Afghanistan massacre on eve of Obama ’s surg e

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Afghanistan massacre on eve of Obama’s surge
By Bill Van Auken
10 December 2009

With the first elements of 30,000 additional US troops set to arrive
in Afghanistan next week, the massacre of as many as 15 civilians in a
US raid has heightened fears that the Obama administration’s so-called
surge will spell a dramatic rise in bloodletting.

The killings took place in eastern Laghman province in the early hours
of Tuesday morning. Gulzar Sangarwal, the acting head of the
provincial council, reported that 13 civilians were killed in the raid
on the village of Armul, including one woman. Local villagers reported
15 killed, including children. Reuters news agency said its
correspondent had seen the bodies of a woman and 12 men, several of
them teenagers.

Local authorities have blamed the killings on US Special Forces troops.

The deaths triggered an angry protest that ended in still more
killings. According to Reuters, some 5,000 villagers marched on the
provincial capital of Mehtar Lam chanting slogans denouncing the US
occupation, the puppet government of President Hamid Karzai and the
provincial authorities. The crowd shouted “Death to America, Death to
Obama and Death to Karzai” as they marched through the town.

The villagers carried the bodies of the civilians slain in the US
raid, laying them in front of the provincial governor’s house.

Soldiers from the Afghan National Army opened fire with live
ammunition in an attempt to disperse the crowd, reportedly killing two
demonstrators outright and mortally wounding two others, who died in
the local hospital.

Outrage over the killings spread to the neighboring province of
Nangarhar, on the border with Pakistan. Pajhwok Afghan News reported
that 3,000 students from Nangahar University occupied the main highway
linking Kabul and the provincial capital of Jalalabad for hours on
Wednesday, chanting slogans denouncing the US-led occupation and the
Karzai regime and burning American flags. A US military column
attempting to move down the highway was forced to turn back to Jalalabad.

As is its standard operating procedure in such incidents, the US
command in Kabul initially denied that any civilians were killed in
the raid. It issued a statement claiming that the occupation troops
had only shot “militants” and insisting that there were “no
operational reports to substantiate those claims of harming civilians,
including women and children during this operation.”

Faced with protestors carrying the bodies of civilians, the
second-highest ranking American commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen.
David Rodriguez, backed off from the categorical denial Wednesday,
stating that the raid had been a “confusing operation” and that the US
military was “continuing to investigate.”

The massacre and mass protests in Afghanistan have taken place as
1,500 Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, prepare to deploy in
southern Afghanistan next week. They will be followed by another 6,200
Marines and 3,400 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division based at
Fort Drum, New York, who will be deployed by early next spring as the
Pentagon implements President Barack Obama’s decision to increase US
occupation forces to roughly 100,000.

These troops are being sent in to suppress not only the armed
resistance but the increasingly evident mass opposition to the
eight-year-old US occupation. Every operation, like the one in
Laghman, further inflames this opposition and strengthens the insurgency.

In a continuation of the round of hearings on the escalation begun
Tuesday by the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley
McChrystal, and the US ambassador in the country, Gen. Karl Eikenberry
(ret.), before the Senate and House armed services panels, Central
Command chief Gen. David Petraeus testified Wednesday before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

As a result of the US military escalation, “violence likely will
increase initially, particularly in the spring as the weather
improves,” Petraeus told the senators. He allowed that the situation
in Afghanistan is “likely to get harder before it gets easier.”

US troops, he said, would “have to fight their way into enemy
strongholds and clear enemy-controlled population centers.”

Recalling that he had testified before the same committee in support
of the “surge” in Iraq, when he was the senior US military commander
there, Petraeus said that the US operation in Afghanistan would be
“tougher than Iraq,” and “the progress there likely will be slower in
developing.”

An indication of just how slow came the day before in a joint press
conference by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and US Defense Secretary
Robert Gates in Kabul.

Karzai stated that it would be 15 to 20 years before Afghanistan would
be able to sustain its own security forces.

For his part, Gates pledged that “our government will not again turn
our back on this country or the region,” referring to the US
abandonment of Afghanistan after spending billions of dollars to
foment a Islamist guerrilla war against the Soviet-backed government
in Kabul beginning in the late 1970s. As deputy director of the CIA,
Gates was deeply involved in that operation, which ushered in three
decades of war, costing well over a million Afghan lives.

“We will fight by your side until Afghan forces are large enough and
strong enough to secure the nation on their own,” Gates continued. The
defense secretary went on to debunk Obama’s pledge to begin
withdrawing US forces in July 2011, saying that any drawdown of troops
would be “gradual” and “conditions-based.” Whether such a withdrawal
will take “three years or two years or four years remains to be seen,”
he said.

According to the New York Times, Pentagon aides went further,
clarifying that when Gates spoke of a withdrawal taking years, he was
not referring to a complete pulling out of US troops, but merely to a
“gradual change in the US military’s role.”

Clearly, Washington’s intention is to turn Afghanistan into a
permanent base for the American military from which it can project its
influence over oil-rich Central Asia and the energy pipeline routes
out of the Caspian Basin. This, not the propaganda about Al Qaeda
terrorism, is the driving force behind the US intervention.

The real scope of this military adventure was hinted at in an
“after-action report” [PDF] prepared at West Point by Gen. Barry
McCaffrey (ret.), who was invited to Afghanistan last month by General
Petraeus to conduct a strategic assessment and spoke to scores of US
military commanders and civilian officials.

McCaffrey—who supports the escalation—suggested that the US military
faced a prolonged battle. “It may well cost us an additional $300
billion and we are likely to suffer thousands more US casualties,” he
warned.

Next spring, when the US forces and the Taliban are both expected to
launch military offensives, “We may well encounter ISAF [International
Security Assistance Force] casualty rates of 300-500 a month,”
McCaffrey predicted.

By next summer, he said, the Afghan operation will face “a burn rate
in excess of $9 billion per month.”

McCaffrey gave no estimate on the number of Afghans who will be killed
or wounded in the coming months, but clearly if this level of US
casualties is anticipated, they will number many thousands.

The threat of increased death and destruction does not stop at the
Afghan border. What has emerged clearly from the congressional
hearings on the US escalation is that Washington is preparing to
increase its military operations—through both drone missile attacks
and cross-border raids by ground troops—against Pakistan.

Bipartisan support for such operations was in evidence at Wednesday’s
Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

The committee’s chairman, Senator John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat,
argued in his opening statement that “Pakistan is in many ways the
core of our challenge.”

The ranking Republican on the committee, Senator Dick Lugar of
Indiana, questioned whether the escalation was picking the right
“battlefield where we will concentrate most of our available military
resources.”

“The risk is that we will expend tens of billions of dollars fighting
in a strategically less important Afghanistan, while Taliban and Al
Qaeda leaders become increasingly secure in Pakistan,” said Lugar.

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/afgh-d10.shtml

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