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19 May 2010 By Rick
Rozoff Since the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization took control of the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in
Afghanistan in 2003 the amount of troops serving under
that command has grown from 5,000 to over 100,000. There are currently
134,000 foreign troops in the nation counting U.S.
soldiers serving separately with Operation Enduring
Freedom, although the aggregate number is to reach
150,000 by the summer and most American troops not now
under NATO command will soon be. There are 47,000
troops from NATO member and partner countries in the
nation. U.S. soldiers in
Afghanistan will soon outnumber those in Iraq. Over 1,600 U.S., NATO
and allied troops have been killed in the war theater,
with 520 of those killed last year. U.S. deaths more
than doubled from 2008 to 2009, from 155 to 318. Over 170 Afghan
civilians have been slain so far this year, a 33
percent increase over the same period last year. U.S.
and NATO forces killed 90 civilians from January to
April, a 76 percent rise from 51 in the same period of
2009. [1] More than 300 people
have been killed in U.S. drone missile strikes against
alleged insurgent sites in Pakistan this year,
bringing total deaths in such attacks to over 1,000
since August of 2008. 15,000 U.S., NATO and
Afghan government troops participated in the largest
ground offensive of the war this February in Marjah
and there are over 23,000 troops being amassed in the
southern province of Kandahar for an assault planned
to begin next month. With recent
announcements that Montenegro, Mongolia and South
Korea have become the 44th, 45th and 46th official
troop contributing nations – Bahrain, Colombia, Egypt
and Jordan have already supplied or pledged troops but
have not yet been given that designation – there will
be military units from 50 nations on all six populated
continents serving under the North Atlantic military
alliance in a war in South Asia that will enter its
tenth year on October 7. Australia, with 1,550
troops, is engaged in its first combat operations and
has experienced its first war deaths since the Vietnam
War. Canada since the Korean War. Germany and Finland
since the Second World War. If not for military deaths
in Iraq since 2003, many more European countries would
also be in the last category. (The four Swedish
soldiers killed in northern Afghanistan are the
Scandinavian country’s first combat deaths in almost
200 years.) The effects of the war
in Afghanistan have not been limited to battlefield
losses, though. Last year NATO member
Denmark spent $415 million for its mission in
Afghanistan, up from $135 million in 2007. As the
nation’s total defense budget for 2009 was $3.87
billion, the Afghan war accounted for almost one-ninth
of the country’s annual military spending. Denmark,
which lost seven soldiers in Iraq, has already lost 31
in Afghanistan. Last week a Danish
base in Helmand Province was attacked by insurgents
and eleven Danish soldiers were wounded. On May 9 a British
soldier was killed in Helmand, the 40th of the year
and the 285th since the war began, exceeding the 255
killed in the 1982 war with Argentina over the
Falkland Islands/Las Malvinas which had been the
largest number since Britain’s counterinsurgency war
in Malaya in the 1950s. The United Kingdom registered
179 deaths in Iraq by comparison. Over the past weekend
four French troops were injured in a landmine
explosion northeast of the Afghan capital, one of them
gravely. On May 12 it was
reported that a Romanian soldier was killed in
southern Afghanistan, the nation’s 12th death there. Less than a week
earlier, May 6 and 7, NATO Secretary General Anders
Fogh Rasmussen was in the Romanian capital of
Bucharest to meet with the country’s president and
foreign minister, and while there praised the
government’s commitment to the Afghan war – Romania
recently announced its troop strength would be boosted
to 1,800 – as “substantial, without caveats and with a
growing focus on training.” [2] A week before the NATO
chief was in Albania and Croatia, the military bloc’s
newest members, and also pushed for more forces in
Afghanistan, including military trainers. During his four-day
trip to Europe early this month, U.S. Vice President
Joseph Biden promoted NATO allies’ contributions to
the Afghan war among other demands – which included
the consolidation of a European interceptor missile
system under U.S. control – and addressing 1,100
members of the Spanish Light Infantry Parachute
Brigade, slated for deployment to Afghanistan in July,
said, “I very much wanted to be here today to pay
respect to such a group of warriors who stood side by
side with American warriors in Afghanistan. As NATO
allies we are working together….” [3] In February of this
year the government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose
Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced that it was sending
