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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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10 October 2010 By Rick Rozoff
On October 4 President Barack Obama and what the
press characterized as his war council conducted a
30-minute video conference with Obama’s Afghan
opposite number, President Hamid Karzai, to discuss “a
number of topics, including the strategic vision for
long term US-Afghan relations, the recent Afghan
parliamentary elections, and regional relations.”
A statement issued by the White House later in the
day added that “The two leaders agreed that they
should continue routine engagements to refine a common
vision and to align our efforts to support President
Karzai’s goal of completing transition to Afghan lead
security responsibility by 2014.” [1]
The conference also included Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in
Washington and commander of all U.S. and North
Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan
General David Petraeus and American ambassador to
Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry from Kabul.
October 7 will mark the advent of the tenth year of
the war waged by Washington in South Asia, the longest
continuous combat operations in U.S. history. By
invoking its Article 5 collective military assistance
clause on September 12, 2001, NATO also joined the war
effort and officially took over the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in August of 2003.
There are now at least 152,000 foreign troops in
Afghanistan, 120,000 under NATO command, and according
to several recent statements by American and NATO
officials most if not all them of them will remain
there beyond the 2011 withdrawal date announced by the
American administration last year.
If troops from all the major Western military
powers in theater remain beyond New Year’s Eve of
2014, they will be engaged in the fifteenth calendar
year of the Pentagon’s and NATO’s war in Afghanistan
and neighboring Pakistan. The conflict has also
allowed the expansion of American and Alliance
military bases into Central Asia – Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – and the elaboration of
networks for the transit of troops, military equipment
and supplies and for combat training and bombing runs
from Estonia and Latvia on the Baltic Sea to Georgia
on the Black Sea and Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan on
the Caspian Sea as well as in several other nations
from Eastern Europe to the so-called Broader Middle
East including Pakistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Diego
Garcia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Kazakhstan.
The fruitless pursuit of the ever more elusive
Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar – as such
remains the official rationale of the U.S. and the 50
military partners under NATO’s umbrella in the Afghan
war zone – has not registered any progress in nine
years, though thousands of Afghans and Pakistanis who
had no contact with either of the evasive fugitives
have been killed in overnight raids, checkpoint
shootings, bombing runs and drone missile strikes.
Cluster bomb fragments and depleted uranium residue
will guarantee more deaths into the indefinite future.
Also on October 4, President Obama handed over his
administration’s latest classified report on the war
in Afghanistan to Congress, in which he wrote: “We are
continuing to implement the policy as described in
December and do not believe further adjustments are
required at this time.” [2] He was referring to the
decision to deploy an additional 30,000 U.S. troops,
which has been accompanied by a dramatic escalation of
lethal drone attacks inside Pakistan.
U.S. and NATO troop strength in Afghanistan has
recently passed the 150,000 mark. Two years ago there
were an estimated 34,000 U.S. troops and approximately
28,000 from other NATO nations in the country. The
increase since 2008 is almost 250 percent. Recently
the number of nations supplying troops for NATO’s ISAF
mission has also grown, with commitments secured from
nations like Armenia, Georgia, Colombia, Mongolia,
Malaysia, South Korea (a second time), Montenegro and
Tonga. General Roger Brady, outgoing commander of U.S.
Air Forces in Europe, recently stated that 39 European
nations have troops assigned to NATO in Afghanistan.
The amount of countries supplying military contingents
for and those that have lost troops in one nation are
unprecedented.
Two major milestones were reached in the last full
month of the ninth year of the war on both sides of
the Durand Line that separates Afghanistan and
Pakistan. With 59 NATO soldiers killed in September,
the combined U.S. and NATO death toll this year in
Afghanistan exceeded the previous annual high of 2009,
521. As of October 4, 561 U.S. and NATO soldiers have
died this year. The three months before last were the
deadliest for foreign forces in the nine-year war: 103
in June, 88 in July and 79 in August.
U.S. and NATO deaths for 2009 and so far this year
account for over half of the total of 2,129 killed
since the beginning of the war: 1,082. The war dead
include troops from 27 nations: 20 of 28 NATO member
states and seven partner nations – Australia, Finland,
Georgia, Jordan, New Zealand, South Korea and Sweden.
On the other side of the Khyber Pass, last month
the U.S. launched the most deadly drone missile
attacks inside Pakistan since they began in 2004. At
least 22 unmanned aerial vehicle strikes in the
nation’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas caused a
record amount of deaths, of alleged insurgents and
civilians alike.
In May U.S. Marine Corps Brigadier General Glenn
Walters announced that military drones were being
diverted from Africa Command, Pacific Command and
Southern Command for Central Command, which covers the
Middle East, Central Asia and Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Walters also said that the Pentagon’s drone
fleet had grown from 200 in 2001 to 6,500 at the
beginning of this year and will expand to 8,000 by
2012, an increase of twenty times in slightly over a
decade.
This March legal advisor to the State Department
Harold Koh justified the use of missile-wielding
drones for killing human targets in Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen as being
“consistent with [the nation's] inherent right to
self-defense under…international law.”
The Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review of
earlier this year confirmed that “The pilotless drones
used for surveillance and attack missions in
Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with a goal
of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and
expansion of Predator and Reaper drone flights through
2013.”
In May of 2009 Central Intelligence Agency Director
Leon Panetta told a think tank audience in Los Angeles
that deadly drones strikes were “the only game in town
in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al
Qaeda leadership,” although the overwhelming majority
of attacks have not been directed against al-Qaeda
targets, leaders or otherwise.
