U.S. stumbling to disaster in Afghanistan

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By GERRY FOLEY Todd Pitman / AP 4 Socialist Action november 2010 The New York Times editorial “Afghanistan Today,” in its Oct. 22 issue, is a good indication of the political dilemma of the Obama regime as it tries to expand the war in this Central Asian region: “President George W. Bush shortchanged the Afghan fight for seven years. We continue to wonder whether, at this late date, the United States can achieve even minimal success against the Taliban and their allies. The cost of the war is still rising. Nearly 600 coalition forces, including 400 Americans, have been killed there this year.”

The Times was willing to give the U.S. commanders and the Obama administration more than the benefit of the doubt. It credited them with “mixed results” and putting to together a “more coherent plan,” but it still found it difficult to believe that they could accomplish their stated objectives. In fact, in previous articles, Times writers bent over backward to endorse the Polyanna version of the U.S. war projected by the military commanders.

On the same day The Times editorial was published, Derrick Crowe, writing controlled by President Karzai’s corin the Huffington Post, took the grey rupt brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, who lady of U.S. journalism to task for “hyp- runs the region like a kingpin. He has ing” the Afghan war: “The New York consolidated power in the area and has Times just published a story [by Carlot- used CIA resources to knock off rival ta Gall] under the headline, ‘Coalition tribal elders and is infamous for makForces Routing Taliban in Key Afghan ing profit off the opium trade. Ahmed Region’ that could not include more Wali is to this day single-handedly fuelPentagon talking points if it were writ- ing the insurgency in the South.” ten by General David Petraeus himself. The recent period has also been In both the broad outline of the story marked by another stunning exposure and in the particulars, the Times con- of the corruption of the Karzai regime. veys a deceptive picture of the state of The Afghan election board threw out a the conflict and obscures the continued fourth of the ballots from the latest vote deterioration of the situation in Af- in the country. So presumably, the good ghanistan. The available facts simply do news is that the election officials are not support the assertion that U.S. and beginning to attack fraud (of course, coalition forces are ‘making “deliberate the truth of this depends on an analysis progress” and have seized the initiative of just what votes were thrown out and from the insurgents.’” who benefited; and this has not been Crowe noted that Gall had quoted a forthcoming). The bad news is the adlocal U.S. commander stating that he mission of the authorities themselves thought the Taliban in the Kandahar that election fraud remains massive. area was “losing heart.” “But here’s the In early October, a Senate Armed Serproblem: According to the Afghan NGO vice Committee investigation found that Safety Office, armed opposition group the private security companies conattacks all across Afghanistan increased tracted by the U.S. were in bed not only between August and late September. with corrupt Afghan warlords and drug “And, in Kandahar City, the insurgent mafiosi but with enemies of the regular attack rate continues to follow a general U.S. armed forces. An Oct. 8 article in upward trend: The daily attack rate [in The New York Times reported: “Afghan Kandahar] has grown from 0.1 in Week private security forces with ties to the one to 2.8 per day by Week 35 suggest- Taliban, criminal networks and Iranian ing that the elements of OP HAMKARI intelligence have been hired to guard undertaken so far are not degrading the American military bases in AfghaniAOG ability to conduct attacks. Field re- stan, exposing United States soldiers ports suggest that the Taliban retain to surprise attack and confounding the up to 4000 fighters inside the city and fight against insurgents, according to a continue a wide-spread campaign of in- Senate investigation.” timidation, targeted assassination and The article noted: “There are more the widespread deployment of IEDs than 26,000 private security employagainst Police and Military targets. ees in Afghanistan, and 90 percent of “Further, the area continues to be- them are working under United States come more hostile for civilians. The In- government contracts or subcontracts. ternational Committee of the Red Cross Almost all are tied to the militias of says that the number of war-related in- local warlords and other powerful Afjuries being treated at local hospitals is ghan figures outside the control of the spiking.” American military or the Afghan govCrowe ridiculed the claims by military ernment, the report found.” officers quoted by Gall that “precise” Even the corrupt Karzai regime has rockets were devastating the Taliban: become worried about the chaos and “The article lacks any mention of the social decay fostered by these mercelast time the HIMARS [High Mobility Ar- nary gangs. It has ordered them distillery Rocket System] made the news, solved by Dec. 17. But its big brother, back in February, when U.S. forces in the U.S., is not so squeamish. It is begMarjah killed a slew of civilians with ging Karzai to give the murder-for-hire it, after which the HIMARS was briefly companies a reprieve. And according to suspended from use in the country.” a report in the Oct. 24 New York Times, In an article in the Oct. 20 Huffington he has begun making concessions. Post, Michael Hughes referred to a po- Of course, since the control of these litical obstacle facing the NATO cam- mercenaries is so tenuous, the U.S. can paign to win Kandahar: “The province use them with deniability. It is known of Kandahar is purportedly the most that they are using them in Pakistan. critical to winning the war, considering But no one knows how many. Now the it’s the birthplace and spiritual cradle U.S. government is begging the Pakiof the Taliban. Yet, thanks to the Bush stani government to allow more CIA brain trust’s brilliance, it is de facto agents to operate in its country.

