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nestopwar

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2011: U.S. And NATO To Extend And Expand Afghan War
« on: December 26, 2010, 08:12:12 PM »

   2011: U.S. And NATO To Extend And Expand Afghan War
Rick Rozoff

Stop NATO

The war being waged by the United States and the Western military alliance it controls, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is well into its tenth year and is already the longest war in the history of the U.S., Afghanistan and NATO alike. In fact it is NATO's first ground war and its first armed conflict in Asia.

It has now graduated into a broader war, having engulfed neighboring Pakistan with a population of 170 million and a nuclear arsenal.

The U.S. has suffered reverses in the past week and half with the death of Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke on December 13 and the recall of the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan, Jonathan Banks, on December 16, the day the White House issued its annual policy review on the protracted and increasingly deadly war in Afghanistan.

As of December 23, American and NATO military fatalities for this year are at 705, almost a third of the total 2,275 killed since the war was launched on October 7, 2001.

The Afghan National Army created from scratch by the Pentagon and NATO acknowledged this month that it has lost 806 soldiers so far this year, an increase of 25 percent over 2009.

Earlier this month a report by the United Nations General Assembly documented that Afghan civilian casualties had risen by 20 percent in the first ten months of this year over all of last to a total of 5,480 killed and wounded.

In the past few days Western military forces have intensified lethal air strikes against Afghan civilians and troops, killing four Afghan soldiers in the south of the country in an air attack in the middle of the month, killing a civilian and wounding two children in another air strike in Helmand province during the same time period, and most recently killing a policeman and the brother of a legislator in a helicopter attack in northern Afghanistan on December 23.

The day before the last incident an Afghan provincial governor called on the North Atlantic military bloc "to pay attention to civilian casualities during operations and prevent civilian casualities. " [1]The two deaths on the following day indicate that such appeals fall on deaf ears.

On the other side of the Afghan-Pakistani border, on December 16 three U.S. missile attacks killed an estimated 54 people in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, all identified as "militants" in the Western press. The overwhelming majority of deadly CIA-directed drone attacks have occurred in North Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The attack in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa signals the expansion of the war deeper into the country - "a possible expansion of the CIA-led covert campaign of drone strikes inside Pakistani territory" [2]- as does a recent NATO helicopter gunship raid into Balochistan province.

Days later NATO oil tankers came under rocket attack in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and "The Pakistan-Afghanista n highway was temporarily blocked and NATO supplies suspended following the attack." [3]

As in Afghanistan, the killing has increased substantially this year.

In the past year there have been at least 115 U.S. drone attacks in the tribal areas, more than double the amount in 2009, which itself represented a dramatic increase over previous years. In 2009 and 2010 there have been approximately 170 missile strikes in North and South Waziristan, a 300 percent increase over the last four years of the George W. Bush administration. The cumulative death toll is in the neighborhood of 2,000, with close to half of those deaths occurring this year.

The CIA's Jonathan Banks was whisked home from Pakistan after his identity was revealed in a legal action initiated by surviving victims of the drone attacks and their families. The suit also named CIA Director Leon Panetta and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Nothing daunted, the special assistant to the commanding general of U.S. Army Special Operations stated that the current demand for more drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) is "insatiable. "

"It's like crack, and everyone wants more," Brigadier General Kevin Mangum recently announced. [4]

The U.S. is pressuring the Pakistani government to launch a military operation in North Waziristan in tandem with the marked escalation of drone attacks there, something paralleling the Pakistani army offensive in the Swat Valley in May of last year that led to the displacement of three million civilians.

In addition, the Pentagon has recently announced that U.S. and NATO forces will be stationed at a military base in the capital of Pakistan's Balochistan province. [5]

Washington is now pushing to expand special forces operations in Pakistan's tribal areas, supplementing CIA drone strikes and NATO helicopter attacks in the region.

Until now, "The main role in a secret war on Pakistan territory has belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has operated armed drones to hunt down insurgent leaders and also organized a number of secret missions carried out by Afghan operatives, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams."

The introduction of American ground forces - in the words of an American official, "We’ve never been as close as we are now to getting the go-ahead to go across" - would "open a new front in the war that is becoming more and more unpopular in America.

"It also could ruin relations with...Pakistan, especially considering the risk of civilian casualties." [6]

However, civilian deaths on both sides of the Khyber Pass and the destabilization of nuclear Pakistan are matters of small importance to American and NATO geostrategists, who nurture grand designs for Central and South Asia.

A recent Chinese analysis put the matter this way:

"Though it started long ago, the game is still on. There are only more players with more pieces moving and moved on a bigger board, all for a newer rendition of the Great Game.

