Obama announces escalation of war in Afghanistan, Pakistan

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Obama announces escalation of war in Afghanistan, Pakistan
By Alex Lantier
28 March 2009

President Barack Obama on Friday announced a major escalation of the
US war in Afghanistan and its further extension into Pakistan.

His statement was presented as the outcome of a review of US strategy
in Afghanistan and Pakistan involving the State Department, the
Pentagon and US intelligence agencies, all of whose top officials were
on the platform behind Obama when he gave his remarks.

The policy Obama announced represents a massive increase in military
violence not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan. Significantly,
Obama devoted the first half of his remarks to Pakistan, signaling
that a major conclusion of his administration's strategic review is to
expand the war more aggressively beyond the borders of Afghanistan.

This will mean the deaths of untold thousands Afghans and Pakistanis,
the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, and the deaths of
thousands of US youth, sent to kill or be killed in a wider war in
South and Central Asia.

Obama acknowledged that the US military and security position in
Afghanistan is dire. "The situation is increasingly perilous," he
said. "It's been more than seven years since the Taliban was removed
from power, yet war rages on, and insurgents control parts of
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Attacks against our troops, our NATO allies
and the Afghan government have risen steadily. And, most painfully,
2008 was the deadliest year of the war for American forces."

He continued: "Afghanistan has an elected government, but it is
undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services
to the people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotics trade
that encourages criminality and funds insurgency."

Obama outlined plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan that echoed the Bush
administration's military "surge" in Iraq. Bush used a combination of
bribes and military violence to buy a temporary peace with various
militia leaders, while directing US reinforcements to slaughter Iraqis
who continued to oppose the US colonial-style occupation.

Obama explained, "In Iraq, we had success in reaching out to former
adversaries and targeting Al Qaeda in Iraq. We must pursue a similar
process in Afghanistan."

On top of the 17,000 additional US troops Obama has already deployed
to Afghanistan, he announced plans to send 4,000 more, ostensibly to
train Afghan recruits. The aim, he said, was to raise the trained
strength of the Afghan army to 134,000 and the police to 82,000.

He called Pakistan, Afghanistan's larger southern neighbor and a US
ally, a "safe haven" for Al Qaeda operatives and Taliban fighters,
claiming that the Pakistani territories bordering Afghanistan
constituted "the most dangerous place in the world" for the American
people.

He implied that Pakistan had failed to undertake the large-scale
military effort to destroy these forces demanded by Washington, and
that the US would no longer tolerate the situation: "After years of
mixed results, we will not and cannot provide a blank check. Pakistan
must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out Al Qaeda and the
violent extremists within its borders. We will insist that action be
taken, one way or another, when we have intelligence about high-level
terrorist targets."

Along with the "stick" of military threats, Obama offered a "carrot"
to the Pakistani regime, calling for the US Congress to authorize $1.5
billion per year for the next five years to build roads and social
infrastructure in the country. He described these funds as a "down
payment on our own future," while insisting that "Pakistan's
government must be a stronger partner in destroying these safe havens."

The essential continuity between the policies of Obama and Bush was
visually symbolized by the individuals who flanked Obama on the
platform as be made his statement. On one side was Robert Gates,
chosen by Obama to stay on as defense secretary after serving as
Bush's Pentagon chief and overseeing the military surge in Iraq, and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, against whom Obama ran in the 2008
Democratic primaries. At the time, Obama appealed to popular anti-war
sentiment against Clinton, criticizing her for her 2002 Senate vote
giving the Bush administration authorization to invade Iraq.

Obama also noted the presence of, and thanked several other holdovers
from the Bush administration, including Gen. David Petraeus, Bush's
commander in Iraq in 2007-2008, who, since fall 2008, has directed the
US Central Command and Gen. Karl Eikenberry, former corps commander in
Afghanistan who has been named by Obama as US ambassador to Kabul.

Obama stressed that the planned reduction of US troops in Iraq would
make it possible to expand the US military effort in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. (Obama has made a point of linking the two countries in all
of his statements on the war, in part to condition US public opinion
for an extension of military action to Pakistan). In fact, well before
the 2008 election, a policy of drawing down US troop levels in Iraq in
order to escalate the war in Central Asia had become the consensus
policy of the US military and political establishment, and had been
embraced by Bush. In any event, Obama has made clear that he intends
to keep tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq for at least several years.

Obama's Republican opponent in the 2008 election, Senator John McCain,
warmly praised Obama's announcement on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The justifications Obama gave for his policy were recycled wholesale
from those of the Bush administration. While he did not use the phrase
"war on terror," Obama based his escalation of the US war in Central
Asia on the same pretexts employed by Bush, citing the 9/11 attacks
and claiming that the expansion of US military violence and its
extension into Pakistan were necessary to protect the American people
against a new terrorist attack by Al Qaeda and other "extremists"
based in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Obama said the US "did not choose to fight" in Afghanistan and that
its goal was not "to control that country or dictate its future." He
asserted that the role of the region's terrorists in the September 11,
2001 attacks meant that they were a "common enemy" of the US,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Obama went so far as to assert that the
"greatest threat" to the future of Pakistan is Al Qaeda and its
"extremist allies."

