathered in Bonn, Germany, had anointed Karzai as the country's interim leader; the UN signed off on the arrangement. In Kandahar, the reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar dispatched his second in command and defence minister, Mullah Obaidullah, to meet Karzai.

Recognising defeat, the Taliban wanted to talk peace: a formal surrender, the transfer of vehicles and weapons, an end to fighting in Kandahar, all in return for assurances their leaders could be able to return to their villages. That night Obaidullah sent bread for Karzai, in a gesture of conciliation.

In retrospect, it was a tantalising opportunity for a smooth post-Taliban transition and, perhaps, a novel political dispensation. But it wasn't to be. Furious after the 9/11 attacks, the US war machine pursued the Taliban hard. Karzai, the new leader, acquiesced. And the Taliban leadership slunk across the border into Pakistan to lick their wounds and plan the resurgence that is racking the country today.

The exact circumstances of that meeting are still debated among historians. But the irony is lost on few that, today, President Karzai wants to get back into that room with the bearded Talibs in Shah Wali Kot. After 10 years of steadily rising conflict and with the prospect of a major American withdrawal by the end of 2014, Karzai knows that his political future – and perhaps that of his country – could hinge on a negotiated settlement to the conflict. The question is whether there's enough time left to achieve it.

The headlines of the past decade in Afghanistan have been written in blood – about 17,000 civilians and 2,750 foreign soldiers killed, countless suicide bombings and, in recent years, guerrilla spectaculars such as the recent 20-hour assault on the US embassy. But if war has dominated the news, the greatest failings have been political.

At first, it seemed anything was possible. As the Talibs fled in late 2001, reporters filed stories about jubilant women casting off their burqas; kites, banned under the Taliban, fluttered in the skies. Then came more substantial gestures: promises of money, development and democracy. That mood of hope peaked in 2004, with the first presidential poll. Some 70% of voters participated and Karzai scooped a 55% majority, with support from every ethnic group. Designer Tom Ford hailed him as the "chicest man on the planet" for his flowing cape and wool hat.

An airy sense of confidence gripped Kabul, which expressed itself in small ways – young lovers who defied convention and eloped in "love marriages"; palatial wedding halls modelled on mirrored-glass skyscrapers from Dubai; flourishing body-building and sports clubs. On the edge of the city, I visited the Kabul golf club, which had shut under the Taliban, now open after the putting greens had been swept for mines. The course pro, recently returned from exile, told me the Taliban had flogged him with a steel cable. Now a gentrified warlord was financing the renovations. "Attack the course," urged the scorecard.

The joke was not seen as bad taste. The Taliban insurgency was distant, largely confined to the southern provinces, more nuisance than serious threat. A Swiss Red Cross worker had been killed in Kandahar in March 2003, but western military officials had started to speak of the Taliban as a declining force. At Bagram airbase, north of Kabul, American soldiers took pedicures and massages in a beauty parlour. "You can't fight if you have sore muscles," one young officer told me.

Yet this brave democracy had perilously fragile foundations. The US invasion had toppled the Taliban but, many Afghans complained, left behind the force they hated equally: the warlords who had plundered the country for decades. Instead of being banished, many of the old faces were back. Some stood for election, such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, the US-allied warlord accused of suffocating up to 2,000 Taliban fighters in shipping containers. In 2005 Karzai made him chief of staff to the military.

The president protested he had little choice but to accommodate such bullies – the Americans wanted nation building on the cheap. He had a point. The Bush administration, preoccupied with the war in Iraq, had only 8,000 soldiers in Afghanistan at the time of the 2004 election. Commanders, intelligence assets, military equipment – all were being re-routed to Baghdad.

Meanwhile, across the border in Pakistan, the Taliban leadership were plotting a comeback. There was clearly no place in a political process – American leaders bundled them in the same basket as al-Qaida fugitives, which was a mistake. Then, in 2005, they made a dramatic reappearance. Violent incidents soared to more than 4,000, from 1,500 the year before. Coalition deaths doubled from 60 to 131.

