- On October 7 it will enter its ninth calendar year and
with the projected deployment of at least 30,000 more American and thousands
of more fellow NATO nations' troops this year it promises to go on indefinitely.
-
- It is the second longest war, both on the air and ground
fronts, in United States' history, with only its protracted involvement
in Indochina so far exceeding it in length.
-
- The Afghan war is also the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's
first armed conflict outside of Europe and its first ground war in the
sixty years of its existence. It has been waged with the participation
of armed units from all 26 NATO member states and twelve other European
and Caucasus nations linked to NATO through the Euro-Atlantic Partnership
Council, the Partnership for Peace and the Adriatic Charter with the first-ever
invocation of the Alliance's Article 5 mutual military assistance provision.
-
- The twelve European NATO partners who have sent troops
in varying numbers to assist Washington and the Alliance include the continent's
five former neutral nations: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland.
-
- The European NATO and partnership deployments count among
their number troops from six former Soviet Republics - with Azerbaijan,
Georgia and Ukraine tapped for recent reinforcements and the three Baltic
states represented disproportionately to their populations - although Western
officials and media refrain from using words like invasion, empire and
occupation that were tossed around so profligately in the 1980s.
-
- The conflict marks the first time since the Vietnam War
that US, Australian, New Zealand and South Korean troops have fought in
the same campaign in the same theater. (Although all four also had troops
in Iraq after March of 2003, only American forces were engaged in combat.
In Afghanistan, however, over 1,000 Australian troops, including special
forces, participate in counterinsurgency operations and ten of their soldiers
have been killed.)
-
- In all, 42 nations have military contingents ranging
from a handful to thousands of troops serving under NATO in a war nearly
as far removed from the North Atlantic as could have been imagined and
embroiled in an endless engagement because of a 1949 commitment by the
major Western powers to render each other military aid in the event of
a conflict in Western Europe or North America.
-
- Over a thousand US, NATO and NATO partner nations' soldiers
have been killed in the war, including servicemen from all three Baltic
States, Australia and South Korea.
-
- From the beginning of the invasion of and war in Afghanistan
in early October of 2001 under the aegis of so-called Operation Enduring
Freedom, which commenced with US and British air and missile attacks, the
model used seventeen months later in Iraq, the conflict has not been limited
to Afghanistan itself but rather has exploited the nation's alleged and
highly tenuous connections to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington
to situate US and other NATO military forces in several neighboring and
nearby nations, including airbases and troop and naval deployments in Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the Indian Ocean (where the Japanese
navy has been assisting Operation Enduring Freedom).
-
- The Russian press wire agency Itar-Tass reported last
December that 120,000 US and NATO soldiers passed through the Manas airbase
in Kyrgyzstan in 2008.
-
- 2009 has brought the Pentagon and NATO the bad news that
the government of Kyrgyzstan may close the base to warplanes used for the
war in Afghanistan, a base that since 2001 has hosted military personnel
from the United States, Australia, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Poland,
Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France and South Korea.
-
- The Pentagon officially defines Operation Enduring Freedom's
area of responsibility as encompassing fifteen nations: Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Cuba (Guantanamo Bay Naval Base), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan,
Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, the Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan,
Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
-
- After the invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001,
the US and its NATO allies obtained from the United Nations of ever-obliging
Secretary-General Kofi Annan (who in 1995 held the posts of Special Representative
of the Secretary General of the United Nations to the former Yugoslavia
and special envoy to NATO and was installed as Secretary-General after
the US deposed his predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali and browbeat the other
14 Security Council members in 1997 to accept him) a resolution authorizing
the establishment of an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF),
initially to oversee Afghanistan's occupation, but later to wage a full-blown
counterinsurgency campaign inside the country and across the border into
Pakistan.
-
- There was and is nothing international about ISAF. It
is a NATO operation entirely.
