Forces are deployed at a military base and prison camp at the Kandahar airport in southern Afghanistan; at the Bagram airfield, just north of Kabul, the capital city; at the northeastern city of Mazar-i-Sharif; and in Jalalabad and Tora Bora in the southeast.

At the Kandahar airport base the marines who set up a temporary encampment are being replaced more permanently by 1,000 troops from the Army's 101st airborne division, with the number of troops likely to double in the coming weeks.

At the same time Washington is building up its military bases throughout the Central Asia region. Washington is constructing an air base in Kyrgyzstan, a neighboring former Soviet republic, to accommodate 3,000 troops and a full range of warplanes and support aircraft. This airbase, located on 37 acres near the Manas International Airport, outside of the country's capital city of Bishkek, is projected to begin unrestricted air operations by the end of February.

Some 1,000 troops from the 10th Mountain Division, as well as several hundred Special Operations forces are stationed at Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan.

In Pakistan, Washington has taken over control of three air bases located in Jacobabad, Dalbindin, and Pasni. The Pakistani government has also agreed that U.S. troops can now expand its military operations across the border into Pakistan under the guise of pursuing "terrorist" suspects.

The Pentagon has also agreed to station two aircraft carriers and thousands of marines aboard ships in the north Arabian Sea through March, with the likelihood that their deployment will be renewed every three months.

In another sign of the expansion of U.S. military presence in the region, each branch of the U.S. military has adopted the policy of rotating troops through the region every 90 days to six months. To fund these war moves, the Pentagon is seeking a $20 billion boost in the 2003 budget, over the current $329 billion spent annually on military operations.  
 
U.S. bombing to continue
The new government of the country, approved at a imperialist-sponsored conference in Germany last month, has been given no say over U.S. military operations in the country. Despite objections by the government to continued bombing, the U.S. envoy to Kabul, Zalmay Kahlilzdad, reiterated the Pentagon's policy that the bombing will continue and that the U.S. rulers alone will decide if and when it will stop. Afghan troops are confined to barracks and can leave only with the approval of the interim government and after notifying a British general on the scene.

In an interview with the New York Times, U.S. deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz displayed the attitude of a official of a conquering power toward the regime. The new Afghan leader Hamid Karzai has "proven to be an impressive man," he said. "Whether he is up to the formidable job he has is a different question."

Large numbers of Washington's troops in Afghanistan are involved in guarding and interrogating thousands of Taliban prisoners. The POWs are held in abysmal conditions throughout the country. "The U.S. Central Command says American forces are just beginning the process of sorting out which of the [7,000 prisoners] they want to take into U.S. custody for interrogation," reported the Wall Street Journal.

Washington says it has more than 300 prisoners under its direct control, and is preparing a high-security detention facility at the U.S. navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that could hold as many as 2,000 Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. The Pentagon is sending some 1,500 troops to build prisons at the Guantanamo base, and has raised the possibility that additional detainees could be held within the United States. Two sites mentioned in the media are the Charleston Naval Weapons Station in South Carolina and the maximum security prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

To assist Washington in maintaining order, a 4,500-strong UN-sanctioned occupation force, headed by British forces, is taking up posts around Kabul. This force reports to Thomas Franks, the U.S. general responsible for military operations in Afghanistan.

The British government has pledged 1,500 troops. Canada's rulers have announced that they are sending up to 900 soldiers, in addition to the estimated 40–50 members of Canada's Joint Task force now operating alongside U.S. forces in the Kandahar region. Seventy German and 30 Dutch soldiers are also are on their way to Afghanistan.

A small contingent of French troops has already arrived in Kabul. According to a French defense ministry spokesman, some 2,450 naval and air force personnel will also be involved in the deployment of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in the Indian Ocean.

After first balking at the proposal, Afghanistan's interim government endorsed the agreement delegating broad powers of operation to the occupation force. The pact grants it full freedom of movement in the country's territory and airspace. The troops will be stationed at five bases in and around Kabul, including the airport. They have immunity from arrest or prosecution by Afghanistan. The commander of the force will act as the final arbiter on interpretations of the agreement.

