At the request of the U.S. military command, the first of 1,700 British marine commandos arrived at the U.S. Bagram air base in eastern Afghanistan this past week, bringing the total British deployment inside the country to 6,000 troops--a number comparable to the U.S. force. Noting the vulnerability of helicopters to ground fire such as during fighting at Shah-i-Kot, the Pentagon also announced that it had flown in A-10 "Thunderbolt" attack jets to Bagram. The slow-flying aircraft, armed with a seven-barrel Gatling gun that can fire 3,900 rounds a minute, can also carry bombs and missiles. It is the first fixed-wing aircraft to be stationed in Afghanistan and is used in close air support to ground attacks, said Maj. Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck.

U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. John Rosa, the deputy director of the current operations of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on March 19 that U.S. operations in Afghanistan "still continue. We still have teams operating in the area, looking for any remaining Taliban and al Qaeda, searching caves and in other positions they may have occupied." Attacks on other areas in the eastern and southern parts of the country are being planned, officials said.

"We continue to watch all of Afghanistan. We have assets and resources available to do that for reconnaissance on the ground, intelligence, [and] cooperation with Afghan forces," said Maj. Brad Powell, a Pentagon spokesman at the central command post in Tampa, Florida, March 24.

Four days earlier, U.S. aircraft bombed an area in Khost, near the border with Pakistan, after a U.S. soldier and several allied troops were injured in an ambush.

The governor of the eastern province of Khost is demanding that the U.S. Special Forces hand over several men apparently involved in an assassination attempt on the province's chief of security. The accused men are among a large number of mercenaries that U.S. forces have recruited, armed, and paid $200 to serve as foot soldiers. The men are often recruited from rival militias, according to the Financial Times.

As officials in the Bush administration have publicly trumpeted the creation of a national Afghan army, a U.S. government review states that at most only 4,000 Afghan troops will be equipped and trained by the end of September. A further year after that will be required to attain a strength of 12,000 troops.

News reports since the conclusion of the imperialist offensive at Shah-i-Kot help show both the lack of any central authority outside of the occupying armies headed by Washington and the divisions and conflicts among the ruling layers in Afghanistan.  
 
Divisions in Afghan ruling layers
Midway through the 11-day assault, "question marks over the reliability of local Pashtun militias were underscored by the Afghan government's decision...to reinforce the allied contingent with 1,000 ethnic Tajik fighters from the Northern Alliance," reported the March 14 issue of Time magazine. The alliance, whose brutal rule preceded the Taliban regime, provided the principal proxy troops for the imperialists in the first months of the war.

The article in the big-business weekly, entitled "What We Learned in Shah-i-Kot," reported that "pro-government Pashtun commanders in nearby Gardez have called for the Tajiks to be withdrawn, some saying their men would rather have the Taliban and al Qaeda on their turf than the Northern Alliance." Noting that "the ongoing campaign in Afghanistan runs the risk of exacerbating ethnic tensions," Time concluded, "Shah-i-Kot may be another reminder of why Afghanistan is not famous for short wars."

In an indication of similar divisions at the national level, 87-year-old Mohammad Zahir Shah, who ruled Afghanistan as king until his overthrow in 1973, announced on March 23 the postponement of his planned return to his "number 8" palace in Kabul. The delay, reported the New York Times, resulted from strains within the government "that roughly parallel the ethnic split between Mr. Karzai, a member of the Pashtun tribe that is Afghanistan's most populous, and members of the Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara minorities who owe their role in the government to their membership in the Northern Alliance."  
 
Protests in Kyrgyzstan
Signs that social and class conflicts are on the rise in the broader region where U.S. imperialism is seeking to strengthen its military foothold have also appeared. In Kyrgyzstan, protests erupted during March over the government jailing of Azimbek Beknazarov, an opposition parliamentarian known as an outspoken critic of the government of President Askar Akayev.

The government's interior minister announced that in the course of two days of protests, police had attacked thousands of demonstrators in Kerben and other towns in the south of the country, killing four and injuring many more.

Akayev, who has accused "Islamic radicals" from neighboring Uzbekistan of stirring up dissent against his government, claimed that the opposition forces had mounted an attempted coup. Following the protests, however, and with expressions of Washington's "concern" ringing in his ears, Akayev released Beknazarov.

