We licked you and the Russians, the first time around. Of
course, we had Osama helping us then. Hmmm. We still do!
RIVERS OF BLOOD - What the New York Times unwittingly reveals about the war in Afghanistan. CIVILIAN GENOCIDE RUN AMOK
We licked you and the Russians, the first time around. Of
course, we had Osama helping us then. Hmmm. We still do!
By Alex Lantier WSWS E ZINE
22 April 2009
Over last two weeks, the New York Times has
published a series of articles on conditions facing US soldiers fighting
in
Afghanistan.
In describing soldiers’ lives and calling attention
to the hellish conditions in Afghanistan, the Times articles reveal
considerably more than what one suspects their
authors set out to explain. For anyone reading them with a degree of
historical consciousness, they depict a colonial
war waged against an entire population, by US troops who see little
purpose behind the violence they are unleashing
on the Afghan population.
On April 20, the Times carried an article titled
“Pinned Down, a Sprint to Escape Taliban Zone.” Beginning with a
description of a US platoon ducking for cover
amid a Taliban ambush that claimed the life of one of its members, it
states, “Another pitched firefight in a ravine
in eastern Afghanistan had begun, shaped by factors that have made the
war
against the Taliban seem unending: grueling
terrain that favors ambushes and prevents American soldiers from massing.
Also, villages in collaboration with insurgents;
and experienced adversaries each fighting in concert with its [sic]
abilities and advantages.”
All this for a pipeline? Hell, ask for it, Pay for it
What's this INVASION thing you always do?
The response of the trapped American troops
is to call in air and artillery support, raining down bombs and mortar
shells
on Afghan positions above the riverbed where
US troops are trapped. The targets apparently include not only barren
mountainsides where insurgents are taking
cover, but villages as well. The Times adds, “soldiers with heavier machine
guns and automatic grenade launchers focused
on Afghan buildings in three villages—Donga, Laneyal, and
Darbart—from where the trapped platoon was
taking fire.”
Halfway through the article, the Times explains
that the local population is hostile because the US-backed Afghan
government threw them all out of work by banning
logging in the area. It notes that the “Taliban pay the best wages in the
valley now,” adding that the US forces have
taken over a sawmill as their base in the region.
The reader later learns that US forces are
using ammunition containing white phosphorus—a chemical weapon that burns
human flesh down to the bone—and that a Times
photographer is with the troops in the fighting. The article does not say
whether the Times has agreed to censor itself
in exchange for obtaining permission for its staff to accompany the troops
into battle.
After several Afghans are killed and the Afghans
withdraw, the soldiers search for and ultimately find the body of one of
their number, who has gone missing. The company
commander says, “There is nothing I can say or anybody else can say
that will bring Dewater back. But the best
thing we can do for him is to continue to do the type of stuff that you
guys did
the other day.”
The commander is apparently referring to an
incident described in a previous Times article. The April 17 piece, “Turning
Tables, US Troops Ambush Taliban With Swift
and Lethal Results,” explained, “The ambush, on Good Friday, has
become an emotional rallying point for soldiers
in Kunar Province, who have seen it as both a validation of their
equipment and training and a welcome bit of
score-settling in an area that in recent years has claimed more American
lives than any other.”
The bulk of the April 17 article consists of
a detailed account of how US soldiers “killed at least 13 insurgents, and
perhaps many more, with rifles, machine guns,
Claymore mines, hand grenades, and a knife.”
In the April 20 article, the Times explains
that village elders later “arrived at the outpost to say that the Americans
had
shot up a search party of local men who were
looking for a lost girl.” The US commander simply dismissed the elders’
claim as “one of the most ridiculous lies
he had ever heard.”
The Times repeatedly notes the population’s
hostility to the US occupation. In another article in this series, the
April
13th “In Afghanistan, Soldiers Bridge 2 Stages
of War,” reports, “Villagers have bluntly told the American military that
its presence is not wanted.... In one village,
the soldiers found an old woman carrying an assault rifle under her shawl;
in
another, they found a 12-year-old boy with
a rocket-propelled grenade.”