-
- From December of 2001 until August of 2003 command of
ISAF was held in six month rotations by major NATO nations. At the end
of that period it passed to NATO collectively. Initially its mission was
limited to the capital of Kabul, but by 2003 its mandate was extended beyond
the capital and by 2006 to all of Afghanistan's provinces.
-
- To deploy combat forces to a nation that was bombed and
invaded and to conduct aerial and ground assaults throughout its territory
is as good a working definition of the words war and occupation as could
be devised.
-
- Afghanistan has become a permanent training ground and
firing range for providing the US and its NATO allies and candidate members
opportunities to test out new weapons systems, wage 21st Century counterinsurgency
operations and integrate so-called niche deployment military units from
over 42 nations to achieve weapons and warfighting interoperability.
-
- Polish military officials among others have openly stated
that in Afghanistan NATO has provided them with the conditions to modernize
their armed forces, which had not been employed in war zone and combat
operations since the beginning of World War II. Coupled with recent statements
by Polish and Baltic officials that NATO should renew its focus on "defending"
Europe, the Greater Afghan war theater is a laboratory for preparing Eastern
European and South Caucasus nations for actions on Russia's eastern and
southern borders.
-
- Last month the US signed an agreement with Poland to
train their special forces (comparable to what the Pentagon has already
done with Georgia), citing Afghanistan as the immediate locale for its
joint implementation.
-
- The comparative size of each NATO nation's contribution
is less important than the fact that several tens, perhaps hundreds, of
thousands of NATO troops have been rotated through Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan over the past seven and a half years and in the
process gained experience in serving under the command of major NATO powers.
-
- Earlier this year the US's Central Command chief David
Petraeus began focusing on the Caucasus nations of Georgia and Azerbaijan
as military transit routes for the expanding war in Afghanistan and visited
the former Soviet Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan
to also incorporate them into the ever-widening South Asian war vortex.
-
- Late last year General Nikolai Makarov, chief of the
General Staff of Russia's Armed Forces, warned that "American military
bases are dotted throughout the world. The U.S. has opened bases in Romania
and Bulgaria, and according to our information plans to establish them
in Kazakhstan
- and Uzbekistan."
- ....
- Much is made in Western official circles and in the obedient
media about the pretexts under which the US and NATO attacked and invaded
Afghanistan, took over all its strategic Soviet era airbases (as was done
most recently with the Shindand airbase in 2005 in Herat Province, near
the Iranian border) and installed a compliant puppet government to rule
over the nation and its people.
-
- At first as the memory of the attacks of September 11,
2001 were still freshly burned into America's and the world's imaginations,
the rationale for Operation Enduring Freedom was to hunt down and "bring
to justice" - or kill - Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and several of
their top associates in a lex talionis punishment for the deadly attacks
on New York's financial center and the headquarters of the US Defense Department.
-
- As the years proceeded and not only weren't bin Laden
and Mullah Omar apprehended but their whereabouts couldn't even be determined,
emphasis was shifted to the fight against Taliban for having hosted the
above two.
-
- That fallback position was belied by the fact that Washington
in the person of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld right after 9/11 asserted
that as many as sixty nations, almost a third of the world's, were harboring
terrorists and as such were fair game for missile and other attacks, but
conspicuously left off the hit list the only three nations that had recognized,
funded and no doubt armed the Taliban: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates.
-
- Nor was the Taliban argument helped by US-installed President
Hamid Karzai being quoted regularly on the US's Voice of Afghanistan (an
offshoot of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) applauding "our Taliban"
who "fought shoulder-to-shoulder with us in the jihad against the
Soviets."
-
- The US and NATO tact was then to adopt an ex post facto
humanitarian guise to justify their fanning out into Afghanistan's provinces
in 2003 (in addition to the original in Kabul, NATO launched North, South,
East and West commands): Establishing so-called Provincial Reconstruction
Teams (PRTs).
-
- Invading armies with their bombers, cruise missiles,
15,000 pound Daisy Cutter bombs and long-range artillery are designed to
destroy and not construct buildings and the PRTs would be better termed
provincial pacification teams, with the model being the Strategic Hamlet
Program in South Vietnam in the early 1960s.
