Facing rising resistance: Pentagon brings NATO into Afghanistan
By Leslie Feinberg
Aug. 21, 2003--With pomp and circumstance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Aug. 11 took formal command of the transnational military troops in Kabul, Afghanistan, which are euphemistically dubbed "peacekeepers."
This is the first time in NATO's 54-year history that it has deployed its forces beyond the boundaries of the European continent.
The official ceremony concluded the joint command of the International Security Assis tance Force by Germany and the Netherlands. All told, some 5,500 troops from 29 countries have been deployed under the ISAF command created by a December 2001 UN Security Council resolution.
The operation of these troops is strictly separate from the Pentagon-led "Operation Enduring Freedom" forces.
The Aug. 11 handover ceremony, at Kabul's Amani High School, was designed to convey military power and stability. Under the watchful eye of NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. James L. Jones--a U.S. Marine general--outgoing German commander Lt. Gen. Norbert van Heyst passed the green ISAF flag to NATO Lt. Gen. Goetz Gliemeroth.
German Defense Minister Peter Struck looked on, as did Afghani President Hamid Karzai--hand-picked by the U.S. as titular head of the government. The 300 guests, mostly military, included NATO and diplomatic luminaries, as well as United Nations and Afghan officials.
But the scene outside the high school proved that the Pentagon-led occupation is anything but stable. The school auditorium was as heavily guarded as a bunker. Surrounding streets were blockaded with bales of barbed wire. Hundreds of armed troops and dozens of armored cars bristling with machine guns fortified the building's perimeter. Crack-shot snipers were positioned on the roof. Trained dogs sniffed for explosives.
Twenty-two months after Washington hastily declared victory in Afghanistan--its opening cannon blast in the "war against terrorism"-even the relatively secured military occupation of the capital city of Kabul has become an island in a rising sea of opposition.
Attacks on Pentagon and supporting occupation forces, representatives of the puppet Afghani government and imperialist aid organizations are being carried out with greater frequency in many provinces, according to many world news sources.
The day before NATO entered Afghanistan, the United Nations announced it was suspending fieldwork in the south of the country after a series of attacks on its agencies in the provinces. The south is the traditional stronghold of the Taliban, the religious group officially deposed by the U.S.-led war. Other forces are also reportedly playing a role in the resistance.
A spokesperson for the Taliban also told the Pakistani daily, The News, on Aug. 10 that the group plans to extend its offensive against U.S.-led troops and their Afghan allies in northern provinces, including Balkh, Baglhan and Konduz. (FT.com, Aug. 11)
However, acts of anti-colonial resistance are reportedly also escalating in the heart of the capital, including bombings. According to the Aug. 12 Deutsche Welle, Kabul itself "could yet be overwhelmed by waves of violence from the countryside." German occupation forces alone have already lost 14 soldiers in attacks in the capital city. German troops took their worst casualties in June when a suicide bomber detonated a taxi packed with explosives, killing four German troops and wounding 29 others.
Insurgents fired six rockets at a Pentagon base near the border with Pakistan on Aug. 9. And frequent rocket attacks on "coalition" troops in bases around southern and eastern Afghanistan get mentioned in small news items in the U.S. monopoly media. But in general the news industry in this country has played down Pentagon Special Forces casualties in Afghanistan, as well as reports about civilian deaths and injuries under the military occupation, vast destruction of the infrastructure of that impoverished country, and the anti-imperialist anger it is all fomenting.
However, the pressure that Washington is exerting on other imperial powers to commit forces and funding for the military occupation speaks volumes about how the effort to bring Afghanistan under colonial control is going.
Money channeled to dirty war
After decimating Afghanistan, the Bush administration has spent less than $1 billion under the vague label of "reconstruction." Hunger and disease are rampant. The main road between Kabul and Kandahar has still not been restored. Thousands of students take classes outdoors in tents.
However, the Pentagon does generously shell out, officially, $10 billion a year to keep 9,000 to 12,500 U.S. troops fighting in the field, mostly in the east and south of Afghanistan. (Daily Times, Aug. 10)
The authority of the puppet Karzai government hardly reaches beyond Kabul, the only part of the country patrolled by the international forces. Karzai's regime is so vulnerable that the president barely survived an assassination attempt in the southern city of Kandahar in September. Pentagon bodyguards saved his life. Keeping him alive is now the job of the most controversial U.S. private military contractor, DynCorp.
DynCorp's involvement sheds light on the character of the occupation of Afghanistan. The well-connected corporation is also contracted to work on "Plan Colombia"--Washington's attempts to crush the national liberation movement in that Latin American country. DynCorp reportedly ran a prostitution ring while it was under contract to the UN police service in Bosnia. And the magazine New Republic charged that DynCorp staff working with the CIA were involved in the shooting down of a plane carrying U.S. missionaries in Peru. (The Observer, Nov. 24, 2002)
Resistance hinders imperial plunder
While the Pentagon was able to crush much of Afghanistan's army and its meager apparatus with merciless blanket bombing raids across the country, the U.S. has not been able to establish a secure colonial state machine. There's no new, viable national army, police force and judiciary in place, and there are too few Special Forces troops, spread too thin to act as an effective boot heel.
