Cops for the empire: U.S. to stay in Afghanistan 'for years'
By John Catalinotto
Aug. 29, 2002--Each successive U.S. military intervention has turned into a long-term occupation of countries in every region of the world. Lately the top officials have even stopped making promises about "bringing the troops home."
On Aug. 15, War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. commander for Afghanistan Gen. Tommy Franks laid it on the table: U.S. troops will be staying in Afghanistan for years. Franks says it's to make sure there is no base for "terrorists."
When U.S. troops went into Bosnia in 1996, then-President Bill Clinton promised to bring them home by the end of the year. But there are still U.S. troops in Bosnia, plus a long-term base in Kosovo, plus U.S. and NATO bases all over the Balkans.
You might gather from the above that a major difference between Democratic and Republican administrations is the character of the lies they tell to justify imperialist foreign policy. The Democrats pretend the occupation doesn't exist. The Republicans try to cover up everything by harking back to Sept. 11, 2001, and the "war on terrorism."
"We are engaged in military-to-military relationships in a great many countries around the world so it does not surprise me that someone would say, 'Oh gosh, the military's going to be in Afghanistan for a long, long, time,'" Franks said at a Pentagon briefing Aug. 15. "Sure we will be."
"Truth be told, the security situation in Afghanistan is reasonably good," Rumsfeld claimed from the same podium. "Is the situation perfectly tidy? No."
The truth is that the U.S. destruction of the Taliban regime has left Afghanistan with a central government split into hostile factions, none of them having the support or respect of any large part of the population.
U.S. troops guard president
The current president, Hamid Karzai, is an acknowledged U.S. puppet, so much so that 70 U.S. Special Forces troops serve as his personal bodyguards. This is a blatant admission that without direct U.S. support, he'd be assassinated in days.
It is also an admission of failure by Washington. It means that any opponent of Karzai need only point to his bodyguards to show that the U.S. is directly running the country and Karzai is nothing but a puppet.
For all the talk about preventing the use of Afghanistan by "terrorists," what Rumsfeld and Franks really mean is that without U.S. military occupation Afghanistan would not currently exist as a cohesive unit. The country has been so ravaged by decades of U.S.-fomented civil war, followed by the U.S. invasion and occupation, that it is instead a region of various ethnic groups ruled from Washington.
And it is a region where 6 million people face starvation, where women have no rights, where U.S.-backed forces massacred hundreds of Taliban captives at Dasht-i-Leili--now to be investigated by a United Nations commission--and where the mass of the people face a future even bleaker than it was under the Taliban.
This is the result of the U.S. war on that country.
At the present time, as Franks admitted, the Pentagon has its forces stationed in bases and actively engaged in battles in all parts of the globe. There are U.S. "advisers" actively involved in the Philippines against the revolutionary New People's Army, in Colombia against the revolutionary FARC-EP, and even in Georgia in the Caucasus, just over the border from the civil war in Chechnya.
Since Sept. 11 the U.S. has set up bases in various Central Asian countries using as its excuse the "war on terrorism." Once the troops are there, however, they remain to protect U.S.-based transnationals, especially the big energy companies and the pipelines delivering energy sources.
They are the troops of the Empire, fighting without allies and relying more and more on naked power and the fear they inspire.
Now Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and the whole gang are not only planning the invasion of Iraq, they are also--according to the Aug. 19 Newsweek--talking of taking on north Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Syria, maybe even Saudi Arabia, and occupying all of Asia and the Middle East.
It may look like a great vision to them. But it is a formula that promises suffering throughout the world and the life of hired killers for U.S. youths.
It's a formula that has failed before. It promises to stir resistance, at home and abroad.
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