Rupen Savoulian
Afghanistan faces its worst military crisis since the fall of the Taliban in October 2001. There has been a surge of fighting particularly, but not only, in the southern provinces. The US-sponsored government of President Hamid Karzai controls only the capital of Kabul and its districts. Its authority does not extend to the rest of the country, even though October this year will mark five years since the US invasion.
At the beginning of July US-led military forces launched a major operation aimed at crushing opposition in four provinces in southern Afghanistan, ahead of a NATO takeover in the region in August. Around 11,000 troops from the US, Britain, Canada and Afghanistan, backed by warplanes, engaged in the biggest offensive since the 2001 invasion.
"Operation Mountain Thrust" has claimed hundreds of Afghan lives since major operations began on June 15. Major General Benjamin Freakley, the US operational commander in Afghanistan, told Associated Press on June 14 that troops would attack "Taliban enemy sanctuary or safe haven areas" in Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan provinces.
The operation was launched in response to a rising tide of attacks on US and allied forces, including roadside bombs and suicide attacks, since the beginning of the year. Outside of the main cities and towns in the tribal areas of the south and east, anti-occupation militias operate freely. Some villages are under Taliban control.
While Washington has downplayed the scale of the Taliban insurgency, dismissing the insurgents as "remnants", it is clear that it has been escalating.
The Karzai government has done nothing to alleviate the deteriorating social and economic conditions of ordinary people. In May this year, Afghans protested against the presence of US troops.
The mass protest was sparked when a US military cargo truck crashed into cars in a traffic jam, killing one person. An angry crowd gathered around the accident scene and US troops supported by Afghan police opened fire. According to media reports, at least four people were killed.
News of the incident spread rapidly through Kabul, bringing crowds of thousands of young men and students into the streets chanting "Death to America", "Down with Karzai" and "Down with Bush". At least 20 people were reported killed in clashes between demonstrators, US troops and Afghan security forces.
Some demonstrators were shot dead when the crowds attempted to march on the presidential palace and the US embassy compound and were turned back by gunfire. Television news footage showed demonstrators scrambling for cover amid the sound of gunfire as US military vehicles sped past them in the streets. Some of the protesters were reportedly armed and exchanged fire with foreign troops and Afghan security forces. The vast majority, however, were unarmed civilians.
The protesters turned their rage on other targets, setting dozens of police posts on fire and attacking foreign aid organisations, the UN headquarters, offices of multinational companies and a recently opened luxury hotel that accommodates foreign guests. The crowd attempted to storm the hotel, but was turned back by gunfire from inside.
The demonstrations erupted quickly not only because of the presence of US troops, but also due to growing unrest over the repressive character of the US occupation. The May riot was larger in scale than similar demonstrations last year when it was revealed that US troops in Guantanamo Bay prison camp had desecrated the Koran.
In February this year, demonstrations broke out in response to the publications of the racist Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed.
The attacks on foreign businesses, aid agencies and UN buildings are not merely a matter of anti-foreign sentiment. Large numbers of Afghans are bitterly angry over the failure of US-led "aid" and "reconstruction" efforts to make any discernable improvement to the conditions of life for the masses of working and poor people.
Over 90% of the Karzai regime's budget is funded by foreign aid; much of this money flows into the bank accounts of government officials and contractors. The official unemployment rate remains at over 35%. Only 20% of the population has access to clean water, and barely 6% to electricity. Social discontent only feeds popular anger against the US occupation.
The main economic activity that many Afghans resort to is the cultivation of opium poppies. Afghan opium accounts for the majority of the world's heroin production and distribution.
Afghanistan's social indices remain among the worst in the world. Life expectancy is just 44.5 years and one fifth of children die before reaching the age of five. Around 72,000 new cases of tuberculosis are reported every year. Epidemics are frequent, including measles, malaria, meningitis and haemorrhagic fever. The World Health Organisation recently announced that an unknown water-borne disease, possibly cholera, had broken out in Kabul with more than 3000 cases reported.
The World Food Program estimates that at least 6.5 million of the country's population of 21-26 million are dependent on food aid for survival.
It is little wonder that, nearly five years after the US-led intervention, Afghans blame Washington for creating this disastrous state of affairs and some are prepared to take up arms against the occupation.
The May demonstrations exposed the intensity and breadth of popular opposition to the occupation of Afghanistan and the fragility of the hold on the country by Washington and the Karzai puppet regime. There are regular reports of atrocities by US troops in Afghanistan, on the same scale as those in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
In the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, US warplanes have strafed villages, bombing civilians indiscriminately. After US planes bombed the area in May, Afghan security forces sealed it off to prevent ambulances and medical staff from entering the area.
Such was the carnage and subsequent popular outrage that even Karzai felt compelled to call for a military investigation into the air strike.
In 2004, the Afghan government performed the charade of "democratic elections", which were predictably hailed by US President George Bush and Australian Prime Minster John Howard as a great "victory". As is the case in Iraq, the Bush administration has declared that "the enemies of democracy" are responsible for the escalation of armed opposition in Afghanistan. These claims are ridiculous; with the cooperation of the UN Security Council, Washington manipulated the constitutional and electoral processes to ensure that political power was concentrated in the hands of its loyal puppet, Karzai.
Under the constitution, which was rubber-stamped by an undemocratic loya jirga (tribal assembly), the national assembly has limited control over the president and his appointed ministers.
Karzai, with the support of the US, deliberately undercut political parties. The electoral system was set up to reward candidates based on ethnic and tribal loyalties. Rather than being based on political parties that unite various ethnic groups, the electoral process facilitated divisions such that the national assembly is now fragmented along ethnic and sectarian lines.
The main factor in understanding the twists and turns of the US regime's operations in Afghanistan is not a "war on terror" but rather how it seeks to most effectively exploit the new commercial opportunities that opened up in Central Asia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Throughout the last decade, the US has vied with Russia, China, the European powers and Japan for political influence in this key strategic region and for the right to exploit the world's largest untapped reserves of oil and gas in the newly formed Central Asian republics — Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
There are enormous potential profits from exploiting the oil and natural gas reserves of Central Asia. However, the crucial problem is overland distribution: The region is landlocked, so oil multinationals need a network of pipelines and agreements with Central Asian countries to transport their resources.
For the US ruling class, the goal is to exclude Russia, Europe, and Japan from the Central Asian region, and install regimes that are friendly to US interests. Washington could exert political and economic influence over those countries and establish commercial operations.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s successive US administrations spent billions of dollars funding the jihad by mujaheddin fighters against the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul in order to undermine the Soviet Union. The US actively courted the Taliban in the 1990s, turning a blind eye to the extremist group's fundamentalism and regressive social policies.
From Green Left Weekly, July 19, 2006.
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