What emerges from the Times' accounts, whatever
its intentions, is a description of an imperialist occupation. The Times
takes for granted that local population's
hostility to the US occupation should be repressed, that its livelihood
can be
taken away at will, and that local inhabitants
can be killed without trial. As for American soldiers, their grief at the
death
of their comrades is apparently handled with
recommendations to get on with killing Afghans.
The Times' coverage comes shortly after President
Barack Obama—whose election was in part motivated by popular
opposition to war, due to his initial statements
against the Iraq war and the Bush administration—announced plans to
escalate US fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
On March 27 he announced plans to send at least 21,000 more US
troops to Afghanistan and to intensify US
attacks inside Pakistan.
The April 13 article makes clear that Obama’s
policy will entail stepping up the fighting detailed in his later articles.
The
Times writes, “New construction is visible
on a string of small American bases between Kabul and the Pakistani border.
The officers said the infrastructure will
house many of the 21,000 additional American soldiers due to arrive later
this
year and will serve as an on-ramp for fresh
combat forces to flow into the field and fill many current gaps.”
US forces will present Afghans with an ultimatum:
join a US-sponsored militia or face US attack. In an April 15 article
titled “In Recruiting an Afghan Militia, US
Faces a Test,” the Times notes, “The military is borrowing a page from
a
similar program that helped bring about the
recent calm to Iraq, where the Americans signed up more than 100,000
Iraqis, most of them Sunnis and many of them
insurgents, to keep the peace.”
In Afghanistan, US forces are bringing Afghan
village elders to meetings and telling them that “time is running out”
to
decide whether they will join a US-sponsored
militia. Those who fail to join the US will be treated as targets. An Afghan
working for the Americans told reticent village
elders, “If you don't take it, we are just going to associate you with
the
Taliban.”
The Times is well aware that this fighting
along the Afghan-Pakistani border regions will also spill over into Pakistan,
with
disastrous consequences for that country.
It writes, “Taliban militants are teaming up with local militant groups
to make
inroads in the Punjab, the province that is
home to more than half of Pakistanis, reinvigorating an alliance that Pakistani
and American authorities say poses a serious
risk to the stability of the country.... As American drone attacks disrupt
strongholds of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in
the tribal [border] areas, the insurgents are striking deeper into
Pakistan—both in retaliation and in search
of new havens.”
The Taliban also obtain support by appealing
to peasants’ hostility to big landowners, who make up a substantial section
of the Pakistani ruling class. The Taliban
have forced unpopular landlords to leave, taking over the rents paid by
the
peasantry and control of local mines. They
strike, the Times noted, “at any competing point of power: landlords and
elected leaders—who were usually the same
people—and an underpaid and unmotivated police force.”
In an unusual piece of class analysis that
seemed out of place in its pages, the Times added, “after independence
in
1947, Pakistan maintained a narrow landed
upper class that kept its vast holdings while its workers remained
subservient, the officials and analysts said.
Pakistani governments have since failed to provide land reform and even
the
most basic forms of education and health care.
Avenues to advancement for vast majority of rural poor do not exist.”
The Times’ readers could be pardoned for asking
why these issues are not raised more often in its pages. However, this
important admission raises another question:
what is it about the US that has allowed it to use as its main ally in
the Indian
subcontinent the state of Pakistan, which
maintains such an iniquitous class structure? In fact, the oppressiveness
of
Pakistani capitalism is closely bound up with
the aims the US bourgeoisie itself pursues in the region.
Obama's war in Afghanistan and Pakistan—in
direct continuity with the policies of Bush and his predecessors—defends
a regional order that has proved immensely
profitable for the American ruling class. US forces in Afghanistan and
violence in Pakistan block direct overland
access from China and India to the energy reserves of the Persian Gulf,
further
the US policy of isolating Iran and threaten
Russia to the north.
They thus prevent developments that would threaten
the dominant role that US military, energy and financial interests
play in Eurasia and the Middle East—and, one
might add, inside the US itself.
Such policies are not bound up with a growth
of prosperity or democracy. Rather, they entail the use of violence to
repress discontented populations and maintain
corrupt elites with whom the US bourgeoisie shares the spoils in the
region. These are the interests dictating
the bloodshed detailed in the pages of the Times.
But never forget that this is essentially a race war, a religious war,
another crusade
Not to regain the holy land, but to gain all the OIL UNDER IT.
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