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30 September 2010 By Rick Rozoff
On October 7 the United States and its North
Atlantic Treaty Organization military allies will
begin the tenth year of their war in Afghanistan, over
3,000 miles from NATO Headquarters in Brussels.
The following month midterm elections will be held
in the U.S. and NATO will hold a two-day summit in
Portugal. The American administration is eager to
achieve, or appear to have achieved, a foreign policy
triumph in an effort to retain Democratic Party
control of Congress and NATO something to show for the
longest and largest military mission in its 61 years
of existence.
President Barack Obama has tripled the amount of
American combat troops in Afghanistan to 100,000 and
along with forces from other NATO member states and
partner nations there are now over 150,000 foreign
troops in the nation, the most ever stationed in the
war-wracked country. 120,000 of those soldiers are now
under the command of NATO’s International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF), the most ever serving in a
North Atlantic Alliance-led military operation. NATO
deployed 60,000 troops to Bosnia in 1995 and 50,000 to
Kosovo four years later, in both instances after
bombing campaigns and in post-conflict situations.
The 120,000 NATO forces currently in theater – from
50 nations already with more pegged to provide troops
– are at the center of the world’s longest-lasting and
increasingly deadly hot war. NATO’s first ground war,
its first combat operations in Asia.
Last year was the most lethal for the U.S and NATO
in what is now a nine-year conflict and this year has
already proven even more costly in terms of combat
deaths. And there are three more months to go.
Washington and Brussels could decide to save face
and end the fighting through some combination of an
internal political settlement and a true international
peacekeeping arrangement – rather than the subversion
of the International Security Assistance Force that
was established by a United Nations mandate in
December of 2001 but which is now the Pentagon’s and
NATO’s vehicle for waging war in Afghanistan. And in
neighboring Pakistan.
But the military metaphysic prevalent in Washington
over the past 65 years will allow for nothing other
than what is seen as victory, with a “Who lost
Afghanistan?” legacy tarnishing the president who
fails to secure it and the party to which he belongs
being branded half-hearted and defeatist.
As for NATO, the Strategic Concept to be adopted in
November is predicated upon the bloc’s expansion into
a 21st century global expeditionary force for which
Afghanistan is the test case. A NATO that loses
Afghanistan, that loses in Afghanistan, will be viewed
more critically by the populations of its European
member states that have sacrificed their sons and
daughters at the altar of NATO’s international
ambitions. In the words of then-Secretary General Jaap
de Hoop Scheffer six years ago: “What is NATO doing in
Afghanistan? Defending values at the Hindu Kush in the
present day international climate. We have to fight
terrorism wherever it emerges. If we don’t do it at
the Hindu Kush, it will end up at our doorstep. In
other words, this perception gap [of the North
Atlantic military alliance operating in South Asia] in
the long run must be closed and must be healed – that
is, for NATO’s future, of the utmost importance.” [1]
Not satisfied with the Vietnam that Afghanistan has
become, NATO has now launched its Cambodian incursion.
One with implications several orders of magnitude
greater than with the prototype, though, into a nation
of almost 170 million people, a nation wielding
nuclear weapons. Pakistan.
As the U.S. delivered its 20th deadly drone missile
attack of the month inside Pakistan on the 27th, five
times the amount launched in August and the most in
any month since they were started in 2004, NATO
conducted a series of attacks with helicopter gunships
in Northwest Pakistan. Claiming the “right of
self-defense” and in “hot pursuit” of insurgents that
had reportedly attacked a NATO camp, Combat Outpost
Narizah, in Afghanistan’s Khost province near the
Pakistani border, this past weekend NATO attack
helicopters conducted two forays into the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas where U.S. drone strikes
have killed a record number of people this month.
Estimates of those killed, dutifully referred to in
the Western press as insurgents, militants or
terrorists, were 30, then 50, afterward 60, 70 and
later “82 or higher.” [2]
The amount, like the identify, of the dead will
never be definitively known.
