No end to 15 years of US war in Afghanistan

BY BRIAN WILLIAMS

Nearly 15 years after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan, Washington has failed to create a regime that serves the U.S. rulers’ interests with stable conditions that can stop the country from falling apart in sectarian violence. The Taliban — whose government Washington intervened to overturn — now controls more territory there than any time since 2001, and the Islamic State is also making gains.

The Barack Obama administration, which had earlier promised to withdraw all U.S. troops by 2014, authorized in June stepped-up airstrikes against the Taliban and more aggressive use of special forces. The Pentagon will maintain 8,400 troops in Afghanistan at least through the end of Obama’s presidency, and an undisclosed number of additional troops are being deployed against Islamic State. Thousands of NATO troops are staying as well, in what has become the longest U.S. war in history.

Hardest hit by these years of war are workers and peasants throughout the country. The numbers of Afghans internally displaced has more than doubled to 1.2 million since the beginning of 2013, reported Amnesty International.

Each day this year an average of 1,000 people have been forced from their homes, living in camps lacking adequate water, food and health facilities. Many have fled to the neighboring countries of Iran and Pakistan. About 20 percent of refugees arriving in Europe by boat last year were from Afghanistan.

Civilian casualties are at record highs during the first six months of this year, with more than 1,600 deaths and another 3,500 injured, according to a July 25 U.N. report. Almost a third of those killed or wounded were children.

The Afghan army and police are in shambles, despite efforts by U.S. troops to train them. Altogether they’re supposed to number 352,000, but many are AWOL. Among Afghan special forces morale is also “wearing thin as they are increasingly called upon to lead the fight against the Taliban,” reported the Wall Street Journal July 27.

In southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban gained control in districts in Helmand and Uruzgan provinces, efforts by U.S. and Afghan forces have failed to effectively push them back, “with the government barely clinging to administrative buildings,” reported the New York Times.

Islamic State gets foothold

Meanwhile, the Islamic State is making inroads in eastern Afghanistan near Pakistan’s border. Gen. John Nicholson, top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said that under special authority he was deploying an unspecified number of troops — in addition to those already stationed in the country — particularly in the districts of Achin and Kot. The U.S. military announced July 27 that five U.S. soldiers were wounded while battling Islamic State fighters in eastern Nangarhar province.

Four days earlier an Islamic State suicide bombing in the capital Kabul killed more than 80 people and wounded hundreds at a peaceful demonstration, mostly members of the Shiite Hazara minority demanding better access to electrical power in several rural provinces.

About 90 percent of Afghanistan’s population are Sunni Muslims, with Shiites comprising 10 percent. The Taliban are predominantly based on Pashtun Sunnis. Hazaras have long faced sectarian discrimination and abuse from Sunni-based officials. Immediately after the bombing of the protesting Hazaras, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani ordered a 10-day ban on public protests.

“If we don’t continue to protest, it will be an insult to the blood of those killed,” responded Raihana Azad, a Hazara member of parliament.

Large numbers of Afghan Shiites have fled to Iran, and thousands have joined with Iranian forces in Syria fighting to support the Bashar al-Assad regime.

In Jebrail, a Hazara district of Herat, Afghanistan, near the border with Iran, where 100,000 people live, about 20 percent of the families had someone serving in Syria, a local official told the Times.

The Iranian government is also working with the Taliban to set up a buffer zone along its 572-mile border with Afghanistan to keep Islamic State out.

Tehran is providing Taliban forces, which have been fighting against Islamic State, with money, some low-grade weaponry, ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades, according to Foreign Policy magazine. This marks a big shift from the Iranian government’s longstanding opposition to the Taliban.

At the end of May Iranian President Hassan Rouhani signed an agreement with Afghan President Ghani and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to facilitate the transit of goods through Afghanistan to Iran’s southern port of Chabahar and then on to India, a trade route that bypasses Pakistan.

Roots of today’s war

Today’s long war in Afghanistan has its roots in the April 1978 revolutionary upheaval that opened with the overthrow of President Mohammad Daud. The new government was headed by the Stalinist-led People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. A land reform was announced, along with a literacy campaign, legalization of trade unions, freedom of worship, and steps to advance the rights of women and nationalities.

These measures were implemented through administrative decree by the Stalinist regime, rather than organizing peasants and other working people into political and social life. This provided an opening for reactionary landlord and capitalist layers to mobilize opposition. As support for the government eroded, Moscow in December 1979 began sending tens of thousands of troops into Afghanistan to prop it up.

Taking advantage of this counterrevolutionary move by Moscow, the U.S. imperialist rulers helped arm and finance reactionary Islamist groups that forced the Soviet troops to withdraw in 1989. Many of those forces later became the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the core of Islamic State.

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