31 December 2010 By Rick Rozoff The war being waged by the United States and the
Western military alliance it controls, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, is well into its tenth
year and is already the longest war in the history of
the U.S., Afghanistan and NATO alike. In fact it is
NATO's first ground war and its first armed conflict
in Asia. It has now graduated into a broader war, having
engulfed neighboring Pakistan with a population of 170
million and a nuclear arsenal. The U.S. has suffered reverses in the past week and
half with the death of Special Representative for
Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke on December
13 and the recall of the Central Intelligence Agency
station chief in Pakistan, Jonathan Banks, on December
16, the day the White House issued its annual policy
review on the protracted and increasingly deadly war
in Afghanistan. As of December 23, American and NATO military
fatalities for this year are at 705, almost a third of
the total 2,275 killed since the war was launched on
October 7, 2001. The Afghan National Army created from scratch by
the Pentagon and NATO acknowledged this month that it
has lost 806 soldiers so far this year, an increase of
25 percent over 2009. Earlier this month a report by the United Nations
General Assembly documented that Afghan civilian
casualties had risen by 20 percent in the first ten
months of this year over all of last to a total of
5,480 killed and wounded. In the past few days Western military forces have
intensified lethal air strikes against Afghan
civilians and troops, killing four Afghan soldiers in
the south of the country in an air attack in the
middle of the month, killing a civilian and wounding
two children in another air strike in Helmand province
during the same time period, and most recently killing
a policeman and the brother of a legislator in a
helicopter attack in northern Afghanistan on December
23. The day before the last incident an Afghan
provincial governor called on the North Atlantic
military bloc "to pay attention to civilian casualties
during operations and prevent civilian casualties."
[1] The two deaths on the following day indicate that
such appeals fall on deaf ears. On the other side of the Afghan-Pakistani border,
on December 16 three U.S. missile attacks killed an
estimated 54 people in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
province, all identified as "militants" in the Western
press. The overwhelming majority of deadly
CIA-directed drone attacks have occurred in North
Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
The attack in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa signals the expansion
of the war deeper into the country – "a possible
expansion of the CIA-led covert campaign of drone
strikes inside Pakistani territory" [2] – as does a
recent NATO helicopter gunship raid into Balochistan
province. Days later NATO oil tankers came under rocket
attack in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and
"The Pakistan-Afghanistan highway was temporarily
blocked and NATO supplies suspended following the
attack." [3] As in Afghanistan, the killing has increased
substantially this year. In the past year there have been at least 115 U.S.
drone attacks in the tribal areas, more than double
the amount in 2009, which itself represented a
dramatic increase over previous years. In 2009 and
2010 there have been approximately 170 missile strikes
in North and South Waziristan, a 300 percent increase
over the last four years of the George W. Bush
administration. The cumulative death toll is in the
neighborhood of 2,000, with close to half of those
deaths occurring this year. The CIA's Jonathan Banks was whisked home from
Pakistan after his identity was revealed in a legal
action initiated by surviving victims of the drone
attacks and victims' families. The suit also named CIA
Director Leon Panetta and Defense Secretary Robert
Gates. Nothing daunted, the special assistant to the
commanding general of U.S. Army Special Operations
stated that the current demand for more drones
(unmanned aerial vehicles) is "insatiable." "It's like crack, and everyone wants more,"
Brigadier General Kevin Mangum recently announced. [4] The U.S. is pressuring the Pakistani government to
launch a military operation in North Waziristan in
tandem with the marked escalation of drone attacks
there, something paralleling the Pakistani army
offensive in the Swat Valley in May of last year that
led to the displacement of three million civilians. In addition, the Pentagon has recently announced
that U.S. and NATO forces will be stationed at a
military base in the capital of Pakistan's Balochistan
province. [5] Washington is now pushing to expand special forces
operations in Pakistan's tribal areas, supplementing
CIA drone strikes and NATO helicopter attacks in the
region. Until now, "The main role in a secret war on
Pakistan territory has belonged to the Central
Intelligence Agency. The CIA has operated armed drones
to hunt down insurgent leaders and also organized a
number of secret missions carried out by Afghan
operatives, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams."
The introduction of American ground forces – in the
words of an American official, "We've never been as
close as we are now to getting the go-ahead to go
across" – would "open a new front in the war that is
becoming more and more unpopular in America. "It also could ruin relations with…Pakistan,
especially considering the risk of civilian
casualties." [6] However, civilian deaths on both sides of the
Khyber Pass and the destabilization of nuclear
Pakistan are matters of small importance to American
and NATO geostrategists, who nurture grand designs for
Central and South Asia. A recent Chinese analysis put the matter this way: "Though it started long ago, the game is still on.
