By Yusuf Fernandez
June 27, 2010
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Few people got surprised when they knew that General Stanley McChrystal had been dismissed by the US Administration.
The alleged reason was remarks by McChrystal concerning President Obama and other civilian officials in an interview that was published in the magazine Rolling Stone, but there is another more powerful reasons for this fact. It is that the US army has failed to suppress the popular resistance in Afghanistan to the US dirty colonial-style war. The US invaded and occupied Afghanistan to serve its strategy of achieving an advantage over its European and Asian rivals by seizing control of Central Asian energy reserves and pipeline routes. However, there is clear dissatisfaction in the US Administration with the military situation in the country.
June has been already the deadliest month for NATO troops since the 2001 invasion. Ten soldiers died on June 22, six on 23 and 8 on 24. At this moment, 80 NATO soldiers had already died in the country that month in comparison with 38 of the same month of 2009. Now, no one doubts that 2010 will become the worst year for NATO soldiers since the start of the war. More than 1,100 American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan. In June, the war in Afghanistan surpassed the Vietnam conflict as the longest war in US history.
An example of the failure of the US strategy in Afghanistan was the offensive in Marjah launched last February. What was going to be a pivotal operation has now bogged down into daily firefights against insurgents, who retain the control of a large part of the region.
The US made a large effort to hold the city and to clear Taliban from the area. McChrystal deployed 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops, which means provide a ratio of one occupying soldier for every 2 members of the 35,000-inhabitant region, as analyst Gareth Porter has pointed out. Counterinsurgency doctrine normally calls for one soldier for every 50 people in the target area. “The fact that the US forces could not clear the Taliban from Marja despite such an unusually heavy concentration of troops is devastating evidence that the McChrystal strategy has failed,” Porter said.
According to the Washington Post, the real reason of US failure in Marjah is that the Afghan population is not cooperating with US and NATO forces. “When you go to protect people, the people have to want you to protect them,” said McChrystal in London during a NATO conference. He did not have to add that the population of Marjah does not want the protection of foreign troops. The report in the Post showed that in Afghanistan the insurgents are deeply embedded in the local population. They are sheltered and protected by the local residents, who regard the American troops with deep distrust and hostility. US forces continue to be regularly ambushed, while locals have largely shunned the various aid programs offered by the US occupying troops and Afghan government officials.
The decision announced earlier June to delay for at least three months the repeatedly-announced assault on Kandahar has also been widely seen as an embarrassing setback. The alleged reason of this postponement was again that the offensive does not have the support of the Kandahar population and local authorities. According to the Post, “the support from the population of Kandahar that the United States was counting on (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai to deliver has not materialized.”
US attacks on civilians have generated a wave of hatred against American army among ordinary Afghans and fuelling anti-American insurgency. Tens of thousands of Afghans have been killed by US and NATO forces. According to Afghan authorities, 170 civilians were killed between March and April this year, one-third higher than the same period in 2009. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, jailed or tortured in US prisons, such as infamous base of Bagram, which is seen by Afghan as a symbol of US continued occupation. At least two detainees have been murdered by US guards in the facility since 2001, while the International Committee of the Red Cross recently unveiled the existence of a secret prison on the base in which prisoners continue to be beaten, abused and subjected to sleep deprivation and other types of torture. However, US elites and some media -as The New York Times- are demanding even harsher and bloodier strategies in order to suppress growing Afghan opposition to their presence.
Recently, The New York Times published an article titled “Warriors Vexed by Rules For War”, which made the case for the US to brutally escalate its attacks on the Afghan population in order to mercilessly crush any opposition to the US occupation. The article criticized McChrystal´s strict orders to limit civilian casualties in order to avoid fuelling anti-US insurgence. “The rules have shifted risks from Afghan civilians to Western combatants… Young officers and enlisted soldiers and Marines…speak of ‘being handcuffed,” it said.
However, attacks on civilians have backfired. William Dalrymple, a New Statesman reporter, was told by an Afghan tribal elder, “Last month some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, 'Why do you hate us?' I replied, 'Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.” The American then turned to his friend and said, “If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?' In truth, all the Americans here know that their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this.”
The insurgence has spread to new areas, which had been seen as peaceful until recently. Taliban are operating now even in Kabul. On May 27, Taliban carried out a suicide attack on a American convoy in the Dar ul Aman quarter of the capital killing six US soldiers. The US base of Bagram was also attacked with grenades and machine-gun fire. Nine US soldiers were wounded and one US contractor died. On 22-23 May, there was a series of rocket, mortar and ground attacks on the Kandahar Airbase.
Nimroz, a remote province with a long border with Iran and Pakistan, had also been a quiet place in recent years. However, on May 5, nine insurgents disguised as police attacked the building of the provincial council in Zaranj, the capital, killing four people, including one member of the council. Following the assault and some death threats, all the members of the council fled to Kabul.
According to analysts, Taliban now control more than 70% of the countryside where they have set up a parallel administration, which collect taxes and dispense justice. According to a recent Pentagon report, the Karzai government controls only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.
A United Nations report has found that roadside bombings had nearly doubled in the first four months of 2010, compared to the same period last year. The Taliban is adapting and outsmarting the equipment designed to counter roadside bombs by designing new types of IEDs being capable of destroying US newest tactical vehicles that use mine rollers in order to trigger roadside bombs before the vehicles roll over them. One of these new IEDs destroyed a vehicle of this type in Marjah on May 15.
Karzai himself does not believe that the US and its NATO allies can win in Afghanistan and has made no secret of his preference for a negotiated settlement. Both the New York Times and the British Guardian newspaper have recently published articles quoting people close to Afghan recently-sacked intelligence director, Amrullah Saleh, as saying that Karzai has “lost confidence in the capability of the coalition” to defeat the Taliban. The Times article (June 12) said that Karzai would be seeking to save his regime and his own neck in the event of an American defeat or withdrawal by reaching some sort of deal with the Taliban, perhaps brokered by Pakistan. Karzai, for his part, has accused Saleh of plotting with the Americans and the British to fire the rockets at a jirga of tribal leaders -whom Karzai had convened to collect support for his peace plan- in order to wreck it.
In the United States, polls indicate that Americans and Europeans are becoming more and more skeptical about the prospects for success in Afghanistan. More than half of Americans believe that the war in Afghanistan is no longer worth fighting. A Washington Post/ABC poll released in June showed that 53% of respondents claimed that the war was “not worth fighting” - the highest percentage in three years. Perhaps even more embarrassing for the Obama administration is that the poll found that 39% of the public believe that the US is losing the war, just 3 percentage points less than the 42% who believe that the US is winning. In Britain, the second contributor to the military coalition, 72% of people support an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to recent polls.
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