US SECRETARY of State Clinton was on a special mission to Afghanistan on Wednesday, the day after she expressed her hope in Tripoli, that Colonel Gadaffi, who has refused to accept a US-NATO recolonisation of Libya, would soon be either captured or killed.
Her mission to Afghanistan, after ten years of war against the Taliban, was to pressure the Afghan puppet president Karzai, into continuing to seek talks with the Taliban, and to plead with the Taliban to agree to talks with the US and with Karzai, before she moved on to Pakistan to try to twist the arms of the Pakistani ruling class.
In Kabul, Clinton urged the Taliban to be part of a peaceful future in Afghanistan or ‘face continuing assault’.
The facts however show that, after ten years of a US–NATO assault, the Taliban are stronger than ever. The US has now given up the struggle to militarily defeat them and is offering them positions in an Afghan government if they stop fighting.
The Taliban however is not rushing into the arms of Clinton and Karzai.
In fact, the Afghan puppet regime’s ‘peace chief’ Rabbiani was, less than a month ago, killed by a Taliban assassin who saw him to ‘discuss peace’, but had a bomb in his turban which he exploded, killing Rabbiani.
This has not stopped the US from continuing to woo the Taliban, so keen is it to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan by 2014.
The Rabbiani disaster left Karzai saying that there was no way that the Taliban would talk to him or the US, and it would be easier to talk to the Pakistani government because of the role that the Pakistani secret service played in forming the Taliban in the first place.
After numerous US drone attacks inside its border with Afghanistan, in which a large number of Pakistani citizens have been killed, the Pakistani government is under very great popular pressure to break with the US and turn elsewhere, in the direction of Iran and China. It has been forced to declare that the US intervention to kill Osama bin Laden on its territory was an attack on Pakistan’s sovereignty, and constituted foreign aggression.
Pakistan’s inability to accept every murderous action by US imperialism led to the then US chief of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, stating to a US Senate hearing on September 22, that Pakistani intelligence was supporting the militant extremists in Afghanistan who were attacking US forces.
He said: ‘The Haqqani network, for one, acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.’
Mullen attacked Pakistani ‘grand strategy’ which he said was its use of militant groups like the Haqqanis as ‘proxies’ to increase Pakistani leverage in the region.
‘They may believe that by using these proxies they are hedging their bets, or redressing what they feel is an imbalance of regional power,’ he said.
He threatened that ‘Only a decision to break with this policy can pave the road to a positive future for Pakistan.’
Clinton has now arrived in Pakistan with CIA chief David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Martin Dempsey to make an attempt to resolve this debacle for US imperialism by bullying the Pakistani ruling class into submission.
She said Pakistan ‘must be part of the solution’ and ‘That means ridding their own country of terrorists who kill their own people and who cross the border to kill people in Afghanistan.’
The US is still planning to withdraw troops and hand over security to the Afghans by 2014.
She may well succeed in bullying the Pakistani ruling class for the moment, but the Pakistani masses will never be bullied. They will unite with the Afghan masses to drive US imperialism and its puppets out of the region, and in their place install revolutionary governments that will expropriate the bourgeoisie and the great landowners for the benefit of the working class and the poor.
