This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Today it looks like de jeva vu all over again as many Afghans apparently prefer Taliban rule again they see as the lesser of the only choices they now have. The result is that daily violence has erupted into a growing catastrophic resistance guerrilla war, slowly becoming more like the one in Iraq, that's intensifying and making the country unsafe and ungovernable. It's led the international policy Senlis Council think tank, that does extensive monitoring of Afghanistan, to issue a damning report called: Afghanistan Five Years Later: The Return Of The Taliban. The report blamed the occupying forces for doing nothing to address the crushing poverty, failing to achieve stability and security, and claims Afghanistan "is falling back into the hands of the Taliban (and their) frontline now cuts halfway through the country encompassing all of the southern provinces" (that have) limited or no central government control." Emmanuel Reinert, Executive Director, concluded "The Taliban community are winning control of Afghanistan (and) the international community is progressively losing control of the country." He added that Afghanistan today is a humanitarian disaster, and that there's a hunger crisis with children starving in makeshift unregistered refugee camps because of lack of donor interest.It's fueling the Taliban guerrilla resistance that's close to critical mass, and, despite official reports to the contrary, the US-led occupying force won't likely be able to contain it. It's what always happens in one form or other eventually under any kind of foreign occupation and system of governance unwilling to address the basic needs of the people - extreme poverty and desperation demanding relief, without which people can't even survive. It's also a response to the brutality of this occupation where war crimes are just standard operating procedure and an outrageous strategy used to contain the growing resistance. One example of it, most people in the West wouldn't understand, was the public burning of supposed Taliban fighters killed by US soldiers. This is forbidden under Islamic law, and the images of it provoked outrage in Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world that views the US occupiers as barbarians. This is just one of many instances of deliberately inflicted offenses against Islam including defiling the Koran, arbitrary and unlawful indefinite detentions as well as humiliations, torture and other atrocities committed routinely against Afghans taken prisoner for any reason. The same things happen in most parts of Iraq as well.
Amnesty International documented some of the crimes and abuses it learned from former detainees. Just like in Iraq they reported being made to kneel, stand or maintain painful positions for long periods, being hooded, deprived of sleep, stripped and humiliated. They were also held without charge and denied access to family, legal counsel or any kind of due process. In December, 2004, US officials acknowledged eight prisoners died in US military custody with little detail as to why. Earlier in October, the US Army's Criminal Investigation Division recommended that 28 US soldiers be charged with beating to death two prisoners at the Bagram air base after autopsies found "blunt force injuries." At year end only one of the soldiers was charged with any offense, and it was just for assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty.
Amnesty also reported on the many civilian deaths resulting from randomly targeted US air strikes supposedly directed at "armed militants." These attacks are frequent killing many hundreds of innocent Afghans and always claimed by the US military only to have been directed against Al Queda or Taliban fighters. The evidence shows otherwise. On one dramatic occasion early in the conflict in December, 2001, US airstrikes against the village of Niazi Kala in eastern Afghanistan killed dozens of civilians resulting in the London Guardian and Independent each running front page stories with headlines: "US Accused of Killing Over 100 Villagers in Airstrike" in the Guardian and "US Accused of Killing 100 Civilians in Afghan Bombing Raid" in the Independent. Even the Rupert Murdoch-owned London Times reported "100 Villagers Killed in US Airstrike." In contrast, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reported the New York Times (known as the nation's newspaper of record) could barely get itself to headline "Afghan Leader Warily Backs US Bombing." Instead of accurately reporting what happened, the NYT instead merely mentioned these villagers had been killed as background information in an article about whether the nominal Afghan leader (and former CIA asset) Harmid Karzai was holding firm in "his support for the war against terrorism." As it usually does, the NYT plays the lead role in directing the rest of the US corporate media away from any disturbing truths replacing them with a sanitized version acceptable to US authorities. They call it "All The News That's Fit To Print."
