WITH the world’s attention focussed on the capitalist crisis, the US military have unleashed a series of massive attacks on the Afghan and Pakistani people.
Pakistani officials reported yesterday that a US drone has fired a missile in South Wazirstan, inside Pakistan, at a house inside the village of Sam, killing five people.
The target was a group of alleged Uzbek militants who were said to be fighting alongside the Taleban, by taking part in cross border raids into Afghanistan.
In the last three weeks dozens of missiles have been fired from US drones inside Pakistan.
Residents of South Wazirstan say that they are now used to seeing missile armed spy drones, controlled from the USA, circling over the area like deadly vultures.
Spy drones are still reported to be circling over the area of the missile strike on Sam village with local people fearing further attacks.
The US military says that the missile attacks are aimed at Taleban targets, but residents on the ground say that large numbers of women and children are being slaughtered in these attacks.
Pakistani government officials have condemned these attacks by their US ally.
The US intervention into Pakistan is the US administration’s response to the step-up of the activities of Taleban fighters inside Afghanistan, and the fact that their forces, and the troops of the other NATO countries, are being beaten.
Practically every day NATO soldiers are killed and wounded in savage engagements in which they are coming off worst.
Their only solution is to call up US airpower which dutifully arrives on the scene after the Taleban has retreated from the area and wins a ‘great victory’ by slaughtering numbers of the local women and children with bomb and missile attacks.
This is now the standard type of NATO operation, which, just as it did in Vietnam, strengthens the anti-imperialist forces and wins them many new reinforcements seeking revenge.
The UN special envoy in Afghanistan Kai Eide, said last week that heavily armed insurgents were now operating well beyond the strongholds of the Taleban insurgents in the south and east, and that Afghan puppet and foreign forces have lost Afghan support.
The US reply to these setbacks has been to convince themselves as they did in Vietnam, that the way to win the war was to attack the safe bases of the ‘enemy’, this time inside Pakistan.
Far from winning the war, this tactic will be the quickest way to lose it. In Vietnam it resulted in the US having to negotiate a humiliating withdrawal from South Vietnam.
Hot pursuit operations into Pakistan, or missile attacks on ‘Taleban targets’ in Pakistan will have the same result.
They will lead to a strengthening of the pro-Taleban forces inside Pakistan, the overthrow of the Pakistani government and tens of thousands more reinforcements joining the war inside Afghanistan.
Special envoy Eide states that the Taleban attacks in July and August inside Afghanistan have been at their highest level since 2002.
He noted an increase in ‘asymmetric attacks, some of them very sophisticated’ and to more, ‘and sometimes, deadly attacks against aid-related and humanitarian targets, including against NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and UN personnel’.
He adds: ‘We should not expect the same winter lull in the level of hostilities that we have experienced in past winters.’
Earlier this month, the UK’s commander in Afghanistan, Brig Mark Carleton-Smith, told a British newspaper on the basis of these experiences: ‘We’re not going to win this war.’
The Taleban have responded to these moods in the British army and inside the Afghan puppet government by stating that they are willing to guarantee the safe withdrawal from Afghanistan of all NATO forces. The UK should take hold of the Taleban offer with both hands.
If however, they refuse the offer, a humiliating defeat and surrender in Afghanistan will greatly weaken the British state, and thereby strengthen the struggle of the British workers for socialism. Of this there is no doubt.
