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Now
With attention focused on the disastrous
U.S. war in Iraq, there has been much less media coverage of
the Bush administration's other ongoing war, in Afghanistan.
The war in Afghanistan is now entering its sixth year, but from
the perspective of the U.S. ruling class, the situation is deteriorating
rapidly.
The U.S. began bombing Afghanistan
on October 7, 2001 in retaliation for the September 11 attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A ground invasion
began shortly afterwards and U.S. troops in collaboration with
a collection of Afghan warlords known as the Northern Alliance
quickly overthrew the fundamentalist Taliban government led by
Mullah Omar, accusing it of harboring those responsible for the
September 11 attacks.
Just as in Iraq, Washington
promised that the invasion would bring about liberation for the
local population-particularly women, who had suffered severe
oppression under the Taliban-democracy, respect for human rights,
stability, and prosperity. Now, more than five years later, it
is easy to see just how hollow those promises were. According
to a report in the London Times, "the triumph and
hope" that followed the Taliban's ouster, "have given
way to despair and disappointment."
With the partial exception
of the capital, Kabul, much of the country remains in chaos.
Kandahar in the south, for instance, gets no more than six hours
of electricity every two days. "Bad roads, open sewage systems,
and a lack of fresh water are seen in the city as inconveniences
very low down on the list of complaints," the Times
reported. "Kidnapping, banditry and police corruption rank
much higher." Thirty-nine percent of Afghans under the age
of five are malnourished and 61 percent depend on untreated drinking
water.
"When we saw the Taliban
go and the foreign soldiers come we were so full of hope,"
Abdul Shakoor, a young shopkeeper, told the newspaper. "We
were 100 per cent sure that, with the world behind it, our Government
would improve our lives. But now our hopes are crushed."
The supposedly democratic government
of Hamid Karzai was in fact hand-picked in 2002 by the then-U.S.
ambassador to the country, Zalmay Khalilzad, and rules in alliance
with brutal U.S.-backed warlords, such as Ismail Khan, Rashid
Dustum, and Yusuf Pashtun, whose records are as bad or worse
than the Taliban, but whom Washington relies on to control much
of the country. The result has been continued human rights abuses
and enormous corruption, with much of the foreign aid that has
gone to the country ending up in the hands of local strongmen
and their private armies.
In a recent editorial, the
New York Times lamented that "after years of effort-and
more than $1 billion spent-Afghanistan's American-trained police
force is unable to perform even routine law enforcement work."
The newspaper reported that "investigators for the Pentagon
and the State Department found that the training program's managers
did not even know how many police officers were serving, while
thousands of trucks and other American-purchased police equipment
have simply disappeared."
Meanwhile, the situation for
women, who were initially promised so much, remains abysmal.
The majority of girls in Afghanistan still cannot go to school,
and a report by the charity Womankind Worldwide concludes, "It
cannot be said that the status of Afghan women has changed significantly
in the last five years."
Malalai Joya, the youngest
and most outspoken woman in the Afghan parliament, lives in fear
for her life. She told Britain's Guardian newspaper, "Here
there is no democracy, no security, no women's rights. When I
speak in parliament they threaten me. In May they beat me by
throwing bottles of water at me and they shouted, 'Take her and
rape her.' These men who are in power, never have they apologized
for their crimes that they committed in the wars, and now, with
the support of the U.S., they continue with their crimes in a
different way. That is why there is no fundamental change in
the situation of women." According to the Afghan Human Rights
Commission, some Afghan women are even burning themselves to
death to escape abuse from their families.
* *
*
Large numbers of civilians
have been killed in Afghanistan since the U.S. launched its war.
According to as study in the Journal of Peace Research,
as many as 10,000 died during the initial invasion and its immediate
aftermath, but since then no one has been keeping accurate figures,
although the fighting has never stopped. Unlike in Iraq, however,
where only Britain has given the U.S. substantial military support,
Washington has been able to persuade its NATO allies-including
Britain, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, and France-to
provide the majority of the 32,000 international troops in Afghanistan,
even though Germany, Italy, and France have refused to actively
engage in combat operations.
In 2003, NATO officially took
over command of the so-called International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF), which has been engaged in fierce fighting with
rebel groups in the south and east of the country. In percentage
terms, ISAF casualties are even higher than U.S. casualties in
Iraq, with nearly 200 deaths in 2006 alone. Of course the Afghan
casualties are much higher, with at least 4,000 killed last year,
many of them civilians.
The brutal tactics of the ISAF
is one of the factors that has resulted in growing support for
Taliban rebels, who have rebuilt a formidable guerrilla army
in the south in alliance with other anti-American forces. Coalition
forces routinely kill civilians in their clashes with rebel forces.
In October, for example, observers reported that at least thirty
nomadic herders were killed in one ISAF air strike alone. In
early December, eyewitnesses told reporters that British troops
in Kandahar indiscriminately opened fire on bystanders after
a suicide bomber attacked one of their convoys.