An Agence France Presse story published in the Oct. 23 Wall Street Journal reported: “The requests have so far been rebuffed by Islamabad, which remains extremely wary of allowing a larger U.S. ground presence in Pakistan, illustrating the precarious nature of relations between Washington and its wartime ally.”

In fact, tensions between the Pakistani government and the American military reached a new high in the beginning of October, when Pakistan closed its border crossing for trucks carrying supplies to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s action was prompted by a U.S. strike on a border post that U.S. pilots had claimed was firing on them. Three Pakistani border guards were killed. Background to the incident were U.S. claims that Pakistani border guards have often covered for Taliban fighters.

During the week that the border crossing was closed, stranded convoys of trucks carrying U.S. supplies were attacked four times by the Taliban. The biggest attack was in the outskirts of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, in which 20 trucks were burned and four people killed. The Oct. 4 report in USA Today did not say who the four were. But in general U.S. forces depend on local contractors who hire drivers at low pay and with zero guarantees.

USA Today quoted one: “Trucker Kalam Khan, who has been waiting for five days on his flatbed truck with a container of supplies for the U.S. Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, said drivers are in constant fear. ‘If vehicles for Afghanistan are not safe in Islamabad, we could be attacked any time,’ he said.”

More than 90 percent of supplies for the U.S.-led occupation army in Afghanistan comes through Pakistan. There are other routes through the former Soviet Central Asian Republics, but they are not necessarily more certain. For example, the recent parliamentary elections in Kyrgyzstan brought forth indications that the new government might at least greatly raise the rent of the U.S. base at Manas.

In one stroke, the Pakistani government demonstrated that it can pull the rug out from under the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Of course, the Pakistani government is as subordinate to the U.S. as it can be. But there is no telling what may happen if anti-U.S. feeling continues to grow there. The Pakistani action and the attacks on the trucks carrying supplies to U.S. troops indicates the precariousness of the U.S. position in Afghanistan and the dangers of a widening war.

The revelation in the Oct. 23 New York (Left) U.S. Marine searches Marjah resident. Eight months after U.S. launched campaign to clear Taliban from the area, the effort has stalled.

Times that the U.S. client ruler of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has been collecting a big subsidy from the Iranian government is another indication of the corruption of the Karzai government. The Times of Oct. 25 confirmed its previous report: “The article in The Times said that Umar Daudzai, the president’s chief of staff, received between $1 million and $2 million every other month from Iran and that the money, effectively a slush fund, was distributed to Afghan lawmakers, tribal elders and even Taliban commanders to secure their loyalty.” Karzai acknowledged receiving the money but he claimed that The Times report of it was retaliation for his decision to ban the mercenary security forces. The report does indicate that Iran is not engaged in a covert war with the United States forces in the Middle East as the U.S. advocates of a military assault on Iran claim. There are of course frictions and mutual probing. (It is an open secret that the U.S. is supporting Baluchi nationalist guerrillas in Iran.) But Iran is also giving substantial toleration to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and even of Iraq, although in the latter country Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ links with Shiite Islamist armed groups complicate matters.

In the case of Afghanistan, Iran even offers collaboration to the U.S. (Iran no doubt wants to woo Karzai in its own interests, but it must know that he will not survive if the United States withdraws from Afghanistan.) Considering the by now well known support of the Pakistani intelligence service for the Taliban, it would be as easy to claim an element of the Pakistani forces are waging a covert war against the U.S. Would the hawks want a military assault on Pakistan as well?

In all, it seems to be becoming harder and harder to tell who is the enemy and who is the friend of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. And the U.S. is increasingly becoming enmeshed in a tangle of corruption in a region that can become a bottomless pit for American resources.

The Oct. 21 Huffington Post describes a vast program for expanding U.S. bases in Afghanistan, citing little-noticed U.S. government records: “The documents reveal plans for large-scale, expensive Afghan base expansions of every sort and a military that is expecting to pursue its building boom without letup well into the future.”

