AFGHANISTAN’S re-run election will be held on November 7th as scheduled, said the Afghan Electoral Commission yesterday. It is to have just one candidate, President Karzai, whose first-round election victory was declared to be null and void because of massive and widespread rigging.
President Hamid Karzai’s only challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, has withdrawn from the re-run, after he said that it was being rigged in the same way as the completely discredited first round.
The prospect is that Karzai’s masters, the US-UK imperialists, will step in and say that enough is enough as far as any democratic posturing is concerned.
They will decide that the re-run of a completely discredited democratic election is not worth the considerable military effort that it will require, and that the best they can do in this situation, is to ditch Karzai, who can hardly claim to be the legitimate elected president, and settle for an appointed national unity government made up of assorted warlords, drug runners and tribal chiefs. This may be broadened to include any ex-Taleban who can be bribed with gold coin to join it.
The Bush-Blair campaign to bring alleged western democratic values and various western ‘freedoms’ to Afghanistan has ended up as the laughing stock of the planet, with Obama and Brown settling for any sort of Afghan regime that can be cobbled together.
This regime will have no support at all from the Afghan people, and its emergence will testify that total defeat for the imperialist armies of occupation is now on the horizon.
Not content with sinking deeper and deeper into the Afghan quagmire, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been stomping around Pakistan, inspiring a national hatred and loathing for the US by treating its rulers and people as if they they were colonials, a part of the new American empire.
Clinton suggested that elements within the Pakistani government knew the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leaders but were refusing to act on the information.
She was told ‘You had one 9/11, and now we are having daily 9/11s in Pakistan,’ ever since the date that the US told the Pakistan government to attack Waziristan and the tribal areas.
In Islamabad, a journalist told her ‘Look, Madam Secretary, we are fighting a war that is imposed on us. It’s not our war. That was your war, and we are fighting that war.’
Pakistanis have been incensed by the CIA-operated drone strikes which have killed hundreds of residents of the tribal areas, with even Pakistani government and military leaders saying that these attacks are violations of Pakistan’s sovereignty.
Pakistanis are also angry that the $7.5-billion US ‘aid package to Pakistan’ stipulates just what the money must be spent on, to the point where the Pakistani government has less control over Pakistan than the US administration.
The just-resigned US civilian administrator of Zabur province in Afghanistan, Matthew P Hoh, wrote in his letter of resignation that ‘Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilisation and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons.
‘However, again, to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan.’
The US is now being driven along the road to disaster, the garrisoning of Pakistan is a project that will cost hundreds of thousands of lives and require the most savage domestic budget cuts ever seen in expenditure in the US and UK.
Faced with this disaster, workers in the UK must take action to support the Afghani and Pakistani people and demand that all UK troops leave Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at once.