Press reports stated the targets were members of
the Haqqani network, founded by veteran Afghan
Mujahedin leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, who when he led
attacks from Pakistani soil against Afghan targets
slightly over a generation ago was an American hero,
one of Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters.” Two years
ago the New York Times wrote: “In the 1980s,
Jalaluddin Haqqani was cultivated as a ‘unilateral’
asset of the CIA and received tens of thousands of
dollars in cash for his work in fighting the Soviet
Army in Afghanistan, according to an account in ‘The
Bin Ladens,’ a recent book by Steve Coll. At that
time, Haqqani helped and protected Osama bin Laden,
who was building his own militia to fight the Soviet
forces, Coll wrote.” [3]
As to the regret that the otherwise praiseworthy
Haqqani has of late allied himself with the Taliban,
one voiced by among other people the late Charlie
Wilson who once celebrated Haqqani as “goodness
personified,” in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press
last year Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told
his American audience that the Taliban “was part of
your past and our past, and the ISI and the CIA
created them together. And I can find you 10 books and
10 philosophers and 10 write-ups on that….” [4]
On September 27 two NATO helicopters attacked the
Kurram agency in Pakistan’s Federally Administered
Tribal Areas, killing six people and wounding eight. A
local Pakistani government official described all the
victims as civilians. According to Dawn News, “Nato
has also shelled the area before.” [5] Three attacks
in three days and as many as 100 deaths.
On the same day a U.S. drone-launched missile
strike killed four people in the North Waziristan
agency. “The identities of the four people killed in
the attack were not known….” [6]
The above events occurred against the backdrop of
the revelation in Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars
that “a 3,000-strong secret army of Afghan
paramilitary forces run by the Central Intelligence
Agency had conducted cross-border raids into
Pakistan.” [7]
After mounting in intensity for two years and
consisting in part – helicopter gunship attacks and
special forces assassination team raids – of covert
operations, the U.S. and NATO war in Northwest
Pakistan is now fully underway and can no longer be
denied.
The Pentagon – the helicopters used in the attacks
on September 25 and 26 were American Apaches and
Kiowas – defended the strikes over the weekend as
falling within its rules of engagement and Defense
Department spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said the U.S.
had adhered to “appropriate protocol” and “Our forces
have the right of self-defense.” [8]
A spokesmen for the NATO-led International Security
Assistance Force initially denied that Alliance forces
had launched any attacks inside Pakistani territory,
although Afghan police officials had confirmed that
they did. On September 27, however, the International
Security Assistance Force verified that NATO forces
had conducted the deadly strikes. As the third attack
by NATO helicopters occurred on the same day,
“Coalition officials said the cross-border attacks
fell within its rules of engagement because the
insurgents had attacked them from across the border.”
[9]
A NATO official informed the press that “ISAF
forces must and will retain the authority, within
their mandate, to defend themselves in carrying out
their mission.” [10]
Mehmood Shah, former top security official of the
Pakistani government in the region where the
helicopter gunship and drone strikes have killed over
200 people so far this month, said of the recent NATO
attacks: “This should be considered a watershed event.
They [Nato] must be warned: the next time you do this,
it can lead to war. Our units should be deployed to
fire upon them. This border has sanctity. Nato must
realise they have a mandate to operate in Afghanistan,
not in Pakistan.” [11]
On September 27 Interior Minister Rehman Malik
denounced the NATO raids as a violation of Pakistani
territorial integrity and national sovereignty and
told the nation’s Senate that the Afghan ambassador to
Islamabad would be summoned to explain the attacks.
Malik and the Pakistani government as a whole know
that the Hamid Karzai administration in Kabul has no
control over what the U.S. and NATO do in its own
country, much less in Pakistan. The interior
minister’s comments were solely for internal
consumption, for placating Pakistani popular outrage,
but as Pakistan itself has become a NATO partner and
U.S. surrogate [12] its officials, like those of
Afghanistan, will not be notified of any future
attacks.