That makes it difficult, for example, for capital ventures to control access to the oil and gas resources of Central Asia--one of the targets of the Goliath-versus-David war against Afghanistan. With resistance flaring in the south, and perhaps now in the north as well, the U.S.-based oil company Unocal Corp. will find it hard to complete its multi-billion-dollar, 1,500-kilometer pipeline project across Afghanistan from Turkmenistan to Pakistan--even with a former employee of the company, Hamid Karzai, now president of Afghanistan.
In an Aug. 11 media conference, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that Washington is "looking at ways of accelerating our work with more resources, both resources in terms of money and other assets that we can put to the task of rebuilding the country."
He means that the Bush administration, which had balked earlier at letting its rivals in on the occupation of Afghanistan, now wants other imperial powers to ship in ground troops and chip in on the costs of empire-building--financial and political. Rival imperialists are salivating for their share of the spoils of war. But without crushing the anti-colonial resistance, the plunder is more difficult to pillage. And defeating the anti-imperialist attacks is proving to be a considerable challenge.
NATO will discuss expanding its operations beyond Kabul, announced a NATO spokesperson on Aug. 11, but it wants "some months" to settle into the capital city first, a spokesperson announced. (Reuters, Aug. 12)
The German government also announced on Aug. 11 that it will expand the presence of its troops in Afghanistan to Kundus, 250 kilometers northwest of Kabul, upon "insistence by the U.S. government." (German edition of Financial Times, Aug. 11)
President George W. Bush, speaking to reporters with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at his side, praised Germany at a media conference on Aug. 8. Bush said he intended to thank German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. "Germany is taking a very active role in Afghanistan, and we're very thankful for that. As NATO steps forward, Germany has assumed a big responsibility."
Bush said he was focusing on Germany's role in Afghanistan to contrast "a change from six months ago," when the Schroeder regime opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
The day after Bush's media conference, the vice-chair of Germany's ruling Greens Party in parliament spoke out against expanding his country's military mission in Afghanistan, warning against "Vietnamizing" the area.
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien also came under political fire domestically for sending 1,900 soldiers to Afghanistan, reportedly over the objections of his generals. Canada had earlier refused to take part in the Washington-led war against Iraq.
Canada now has the biggest military contingent of any U.S. ally in Kabul--some 35 to 40 percent of the ISAF operation. In an Aug. 11 interview on CBC Newsworld, Canadian Major-General Andrew Leslie admitted that the dangers of casualties were high because of the level of resistance. Using a one-to-five scale, with five representing a major combat operation, the Kabul mission is "a solid four," he said. And in a teleconference call from Kabul with Canada's media the same day, he acknowledged pressure on the ISAF to expand its operations beyond Kabul.
The best-laid plans
The NATO alliance includes all the major imperialist powers except Japan and Australia. It was formed at the end of WWII after the imperialists realized that while they had been battling each other to re-carve the world into colonial possessions, a third of humanity had liberated itself from the rule of finance capital.
So in 1949, the NATO alliance, with the U.S. as top dog, was forged as a counter-revolutionary weapon to try to crush the gains of the working class in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
In the post-Cold-War era after the overturning of the Soviet Union, it was the Clinton administration that in 1998 first publicized U.S. plans to expand NATO's role into a military SWAT team that could strike worldwide.
To corral the competing interests of the NATO countries and saddle them under U.S. strategic control, the Pentagon organized NATO interventions in eastern Europe--first in Bosnia, and then in the brutal bombing and attempts to dismantle the remnants of socialist Yugoslavia.
Now, according to State Department Deputy Spokesperson Philip Reeker, NATO will run its mission in Afghanistan "much as it has managed other successful peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia."
Wall Street doesn't fear bringing in its imperialist rivals because it stands head and shoulders above them all in terms of military superiority.
But the U.S. imperialists expected quick victories, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq. Instead, the mighty war machinery is bogged down in long-term occupations. Empires require legions of troops and are costly to maintain.
And as in Iraq, in Afghanistan the U.S. can't rely on a puppet government to create a safe environment for the taking of profits.
Gen. James Jones recalled that in 2002, NATO ambassadors in Brussels hounded him with the same question: "General, tell us how you are going to get us to Afghanistan?"
But, Financial Times analyst Judy Dempsey wrote on Aug. 12, "Yesterday as the first Marine commander to become the alliance's military chief flew into a hot and noisy Kabul to oversee the handing over of the 5,500 strong International Assistance Force to NATO's command, he faced the next big question: how will the alliance get out?"
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