Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death's construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds, oh lord yeah!

War Pigs by Black Sabbath
 
 
 
By James Cogan
4 July 2009


The Obama administration has ordered the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade (2
MEB) into a potentially bloody offensive in the southern province of Helmand.
The objective is the suppression of the ethnic Pashtun population, which is
overwhelmingly hostile to the seven-and-a-half year US and NATO occupation of
the country and rejects the legitimacy of the Afghan puppet government headed by
President Hamid Karzai.
 

Early Thursday morning, 2 MEB began what has been described as the biggest
airlift of marines since the Vietnam War. Code-named “Khanjar”—Pashtun for
“strike of the sword”—the operation is the largest undertaken by the
Marine Corp since it led the assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November
2004. In all, some 4,000 marines and a 600-strong battalion of the Afghan Army
are involved, supported by an array of jet fighters, unmanned drones and
helicopter gunships.
 

An article in Friday’s New York Times by veteran war correspondent Carlotta
Gall, who has worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001, made clear why
Helmand has been targeted for the first major operation in Obama’s Afghan
“surge”.
 

She wrote that the “mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt
in some parts of southern Afghanistan”. People have “taken up arms against
the foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger at losing relatives in
airstrikes”.
 

Gall noted: “The southern provinces have suffered the worst civilian
casualties since NATO’s deployment into the region in 2006. Thousands of
people have been displaced by fighting and taken refuge in the towns. ‘Now
there are more people siding with the Taliban than with the government’, said
Abdul Qadir Noorzai, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights
Commission...”
 

One man interviewed by Gall in June declared: “Who are the Taliban? They are
the local people.” Another, whose house was bombed by US jets two months ago,
said: “We Muslims don’t like them [the foreign troops]. They are the source
of danger.”
 

Gall’s outline of the real state of affairs refutes the barrage of propaganda
depicting the offensive as aimed at saving the people from Taliban tyranny,
allowing them to vote in upcoming elections and creating conditions for economic
development. Helmand is, in reality, the epicentre of popular resistance to the
occupation. Thousands of troops have been poured in to force the population to
submit.
 

In the first days of the operation, marine infantry soldiers have been deployed
deep into the lower Helmand River Valley, to the south of the new American base
near the city of Lashkar Gah. They have occupied the towns of Nawa and Garmser,
as well as Khan Neshin, just 130 kilometres from the Pakistani border, which has
not been visited by occupation or Afghan government forces for more than five
years.
 

The marine assault was preceded by a British operation two weeks ago to seize 13
river crossings to the north of Lashkar Gah, in order to prevent Taliban
reinforcements entering Helmand from insurgent-held areas of the neighbouring
province of Kandahar. Yesterday, British units began a new offensive to secure
the road between Lashkar Gah and the town of Gereshk in the north of the
province.
 

US officers told the Washington Post that “Khanjar” was the product of
months of planning. It has been conceived for Obama by the same figures who
directed the Bush administration’s surge of tens of thousands of additional
troops to Iraq in 2007. These include, most notably, Defence Secretary Robert
Gates, Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, Centcom
commander General David Petraeus and the recently appointed US commander in
Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrhystal.
 

The offensive has been timed to coincide with the initial stages of an assault
by the Pakistani military into the tribal agency of South Waziristan. The ethnic
Pashtun tribal agencies are largely controlled by Islamist movements with close
links to the Taliban, who provide Afghan guerillas with safe haven and
contribute their own fighters to the anti-occupation insurgency.
 

The combined operations were described by a Pakistani officer as a “hammer and
anvil” strategy. The intention is to force the Taliban to fight on two fronts,
against both the US/NATO and Pakistani forces. Mahmood Shah, a retired Pakistani
officer, told the Washington Post last month that his sources indicated that
Taliban leaders had already “called back their fighters from Afghanistan and
are bringing them to Pakistan” to meet an expected attack by the army. The
Pakistani military has also deployed additional troops to the border between
Helmand and the Pakistani province of Balochistan, to prevent any Afghan Taliban
escaping the marines.
 

The marines in Helmand will duplicate the methods used by the US military in
Iraq and they are well qualified to do so. Most of the 2 MEB units, and many of
the officers and enlisted men, served one or multiple tours in Iraq’s western
province of Anbar. The surge tactics were first tested in Anbar, a centre of
Sunni Arab resistance to the US invasion. Over two years, the marines honed
their counter-insurgency methods at the cost of thousands of Iraqi lives and the
repression of the entire population.
 

