By Roger Annis, Jan 4, 2015
The following is adapted from several postings to the new website ‘The New Cold War, Ukraine and beyond‘.
The Conservative government and Liberal Party opposition in Ottawa would very much like Canadians to forget about Canada’s more than ten-year participation in the U.S. and NATO war in Afghanistan. That’s because the U.S. and NATO-created war in that country has been a disaster on every count–for the Afghan people, for the citizens of the warmaking countries who paid taxes to fund the warmaking rampage, for the citizens of the world whose dignity and individual freedoms were degraded by the war, and for the NATO-country soldiers who volunteered to serve there out of malice or naivete.
NATO’s enthusiasm for sanctions against Russia and war in eastern Ukraine is threatening to drag eastern Europe into the same kind of scenario of permanent war that now marks the Middle East and Afghanistan-Pakistan. So it is important to analyze the wreckage that NATO leaves behind in Afghanistan in order to better alert the world to what the imperialist military alliance has in store in eastern Europe. Enclosed below are links to several, recently published essays on the subject.
The Afghan intervention that began in 2001 was endorsed by the UN Security Council and was nominally a NATO-led operation. It was called the ‘International Security Assistance Force’ (ISAF). The driving force behind ISAF was, of course, the United States government and armed forces.
As of Jan 1, 2015, ISAF has been repurposed into a NATO operation called ‘Resolute Support’. It numbers some 12,500 soldiers. The exact form and numbers of Canadian soldiers participating in Resolute Support is hard to discren. Canada claimed in March 2014 that its military intervention in Afghanistan was over, but it continues to fund and supply soldiers to Resolute Support in the form of ‘training’ of the Afghan police and army. As 2014 came to a close, we learned the grim news that the Canadian et al-trained Afghan army attacked a wedding party on Dec. 31, killing at least 28 people.
A two-round presidential election took place in Afghanistan in April and June of this year. It took months of ballot counting and legal disputes before the winner was declared: Ashraf Ghani. He is a graduate of the American University of Beirut and of Columbia University in New York. He is a former employee of the World Bank and served as finance minister of Afghanistan from 2002-2004. Canadian Journalist Scott Taylor has a dim assessment of that less than democratic exercise.
Fittingly, the ending of the ISAF mission occurred just a few weeks after the release by a commission of the U.S. Senate of some (not all) details of the torture regime that the U.S. and its allies put into place since 2001 to accompany their warmaking in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Thanks to the earlier work and sacrifices of U.S. citizen and former intelligence officer Edward Snowden and the courageous journalists and filmmakers who have worked to tell his story, the world has come to learn of the massive, U.S.-led international spying regime that is another product of the state of permament war. The U.S. would like to place Snowden in jail and throw away the key, but he has won political asylum in Russia.
Associated Press has published a story on Dec. 29 reporting the appalling, winter conditions of families who have been forced by renewed military conflict in Afghan provinces to flee to Kabul in the vain hope of finding refuge. The deputy head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitairian Affairs says there is no money to help people, not even for blankets.
Here are two, hard-hitting articles published recently that assess the long U.S.-NATO military intervention in Afghanistan:
1. Afghanistan: The Making of a Narco State
By Matthieu Aikins, published in Rolling Stone on Dec. 4.
You can listen to an interview with Matthieu Aikins on CBC Radio’s The Current, Dec. 22, 2014. The broadcast is titled, ‘Afghanistan is a nation ruled by drug lords, says Matthieu Aikins’. Canadian government officials declined to be interviewed for the broadcast.
Aikins also wrote an article on Afghanistan in August 2014 which looked at the prospect of a reduction in the number of imperialist soldiers in Afghanistan. He said, “The Taliban have outlasted the Surge, and are patiently waiting for the foreign troops to leave. Condemned by our mistakes, we find ourselves in history’s bind, too demoralized to shape Afghanistan’s fate, and yet complicit in it.”
2. Worse than defeat
Lengthy essay by James Meek reviewing four books on Afghanistan, published in London Review of Books, issue of Dec. 18, 2014
‘The extent of the military and political catastrophe it represents is hard to overstate… How bad was it? In a way it was worse than a defeat, because to be defeated, an army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it.’
Reviewing:
- The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan by Jack Fairweather
Cape, 488 pp, £20.00, December 2014, ISBN 978 0 224 09736 9 - Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War by Frank Ledwidge
Yale, 287 pp, £10.99, July 2014, ISBN 978 0 300 20526 8 - British Generals in Blair’s Wars edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan
Ashgate, 404 pp, £19.95, August 2013, ISBN 978 1 4094 3736 9 - An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012 by Mike Martin
Hurst, 389 pp, £25.00, April 2014, ISBN 978 1 84904 336 6
