WRITTEN BY HAMMAD RAZA
NOVEMBER, 2009

America and its allies seem to have run into the same quagmire in Afghanistan as did the Soviets and the British before them. Would it be advisable to withdraw? The US forces invaded Afghanistan in the hope that it would be a cake-walk, but now harsh realities are dawning for the White House and the Pentagon.

In the wake of 9/11, the US garnered unanimous international support for its invasion and destruction of Afghanistan. It concocted a ‘just war' theory to maintain its moral standing over the globe as the imperial powers have always relied on multiple fronts - cultural, military, economic and political - to buttress their hegemony and domination. In Afghanistan, the US unleashed its military might to subjugate what the revolutionary scholar, Eqbal Ahmad, has called the insurrectional culture of Afghanistan and re-configure its power structure to maintain regional hegemony by asserting US military presence in the region.

In this age of political economy, the concept of power has changed dramatically. Power is a reflection of forces of production and technology available for economic growth. The U.S., however, relied totally on a primitive mode of warfare in Afghanistan, forgetting that in tribal states like Afghanistan, foreign occupation is always fought valiantly. The British Empire tried to the hilt to conquer Afghanistan, but failed. The ‘Vietnam Syndrome' is coming back home to rule the roost.

The situation is bleak for America: victory is nowhere in sight in Afghanistan, international opinion is divided, soldiers' vitality has fizzled out, the death toll of coalition forces is on the rise, the Taliban have re-emerged and the theatre of war is expanding into Pakistan. As Washington's paralysis deepens, Afghanistan slips further into chaos. The US invaded Afghanistan without a clear understanding of its goals and after eight years remains as torn as ever over defining them. It was hoped that the incoming Obama administration and its new Af-Pak strategy would finally end the drift, but that hope is fading fast as there is no tangible shift visible in Obama's new Af-Pak policy.

Even the erstwhile loyalists of the American empire have changed tack. Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul has published an assessment of the crisis. Though ignored by the White House, since he has challenged most of the assumptions on which the war was based, Fuller says Obama was ‘pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush' and that military force would not win the day. He also explains that the Taliban are all ethnic Pashtuns, who ‘are among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalised and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader' and ‘in the end probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist'. ‘It is a fantasy,' he says, ‘to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.'

As war in Afghanistan increases in intensity, powerful groups within the US administration are found opposing the very idea of sending in more troops and are thus creating a binary formation in policy-making. That is important since there are a number of powerful figures in Congress who have let it known that they would not be in favour of increasing troop strength in Afghanistan. It was awkward for the president that the opposition came from the members of his own party - people whose support he badly needed.

The McChrystal plan is predicated on the counter-insurgency operation in Iraq implemented when Bush's presidency was in its twilight. The strategy was four-pronged. Additional troops were to be sent to Iraq to secure some of the critical areas in the country, in particular its large cities. A large number of Iraqis were to be trained to man the country's army and the police force. Alliances were to be made with the insurgents who were prepared to give up their weapons and work with the government and the Americans. And, serious development efforts were to be put in place to improve the living conditions of the citizenry.

Many observers have predicted that US hegemony (or in post-cold-war terminology, "uni-polarity") is dissolving. Indeed, this a key theme in each decade, an accompanying chorus to, for example, the Soviet Union's space programme in the 1950s; the "third-world" revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s; and the emergence of Japan, Europe and China as major economic powers in the 1980s-2000s. In order to maintain its hegemony, the US has brazenly shown unilateralism in the global political arena: it has softened its military muscle everywhere in the region where its interests are threatened by the ‘virus' of independence from American shackles.

The real reason for the war in Afghanistan is very easy to discern: it was essentially a crude war of revenge to hit back immediately after the September 11 attacks - for political leaders to show the American population that "we are busy defending you." It had no other major purpose to it other than an eye for an eye.

Another aim of the war, as Bush spelled out, was to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." Those were his exact words, which we shouldn't forget. Apart from that, there were no war aims. The higher objective, of course, was to put US and NATO boots on the ground - and, for all practical purposes, occupy the country. The Northern Alliance wasn't going to resist and nor were the Iranians, who were very strong in Western Afghanistan. Iranian leaders were hostile to the Taliban for their own opportunistic reasons, so they clambered onto the imperial bandwagon and said, "Fine, we can't get rid of these guys, but if the Americans can, we'll see how the situation develops."

Then there was the Pakistani military regime, without which the Taliban would never have been in power and which had been backing up the Taliban logistically, militarily and in every other way. When the military regime in Pakistan came to know that the US was going to use its bases to launch military operations inside Afghanistan, it changed its position vis-à-vis. the Taliban.

The US and its allied forces, however, could do not extend their presence beyond Kabul and Kandahar. Elsewhere, especially in the west of the country, pro-Iranian forces are in control, while in the North, the former Soviet republics, still heavily under Moscow's influence, are dominant.

What people underestimate is that imperial occupations under neo-liberalism reflect the priorities of the new capitalist order, where they privatize everything in their own countries. So what happened was that money did pour into Afghanistan as well and was used by Hamid Karzai and his cronies to bolster the elite classes - the drugs and arms barons.
The majority of Afghans still remain in the hinterlands of the poverty-ridden areas. For them change from the Taliban regime to foreign occupation makes no difference. They tend to align with the Taliban though and add to the ranks of the resistance forces inside Afghanistan.

To sum up, the situation in Afghanistan is in a total mess. The US can never win its war there. More troops lead to more Afghan deaths - a situation that is totally counter-productive. An exit strategy that involves Iran, Russia and China as well as Pakistan and a national coalition in Afghanistan is the only medium-term solution. Washington has been negotiating privately with the Pashtun resistance and the neo-Taliban have made it clear that once a NATO withdrawal began they would work with other groups and participate in a national government.

Meanwhile the war continues and soldiers continue to die on both sides. All one can offer the imperial war-mongers is Kipling's advice to British soldiers battling the Pashtuns in the late 19th century:
‘When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come to cut out what remains,
Just roll to your rifle, and blow out your brains.
And go to your God like a soldier.'

The US army can take a leaf out from Britain's and Russia's book and leave this beleaguered country to its fate, or else, consign the whole region to extremism and instability.

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