Each and every one of these claims is a lie. Far from being a
reluctant and altruistic participant in the political life of
Afghanistan and Pakistan, the American ruling elite has pursued an
aggressive and ruthless policy in these unfortunate countries for over
30 years, in the pursuit of its own imperialist interests.

In 1979, the Carter administration worked to provoke a Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan, aiming to trap the USSR in a bloody, Vietnam-like
quagmire. That this was official US policy was revealed by Defense
Secretary Gates—who was on the National Security Council staff, then
director of the CIA's Strategic Evaluation Center at the time—in his
1996 book From the Shadows. Through Pakistan, the US aggressively
armed the anti-Soviet resistance, which was led by a class of local
warlords who funded their activities largely through the cultivation
and sale of opium. This led to an explosion of Afghanistan's narcotics
industry.

Far from being a "common enemy" of the US and Pakistani ruling elites,
the Taliban were among their main proxies in Afghanistan after the
1992 collapse of the Soviet-backed Afghan regime.

As the US now adopts an increasingly harsh line towards Pakistan, the
press is breaking its silence on this topic. The New York Times
recently wrote: "The ISI [Pakistani military intelligence] helped
create and nurture the Taliban movement in the 1990s to bring
stability to a nation that had been devastated by years of civil war
between rival warlords, and one Pakistani official explained that
Islamabad needed to use groups like the Taliban as ‘proxy forces to
preserve our interests.'"

The Times decided not to mention that the US backed these efforts at
the time, aiming to use the Taliban to unify and pacify Afghanistan.
Had the Taliban succeeded in this attempt, Washington and the US
energy firm Unocal hoped to run oil and natural gas pipelines from
Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan, India, and Indian Ocean
ports.

The real motive behind the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was the
drive for US hegemony in oil- and natural gas-rich Central Asia,
through which it would gain strategic advantage over its global
competitors.

Afghanistan and Pakistan stand at a nexus of pipeline and trade routes
between the Middle East, Russia, China and the Indian subcontinent,
and US domination of the countries would give it decisive influence
over developments in trade and strategic relations between many of
Eurasia's largest and fastest-growing economies. In particular, it
would cement the US' ability to mount a blockade of oil supplies for
China and India in the Indian Ocean.

Fundamental US aims have not changed since Washington's 2001 invasion
of Afghanistan and the subsequent extension of fighting into Pakistan.
The US ruling class' drive to assert dominance over its rivals will,
in fact, only increase as the world plunges into the most serious
economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The hundreds of thousands of people killed and the millions wounded
and displaced by the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan give the
lie to Obama's claim that terrorists are the most dangerous enemy of
the Pakistani and Afghan people. In fact, the greatest threat to the
Central Asian masses is the militarist clique in Washington that
remains in power, unaffected by the transition from Bush to Obama. As
for the American people, Obama and his handlers view its anti-war
sentiments and democratic instincts with nothing but contempt.

With the escalation of US military operations in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Obama is heading towards broader, far more devastating wars
that will ultimately involve major world powers.

The implications of this expanded war policy are incalculable.
Pakistan, which is being destabilized by US policy, is a nuclear-armed
country of 130 million people. A March 26 report by the Wall Street
Journal noted that US drones were now targeting "Pakistani Taliban"
leader Baitullah Mehsud, who is not involved in attacks on US and NATO
forces across the border in Afghanistan, but is considered by the
Pakistani regime to be a major threat, and that Washington is
considering widening its missile attacks to include the Pakistani
province of Baluchistan. Such attacks risk plunging Pakistan into
civil war, and ultimately a full-scale US invasion.

The decision to send more US troops to Afghanistan will not only
inflame the war in that country, but destabilize the broader region
and intensify tensions with other countries, in the first instance,
Russia. With the US' main supply lines to Afghanistan running through
regions of Pakistan that are being turned into war zones, Washington
will increasingly consider alternate supply routes, notably through
the Caucasus and former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Last August,
US competition with Russia for influence in the Caucasus saw the US
encourage Georgia to attack Russian monitors in South Ossetia.

China will also see mounting US military intervention in Pakistan as a
hostile policy. Pakistan is an important trading partner and strategic
ally of China against India. Escalating the war will also fuel
tensions between Washington and European countries which are under
increasing US pressure to contribute more troops to NATO operations in
Afghanistan, and whose populations overwhelmingly oppose these
deployments.

Obama's announcement of wider war in Central Asia underscores the
cynical and fraudulent character of his presidential campaign and the
fundamental agreement, whatever their tactical differences, between
the Democratic and Republican parties in support of the predatory aims
of US imperialism around the world. Having presented himself as the
agent of "change," Obama is now presiding over an expansion of
imperialist aggression that will have incalculable consequences.

Friday's announcement is the clearest demonstration of a basic
political fact: War cannot be opposed through the Democratic Party or
appeals to Congress, but only through the independent political
mobilization of the American and international working class.

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