Ironically, given the intertwining of big corporations with military, the pouring of still more resources into this area does not necessarily mean that the U.S. government intends to stay there. The contracts are sufficient unto themselves for the companies that fatten off the public purse and their military buyers. lf the waste and overcharging are monumental, what do a few more hundred million dollars matter?

However, these plans are testimony to a continued disastrous course of military adventure and economic waste that may lead to incalculable losses for the American people. By now there is abundant evidence that no U.S. administration that serves big business, either Democrat or Republican, is going to do that. Americans have to take the issue into their own hands and demonstrate their determination in the streets to end this course, and not tie themselves down by trusting any politician beholden to big money. n

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... Palestine ‘peace’ deal unravels Socialist Action novemBER 2010 5 (continued from page 1: “Israel, U.S. tighten grip on Palestine after phony ‘peace’ deal unravels”)

of its economy. These needs find both political and military expression (although overlaid with spurious religious justifications).

Of course, the deal desired by Obama was merely Washington’s conception of how to end once and for all the struggle for Palestinian liberation. The deal would have Tel Aviv grant slightly more autonomy to the Palestine Authority, and give the PA economic and internal security responsibility over part of the West Bank and East Jerusalem but with little control over its borders, no right to its own military, and numerous other restrictions. Above all, the plan would require the abandoning of the historic rights of refugees and of Palestinians inside pre-1967 Israel.

Washington saw the opportunity to achieve this partly because of the success of illegally appointed West Bank Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in beginning to shape an economy totally dependent on Israel, the U.S., and the IMF and World Bank. This economy might well prove to be more stable, if no less exploitative, of the majority of Palestinians than under Yasir Arafat’s regime, whose corruption was so blatant that it proved a hindrance to investors’ ability to efficiently exploit the labor of the Palestinian masses.

Dissent against Fayyad’s reforms, as well as against PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ traitorous negotiating postures, have been crushed with the help of U.S. General Keith Dayton, who has been ... Antiwar (continued from page 3: “Republican and Democratic opponents for Congress”)

and Chino Hardin of the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform, a group grappling with the impact of the prison-industrial complex.

Nearly all sections of the antiwar movement, recognizing the way in which the economic crisis and war spending are inextricably intertwined, have also begun to organize under the banner, “Bring Our War Dollars Home!”

Bring Our War Dollars Home campaigns originated in Maine by Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and were led to success in that state by Lisa Savage and Mark Roman. These campaigns are now being taken up by in one way or another by a number of local and national antiwar organizations.

On Oct. 7, after a five-month campaign that involved petitioning, public forums, media debates, engagement with veterans and their families, and city council hearings and votes, the AlJack Guez / AFP / Getty Images arming and training PA security forces (see an account of Dayton’s actions in the Oct. 14 New York Review of Books.)

Obama never had any intention, despite Netanyahu’s intransigence, of cutting a single dollar of the $3 billion in annual aid given to Israel. And the timing of the end of the settlement “freeze,” coming just a month before the U.S. mid-term elections, limited Obama’s ability to twist Netanyahu’s arm, for fear of offending a donor base already shrinking thanks to campaign donor rules significantly loosened by the Supreme Court. And with Republicans poised to make significant gains in those elections, Obama will emerge with even less wiggle room.

In fact, far from pressuring Netanyahu, Obama offered Israel a range of generous diplomatic, security, and financial “incentives,” including new F-35 planes, and agreeing to a permanent Zionist military presence in the Jordan Valley, all in exchange for just one or two months more of the pseudo-freeze.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s government, uniting the “right” (the party of Moldovan immigrant Avigdor Lieberman and allied parties) and the “left” (the Labour Party) with his own Likud, is moving quickly on several fronts to make even more explicit the racist nature of a state founded on dispossession and expulsion.

First is the passage by the Israeli cabinet of the draft of a law requiring anyone seeking Israeli citizenship to swear loyalty to a “Jewish and democratic” state. Coming on top of renewed demands by liance for Peace and Justice was able to celebrate a vote by the Northampton, Mass., city council that called on their senators to oppose “further funding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” and “to bring our troops safely home and redirect our federal tax dollars to pressing educational, employment, housing, nutritional, infrastructure, energy, and environmental needs of our city, state, and country.”

From Harlem to Northampton, organizers are beginning to consider or experiment with grassroots campaigns designed to engage and empower the victims of the U.S. wars at home.