Much of Washington's current air bombardment is focused on eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. U.S. aircraft bombed parts of Paktia province throughout the night January 6 and into the next morning. This followed on the heels of a massive bombardment of a target just three miles from Pakistan in Khost province. These January 3–4 attacks involved four B-1B bombers and other planes, which dropped more than 100 satellite-guided 2,000-pound bombs on the area. This complex, which Washington claims had been an al Qaeda training camp, was the spot hit by U.S. cruise missiles in 1998, allegedly in retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

Several miles from this bombardment an army special forces soldier was killed in an ambush by a 14-year-old boy, according to CNN.

The U.S. rulers continue to use the drive to find and capture al Qaeda and Taliban leaders as the pretext for their extensive military deployment in Afghanistan. Some within U.S. ruling circles are calling for taking this drive into Pakistan itself. Sen. Robert Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has said, according to the Financial Times, that "Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, and Osama bin Laden had 'probably' crossed into Pakistan and should be pursued there."  
 
Deployments off Somalia's coast
Washington is also stepping up its plans for possible military action against Somalia, a nation in East Africa. U.S. naval vessels are positioned to track, and in some cases board, vessels along Somalia's 1,800-mile coastline, all under the guise of pursuing al Qaeda suspects. Among the targets of this naval interdiction, the Journal reports, are the "many small vessels [that] operate in the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia, many of them traders carrying goods back and forth."

U.S. reconnaissance flights have been substantially increased over Somalia, and are being supplemented by British and French aircraft surveillance. "No U.S. military operations are likely for at least a month," a Journal article reports an unnamed Bush administration as saying.

Discussing which country to target next, Wolfowitz said in the New York Times interview that one "of the most difficult things in the next few months is going to be establishing which of our allies of convenience in the early stages of this war can become real allies over the longer term, and which ones are going to be major troublemakers, and which ones are going to just switch sides."

In its biggest naval deployment since World War II, the German government has joined this effort, dispatching six ships to East African waters off the coast of Somalia. This includes two frigates and four support ships carrying 750 marines. The ships are due to reach the Horn of Africa near the end of January.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has detained about 240 Saudi nationals on suspicion of having fled Afghanistan, reported Agence France-Press. The Pakistani interior minister, Lieut. Gen. Moinuddin Haider, has vowed to turn over to Washington anyone the government suspects of belonging to al Qaeda.

The former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who after the collapse of the Taliban regime had sought political asylum in Pakistan, was instead turned over to U.S. forces. He is now incarcerated and is being interrogated aboard the USS Bataan, an amphibious assault ship in the Arabian Sea.

Some 140 former Taliban fighters are also imprisoned in Kohat, Pakistan, south of the border city of Peshawar. They, too, are undergoing interrogation by U.S. officials. A local political leader in Kohat, Javed Ibrahim Paracha, condemned the mistreatment of these prisoners, who were handcuffed, shackled, and stripped to their shorts in freezing cold weather before being put on U.S. military planes in the middle of the night.  
 
Civilian death toll
While the capitalist media has covered in detail the death of the U.S. special forces soldier in combat in eastern Afghanistan, very little is said about the thousands of Afghan civilians killed as a result of the U.S. assault. Nearly 3,800 Afghans died over the course of just two months, from October 7 through December 7, as a result of the U.S. bombing, according to a study by University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold. The figures do not include deaths that occurred in remote areas of Afghanistan, and omit those killed indirectly, when air strikes cut off their access to hospitals, foods, or electricity. The study also did not include those bomb victims who survived the immediate attack but died later of their injuries.

Millions of other Afghan civilians have been displaced from their homes as a result of the U.S. assault. Many have been forced into refugee camps where the conditions are no better than those they left. One such camp, located 30 miles west of the Afghan city of Herat, contains 350,000 displaced people, of whom 100 die each day of exposure and starvation, the London Guardian reported. The paper described the story of Izzah Burza, 38, and her family at the camp. "We traveled more than 125 miles to this camp," she said. "When I arrived I had four children, now I have two. We've had nothing to eat for a week."
 
 
Related articles:
What's behind India-Pakistan conflict?
The battle against imperialism  
 
 
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