There was also no account at all in the US corporate media, beyond the usual distorted version, of the killing of about 800 captured Taliban prisoners in November, 2001 at Mazar-i-Sharif by Northern Alliance soldiers shooting down from the walls of the fortress-like prison at the helpless Taliban fighters trapped below. It was never explained in the US corporate-run media it was in response to a revolt they staged because they were subjected to torture and severe maltreatment. US Special Forces and CIA personal were on the ground assisting in the slaughter by directing supportive air strikes by helicopter gunships and fighter-bombers in an act of butchery. It recalled many like it earlier in Vietnam at My Lai, the many thousands murdered by the infamous Phoenix assassination program in that war, the CIA organized and financed Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and earlier that killed many thousands more, or the later many thousands of Fallujah residents killed along with mass destruction inflicted on this Iraqi city in November, 2004 in a savage act of vengeance and butchery following the killing of four Blackwater USA paramilitary hired-gun enforcers earlier in the year. There was also no report on 3,000 other Taliban and innocent civilian non-combatant prisoners who were separated from 8,000 others who'd surrendered or had been picked up randomly. They were then transported in what was later called a convoy of death to the town of Shibarghan in closed containers lacking any ventilation. Half of them suffocated to death en route and others were killed inside them when a US commander ordered a Northern Alliance soldier to fire into the containers supposedly to provide air but clearly to kill or wound those inside who couldn't avoid the incoming fire.
The response from people suffering the effects of these attacks and atrocities or knowing about them is what would be expected anywhere but especially in a country known for its history of determined resistance by any means to free itself from an oppressive occupier. It happened in Afghanistan during the 19th century "Great Game" period and then during the decade of Soviet occupation in the 1980s. It's now happening again and getting especially intense as described by General David Richards, the British commander of NATO forces in the country. In early August he described the fighting as some of the worst, most prolonged and ferocious he knew of in 60 years with his forces coming under repeated "hit-and-run" and other attacks by Taliban guerrilla fighters engaging in machine gun and grenade battles before dispersing and later regrouping for more attacks. He said: "This sort of thing hasn't really happened so consistently, I don't think, since the Korean War or the Second World War. It happened for periods in the Falklands, obviously, and it happened for short periods in the Gulf on both occasions. But this is persistent, low-level, dirty fighting." One has to wonder if the general thinks cluster-bombing and using other terror weapons from 30,000 feet to kill innocent civilians in villages is fighting clean.
The kind of intense fighting the general is talking about was reported in the London Observer on September 17 on what relatives of British troops serving in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province have to say. They're raising grave concerns for their loved ones safety claiming they face "intolerable" pressures and dangers, relentless fighting, inadequate supplies of rations and water, having to get by on three hours sleep a night, having no body armour, and so shattered and exhausted by the experience they can't function properly. With this to expect, why would any sensible foreign leader heed NATO's request for more troops to help a failed mission guaranteed to get numbers of them killed and wounded and frighten and anger their own people at home in the process. So far only Poland, likely under intense pressure, agreed to do it in any meaningful numbers in a high-level decision it may end up regretting.
The result of recent fighting on the British alone is that 33 of their soldiers have been reported killed in the last two months up to late-September - including 14 killed on September 2 in a warplane the Taliban claim they downed over Banjwai and Kandahar province and 22 known killed since September 1. The reported number of deaths and injuries are likely understated as a good many of the wounded later die but aren't added to the official count. It's known and documented this kind of sanitized casualty reporting is the way it's done in Iraq. No doubt it's handled the same way in Afghanistan as well.
It's happening because the Taliban resistance is gaining strength fueled by the repressive occupation and brutality of the Northern Alliance "warlords," making a growing number of Afghans determined to fight back. It's also because of the extreme level of desperation and deprivation Afghans now experience resulting from the so-called neoliberal Washington Consensus model the US has imposed on the country just like it wants to do everywhere else it can get away with it. It's a model solely beholden to the interests of capital, ignores the essential needs of the people desperate for relief and help, but in an impoverished country like Afghanistan, that's a recipe for pushing people toward Islamic fundamentalist leaders promising something better than their current state of immiseration. It makes it easy for them to get recruits to join the struggle to end it. Apparently growing numbers of them are doing just that as they have been for the past three years in Iraq to fight back relentlessly refusing to quit until the occupation ends which it likely will eventually in both countries.