511 more troops to Afghanistan, raising the nation’s
contingent there to 1,600. Shortly before meeting
with Biden, Zapatero and his defense minister visited
NATO headquarters in Brussels, where the Spanish prime
minister stated that Afghanistan is “NATO’s primary
mission right now abroad,” adding that it is “very
important that we renew our confidence in the current
strategy in Afghanistan….” [4] On May 3 The Times of
London wrote of intensified fighting in the north of
Afghanistan, which until recently had been
comparatively peaceful but where of late Germany has
lost the bulk of the 47 soldiers that have died as a
result of the war and where Finland and Sweden have
suffered combat fatalities. The British daily
wrote that “German troops are fighting the first
pitched battles witnessed by the Bundeswehr since 1945
in the face of a growing Taleban insurgency in the
north of Afghanistan.” [5] General Stanley
McChrystal, in charge of all U.S. and other foreign
forces in Afghanistan as commander of both the
International Security Assistance Force and the U.S.’s
Operation Enduring Freedom, recently announced that he
was deploying 56 helicopters and 5,000 U.S. troops to
serve under German command in the north of
Afghanistan. When NATO took over
the southern quadrant of the South Asian nation in
2006 it “subordinate[d] U.S. troops under foreign
command in a combat situation for the first time since
World War II.” [6] Central Command’s
Brigadier General Douglas Raaberg said at the time,
“That’s a first since World War II.” The chief of Central
Command then, General John Abizaid, told the
Associated Press that “NATO needs to grab hold of this
mission for NATO’s sake. Jumping outside European
boundaries is where the alliance needs to go to stay
relevant for the future.” The Associated Press
wrote at the time that “Abizaid and others have said
the Afghanistan mission marks a historic expansion for
NATO that could see the alliance taking further
missions in Africa or elsewhere.” [7] Four months after
taking control of southern Afghanistan in 2006 the
NATO commander in the region, British Lieutenant
General David Richards, said that NATO was conducting
“land combat operations for the first time in its
history.” And in what has proven
to be an understatement of the first order, Richards
added: “Two years ago, when the North Atlantic Council
agreed to this plan, they probably didn’t know what
they were getting into.” [8] As another news agency
expressed it at the same time, “The mission is
considered the most dangerous and challenging in the
Western alliance’s 57-year history.” [9] A month later the
British general reflected on the first few weeks of
his new assignment and the “persistent low-level dirty
fighting” it entailed, characterizing the situation as
one in which the “sort of thing hasn’t really happened
so consistently, I don’t think, since the Korean War
or the Second World War.” [10] Afghanistan is the
battleground on which NATO effected the transition,
the escalation, from air wars to ground wars. “The NATO
alliance…conducted aerial combat operations during the
wars in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s, but it has
yet to conduct major ground combat operations since it
was founded in 1949.” Its move into southern
Afghanistan, however, signalled “the first time the
alliance has conducted land combat operations….” [11] The war in Afghanistan
has in fact represented a historic expansion for NATO
in Abizaid’s words of four years ago, inaugurating the
bloc’s “jumping outside European boundaries” to Africa
and elsewhere. That is exactly what has occurred in
the interim. It has also been
employed to meld the militaries of over fifty nations
– including those of Afghanistan and Pakistan – under
a unified command and into a combat-experienced and
integrated global force ready for future attacks,
invasions, occupations and other interventions far
from Euro-Atlantic space. Never before have troops
from 50 nations served in one war theater, in one
country. Last week a meeting of NATO’s Military
Committee was attended by the defense ministers of 49
nations with troops assigned to the International
Security Assistance Force. The Afghan war has
secured the U.S. and its NATO allies military bases in
the Central Asian nations of Kyrgyzstan, where an
estimated 50,000 U.S. troops passed through to and
from Afghanistan this March, and Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan. It has allowed the
inauguration of the world’s first multinational
strategic airlift operation in Hungary last year, one
firmly under the control of Washington and NATO, for
supplying the war effort. It has accelerated the
U.S.’s and NATO’s military integration of the three
former Soviet republics in the South Caucasus:
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Azerbaijan, a Caspian
Sea nation bordering Iran and Russia, recently doubled
the size of its troop contingent in Afghanistan. Georgia, eager to gain
