Washington faces deepening debacle in Afghanistan

[IndianaGreen]

Eight years after invasion

Washington faces deepening debacle in Afghanistan
7 October 2009

Today marks eight years since the launching of the US war against Afghanistan. The aerial bombardment of Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad was followed by the deployment of CIA and military special forces units which directed US warplanes in the annihilation of Taliban fighters. The militias of the Northern Alliance—a collection of warlords tied to the opium trade and implicated in war crimes over the previous decade—served as Washington’s proxy army.

Within two months, all of Afghanistan’s provinces had fallen to the US intervention, with large numbers of the Taliban resistance taken prisoner and massacred and others driven into the Tora Bora mountains or across the border into Pakistan. In those two months, a total of 12 US soldiers were killed.

Now, eight years later, the Obama White House and the Pentagon are engaged in a heated debate over whether to send another 40,000 troops—on top of the 68,000 US and 38,000 NATO troops already deployed—in an attempt to salvage an intervention that has succeeded only in intensifying the resistance to the US-led occupation and spreading it throughout the country.

The number of US and NATO troops killed in Afghanistan so far this year has risen to 400—nearly six times as many as died in the first year of the US intervention. The war has gone on twice as long as US forces were engaged in World War II.

The Bush administration launched the war in the name of smashing Al Qaeda and capturing or killing Osama bin Laden. It was justified as retribution for the attacks of September 11, 2001, tragic events whose real origins have not been seriously investigated to this day.

The Obama administration employs this same essential pretext, describing Afghanistan as a “war of necessity”—in contrast to the “war of choice” in still-occupied Iraq. Like his predecessor, Obama insists that the war is aimed at preventing another terrorist attack, maintaining this pretense even as his national security adviser, retired General James Jones, admitted this week that there are no more than 100 members of Al Qaeda in all of Afghanistan, with no means of attacking the US.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pers-o07.shtml