THERE are currently more than 70,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan under Nato command. The Obama administration plans to send in an additional 21,000 troops.
12,000 American troops are being sent to Helmand province to try to prevent a situation – where the 8,000 strong British forces in the area are being fought to a standstill by the Taleban – developing into one where they are run out of Helmand, as they were run out of the city of Basra in Iraq.
Documents released by the Ministry of Defence show that there has already been a 73 per cent increase in Taleban attacks coupled with a 78 per cent increase in NATO coalition deaths over the last year.
The violence in Helmand is now three times greater than the next most combative province, latest official figures show. On average there are almost 12 insurgent attacks a day inside the province.
The US anti-insurgency generals Petraeus and McChrystal are now in charge of Obama’s war.
The central tenet of Obama’s war is that if the US is to be able to take over the entire central Asian region, then the massive civilian casualties that have typified the war in Iraq and Afghanistan up till now must be avoided or at least moderated, and the war must be spread into Pakistan.
The current tactic is that US-UK infantry forces patrol until they detect the presence of the Taleban. They then call up massive airpower which pulverises the entire area killing every living creature – men, women, children and animals – leaving a very impressive body count, to be reported to the army command and the politicians back home.
The current US military leaders have concluded that this slaughter of the innocents merely allows the Taleban to replace every dead fighter with ten more willing recruits, while alerting everybody else to the fact that the US-UK forces are mass murderers. It is counter-productive and self-defeating.
The commanders are now telling their troops that using just overwhelming air power is leading the way to the defeat of the US-UK armies.
The Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal now says, ‘… we are fighting for the population. That involves protecting them from the enemy and from unintended consequences of our operation.’
Echoing McChrystal, the head of US Central Command, Gen Petraeus, says there is a need for ‘being good partners and good neighbours and having enormous concerns about civilian casualties in everything we do.’
When asked just how long this war will last if mass murder from the air of entire Afghan communities is to be demoted from a strategy to just a tactic amongst others, McChrystal replies: ‘It will go on until we achieve the kind of progress we want to achieve. It won’t be short.’
They are preparing for a 30 years war, and not just in Afghanistan.
Another key discovery of the Obama administration and its generals is that the centre of the war is not in Afghanistan, it is in Pakistan. The presidential victory of Obama immediately led to an increase in US drone attacks on houses and areas of Pakistan near to the Afghan border.
One of the organisers of the war against Yugoslavia, Richard Holbrooke, has been brought back by Obama and has been sent into action inside Pakistan. The end result of this is the Pakistani army’s attack on the Swat region, in which almost the entire population supports the Taleban fighters.
So far, thousands have been killed and over two million people have been driven from their homes and have become internally displaced refugees living in camps.
As a result of the Obama tactic of spreading the war into Pakistan, the US and UK governments and their military have already lost the struggle for the hearts and minds of up to 200 million Pakistani people.
In the period ahead, the US and UK military will be forced to openly intervene in Pakistan to rescue the Pakistani army from its own people.
This war has already been lost! The British trade unions must at once call for all UK troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan and Pakistan. They must call mass demonstrations and political strikes to give their call the maximum possible power.
