US prepares Fallujah-style offensive in Afghanistan

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US prepares Fallujah-style offensive in Afghanistan
By Tom Eley
5 December 2009

About 1,000 Marines attacked an area in southern Afghanistan
controlled by insurgents on Friday, in the US-led occupation’s first
major offensive since President Obama announced that he would send
30,000 more soldiers to the war.

The attack on the largely abandoned city of Now Zad comes in
preparation for an assault on a larger and more populous city, Marja,
which the US military says is a center of Taliban resistance in
Helmand province. The commander of the operation in Now Zad, Brig.
Gen. Larry Nicholson, said the model for the coming attack on Marja
will be the US destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, in 2004, in
which thousands of civilians were killed. It is not clear when such an
attack might take place.

On Friday morning, hundreds of soldiers were flown from the north into
the Now Zad valley in Helmand province, while a second force moved on
foot from the south in an offensive dubbed “Cobra’s Anger.” British
forces launched an ancillary attack from the east. About 150 Afghan
soldiers were reportedly attached to the operation, which involved
helicopters and MV-22 Osprey aircraft.

ABC News footage showed unopposed US forces flattening buildings with
heavy artillery fire. The pro-US governor of the province, Daood
Ahmadi, said on Friday that so far the bodies of four Taliban fighters
have been found as a result of the operation. (The Pentagon and the
Kabul government routinely describe all those killed by US military
operations as Taliban.) There were no reports of NATO casualties.

Coming only three days after Obama announced his 30,000 soldier
“surge” to Afghanistan—most of which will be sent to the south of the
country—the attack in Helmand is a precursor to the sort of operations
that will take place in the coming years’ fighting in Afghanistan.
Cobra’s Anger shows that Obama’s war strategy will be characterized by
the use of overwhelming violence to terrorize and intimidate the
Afghan population.

“There is no question that this is meant to be a signal to the Taliban
in terms of what the Taliban can expect in upcoming days in terms of
how this strategy will be implemented,” said Steven Chao, Al Jazeera
correspondent in Afghanistan.

The short-term tactical aim of the operation, military spokesmen
claim, is to destroy Taliban “safe havens,” to cut off north-south and
east-west supply lines, and to root out “more than 100 hardline
insurgents” from the Now Zad area.

The insurgents of Now Zad, though small in number, were able in the
summer to entrench themselves in “positions so solid that a fixed
frontline runs just a few hundred yards (meters) north of the Marines”
in their Marines’ Forward Operating Base, the Associated Press reports.

Neither the British, who were stationed in the area for years, nor the
Americans have been able to hold Now Zad. “British troops who were
once stationed there left graffiti dubbing the town ‘Apocalypse
Now-Zad,’ a play on the title of the 1979 Vietnam War movie Apocalypse
Now,” according to the AP. “The British base was nearly overrun on
several occasions with insurgents coming within yards (meters) of the
protection wall. The area was handed over in 2008 to the Marines, who
have struggled to reclaim much of the valley.”

Before the US invasion in 2001, there were 30,000 inhabitants in the
city of Now Zad, a center of poppy cultivation for the opium trade.
Now, it is a “ghost town,” and “virtually empty,” according to press
accounts.

Taking the Now Zad area is preparation for an assault on Marja, a
large town in the region where many Afghans fled in the wake of Marine
attacks on their villages this summer—attacks that were made possible
by Obama’s ordered dispatch of 21,000 more soldiers after his
inauguration.

The Marines, including Gen. Nicholson, “have made no secret that,
together with the Afghan national army, they plan to rout the Taliban
from Marja in a sweep akin to that of the November 2004 battle of
Fallujah, Iraq,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“Marja is that last major sanctuary in Helmand province, the last
place where the enemy has freedom of movement,” Nicholson told the LA
Times. “We’re going to take that away from him.” Elsewhere Nicholson
has called Marja a “cancer in Helmand.”

“Marja is much larger than Fallujah and split up with irrigation
canals that will make troop and vehicle movements difficult,” the LA
Times writes. “Also, it is heavily populated, raising the specter of
civilian casualties if the Marines begin a vigorous house-by-house
assault.”

Nicholson was a regional commander with the Marines when the US
military attacked and destroyed Fallujah, during which thousands of
civilians were trapped and subjected to an intense bombardment that
included the use of the chemical weapon white phosphorus, which burns
through clothing and skin on contact. The onslaught destroyed about 70
percent of the city’s structures.

Like Marja today, Fallujah was singled out because it was a center of
resistance to the US occupation of Iraq. The horrific attack on the
city, one of the great war crimes of modern history, served as a
collective punishment to its residents and as an object lesson to the
rest of Iraq, and indeed the world, in what becomes of those who
resist the dictates of American imperialism. (See “Fallujah and the
laws of war”.)

That the US military is openly preparing a Fallujah-style attack on
Marja should be taken as a warning. In the coming years, the Obama
administration’s “surge” will produce a bloodbath and war crimes in
Afghanistan that will surpass those perpetrated by the Bush
administration on Iraq. It is urgent that the working class in the US
and other NATO countries mobilize against Obama’s offensive—and
against those “left” forces who supported his election and now remain
silent in the face of his administration’s crimes.

Obama has also recently authorized the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) to expand its use of Predator drone attacks in Pakistan, the New
York Times recently wrote in a favorable piece on the destructive
assassination program. The missile attacks have killed hundreds in the
past two years—at least 400 by the CIA’s unofficial tally. The real
figure is likely close to 1,000.

In gross violation of international law and the sovereignty of
Pakistan, the drones carry out missile strikes against alleged Taliban
and Al Qaeda supporters. The flights are operated from consoles
resembling video game machines at CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia. While the US—which officially denies the existence of the
attacks—claims that those killed are almost all Taliban or Al Qaeda,
it provides not a shred of evidence to back up these assertions.

Washington’s stepped-up drone attacks and its dragooning of Islamabad
into launching full-scale military operations against the tribes of
its border regions have destabilized Pakistan and provoked a wave of
terrorist attacks.

The latest of these came Monday when four militants using grenades and
automatic weapons targeted a mosque used by Pakistan’s top generals at
Friday prayers, killing 36 with guns and grenades before blowing
themselves up. Among the dead were two generals and several other army
officers.

The brazenness of the assault took Pakistan’s government and military
brass by surprise. It took place in a highly fortified area of the
city Rawalpindi, which is the headquarters of Pakistan’s military and
a large suburb of Islamabad, and was the third such attack in
Rawalpindi in two months. On October 10, a group of gunmen attacked
army headquarters. A day-long battle ensued that killed 23, including
the militants.

More than 400 have died in militant attacks across Pakistan since October.

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/afgh-d05.shtml

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