Taliban extends war to wider region despite U.S. troop surge

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VOL. 29, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2009 WWW.SOCIALISTACTION.ORG U.S. / CANADA $1 With the starting of a campaign of attacks across Pakistan, the Taliban and its allies have in effect extended their guerrilla war to a regional level. The Islamist militant response to the Pakistani army offensive against their redoubt in South Waziristan has pointed up another dimension of the political crisis in Afghanistan.

The Afghan government has no political credibility and the Pakistani government scarcely more. Both are notoriously corrupt. Both are seen by their respective peoples as stooges of U.S. imperialism. Both are confronted by an insurgency, which although it lacks a credible political program and conducts atrocities of its own on innocent civilians, is being waged by dedicated fighters against corrupt and weakly motivated local military forces.

Moreover, regardless of the military fortunes of the U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan and its ally in Pakistan, this war will mean great suffering to the populations of both countries (There are already more than 100,000 displaced persons from South Waziristan. From the Swat Valley, it was more than a million).

The experience of Iraq indicates that the local people will blame the United States even for the atrocities committed by the Islamist militants because the U.S. will be seen as responsible for the strife. The “oral history” of the Taliban published recently in Newsweek indicates the dynamic. The Taliban forces in Afghanistan were shattered by U.S. air power. They fled in disarray into Pakistan tribal areas also inhabited by the Pushtun people, on which they were based.

(Photo above) Helicopters drop U.S. Marines into Afghan territory held by the Taliban, July 2.

(Right) Hamid Karzai’s administration is charged with corruption.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images But the antagonism of the Afghan people to foreign occupation and resentment against the atrocities resulting from U.S. bombing of civilians revived support for the Taliban until it regained control of large sections of Afghanistan and became a serious contender for power in the country. The account of a New York Times journalist held captive by the Taliban in Pakistan for seven months, recently published in his newspaper, indicates that the Taliban also created a mini-state of their own in the Pakistani tribal areas, which the Pakistan government either chose or was forced to tolerate.

The Pakistani government only started launching major offensives against the Taliban when the Islamist militants appeared to be reaching the point of threatening the (continued on page 8, in “Pennsylvania’s governor what could be the third and final warrant for”)

Eros Hoagland / NY Times 200,000 join for LGBT rights See page 3 Oct. 17 in Boston, photo by James Frickey / Socialist Action

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