combat training under war conditions for its next
military confrontations with Abkhazia, South Ossetia
and Russia, will shortly have 900 troops in
Afghanistan, the largest per capita contribution of
any nation to NATO’s International Security Assistance
Force. At NATO headquarters
on May 5 the permanent representatives (ambassadors)
of the bloc’s 28 member states met with senior
Georgian military officials within the framework of
the NATO-Georgian Commission. “The representative
stressed that the alliance appreciates Georgia’s
cooperation with NATO and especially the participation
of Georgian soldiers in peacekeeping operations in
Afghanistan and will continue to support the
reformation of the country’s defense system in the
future.” [12] That is, Georgia will
provide NATO with troops for the war in Afghanistan
and NATO will reciprocate by assisting in the
modernization of Georgia’s armed forces in
anticipation of future conflicts with its neighbors. On May 11 Germany
hosted a meeting of defense ministers and military
chiefs of staff from nations that have troops deployed
in northern Afghanistan where Germany is the main NATO
force. The nation’s defense
minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, “also invited
representatives of NATO, the European Union and
Afghanistan to the informal May 11 meeting. “The ministry did give
details on who exactly was invited. Nations with a
presence in northern Afghanistan now include the
United States, Norway and Sweden.” [13] Defense Minister
Seyran Ohanyan led a delegation from Armenia to the
Berlin meeting. Armenia is the first member of the
Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to
supply NATO with troops for Afghanistan. The CSTO’s
other members are Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and it has long
been viewed as a Russian effort to counter NATO
expansion into the former Soviet Union. The day after the
meeting in Germany, the Armenian defense minister and
the country’s foreign minister were in Brussels to
attend a meeting of the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s
highest governing body, where an assessment of NATO’s
Individual Partnership Action Plan for Armenia was
assessed. The two events are
inextricably connected and are an integral part of
NATO’s plan to gain control over the South Caucasus.
Armenia, like Azerbaijan, borders Iran. Azerbaijan and
Georgia border Russia. The war in Afghanistan
has also provided NATO the opportunity to consolidate
control over the nations of former Yugoslavia. A NATO
foreign ministers meeting in Estonia last month
approved Bosnia’s Membership Action Plan, the last
stage before full membership, after the nation
announced troop deployments to Afghanistan. “Bosnia took its first
step toward joining NATO…as the 28-country alliance
offered the Balkan country a conditional path for
membership….In agreeing to offer the membership action
plan, the NATO ministers welcomed…the country’s
contributions to the NATO-led security force in
Afghanistan (ISAF).” [13] On May 10 it was
reported that NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General
for Security Cooperation and Partnership – and Special
Representative for the South Caucasus and Central Asia
– Robert Simmons announced “Montenegro…will be the
next country to join NATO.” [14] Tiny Montenegro, only
an independent country for four years, sent its first
troops to Afghanistan in March and this month its
defense minister and chief of the general staff will
visit the war zone. Throughout March and
April U.S. Special Operations Command Europe conducted
aviation exercises with the Croatian Air Force based,
as the website of U.S. European Command described it,
on the Pentagon’s new emphasis on international
counterinsurgency operations, the laboratory for which
is Afghanistan: “The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review
highlighted the importance of increasing rotary-wing
availability as one of the most significant elements
to achieving success in large-scale counterinsurgency,
stability and counterterrorism operations worldwide.”
[16] Croatia and fellow
Balkan nation Albania were welcomed as full NATO
members last year after providing troops for the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq. Albania’s defense
minister was in Afghanistan earlier this month to
inspect his nation’s 255 troops stationed in Herat
Province. “The personnel belong to two units of the
army’s elite forces: the 2nd Battalion of the Rapid
Reaction Brigade and the Commando Regiment.” [17]
Along with the Balkans
and the South Caucasus, the war in Afghanistan has
been instrumental in NATO strengthening its grip on
the Scandinavian nations that are not yet full
members. NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, U.S.
Admiral James Stavridis, visited Sweden and Finland on
May 12, thanking the two nations for the 500 and 150
troops, respectively, they have in command of NATO
ISAF operations in four northern Afghan provinces.