-
- More reasons would be devised to explain the West's continuing
and growing presence and intensifying military operations in Afghanistan
and its environs.
-
- Four years of Taliban power had at least accomplished
one objective; it had curbed opium cultivation.
-
- However, after a few years of NATO occupation Afghanistan
became the world's largest producer and exporter of opium and so last autumn
the Alliance announced that it was planning to conduct armed raids against
opium and "drug traffickers," however the West decided to define
the second.
-
- The ongoing and endless war in Afghanistan - and now
Pakistan - has metamorphosed from a hunt for bin Laden, to a fight against
Taliban to a drug war modeled after the US's murderous Plan Colombia initiated
in 1999. There are reports that 300 Colombian troops are slated for deployment
to Afghanistan to replicate that model.
-
- Notwithstanding recent talk by US President Barrack Obama
about an Afghan exit strategy, it's not apparent that Washington and its
allies ever intend to leave the country and the broader South-Asia/Central
Asia/Caspian Sea Basin/South Caucasus circumference whose center Afghanistan
is.
-
- Two weeks ago the Russia Novosti website featured this
observation: "Central Asian states think the U.S. started the Afghan
war to change the regional regimes into local analogues of Georgia's Saakashvili
and Ukraine's Yushchenko, and that it began with Afghan President Hamid
Karzai. Iran, China and Russia think the war could be Washington's attempt
to reduce their influence in Central Asia to zero."
-
- Less than four months before the invasion of Afghanistan
China, Russia and four of the five former Soviet Central Asia republics
- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - founded the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO), a mutual security grouping that would later
include India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan as observers.
-
- It's purpose is to provide regional security and to address
the issues of trans-border crime, including narcotics smuggling, armed
extremism and separatism.
-
- Since its inception it has also increasingly focused
on joint development projects in the spheres of energy, transportation,
trade and infrastructure.
-
- With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Central Asia was
seen by the SCO's founding members and since by its observers as a mechanism
for fostering mutually beneficial relations among the nations of Central
Asia and Russia, China, Iran, India and even Turkey eventually.
-
- Afghanistan has been hurled into interminable turmoil,
with hundreds of thousands of its citizens displaced; almost daily bombing
runs, drone missile attacks, middle-of-the-night commando raids, indiscriminate
shooting of civilians at checkpoints; mass-scale drought and famine; an
explosion of opium cultivation and trafficking; expansion of that destabilization
by setting Pakistan aflame with the potential for its fragmentation and
dismemberment and heightened tensions with its - fellow nuclear - neighbor
India.
-
- This is the current, grave situation seven and a half
years after the invasion of Afghanistan.
-
- With the deployment of another 30,000 US troops and thousands
more from NATO's ranks (recently Italy, Poland, Georgia, Azerbaijan and
other nations have announced increases) Western troop strength will soon
approach 100,000.
-
- This is pouring fuel on fire. Taliban has become as amorphous
a term as al-Qaeda has been; anyone in Afghanistan, even in the non-Pushtun
North and West of the nation, who takes issue with Western warplanes and
combat troops dealing out death and destruction in their nation and their
villages is now a Talib. An enemy.
-
- The more US and NATO troops that arrive in Afghanistan,
the more resentment, resistance and violence will ensue. Inevitably.
-
- The US and NATO have arrogantly spurned offers by the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the post-Soviet Collective Security
Treaty Organization to assist in bringing a regional - and non-military
- resolution of the myriad crises afflicting Afghanistan, its long-suffering
people and the region.
-
- NATO is not a nation-building, peacekeeping or humanitarian
outfit - it is an aggressive military bloc. When it and its individual
member states' military forces leave South and Central Asia then healing,
reconstruction and lasting peace can begin.
-
-
- http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=view
- Article&code=20090326&articleId=12911
|