The US Plan to Pacify Afghanistan and Control It As A Neocolonial State
The Bush administration has no sense of history judging by its plan to control Afghanistan by neutralizing any resistance in it to make the country one more de facto pacified US colony. It failed to heed the lessons learned in Vietnam where the US was defeated or even in Korea before it where the war there ended in a standoff. It's proceeding anyway in spite of the information from the Pentagon's latest quarterly progress report on Iraq to the Congress. In it Pentagon officials paint a grim assessment of a lost war where the same tactics now used in Afghanistan have failed. Those facts, however, don't deter US planners who won't admit they're wrong and intend to keep repeating the same mistakes no matter how many times before they haven't worked. It's part of the Bush administration's Messianic mission of madness under which the thinking must be if at first you don't succeed, try again by making things worse with another misadventure. It's also part of the misbegotten belief that superior air power, high tech weapons, and a little help mostly from a proxy force on the ground can solve all problems. High-level military strategists once again intend to try proving it in Afghanistan even though they know it hasn't worked in Iraq.
The Afghanistan plan involves the use of overwhelming US air power that can quickly send down a reign of death and destruction against any area or resistance it wishes to attack. It's to be done by concentrating its hub activities at two large, permanent US-constructed bases, Bagram and Kandahar, while it wants NATO forces to operate a large new base under construction in Herat that can accommodate about 10,000 troops. In 2005, the US Air Force spent about $83 million upgrading the two bases it will use in the country.
The plan is also to have US forces maintain about 30 smaller, forward operating bases with 14 small airfields housing highly mobile air and ground forces secured in fortified areas and only used for special search operations leaving routine patrol missions for the local satraps to handle. The plan calls for a reduction in US ground forces with NATO troops replacing them, especially in the more volatile Kandahar, Helmand and Urzugan provinces. In its "first (ever) mission outside the Euro-Atlantic area" NATO forces took command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in August, 2003 "to assist the Government of Afghanistan....in maintaining security....and in providing a safe and secure environment (for) free and fair elections, the spread of the rule of law, and the reconstruction of the country." This was pious rhetoric belying the reality on the ground that all occupiers are there only as enforcers to make Afghanistan safe for corporate predators wanting to exploit the country and its people for profit.
The US is also recruiting, training and wants to employ a local proxy Afghan National Army and Police to perform the same role by doing much of the routine patrolling and to engage in ground combat when necessary. This is a common US tactic to use a surrogate force of expendable locals to do as much of its fighting and dying for it to keep its own casualties to a minimum. It intends to support them with its tactical air strength mostly out of harm's way and sell the whole package apparently to the Afghan people and US public by using what the Bush administration calls "strategic communication" - aka well-crafted propaganda, disinformation and carefully sanitized versions of the truth to suppress an honest account of it from ever coming out so that the perception they're able to craft replaces the reality they wish to conceal.
When it comes to deploying overwhelming conventional military superiority including the most highly developed and destructive high-tech weapons and a vast array of almost limitless air power, no competing force can challenge the US. The Pentagon is now deploying those air assets round the clock across the country using its most sophisticated bombers and other aircraft deployed from its bases in Diego Garcia. They're on call at all times for tactical support and heavy strike missions as needed. In addition, unmanned Predator and Desert Hawk aerial drones are also airborne over the country at all times, especially in areas thought to be most hostile. The Predator is able to launch rocket attacks on targets while the tiny Desert Hawk is a spy plane used for surveillance around US bases. Put it all together and this is what an unwanted foreign occupier has to do to keep a population in check after it "liberated" it. The plain fact is it hasn't worked in Iraq and likely won't fare any better in Afghanistan.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