Stavridis didn’t mention the five Swedish and Finnish
troops killed in fighting there, though he did inspect
a live-fire military exercise in Finland. The war in Afghanistan
has also been the vehicle for NATO formally
penetrating the Asia-Pacific area, forming what the
Alliance calls Contact Country partnerships with
Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea. Earlier this month the
chief of U.S. Central Command, General David Petraeus
(now being touted as a 2012 presidential candidate),
said “he would welcome more Australian troops in
Afghanistan.” [18] The nation is already the largest
contributor of forces among those which are not full
NATO members. South Korean Minister
of Foreign Affairs Yu Myung-hwan visited NATO
headquarters on May 11, met with Secretary General
Rasmussen – “During the meeting, they discussed how to
foster NATO-Korea relations” [19] – and addressed the
North Atlantic Council. In April South Korea became
the latest nation to be designated a formal troop
contributor for NATO in Afghanistan and will deploy as
many as 400 soldiers. Troops from Singapore
and Mongolia [20] are also serving under NATO command
and Kazakhstan, which like Mongolia borders Russia and
China, has been mentioned as a location for a new U.S.
and NATO military base to supplement or replace the
one in Kyrgyzstan. [21] The U.S. and NATO
Afghan campaign has served to expand the military
network of the Pentagon and the Alliance throughout
several continents, from air bases in Bulgaria,
Hungary and Romania in Europe to ones in Central Asia
– Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – to transit routes and
centers in the South Caucasus (Georgia and Azerbaijan)
and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan). Through bilateral
military ties between the U.S. and Pakistan and the
Trilateral Afghanistan-Pakistan-NATO Military
Commission, the West has penetrated the military of
that key nation as well. NATO’s International
Security Assistance Force commander General McChrystal
was in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad “to provide
an update on ISAF’s operations in Afghanistan and to
consult with Pakistan’s army chief. “The NATO commander’s
meeting came at a time when U.S. forces are planning a
major offensive in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar
and they would need Pakistan’s support to enhance
security along the border to stop the possible
intrusion of militants. “Pakistan said it has
deployed over 100,000 troops along some 2,000
kilometers [of its] border with Afghanistan….” [22] Four days before,
local media reported that NATO forces fired mortar
rounds across the border from Afghanistan into
Pakistan, injuring five civilians, two critically, and
severely damaging a mosque. [23] The day before
McChrystal’s visit to Pakistan, Reuters reported that
“The CIA has received authorization to target a wider
range of targets in Pakistan with its drone-guided
missiles, despite national discontent on [the] growing
civilian death toll.” [24] In addition to
expanding a military nexus throughout Eurasia and
beyond, the Afghan war has provided the Pentagon other
opportunities as well. U.S. Marine Corps
Brigadier General Glenn Walters spoke at an Institute
for Defense and Government Advancement conference on
the subject of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs),
stating that “Drones are used from Yemen to Pakistan,
but most of the demand is related to the surge of U.S.
forces in Afghanistan.” In 2001, the year of
the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. had
approximately 200 drones in its arsenal. It now has
6,000 and according to the Marine general, in two
years “We’ll have 8,000 UAVs….” [25] A twentyfold
increase. The decade of the
drone [26] has not been limited to Pakistan and Yemen,
as the lethal missile-wielding unmanned aircraft have
also been used in Somalia and Iraq, and late last year
U.S. Africa Command deployed the most deadly of all
drones – the Reaper – to the nation of Seychelles
along with over 100 military personnel, thereby
acquiring the Pentagon’s second major military
installation in Africa. On May 6 “NATO
representatives from around the world” visited the
Camp Atterbury Joint Maneuver Training Center in the
American state of Indiana to observe drone flight
tests. [27] The ongoing war in
Afghanistan has also been used, particularly by
current U.S. and NATO commander McChrystal, former
head of Joint Special Operations Command, to
qualitatively transform U.S. military doctrine and
practice worldwide with an emphasis on
counterinsurgency and the expanded use of special
forces not seen in several decades. Last week U.S. Army
Chief of Staff General George Casey laid stress on the
counterinsurgency role of his branch of the armed
services, stating “the Army has to posture itself and
train to operate across the spectrum.” [28] (On May 10
Casey hosted over a hundred senior military leaders
from more than 24 African nations at an African Land
Forces Summit at the Pentagon.) On May 6 it was
reported that the head of Special Operations Command
Europe and director of Special Operations, U.S.
