The Afghan Dust Is Settling: 560 NATO
Soldiers, Most Of Them Americans, Were Killed 2011
30 Jan 2012
By Eric Walberg
Yes, it really is another Vietnam, and just as in
1972, presidential elections will make no difference,
concludes Eric Walberg
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
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