Pakistan denied the insurgents were using its territory but Nato officers spoke of the "Quetta Shura" – the Taliban ruling council headquartered in western Pakistan. More worrying proof was available. In 2006 I attended a funeral north of Quetta for a fallen Taliban fighter; the homily was read by a mullah who was also the provincial minister of health.

It was a perfect storm for the British deployment to Helmand. Few took seriously the statement by the then defence secretary, John Reid, in mid 2006 that "not a single shot" might be fired. But British officers did promise to do things differently from the Americans. Criss-crossing the desert in nimble – but hugely exposed – open-top jeeps, officers said there would be no kicking down people's doors. They talked confidently about the lessons of Northern Ireland; young soldiers strolled the bazaars, playing football with local kids.

None of that lasted long. By June, British troops had been sucked into a vicious fight in Sangin, a village deep in Helmand's heroin country that threatened to become a British Alamo. Insurgents streamed across the desert from Pakistan; the death toll inched upwards. British commanders turned to pulverising air strikes and helicopter gunships that killed hundreds of Taliban fighters. But the more the British killed, the more fighters seemed to spring up.

The violence spread like a virus. Nato launched Operation Medusa in neighbouring Kandahar in summer 2006 – the alliance's first land operation. It was a success, of sorts. Canadian soldiers started the fight and Americans finished it, driving the Taliban back over the border towards Quetta. I toured the battlefield with Colonel Stephen Williams, a flamboyant American who played heavy metal music as his artillery pounded Taliban-held compounds. "Rock'n'roll, man," he said.

But the Taliban were also adapting. The insurgency melted out of sight, instead attacking western and Afghan forces with roadside bombs and suicide attacks. Casualties of western troops mounted, touching a high of 711 last year. Some 2,700 civilians also perished. The main problem was that the Afghan government seemed incapable of holding captured ground. In Kabul, western officials scrambled to come up with solutions.

Every season brought a new initiative – counter-narcotics, building the justice system, rooting out corruption. At first western forces demobilised Afghan militias, then they started to arm them. Diplomats attended fundraising events in Tokyo, Berlin and London, trying to maintain flagging interest. The term "Afghanisation" – putting Afghan soldiers, civil servants or policemen up front – became an article of shaky faith.

But no amount of money or soldiers seemed capable of patching up the deeply dysfunctional relationship at the heart of the affair. Anger and frustration turned to resentment and deep mistrust on both sides. Diplomatic cables from 2009 released through WikiLeaks showed the US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, describing Karzai as a "paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with the basics of nation building". Another cable noted that Karzai's deputy, Ahmad Zia Massoud, had been questioned after arriving in Dubai with $52m in cash – raising questions about financial propriety at the highest levels of government.

The Obama "surge" of two years ago, bringing the US contingent to more than 100,000 troops, was supposed to rescue the situation. It succeeded in part. Western troops now control a greater swath of southern Afghanistan than they have for years; Taliban violence there is receding. Yet the fight has simply shifted to the mountainous east, along the border with Pakistan's tribal belt.

The area is controlled by the notorious Haqqani network – the tribal jihadi clan based out of north Waziristan, and recently the subject of friction between the US and the Pakistani military. The US accuses Pakistan's ISI intelligence service of supporting the Haqqanis, who carried out the daring 13 September attack on the US embassy. The Pakistanis say they don't know what the US wants – to make peace with the insurgents, or to fight them.

Amid the confusion, the one sure thing is that, by the end of 2014, the US and Britain will have withdrawn most of their troops. Talk of an "endgame" may be premature: informed officials say that between 10,000 and 20,000 US soldiers will remain behind to support Karzai's government.

But will it survive? The prospect of talks with the Taliban has already resurrected old ethnic tensions; grave talk of civil war runs quietly in the corridors of diplomacy. Karzai periodically says he would like to sit down with the Taliban leaders, as he once did 10 years ago. The question now is whether that would solve Afghanistan's conflict, or propel it into a new phase.