Since launching its assault on Afghanistan Washington has established the beginnings of a major airbase near Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Hundreds of U.S. and allied imperialist troops, along with fighter jets, have been stationed there.

The Financial Times observed that the events "raised uncomfortable questions about the stability of one of the U.S.'s newest and most important bases." U.S. officials, noted the London-based daily, "have said they anticipated little opposition among the local population to Kyrgyzstan's new position as a frontline state in the war against the Taliban in nearby Afghanistan."  
 
Instability in Pakistan
The Pakistani regime of Gen. Pervez Musharaff is also threatened with growing instability and continued opposition to its backing to the U.S. assault against neighboring Afghanistan. The military ruler, who seized power in a 1999 coup, has suggested that rather than face elections he may hold a referendum to legitimize a further five years of rule.

The proposal from "one of Washington's most critical allies in the war," reported the March 23 New York Times, "is not likely to be met with any objection by the United States or the European Union."

For 28 of the 55 years since Pakistan was formed as a pro-imperialist outpost against the Indian revolution, the country has been ruled by a military government. The Musharaff regime has announced its intention of expelling around 7,000 Arab, Afghan, and other foreign students studying at religious schools in Pakistan. New enrollments will be forbidden.

The Pakistani government alleges that forces opposed to Musharaff's wholesale backing for the imperialist invasion of Afghanistan were involved in the kidnapping and assassination of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and a grenade attack on a church in Islamabad that took five lives, including that of an employee of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad.

Maj. Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck of the U.S. 10th Mountain Division, the commander of U.S. forces at the Bagram base, said that U.S. forces might pursue Taliban and al Qaeda forces across the border into Pakistan. The region around the two countries' border, home to a majority Pashtun population, is known as a stronghold of opposition to Musharaff's backing for the war. The Pakistani government has so far not given permission for such "hot pursuit."  
 
Expansion of military presence
The imperialists have also been stepping up their assault on working people in other countries in the area.

British Royal Air Force jets and some 140 personnel, operating from the Kenyan port of Mombasa, have begun aerial surveillance of Somalia using high-tech cameras. Although the operation is being mounted under the banner of combating terrorism, British government officials admit that they have no evidence of "terrorist activity" in Somalia.

Somalia is also the target of a naval operation stopping incoming maritime traffic. The Guardian reports the "largest naval force since the second world war [comprising] more than 100 warships from a dozen countries has been tracking hundreds of vessels a day" in the northern Arabian Sea. The British weekly adds that "as far as we know, they have found nothing."

Some 200 U.S. military instructors, scheduled to arrive in Georgia near the end of March, will help prepare troops for offensive operations aimed at establishing government control over the Pankisi gorge. The area is home to Georgia's native Chechen population, whose numbers have been swollen by an influx of refugees from fighting between Russian and local forces in neighboring Chechnya. One analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace stressed the significance for Washington of the deployment. "It is the first time that a former Soviet state is being used as a battlefield," she said.

Unlike its counterparts in Georgia, Yemen, and the Philippines, the Indonesian government has turned down Washington's offer to send troops, citing its fear of the protests and controversy such a step would provoke. However, FBI director Robert Mueller is pressuring Indonesian officials to cooperate with U.S. cops in their pursuit of alleged "terrorists" in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

As the U.S. government campaigns to prepare public opinion for a massive onslaught against Iraq, the capitalist media continues to float rationales for the possible use of a "low-yield nuclear weapon" against that country. Discussion is under way in Washington, the New York Times reported, concerning the development of a weapon that would harness a nuclear blast to dig deep underground to destroy such sites and "keep nuclear fallout to a minimum."

The Pentagon is also "rushing to produce a new and bigger bunker-buster bomb" called "Big BLU," the Washington Times reported March 15. The new weapon, which is being developed for the Air Force by Northrop Grumman Corp. in California, will be packed with 30,000 pounds of high explosive, and will be six times larger than the thermobaric bomb recently dropped on caves in Afghanistan. The targets for the bomb? Alleged "underground hideouts" used by Saddam Hussein.  
 
 
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