The US War in Afghanistan
US massacre in eastern Afghanistan
No amount of lies or distortion from the American media can disguise
the fact that US forces are carrying out a colonial-style massacre in
the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Hundreds of Taliban and Al
Qaeda forces have been killed in five days of fighting, according to
American military officials, who make clear that they intend to see
the remainder exterminated.
There is nothing heroic or brave about the US-led onslaught. The most
sophisticated and horrific means of mass destruction are being thrown
against a small band of fighters wielding only the most rudimentary
weapons. The unequal contest is a sickening spectacle, a shameful
chapter in American history. The "battle" in the Paktia mountains
east of Gardez is an exercise in mass carnage.
The language used by the US military establishment provides an
insight into the character of the campaign. Major General Frank
Hagenbeck, commander of Operation Anaconda, told reporters, "In the
last 24 hours, we have killed lots of Al Qaeda and Taleban. I won't
give you precise numbers but we've got confirmed kills in the
hundreds."
He went on: "Conservatively speaking right now, I'm convinced from
the evidence I've seen that we've killed at least half of those enemy
forces.... As long as they want to send them here, we'll kill them
here. Should they go somewhere else, we'll go with our Afghan allies
and coalition forces and kill them wherever they go."
Only the most depraved social type savors and repeats the word "kill"
in this manner.
Villagers in the area where the fighting is taking place, even those
hostile to the former Taliban regime, are fearful that American bombs
are killing women and children, the families of the Al Qaeda and
Taliban forces, who came with the latter to the area in December.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of America's chief war
criminals, expressed an utter lack of interest in the fate of these
women and children. He told journalists March 4, "We have assumed
that where you find large numbers of Al Qaeda and Taliban, that there
may very well be noncombatants with them who are family members or
supporters of some kind." Rumsfeld commented that the civilians were
there "of their own free will, knowing who they're with and who
they're supporting and who they're encouraging and who they're
assisting."
The forces arrayed against one another in the mountains are entirely
mismatched. The estimated 500 to 800 Taliban and Al Qaeda troops are
armed with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns
and are running low on ammunition. On the other hand, as the
Washington Post noted, "US commanders have used the most devastating
conventional weapons in the US air arsenal to kill enemy troops,
including a 2,000-pound `thermobaric' bomb designed to blast the
caves where Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are believed to be hiding.
Two were used for the first time in a battle near Gardez."
Air Force B-52 and F-15E bombers and Navy carrier-based strike
aircraft, along with AC-130 gunships, were used in military strikes
this week. Hundreds of bombs have been dropped on Taliban positions
to "soften up" the enemy. Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopters have
also been used. Officials reported on Wednesday that the US military
has added more than a dozen Apache and AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters
since the fighting began.
The American-led force of several thousand includes soldiers from the
10th Mountain Division based in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and the
101st Airborne at Kandahar in the south of Afghanistan. Troops from
Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway are
participating in the effort, as are pro-US Afghan fighters, with
thousands more standing by.
Eight US and seven Afghan soldiers have died in the operation, with
several dozen more wounded, compared to hundreds of Taliban and Al
Qaeda troops. The model for this kind of slaughter is the campaigns
of the US military against the American Indians in the 1870s and
1880s. It was during those campaigns that General Philip Sheridan
popularized the infamous phrase, "The only good Indian is a dead
Indian."
The infinitely corrupt and servile American media is pretending that
the massacre near Gardez is a hard-fought contest reminiscent of the
battles of World War II. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, for example, in
an editorial, asserted: "This, in terms of an earlier war, is Berlin
in 1945. What then was house-to-house, room-to-room combat is now
boulder-to-boulder, cave-to-cave fighting. And in such last-ditch
warfare, good men will die with the bad."
This is self-deluded nonsense. The US army in the Second World War
faced a powerful European imperialist nation, armed to the teeth with
the most advanced weaponry of the day—not a rag-tag group of men,
with their wives and children, trapped in freezing caves in the
mountains in one of the most impoverished, backward countries on
earth.
A more apt comparison from the World War II era would be to the
invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini's fascist Italy. During the 1935-41
colonial war some 275,000 Ethiopian soldiers lost their lives; in
addition, hundreds of thousands of civilians starved to death, died
in concentration camps or were executed. By comparison, an estimated
15,000 Italian soldiers died.
The Bush administration and the media have seized on the loss of
eight American lives for their own cynical purposes. On the one hand,
the dead men are apotheosized and made into martyrs for a great
cause, as part of an ongoing effort to whip up enthusiasm for the war
within the American public. A Washington Post editorial, "Remember
the Fallen," comments that the deceased "all were willing to risk
that grim trip back in a flag-covered coffin to defend the United
States. The battle these men died in ... is essential to the Afghan
campaign. That campaign is supported by the overwhelming majority of
Americans and recognized as just by most of the nations of the world.
>From a political point of view, the American casualties must be
accepted as a necessary sacrifice; President Bush has frequently said
that they will be inescapable if the war is to be won."
The tragic truth is that these men's lives—and there will be more to
come—were wasted. They didn't die defending "the United States," but
the interests of the American ruling elite, the oil companies, the
defense contractors and all the transnational corporations for whom
George W. Bush serves as a political figurehead.
While encouraging popular mourning and wrath over the killed US
soldiers, the more forthright commentators can barely conceal their
glee over the deaths. In the view of the American establishment, the
only means by which the "Vietnam syndrome" (i.e., the resistance of
large sections of the public to foreign military adventures in which
American youth are sacrificed to the US war machine) can be overcome
is to incur casualties in the current conflict. The population has to
be "blooded," made used to the idea that its sons and daughters are
going to die in combat.
This is the theme of a bloodcurdling Wall Street Journal commentary
by Ralph Peters, "a retired military officer," entitled, "In War,
Soldiers Die." Peters writes: "Combat deaths indicate that we are
serious about destroying the enemy, that we are willing to do
whatever it takes. I would be far more distrustful of a campaign
without casualties."
He goes on, in reference to the Afghan campaign, "Our military,
admittedly still suffering a residual infection from the cowardice of
the Clinton years, moved timidly at first. Then the generals and
admirals seem to have gotten the message that our national leadership
was serious this time. The lights went on, and they were green
ones.... There likely will be more American casualties. Perhaps many
more. We may see some American elements ambushed and even wiped out.
That's war, folks."
The United States has the overwhelming military advantage in the
current fighting. The outcome of the conflict near Gardez has never
been seriously in doubt. Hundreds more men, women and children will
be killed over the next several days by US bombs and guns and the
guns and bombs of their local agents and allies. Thousands have
already died in the pursuit of American geopolitical interests in the
region.
However, the military side, contrary to the fantasies of Cheney,
Rumsfeld and company, is only one part of the equation, and a
subordinate part. The political destabilization inevitably brought
about by reckless American action will have the most far-reaching
consequences, well beyond anything imagined by the ignorant and
shortsighted policymakers in Washington.
The US campaign in Afghanistan is a brutal, criminal enterprise. In
the future, the American political and military leadership will be
regarded with the same hatred and disgust that the overwhelming
majority of the world's population today feels for the Indian killers
of the nineteenth century, the Italian generals in Ethiopia in the
1930s or, for that matter, the German high command on the eastern
front in World War II.
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