Afghanistan is losing time for a peaceful solution

 

[Tshering22]

Repeating something doesn't make it a lie unless it happens in actions. Drones came late into use but are changing the tide of war. Which is the main reason why your people are whining because jihadis cannot hide inside Pakistani borders anymore as drones will hunt them out and send them to the gates of hell.

You're losing this war... mend ways, join the entire world, leave this Jihad mentality and there is still hope. Otherwise, this mindset will only ruin an otherwise fine country like yours.

 

[Riseup]

Willing to help US exit Afghanistan honourably: Hekmatyar
Updated at: 1640 PST, Friday, October 07, 2011

KABUL: Former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar said Friday that he was willing to help the US exit Afghanistan honourably, Geo News reported.

He said this in a statement to mark ten years since the start of the US-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Hekmatyar added that the US would not benefit from the Afghan war but rather Russia and Iran would be the countries benefitting.

Hekmatyar said if Pakistan had helped and cooperated earlier then the US would not be in Afghanistan. He added that the US had pushed Pakistan into the present situation and was now accusing Pakistan of keeping contact with groups who opposed the war.

Willing to help US exit Afghanistan honourably: Hekmatyar - GEO.tv

 

[GOD OF WAR]

To what extent men go to to satisfy lust, greed and inflated egos..... No wonder that in the end the deadly synergy of these attribute eventually lead them to where they are...

A cruel exercise in vanity By Simon Jenkins |— The Guardian, London.


TEN years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country’s drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation. The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched. This is incredible.

Afghanistan is the world’s greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending. So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai. Everything about Afghanistan beggars belief. This week its leader, Hamid Karzai, brazenly signed a military agreement with India, knowing it would enrage his neighbour, Pakistan, and knowing it would increase the assault on his capital by the Haqqani network.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the Pentagon is exulting over its new strategy of drone killing, claiming this aerial ‘counterterrorism’ can replace the ‘hearts and minds’ counter-insurgency. Down in Helmand, visiting British journalists gather to recite the defence ministry’s tired catechism: ‘We are making real progress on the ground.’

The opening decade of the 21st century has been marked by two epic failures by the western powers that so recently claimed victory in the Cold War; failures of both intellect and leadership. One is the inability to use the limitless resources of modern government to rescue the West’s economy from prolonged recession. The other is the use of an attack on America by a crazed Islamist criminal as an excuse for a retaliatory war embracing a wide swath of the Muslim world.

The decade-long punishment of Afghanistan for harbouring Osama bin Laden has been an act of biblical retribution. The demand that it also abandons the habits of history and adopt democracy, capitalism and gender equality was imperial arrogance.

What happened in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 has spawned an industry of hindsight, with over a hundred titles of wisdom after the event. We learn of the post-9/11 arguments within the Taliban, many of them old CIA allies. We learn of the possible role of Abdul Haq in Kabul, of Pakistan’s intelligence double-dealing, and of the Kandahar jirga of October 2001 which came close to evicting Osama bin Laden.

Yet every counsel of caution in dealing with Afghanistan was disregarded in America’s rush for vengeance — even the warning of Donald Rumsfeld that America “had no dog in the Afghan fight” and should avoid nation-building after a punitive raid. A great surge of imperial eagerness seemed to overwhelm Washington, London and Nato, as if the whole of western liberalism were craving a role in the world.

The occupation of Afghanistan has been a catalogue of unrelieved folly. America is spending staggering sums on the war, which it is clearly not winning. Congressional studies show virtually no US aid reaches the local economy, most remaining with contractors in the US or going on security or being stolen. Local democracy has failed, as warlords feud with drug lords and tribal vendettas resurface. The ‘training of the Afghan police and army’ has become a dope-befuddled joke.

American estimates are that some $3.7tr will have been spent avenging the 9/11 deaths. Britain’s contribution to this stupefying sum is £18.8bn. Whether this spending has prevented another terror attack, or whether the whole venture has been little more than a cruel exercise in vanity, machismo and greed can never be answered.