European Command – Air Force Major General Frank
Kisner – would be transferred to the post of commander
of NATO international special forces operations at the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization Special Operations
Headquarters in Brussels. NATO’s Supreme Allied
Commander Transformation in Norfolk, Virginia, French
Air Force General Stephane Abrial – given that post
when France reintegrated into NATO military command
structures last year – lately spoke of the Alliance’s
current transformation, defining it as centered on
“ensuring that NATO has the necessary means to be able
to deploy forces quickly and for them to be able to
stay in theater for a long time….” [29] The Afghan war
is the prototype of the missions he spoke about. From May 10-13 over
“550 defense ministers, chief of staffs and senior
military officials from 82 countries across the globe”
gathered in Amman, Jordan for a major Special
Operations Forces Symposium and Exposition (SOFEX)
event, the Middle East Special Operations Commanders
Conference. The four-day meeting
was “designed with a view to enhance the capabilities
of Special Operations Forces around the world to
network for global security and combat terrorism. “High-ranking military
officers from Australia, France, Germany, Italy,
Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan and the United States
delivered speeches that covered several topics,
including war-fighting operations to home defense
missions, counterterrorist operations, urban warfare
and dismounted close combat.” The chief of U.S.
Special Operations Command Central (responsible for
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Yemen), Major General
Charles Cleveland, “highlighted the role of special
operation forces in modern wars.” [30] The information
minister of Jordan revealed on May 12 that his country
has trained 2,500 members of the Afghan special
forces, and that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh
Rasmussen had requested that Jordan train Afghan
police during a recent visit to the Middle Eastern
nation. The commander of
Jordan’s special forces, Brigadier Ali Jaradat,
confirmed that “1,500 servicemen, including
anti-terror forces, from Afghanistan and Iraq have
received training at the $200 million King Abdullah II
Special Operations Training Centre, which was
inaugurated in May last year.” He added that “The
Americans and Europeans took part….Most of the troops
serving in Afghanistan received training at the centre
before they went there.” [31] The Pentagon has
recently provided 581 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected
(MRAPS) armored combat vehicles to nations serving
under NATO command in Afghanistan, including Jordan,
Georgia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania, and
the U.S. Defense Department disclosed that hundreds
more are being sought by troop contributing nations
for the counterinsurgency war there. [32] Last year the U.S.
deployed a unit of Stryker armored combat vehicles,
first used in Iraq from 2003 onward, to Afghanistan.
The Stryker is the U.S. Army’s first new armored
vehicle developed since the Bradley Fighting Vehicle
entered service in 1981. The German-based 2nd
Stryker Cavalry Regiment (SCR) trained in Bulgaria and
Romania last year “as part of…preparations for an
upcoming deployment to Afghanistan…. “U.S. soldiers
offloaded 30 Stryker combat vehicles in early August
at the Mihail Kogalniceanu Airfield in eastern Romania
and have since been conducting combined training with
their host-nation counterparts. Soldiers of the 4th
Squadron, 2nd SCR are participating in Joint Task
Force-East’s third annual training exercise in Romania
while soldiers of the 2nd Squadron, 2nd SCR conduct
similar training in Bulgaria.” [33] Joint Task Force-East
is a European Command initiative whose purpose is the
integration of Eastern European armed forces with
those of the U.S. and NATO. It is in effect based at
the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base and regularly deploys
to and conducts exercises in Romanian and Bulgarian
military bases acquired by the U.S. over the past five
years. The word East has a double connotation as its
also applies to employing bases in new NATO countries
to train for and deploy to the Afghan war theater. Afghanistan has,
whether by convenience, design or some combination of
the two, been transformed into a vast training ground
for the consolidation of a fifty-nation military
structure that has already been extended into Central
Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, the Horn of
Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Middle East. It is also a testing
range for new 21st century weapons and combat systems
intended for future use around the world. If U.S. and NATO
forces were to withdraw en masse from the country
tomorrow, the above results would not be lost to war
planners in Washington and Brussels. 1) Reuters, May 12,
2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/../mongolia-pentagon-trojan-horse-wedged-between-china-and-russia 21) Kazakhstan:
U.S., NATO Seek Military Outpost Between Russia And
China http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/../kazakhstan-u-s-nato-seek-military-outpost-between-russia-and-china 22) Xinhua News
Agency, May 7, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/../decade-of-the-drone-americas-aerial-assassins 27) Camp Atterbury
Public Affairs, May 8, 2010 |
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