Nevertheless domestic exigencies compelled Malik to
denounce the strikes inside his country and assert “I
take the drone attacks in Pakistani territory as an
attack on the sovereignty of Pakistan.” A senator from
the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz “asked the government
to inform the parliament about any accord it had
reached with the US under which drone attacks were
being carried out.” [13]
At the same time Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman
Abdul Basit went further and lodged what was described
as a strong protest to NATO Headquarters in Brussels
over the weekend’s air strikes, issuing a statement
that said in part: “These incidents are a clear
violation and breach of the UN mandate under which
ISAF operates,” as its mandate “terminates/finishes”
at the Afghan border.
“There are no agreed ‘hot pursuit’ rules. Any
impression to the contrary is not factually correct.
Such violations are unacceptable.” [14]
By the evening of September 27, after the Pakistani
complaints were registered, NATO’s ISAF attempted to
conduct damage control and reverted to the military
bloc’s original position: That it has not launched
attacks inside Pakistan at all. On that very day it
had dispatched two more helicopter gunships for the
third raid in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
NATO will continue to launch lethal attacks inside
Pakistan against whichever targets it sees fit and
will proffer neither warnings nor apologies. The U.S.
will continue to escalate attacks with Hellfire
missiles against whomever it chooses, however
inaccurate, anecdotal and self-interested the reports
upon which they are based prove to be.
The death toll in Pakistan this month is well over
200 and for this year to date over 2,000. The
justification for this carnage offered by the U.S. and
NATO is that it is intended to extend the policy of
Barack Obama to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat”
insurgent networks in Afghanistan into Pakistan,
supposedly the sooner to end the war.
Forty years ago Obama’s predecessor Richard Nixon
began his speech announcing the expansion of the
Vietnam War into Cambodia with these words: “Good
evening, my fellow Americans. Ten days ago, in my
report to the nation on Vietnam, I announced the
decision to withdraw an additional 150,000 Americans
from Vietnam over the next year. I said then that I
was making that decision despite our concern over
increased enemy activity in Laos, in Cambodia, and in
South Vietnam. And at that time I warned that if I
concluded that increased enemy activity in any of
these areas endangered the lives of Americans
remaining in Vietnam, I would not hesitate to take
strong and effective measures to deal with that
situation.” [15]
He claimed that “enemy sanctuaries” in Cambodia
“endanger the lives of Americans who are in Vietnam,”
and “if this enemy effort succeeds, Cambodia would
become a vast enemy staging area and a springboard for
attacks on South Vietnam along 600 miles of frontier:
a refuge where enemy troops could return from combat
without fear of retaliation.”
The course he ordered was to “go to the heart of
the trouble. And that means cleaning out major North
Vietnamese and Vietcong occupied territories, these
sanctuaries which serve as bases for attacks on both
Cambodia and American and South Vietnamese forces in
South Vietnam.”
The practical application of the policy was that
“attacks are being launched this week to clean out
major enemy sanctuaries on the Cambodian-Vietnam
border.”
In language that has been heard again lately in
Washington and Brussels – with nothing but the place
names changed – Nixon claimed: “We take this action
not for the purpose of expanding the war into
Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in
Vietnam….”
Washington indeed expanded the Vietnam War into
Cambodia, with what disastrous effects the world is
fully aware, and soon thereafter departed Southeast
Asia in defeat, leaving vast stretches of Vietnam and
Cambodia in ruins.
Afghanistan and Pakistan will not fare any better.
1) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 12,
2004
2) New York Times, September 27, 2010
3) New York Times, September 9, 2008
4) Meet the Press, May 10, 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30658135
5) Dawn News, September 28, 2010
6) Daily Times, September 28, 2010
7) Financial Times, September 27, 2010
8) Associated Press, September 27, 2010
9) New York Times, September 27, 2010
10) Dawn News, September 27, 2010
11) The Guardian, September 27, 2010
12) NATO Pulls Pakistan Into Its Global Network
Stop NATO, July 23, 2010
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/nato-pulls-pakistan-into-its-global-network
13) Dawn News, September 28, 2010
14) Dawn News, September 27, 2010
15) Richard M. Nixon, Cambodian Incursion Address
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/richardnixoncambodia.html
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