Support for the central government
is declining and the insurgency is gaining strength, with the
number of suicide attacks, roadside bombs, and border clashes
increasing substantially. Even though the ISAF has killed thousands
of rebels, "the Taliban and its allies draw on what appears
to be an almost inexhaustible supply of potential foot soldiers,"
the Los Angeles Times reports. "Particularly in dirt-poor
rural areas, many Afghans believe their daily lot has improved
little since Taliban times, and tend to cast the blame on the
same Americans they once hailed as liberators." One analyst
says the rebels are "a fresh new generationcopying the skills
and ways of the armed resistance groups in Iraq." Suicide
bombings were previously unknown in Afghanistan (as they once
were in Iraq), but there have now been over a hundred of them
in the past year.
While the U.S. and its allies
have provided $7.3 billion for development projects since 2002,
much of this money has vanished and they have spent a staggering
$82.5 billion on military operations during the same time. "People
previously were repelled by the fanaticism of the Taliban, but
anger at Americans is growing," according to retired Pakistani
general Talat Masood. "And ultimately, they would prefer
that their lives be secure. It's a survival instinct."
* *
*
The deteriorating situation
on the ground and the resurgence of the Taliban has exacerbated
tensions between Washington and several of its NATO allies. At
a summit held in Riga, Latvia, in late November, George Bush
pushed hard for other NATO countries to increase their troop
deployments and to drop their refusal to join the U.S., Britain,
Canada, and the Netherlands in fighting the insurgency in the
south and east. But Bush was almost completely rebuffed by France,
Germany, Spain, and Italy. These governments argue that the situation
in Afghanistan cannot be resolved by military means. They have
no desire to be dragged into the same kind of quagmire in which
the U.S. finds itself in Iraq, and they see Washington's current
difficulties as an opportunity to advance their own interests
in the Middle East and elsewhere.
"Afghanistan was supposed
to be the good war," bemoaned the New York Times
in the editorial I quoted earlier. But the war in Afghanistan
has been an imperial adventure from the beginning, despite the
fact that many supposedly on the left, applauded it at the time
as a "just war." In reality, it was designed to reassert
U.S. power after September 11, to prepare the ground for an invasion
of Iraq, to insert the U.S. military in a crucial strategic region,
and to gain access to Central Asian oil and gas supplies. One
thing it was never about was bringing to justice the perpetrators
of the 9/11 attacks. According to Bob Woodward's insider account
in Bush at War, by September 13 then-Secretary of State
Colin Powell had already noted, "Bush was tired of rhetoric.
The president wanted to kill somebody."
A few days later, Bush ordered
Powell to send an ultimatum to the Taliban government demanding
that they turn over Osama bin-Laden or "We'll attack them
with missiles, bombers and boots on the ground." Bush added,
"Let's hit them hard. We want to signal this is a change
from the past. We want to cause other countries like Syria and
Iran to change their views. We want to hit as soon as possible."
But when Mullah Omar responded that he would be prepared to extradite
bin-Laden if the U.S. provided evidence implicating him in the
9/11 events, his offer was ignored.
The Australian journalist John
Pilger reports that "in late September and early October
[2001], leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic parties negotiated
bin-Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the September
11 attacks. According to reports in Pakistan (and the Daily
Telegraph), this had both bin-Laden's approval and that of
Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader." But this deal too was
rejected. According to Pilger, "The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan
was notified in advance of the proposal and the mission to put
it to the Taliban. Later, a U.S. official said that 'casting
our objectives too narrowly' risked 'a premature collapse of
the international effort if by some luck chance Mr. bin Laden
was captured.'" In other words, the opportunity to go to
war was not to be squandered.
If nothing more, it is at least
poetic justice that as the U.S. imperial project unravels in
Iraq, the same thing is beginning to happen in Afghanistan, the
Bush administration's first imperial intervention, where it believed
it had secured a decisive military victory more than five years
ago. But does this mean that anti-imperialists should now give
support to the Taliban, just as we have called for support for
the resistance in Iraq?
Unfortunately, matters are
not so simple. Although the Taliban is now fighting against an
imperial occupation, when it was previously in power it had a
history of accommodation with global and regional imperialist
powers. Worse, the Taliban's reactionary politics are a positive
impediment to the development of a genuine and effective liberation
movement. It has repeatedly threatened, attacked, and killed
women and girls who attend school, work outside the home, or
fail to comply with its strict dress code. Most recently its
leadership has issued rules calling for teachers to be killed
as government collaborators and opposing all development projects,
including schools, clinics, and roads. Taliban forces had already
murdered twenty teachers in the past year and burned down 198
schools. U.S. imperialism is faltering in Afghanistan and Afghans
have the right to resist it, but the Taliban may ultimately do
more to weaken that resistance than to help it.
Phil Gasper teaches philosophy at Notre Dame de
Namur University in California. His article "Afghanistan,
the CIA, bin-Laden, and the Taliban" appeared in International
Socialist Review 20, November-December 2001. This article will
appear in the January-February ISR (www.isreview.org).
He can be reached at pgasper@ndnu.edu.
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