The Afghan Dust is Settling
By Eric Walberg
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28731
Global Research, January 18, 2012
Yes, it really is another Vietnam, and just as in 1972, presidential elections will make no difference,
Scarcely a word is heard about foreign affairs amid
US election talk, despite the many fires around the world that the US
military is either stoking or trying to douse -- depending on your point
of view. Other than Republican contender Ron Paul -- not a serious
candidate for the mainstream -- no one questions the plans for war on
Iran, Israel’s continued expansion in the Occupied Territories, or US
plans to end the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The problem is that decisions about these vital
American policies are not for mere presidents or presidential hopefuls
to mull over. The one principled decision that US President Barack Obama
made, his first upon coming to office, was to announce that he would
close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. After all, he had voted
against his predecessor’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, and it was on this
basis that he was able to energise an otherwise disillusioned
Democratic base and surge past the more acceptable white alternatives
Hillary Clinton and John McCain.
Obama’s record on foreign policy has been shocking in
retrospect. His call from Cairo for a new dispensation in the Middle
East soon after his vow to close Guantanamo, along with this vow, are
now in history’s dustbin. His enthusiastic embrace of the worst of
Bush’s policies, from drones, assassinations and mercenaries to
Orwellian police-state security are frightening proof of the
helplessness of US politicians these days.
No better evidence that this paralysis will make the
next four years the most perilous in US history is found in the bloody
news dripping out of Afghanistan. NATO soldiers, Afghan soldiers and
police, resistance fighters, and, of course, women and children continue
to be killed at alarming rates, even as the Taliban open an office in
Qatar (originally denied by all parties). Peace negotiations came to a
standstill last year after the assassination of High Peace Council chief
Burhanudin Rabbani (Afghan president 1992-96) by a visitor posing as a
peace messenger from the Taliban.
A total of 560 NATO soldiers, most of them Americans,
were killed in Afghanistan in 2011, the second highest number in the
10-year war, down from a high of 711 in 2010 after the start of Obama’s
surge, still higher than the 521 in 2009.
But according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon,
“security-related events” were up by 21 per cent in 2011 compared to
2010. By this he meant attacks such as the car bombing of an
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoy in Kabul last
October which killed 17, the shooting down of a helicopter in Wardak
south of the capital last August in which 30 US troops perished, and the
explosion that killed at least 80 people in a shrine in Kabul on the
Shia holy day of Ashura in early December. Many ISAF deaths are at the
hands of Afghan soldiers. The recent Abu Ghraib-type scandal of US
soldiers defiling Afghan dead merely ups this perverse ante.
Gung-ho military types like John Nagl, a retired
lieutenant-colonel who co-wrote the US army’s field manual on countering
guerrilla warfare, push counterinsurgency, where the occupiers
“protect” the civilians against violence from the rebels. This was the
logic of the surge which Obama grudgingly (who cares what he thinks
anymore?) approved last year.
The counterinsurgency hurt the Taliban if only
because the occupiers killed thousands of them. It no doubt caused
splintering of Taliban forces, and contributed to the seemingly random
violence. But it did little to endear the occupiers to the native
population, and, according to a WikiLeak from former chairman of the US
National Intelligence Council Peter Lavoy, seems to have prompted a new,
less benign strategy. “The international community should put intense
pressure on the Taliban to bring out their more violent and
ideologically radical tendencies,” he argues, the logic being to prevent
Afghans from giving up entirely on their occupiers.
Nagl and the boys are not pleased by such candor.
Aghast, he told the Guardian: “It just goes completely against the ethos
of the American military not to take more risks in order to protect
civilians. I find it hard to believe elements of the US military would
want to deliberately put more risk on to civilians.”
But he does admit the Taliban are effectively being
forced by the occupiers to engage mostly in crude terrorism, stage one
of Mao Zedong’s famous three phases of revolutionary warfare (phase two
is larger teams of rebels taking on government forces, leading to
full-blown conventional war in phase three). Still, he sees no nefarious
intrigue on the occupiers’ part. “The Taliban have been knocked down to
phase one and you see what you would expect to see, with the resulting
risk of alienating the civilian population. If we can get the civilian
population on our side in the south, in their heartlands, we can knock
them back to phase zero,” enthuses Eagle Scout Nagl.
Such clever reading of Maoist tactics cannot hide the
fact that US plans for Central Asia continue to stumble, stuck in the
imperial groove. Looming large is Pakistan’s remarkable closure of the
US drone base and its refusal to reopen supply routes after NATO killed
28 Pakistani soldiers last month. But equally foreboding is tiny
Kyrgyzstan’s President Almazbek Atambayev’s quiet insistence that 2014
is the final final final date for US control of the Manas airbase, a key
transfer point for Western troops and supplies to Afghanistan.
Just as Bush was boasting in 2008 of permanent US
bases in Iraq, the recent Strategic Partnership agreement with the
Afghan government to place permanent joint military bases in Afghanistan
beyond 2024 is not a serious proposition.
Nor is the latest magic bullet -- the Iron Man --
being forged in NATO headquarters. The idea is to whip into shape an
Afghan security force/ army and hand over nominal power by the end of
2014. But this force will be predominantly northern Tajik-speaking
Afghans who make up only 28 per cent of the population and form the
backbone of the current government. Less than 10 per cent of officers
are Pashtun (vs 42 per cent of Afghans), and in any case the army
attrition rate is 30 per cent, not to mention the infiltration rate of
Taliban suicide martyrs.
Just as in 2012 in Iraq, we can expect some kind of
handover in 2014 -- the US people and economy simply cannot bear much
more, but it will be to a chaotic police state, headed by the weak,
discredited Hamid Karzai, with a confusing mix of army, police and
mercenaries, much like the situation Afghanistan faced in 1993, at the
end of the last US-Afghan love-in, in the 1980s. By 1996 a violent civil
war had brought the country to a stand-still and the Taliban was the
only way out. This scenario is about to repeat itself.
The Taliban are not the Vietnamese, with a clear,
proven economic system and a powerful socialist sponsor able to help
them heal. What post-2014 Afghanistan faces is less-than-friendly
neighbours, including a very troubled Pakistani, with little to
contribute to a post-occupation reconstruction. Perhaps the new Muslim
Brotherhood governments in the Arab world will extend a more sympathetic
hand, paid for by Gulf oil sheikhs. The Afghans have had quite enough
of the kufars over the past three decades.
Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/ His Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games is available at http://claritypress.com/Walberg.html