The potential power of these elements of the newly emerging antiwar movement is clear. If brought together into unified and independent mass marches this spring, the U.S. movement will have gone a long way toward overcoming the period of demobilization and demoralization wrought by the Obama administration’s pursuit of endless war.

For more information on the United National Antiwar Committee and the Nov. 6 meeting at St. Marks Church on the Bowery in New York, see www.nationalpeaceconference.org. n Netanyahu—supported by Obama— that the PA recognize Israel’s right to declare itself a Jewish state, it is also correctly seen as another way of denying the right of refugees to return—i.e., as an implicit admission that refugees should only expect to find safe haven in a rump Palestinian “state.”

Palestinian politicians and organizations have denounced the law as a precursor to more steps whittling down the already-limited civil and political rights of Palestinians in pre-1967 Israel.

In preparation for expected revolts against such measures or a sell-out “deal,” Israel conducted training exercises during the first week of October that were described by journalist Jonathan Cook as intended to test “its ability to quell any civil unrest that might result from a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority requiring the forcible transfer of many Palestinian Arab citizens. In the operation, security services established a large detention center in the Galilee region to cope with an ‘unprecedented’ number of arrests of Palestinian citizens.”

Cook reported on a proposal by Lieberman to the UN General Assembly in September, in which he outlined “land swaps that would force many of Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens into a future Palestinian state in return for annexation to Israel of most of the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.” Cook noted that Netanyahu, although saying he was not consulted about the speech, did not criticize it.

Meanwhile, the pace of settler violence against Palestinians has escalated, from physical eviction of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, to the burning of thousands of olive trees during the fall harvest and beatings and shootings of Palestinians trying to protect their land and crops.

Within pre-1967 Israel, the Bedouin village of al-Araqib has been torn down six times since August, as part of an ambitious plan by the Jewish National Fund to drive more Palestinians off their land in the Naqab (Negev). The JNF, which raises most of its money in the U.S. and has tax-exempt status, is covering its theft with claims of “restoring” the land (what environmental groups call “greenwashing”).

Liberal Israeli group B’Tselem recently issued a report documenting from 2006 to 2009 the murder by the IDF of, on average, one Palestinian civilian every other day—all with total impunity. This does not include those murdered in such operations as the attacks on Gaza in winter 2008-2009.

In the face of Netanyahu’s obstinacy, and Washington’s acquiescence to it, PA head Mahmoud Abbas’ first response was to get the Rina Castelnuovo / NY Times (Above) Israeli police attack March 16 protest against plans for additional Jewish housing in East Jerusalem.

(Left) Residents of Umm-al-Fahm, an Arab town in northern Israel, throw stones at Israeli riot police after rightwing Israelis marched through town.

Arab League to issue a statement saying the PA should only return to “indirect” talks—and giving Tel Aviv and Washington another month’s grace period to think things over.

In mid-October, The New York Times reported another diplomatic pose being struck by Abbas. Now he claims to be seeking recognition of a Palestinian mini-state from the UN, the International Court of Justice, and states signatory to the Geneva Conventions, relying on legal precedents set in past agreements.

This is, of course, just diplomatic posturing. But what’s significant about the article are its last two paragraphs: “If the Palestinians were to go to the United Nations Security Council, they might well face an American veto. Therefore, they might start in the General Assembly, where there is no veto and where dozens of countries would be likely to support them.

“While that would be less binding, it would provide a kind of symmetry— dark or poetic, depending on one’s perspective—with Israel. It was in the General Assembly in November 1947 that the Zionist movement achieved success through a resolution calling for the division of this land into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. Israel has long viewed that vote as the source of its international legitimacy.”

Palestinian activists have long correctly exposed the illegitimacy of a state relying for its justification solely on a General Assembly resolution, in disregard both of other international laws and institutions, as well as the wishes of the expelled population—a disregard imposed by force of arms at its founding and ever since.

Of course, if the PA seriously thought that any international recognition of its rump state were in the offing, it would hasten to permanently drop any demands for refugee rights or the rights of Palestinians inside pre-1967 Israel.

In the face of all this oppression, repression, and diplomatic puppet shows (pun intended), grassroots Palestinians continue to fight for their freedom in a variety of ways, including in the United States. The U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) is holding its second Popular Conference as we go to press. On its agenda is an ambitious and politically astute set of workshop and “Palestine Movement Assembly” tracks, addressing the needs of women and students, strategizing about Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and, most excitingly, seeking to develop new proposals for addressing the civil and national rights of Palestinians worldwide. Look for a report from this conference in our next issue. For more information on USPCN, see palestineconference.org. n