 

[shuntmaster]

The bottom line is, on the long run, Afghanistan will be better off by getting rid of the Taliban.....

 

[r3alist]

The Taliban is a representation of a big chunk of Afghanistan, you simply cannot escape this truth.

And the slow painful realisation of this truth is what's sooooo painful for some.

 

[Peregrine]

America is chasing it's own shadow in Afghanistan. The moment Americans exit from Afghanistan, It will come back to it's post 2001 state. But, the brazen defeat of Americans, would be a great treat.

 

[ramu]

The Taliban is a representation of a big chunk of Afghanistan, you simply cannot escape this truth.

And the slow painful realisation of this truth is what's sooooo painful for some.

Then that chunk should find a means of peaceful coexistence with the west and the east. If they want to get back to their old habits, not just Afghanistan, even Pakistan and to some extent India, Iran and China will suffer.

 

[ramu]

America is chasing it's own shadow in Afghanistan. The moment Americans exit from Afghanistan, It will come back to it's post 2001 state. But, the brazen defeat of Americans, would be a great treat.

In my mind America showed the world that they can come to a continent 8000 miles from its main land and take the attack to the enemy. It shows a great deal of tenacity and resolve. They have killed the important leaders and the Taliban and Al-Q are on the run. Taliban still have some strong holds and are resisting the NATO forces but do they have the power to attack US main land. Unlikely. In my book that is a big success.

Next, they will have a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, come what may. Why do you think Americans are still lingering around in Japan ? Americans would love to have strategic assets spread across and no other base is more important than a base that is close to China and Pakistan.

 

[Peregrine]

It's fascinating, that Indians have more faith in Americans than Americans themselves......OH Well...........Time will tell!

 

[GOD OF WAR]

In my mind America showed the world that they can come to a continent 8000 miles from its main land and take the attack to the enemy. It shows a great deal of tenacity and resolve. They have killed the important leaders and the Taliban and Al-Q are on the run. Taliban still have some strong holds and are resisting the NATO forces but do they have the power to attack US main land. Unlikely. In my book that is a big success.

Next, they will have a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, come what may. Why do you think Americans are still lingering around in Japan ? Americans would love to have strategic assets spread across and no other base is more important than a base that is close to China and Pakistan.

I've only one word for you..... 'Attrition'.

 

[Emmie]

In my mind America showed the world that they can come to a continent 8000 miles from its main land and take the attack to the enemy. It shows a great deal of tenacity and resolve. They have killed the important leaders and the Taliban and Al-Q are on the run. Taliban still have some strong holds and are resisting the NATO forces but do they have the power to attack US main land. Unlikely. In my book that is a big success.

Next, they will have a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, come what may. Why do you think Americans are still lingering around in Japan ? Americans would love to have strategic assets spread across and no other base is more important than a base that is close to China and Pakistan.

This is what the plan is seemingly... But its getting terribly failed now.

I would like to draw your intention to what Gen. McChrystal said - The US embarked on the conflict with a "frighteningly simplistic" view of the country and still lacked the knowledge to end the war. He further simplified 'We didn't know enough and we still don't know enough'.

So, don't be that sure of the prospects... Americans themselves are playing blind.

 

[Splurgenxs]

Whos saying they wana win? Ithink Pakistan should get ready for the long haul wrt America
I was expecting this.....America would have been hugely unwise to leave this time around ...
Cus 1.Pakistan is now anti America and 2. Its well placed buffer in the middle of the world..this way they get ground support on pretty much everywhere...

I get where Pakistni aspiration regarding America comes from ..i would feel such a way too if i were a Pakistani but nevertheless i would rather start making peace and wait it out...play the long con .

 

[pakdefender]

They American military has two choices either stay on another 20 years in the hope of a turn around that will never come and risk certain bankruptcy or pull out in about 5 years at the risk being seen as a defeated military force.