There are only more players with more pieces moving
and moved on a bigger board, all for a newer rendition
of the Great Game. "Whichever way people prefer to describe the game –
geostrategy or geopolitics – there has been a
center-piece: interest in a geography that is
important to world powers, past and present; that is,
in whatever way these powers deem it as important. "Sitting at one end of the board is the same old
player, known as the Russian Empire, while at the
other end now is an alliance orchestrated not any more
by the British Empire but rather by the Americans and
the military coalition they dominate, known as NATO."
[7] Indian analyst and former diplomat M. K.
Bhadrakumar stated in a recent article entitled "NATO
weaves South Asian web" that after its summit in
Lisbon, Portugal last month NATO "is well on the way
to transforming into a global political-military role"
and "is by far today the most powerful military and
political alliance in the world." Speaking about long-term U.S. and NATO strategy in
Asia, he added: "It is within the realm of possibility that NATO
would at a future date deploy components of the US
missile defense system in Afghanistan. Ostensibly
directed against nearby ‘rogue states', the missile
defense system will challenge the Chinese strategic
capability." [8] Regarding the long-planned agreement on
constructing a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India
(TAPI) natural gas pipeline concluded earlier this
month [9], the author said: "TAPI is the finished product of the US invasion of
Afghanistan. It consolidates NATO's political and
military presence in the strategic high plateau that
overlooks Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and China.
TAPI provides a perfect setting for the alliance's
future projection of military power for ‘crisis
management' in Central Asia. "The pipeline signifies a breakthrough in the
longstanding Western efforts to access the fabulous
mineral wealth of the Caspian and Central Asian
region. Washington has been the patron saint of the
TAPI concept since the early 1990s when the Taliban
was conceived as its Afghan charioteer. The concept
became moribund when the Taliban regime was driven out
of power from Kabul. "Now the wheel has come full circle with the
project's incremental resuscitation since 2005,
running parallel with the Taliban's fantastic return
to the Afghan chessboard. TAPI's proposed
commissioning coincides with the 2014 timeline for
ending the NATO ‘combat mission' in Afghanistan. The
US ‘surge' is concentrating on Helmand and Kandahar
provinces through which the TAPI pipeline will
eventually run. What an amazing string of
coincidences!" [10] Last week NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh
Rasmussen affirmed that "as the long-term partnership
that President Karzai and I signed at Lisbon
demonstrates, our commitment to Afghanistan will
continue well beyond 2014." [11] On December 22 U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl
Eikenberry confirmed that the Pentagon "will retain a
‘sizable mission' in Afghanistan beyond 2014″ and that
a troop withdrawal, if it ever occurs, would be
"conditions-based; not calendar-based." American
troops "could also stay on to carry out
counter-terrorism operations," added the retired
general and former deputy chairman of the NATO
Military Committee. [12] In a recent interview, American analyst Gareth
Porter asserted that NATO troops are killing and dying
in Afghanistan "because bureaucrats in Brussels, in
the NATO headquarters, wanted more responsibility,
[they] wanted a job for NATO to be able to take on in
order to justify the continued existence of that
organization." [13] The U.S. and NATO require and are exploiting the
endless war in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more
reasons than simply to justify the continued
existence, even the global expansion, of the world's
only military bloc. As Bhadrakumar has pointed out, far more is at
stake: The military encirclement of Russia, China and
Iran and control of Eurasia's strategic energy
resources. 1) Associated Press, December 22, 2010 http://www.defense.gov/pubs/November_1230_Report_FINAL.pdf 6) US plans to expand raids in Pakistan http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/12/21/37384229.html 7) Gaochao Yi, More players and more pieces in
the New Great Game http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2010-12/19/c_13655299.htm 8) Asia Times, December 23, 2010 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LL23Df05.html 9) NATO Trains Afghan Army To Guard Asian
Pipeline http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/nato-trains-afghan-army-to-guard-asian-pipeline 10) Asia Times, December 23, 2010 http://www.pajhwok.com/en/2010/12/23/eikenberry-sees-continued-role-us-beyond-2014 13) US-led Afghan war serves NATO's existence http://www.presstv.ir/detail/156276.html Comments 💬 التعليقات |