Escalating the “good war”

MILLIONS OF people voted for Barack Obama last November because they saw him as the antiwar candidate. But at the end of February, President Obama increased the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan with orders to deploy an additional 17,000 U.S. troops.

This will increase the number of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan by nearly 50 percent when the deployment begins in May. By midsummer, there will be some 55,000 U.S. troops there, alongside 32,000 non-U.S. NATO troops from Germany, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands.

The number of U.S. soldiers being sent to Afghanistan is just over half of the 30,000 that was requested by Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM).

McKiernan said that the 17,000 extra soldiers and Marines "will get us what we need" through the summer months and the Afghan elections now scheduled for August 20. But, as Gareth Porter of Inter Press Services points out, Obama will likely approve the additional 13,000 after the completion of an Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review in March.

"Obama's decision to approve just over half the full troop request for Afghanistan recalls a similar decision by President Lyndon B. Johnson to approve only part of the request for U.S. troop deployments in a parallel situation in the Vietnam War in April 1965 at a comparable stage of that war," Porter wrote. "Johnson reluctantly went along with the request for additional troops within weeks under pressure from both the field commander and the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

OBAMA'S ESCALATION in Afghanistan comes as little surprise. Fighting the "global war on terror" on its "central front"--Afghanistan--was a featured plank of Obama's foreign policy during the presidential campaign.

Then, Obama criticized the Iraq occupation for diverting "resources from the war in Afghanistan, making it harder for us to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and others involved in the 9/11 attacks," according to the Obama campaign Web site.

In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he tried to outdo the Republicans with this tough-on terror rhetoric. "McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the gates of hell--but he won't even go to the cave where he lives," Obama said.

Afghanistan is presented as the "good" war--one that has to be fought and won at all costs. But the American public isn't so enthusiastic, despite the corporate media's support for the "global war on terror" declared by George W. Bush. According to a BBC World News America/Harris poll released in January, only one-third of Americans support sending more troops to Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, sentiment is more decisively against the occupation. An ABC News/BBC/ARD German TV poll of Afghan public opinion released in early February reported that only one in six people said the U.S. and NATO should increase their troop levels. More than twice that number--44 percent--wanted fewer outside forces. This is a big swing in opinion since 2005, when the U.S. got an 83 percent favorable rating. Today, a majority of Afghans view the U.S. unfavorably.

The poll in Afghanistan also found that there was little confidence the new U.S. administration would bring positive change. One in five Afghans said they thought Obama would make things better for their country, but nearly as many said he'd make things worse.

The reason for these opinion poll numbers is that the presence of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan has only made the lives of ordinary Afghans more dangerous--and every day those troops stay, the situation gets worse.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported on February 17 that there were 2,118 civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2008--an increase of almost 40 percent over the year before. Of these casualties, 55 percent was attributed to anti-government forces, including the Taliban, and 39 percent to Afghan security and international military forces.

Drug production is flourishing. Afghanistan is the source of 90 percent of the world's illicit opium, according to the International Narcotics Control Board. Much of the drug trade is controlled by warlords allied with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, who was installed in office by the U.S. As a result, drug abuse inside the country has reached epidemic proportions, with at least 1 million people there currently addicted to heroin.

The scale of addiction is unsurprising, considering the grinding poverty of the country. According to the ABC News/BBC/ARD poll, 55 percent of Afghans have no electricity in their homes; 63 percent say they can't afford all, or even "some but not all," of the food they need; and 68 percent say they can't afford the fuel they need for cooking or heat.

"Day by day, we see the Karzai government failing. The Americans are also failing," one Kabul resident, Dastagir Arizad, told the McClatchy Newspapers. "People are not feeling safe. Their lives are not secure. Their daughters are not safe. Their land is not secure. The Karzai government is corrupt."

"The problems we are having are made by the Americans," Arizad said. "The Americans should review their policies."

And while the new Obama administration received praise for planning to close down the detainee prison camps at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, they have yet to announce any such plans for "the other Gitmo"--the U.S.-controlled military prison at Bagram Air Base near Kabul.

THERE APPEARS to be no end in sight, as Obama advisers themselves admit. "It's going to be a long, difficult struggle," Richard Holbrooke, the State Department's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said earlier this month at an international security conference in Munich. "In my view, it's going to be much tougher than Iraq."

While the Obama administration will likely try to include a humanitarian component to the Afghanistan war, in many ways, it's prepared to maintain the aggressive military stance of the Bush administration. The new administration made that clear the first week in office when it ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two Pakistani villages, targeting what it said were foreign fighters.

As Middle East expert Juan Cole pointed out:

Many of Obama's initiatives in his first few days in office--preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo--were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with 'President Bush' substituted for "President Obama."

For now, the Obama administration appears to be keeping its options open in Afghanistan and setting its sights very low. There is little high-minded talk about "liberation," "democracy" or even "nation-building."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned, "[I]f we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money, to be honest...[I]t seems to me that we need to keep our objectives realistic and limited in Afghanistan; otherwise, we will set ourselves up for failure." (Gates probably didn't know that Valhalla is a "hall of the slain" in Norse mythology--in which case this may be what he gets after all.)

Gen. McKiernan even told reporters that it was likely violence would increase. "There are areas where we're not at today that, when we do put additional security forces, I would expect to see a temporary time where the level of violence might go up until we transition into holding and setting conditions to build," he said.

The U.S. military buildup begs the question of what the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was really about. What was presented as an effort to go after Osama bin Laden and his allies as retaliation for the September 11 attacks and to "liberate" Afghanistan has turned into a permanent occupation of a strategic Central Asian crossroads.

If the U.S. hoped to win support from the people of Afghanistan by ousting the unpopular Taliban, it has achieved precisely the opposite. The area has become more unstable, and the occupation has given people in the region more reasons to hate the U.S. government.

As an Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission report concerning foreign troop activities in Kandahar Province pointed out, "The combination of abusive behavior and violent breaking and entry into civilians' homes in the middle of the night stokes almost as much anger and resentment toward pro-government forces as the more lethal air strikes."

Author Ann Jones made a similar point on the Asia Times Web site:

Going into Afghanistan, the Bush administration called for a political campaign to reconstruct the country and thereby establish the authority of a stable, democratic Afghan central government...But the vision of a reconstructed, peaceful, stable, democratically governed Afghanistan faded fast. Most Afghans now believe that it was nothing but a cover story for the Bush administration's real goal--to set up permanent bases in Afghanistan and occupy the country forever...

What's worse, there's no reason to expect that things will change significantly on President-elect Barack Obama's watch. During the election campaign, he called repeatedly for more troops for "the right war" in Afghanistan (while pledging to draw-down U.S. forces in Iraq), but he has yet to say a significant word about the reconstruction mission.

The "war on terror" is nothing more than a cover for spreading U.S. imperial power around the globe--a never-ending war that can go anywhere the U.S. chooses. It should be opposed, no matter what political party props it up.