In the midst of the ongoing carnage in Pakistan, on
September 29 Panetta was in the country and said “the
CIA was achieving 100 percent results through the
drone attacks.”
Articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington
Post and Britain’s Sunday Telegraph last weekend
documented that the Pentagon has transferred Predator
and Reaper drones used in Afghanistan to the CIA to
mount escalating attacks in Pakistan. As the
Washington Post described the policy, “The CIA is
using an arsenal of armed drones and other equipment
provided by the U.S. military to secretly escalate its
operations in Pakistan,” adding that the White House
is in full support of the practice and that Defense
Secretary Gates and CIA Director Panetta had “worked
closely together to expand the effort.”
In the words of a Brookings Institution analyst,
“It’s moving from using [drones] as a counterterrorism
platform to an almost counterinsurgency platform,” in
line with the general policy implemented by former and
current U.S. and NATO top commanders Generals Stanley
McChrystal and David Petraeus.
The Washington Post also disclosed that massive
intensification of drone warfare “represents a
significant evolution of an already controversial
targeted killing program run by the CIA” which “in the
past month…has been delivering what amounts to a
cross-border bombing campaign in coordination with
conventional military operations a few miles away.”
The newspaper also pointed out that the “CIA
operations come at a time when the U.S. military has
opened a major phase of operations in and around
Kandahar.” [3]
Regarding the last subject, what had been touted as
the decisive battle for Afghanistan, an all-out
assault by U.S., NATO and Afghan National Army forces
against Kandahar in August, never materialized.
Instead, American and NATO special forces are
conducting counterinsurgency operations in the
province and on the periphery of its capital. As many
as 8,000 Afghan civilians have fled NATO operations in
the countryside to the capital in recent days.
The integrated strategy the U.S. and NATO are
pursuing is threefold: Counterinsurgency operations,
including targeted assassinations, in Afghanistan’s
eastern and southern provinces bordering Pakistan; an
unprecedented escalation of drone missile strikes in
northwestern Pakistan; and attacks by helicopter
gunships in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA) in combination with drone strikes.
NATO helicopter gunships launched deadly
back-to-back attacks in Pakistan on September 25, 26
and 27. On September 30 NATO helicopters again crossed
the border into Pakistan and killed three soldiers of
the Frontier Corps in the Kurram Agency of FATA. A
Pakistani security official stated that the soldiers
had fired warning shots to alert the NATO helicopters
that they had crossed into Pakistani territory, but
that NATO forces fired two missiles at their post and
shelled the area for 25 minutes.
The same government official said: “It was an
unprovoked attack….NATO helicopters entered our
airspace and targeted a paramilitary checkpost,
killing three soldiers and wounding three others,” and
that security forces had taken “suitable measures to
respond to such acts of aggression, which will be
known to people very soon.” [4]
Attacks continued into the new month, with three
U.S. drone strikes in North Waziristan on October 2
killing 18 people and wounding what the local press
reported as scores. Two days later another missile
strike killed four and wounded several others in the
same agency. “Officials say the house [destroyed in
the attack] belonged to a local resident. The death
toll is expected to rise as some of the injured are
reportedly in critical condition.” [5]
By the same day NATO had lost 12 soldiers in
fighting this month.
The reaction in Pakistan was immediate and
demonstrative. Even before NATO killed three Pakistani
soldiers the provincial assembly of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
(formerly the North-West Frontier Province)
unanimously condemned NATO attacks and U.S. drone
strikes inside Pakistan, with ruling and opposition
parties uniting to table a joint resolution which was
“read out by all the leaders one by one” and which
“criticised attacks of the NATO forces, terming the US
drone attacks direct attacks on Pakistan’s
sovereignty, and demanded of the Federal Government to
take solid steps to stop such attacks in future.” [6]
On September 29 a general strike was staged in
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with the province’s governor
warning that the increasing incursions by U.S. and
NATO forces represent “an attack on Pakistan’s
sovereignty.” [7]
The next day the Pakistani government halted NATO
supply trucks and oil tankers from entering
Afghanistan, which policy remains in force with 160
vehicles stopped near the border on October 5.
On October 1 at least 27 NATO oil tankers were
attacked and destroyed in Pakistan’s southern province
of Sindh, which is on the Arabian Sea and doesn’t
border Afghanistan. Later in the day another attack
was staged in the province of Balochistan in which two
NATO supply trucks were targeted by rocket fire and
two people were killed.
Two days later 28 NATO oil tankers were attacked
and 12 people killed in Rawalpindi in Punjab province
near the nation’s capital.
An estimated 70 percent of NATO supplies for the
war in Afghanistan, including 40 percent of its fuel,
are shipped overland through Pakistan.
Reports are currently circulating in the Swat
district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (where a
Pakistani military offensive displaced over 3 million
civilians last year) that the U.S. and NATO plan to
move into the Saidu Sharif Airport on the pretext of
building a warehouse to store relief goods for victims
of this summer’s floods. In the words of a local
official, “We have strong reservations over the role
of the US as its policies have brought instability in
the region and triggered violence.” [8]
Not only are American and NATO military forces not
leaving Afghanistan in the foreseeable future, they
are expanding their nine-year-old war into Pakistan.
1) Agence France-Presse, October 4, 2010
2) Ibid
3) Washington Post, October 3, 2010
4) Daily Times, October 1, 2010
5) Press TV, October 4, 2010
6) The Nation, September 29, 2010
7) Xinhua News Agency, October 1, 2010
8) Asian News International, October 5, 2010
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