Everyone in the newly occupied areas of Helmand—men, women and children—will
be treated as potential insurgents. Bases will be established in towns and
villages, from which US troops will use intimidation to identify resistance
fighters. Afghans will face constant road-blocks, identity checks and searches.
Men of fighting age will have to endure the most humiliating treatment. Local
tribal leaders will be offered cash bribes to order their clans to collaborate
with the occupation. If they refuse, they will be marked as Taliban
sympathisers.
 

While rarely mentioned in the media’s sanitised descriptions, US
counter-insurgency tactics rely heavily on targeted assassinations and arbitrary
detention. General McCryhstal has been placed in command in Afghanistan
primarily due to his expertise in directing such operations. From 2003 to 2008,
he headed the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), whose death squads killed
or seized hundreds of alleged leaders and supporters of the Iraqi resistance.
The same methods are already being used across Afghanistan by American, British
and Australian special forces, and will now be extended into southern Helmand.
 

In the first days of the Helmand offensive, resistance has been minimal. One
marine company fought what an officer described as a “hell of a fight” with
Afghan fighters south of Garsmer on Thursday. After hours of gunfire, a jet
fighter was called in to destroy the insurgent position with a 500-pound bomb.
Further minor clashes took place yesterday. In the areas around Nawa and Khan
Neshin, there have been no reports of clashes.
 

To date, just one marine has been killed and some 11 wounded. Dozens of others
have needed treatment for heat exhaustion in the blistering temperatures of the
Afghan summer. The British and Danish troops operating in the northern districts
of Helmand have also taken casualties. On Wednesday, two British soldiers were
killed and six others wounded by a roadside bomb outside Lashkar Gah. Among the
dead was Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, the highest ranking British
officer to be killed in combat since the 1982 Falklands War. The same day, a
Danish soldier was seriously wounded by a suspected mine.
 

Despite the absence of heavy fighting, concerns have been expressed that the
operation may fail due to a lack of troops. According to the Washington Post,
the 2 MEB commander, Brigadier General Lawrence Nicholson, had apparently
expected that thousands of Afghan government troops would be allocated to
“Khanjar”. Instead, only 600 or so are taking part.
 

Nicholson described the paucity of Afghan forces as a “critical
vulnerability”. His marines will be stretched trying to hold what is still
only a relatively small area of Taliban-controlled territory, under conditions
in which the insurgents are unlikely to confront them in open combat. After more
than seven years, the Taliban has learnt to avoid one-sided engagements with the
far better armed occupation troops. The resistance will either blend into the
sympathetic civilian population or move to safe sites in other areas of
Afghanistan. The marines, by contrast, will suffer a steady flow of casualties
from roadside bombs, mines and other guerilla attacks.
 

There are already signs that top Pentagon commanders are pressuring the Obama
White House to send even more troops to Afghanistan. To date, Obama has insisted
he will not deploy more than the additional 21,000 he ordered to the country
upon taking office. General David McKiernan, the former US commander in
Afghanistan, was summarily sacked in May largely due to his insistence that more
were needed.
 

Disquiet in the military has clearly not been silenced. McClatchy Newspapers
reported on Wednesday that National Security Advisor James Jones, who had just
returned from Central Asia, had “started to hear rumblings that new commanders
and officials being sent to Afghanistan would quickly urge another shift in
strategy and more troops”. An unnamed senior officer allegedly told journalist
Bob Woodward that at least 100,000 were needed.
 

When all the reinforcements arrive, there will be 68,000 American troops in the
country and some 30,000 from various NATO countries, many of which are operating
under caveats that prevent them moving into combat zones.
 

Late Wednesday, Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen told journalists that his
instructions to General McCryhstal were to come back to him and “ask for what
you need” in the way of additional troops. There is no reason to doubt that
Obama will accept whatever the military demands. From his election campaign on,
he has identified his presidency with not only “winning” the war in
Afghanistan but extending it into Pakistan. Behind the façade of rooting out
Islamic extremism and terrorism, the agenda is, and always has been, the
establishment of US strategic dominance throughout Central Asia.
 
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/afgh-j04.shtml




Classical economics  is only value-free on its surface.  In actual fact it
ignores power in the world.  In actual fact it ignores that its outcomes ALWAYS
hurt the lesser much more than they do the greater.  Economics is not just the
dismal science, it is the shameful fancy window dressing of the exercise of
naked power by the rich and the owners against the poor and the workers.  It is
the condom which makes safe and obscure the ways we are screwed.   Wythe Holt
5/21/09
 
Solidarity is the path as well as the destination of socialism. Solidarity
grieves when a worker loses his job or sees her pension slashed. Solidarity
cheers when a union wins middle-class pay. Solidarity rejects the greed of
insurers as the distributor of healthcare and demands single payer for all. 
Solidarity smells the rat who divides white from black, black from gay, native
from newcomer, or America from the rest of humanity.  By Phillip Bannowsky


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