"Whichever way people prefer to describe the game - geostrategy or geopolitics - there has been a center-piece: interest in a geography that is important to world powers, past and present; that is, in whatever way these powers deem it as important.

"Sitting at one end of the board is the same old player, known as the Russian Empire, while at the other end now is an alliance orchestrated not any more by the British Empire but rather by the Americans and the military coalition they dominate, known as NATO." [7]

Indian analyst and former diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar stated in a recent article entitled "NATO weaves South Asian web" that after its summit in Lisbon, Portugal last month NATO "is well on the way to transforming into a global political-military role" and "is by far today the most powerful military and political alliance in the world."

Speaking about long-term U.S. and NATO strategy in Asia, he added:

"It is within the realm of possibility that NATO would at a future date deploy components of the US missile defense system in Afghanistan. Ostensibly directed against nearby 'rogue states', the missile defense system will challenge the Chinese strategic capability." [8]

Regarding the long-planned agreement on constructing a Turkmenistan- Afghanistan- Pakistan- India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline concluded earlier this month [9], the author said:

"TAPI is the finished product of the US invasion of Afghanistan. It consolidates NATO's political and military presence in the strategic high plateau that overlooks Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and China. TAPI provides a perfect setting for the alliance's future projection of military power for 'crisis management' in Central Asia.

"The pipeline signifies a breakthrough in the longstanding Western efforts to access the fabulous mineral wealth of the Caspian and Central Asian region. Washington has been the patron saint of the TAPI concept since the early 1990s when the Taliban was conceived as its Afghan charioteer. The concept became moribund when the Taliban regime was driven out of power from Kabul.

"Now the wheel has come full circle with the project's incremental resuscitation since 2005, running parallel with the Taliban's fantastic return to the Afghan chessboard. TAPI's proposed commissioning coincides with the 2014 timeline for ending the NATO 'combat mission' in Afghanistan. The US 'surge' is concentrating on Helmand and Kandahar provinces through which the TAPI pipeline will eventually run. What an amazing string of coincidences! " [10]

Last week NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen affirmed that "as the long-term partnership that President Karzai and I signed at Lisbon demonstrates, our commitment to Afghanistan will continue well beyond 2014." [11]

On December 22 U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry confirmed that the Pentagon "will retain a 'sizable mission' in Afghanistan beyond 2014" and that a troop withdrawal, if it ever occurs, would be "conditions- based; not calendar-based. " American troops "could also stay on to carry out counter-terrorism operations," added the retired general and former deputy chairman of the NATO Military Committee. [12]

In a recent interview, American analyst Gareth Porter asserted that NATO troops are killing and dying in Afghanistan "because bureaucrats in Brussels, in the NATO headquarters, wanted more responsibility, [they]wanted a job for NATO to be able to take on in order to justify the continued existence of that organization. " [13]

The U.S. and NATO require and are exploiting the endless war in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more reasons than simply to justify the continued existence, even the global expansion, of the world's only military bloc.

As Bhadrakumar has pointed out, far more is at stake: The military encirclement of Russia, China and Iran and control of Eurasia's strategic energy resources.

1) Associated Press, December 22, 2010

2) Associated Press, December 17, 2010

3) Xinhua News Agency, December 20, 2010

4) U.S. Army: 'Insatiable Demand' for UAVs in War Zone

Defense News, December 16, 2010

5) Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan

November 2010

http://www.defense. gov/pubs/ November_ 1230_Report_ FINAL.pdf

6) US plans to expand raids in Pakistan

Voice of Russia, December 21, 2010

http://english. ruvr.ru/2010/ 12/21/37384229. html

7) Gaochao Yi, More players and more pieces in the New Great Game

Xinhua News Agency, December 19, 2010

http://news. xinhuanet. com/english2010/ indepth/2010- 12/19/c_13655299 .htm

8) Asia Times, December 23, 2010

http://www.atimes. com/atimes/ South_Asia/ LL23Df05. html

9) NATO Trains Afghan Army To Guard Asian Pipeline

Stop NATO, December 19, 2010

http://rickrozoff. wordpress. com/2010/ 12/19/nato- trains-afghan- army-to-guard- asian-pipeline

10) Asia Times, December 23, 2010

11) North Atlantic Treaty Organization, December 16, 2010

12) Pajhwok Afghan News, December 23, 2010

http://www.pajhwok. com/en/2010/ 12/23/eikenberry -sees-continued- role-us-beyond- 2014

13) US-led Afghan war serves NATO's existence

Press TV, December 20, 2010

http://www.presstv. ir/detail/ 156276.html

nestopwar

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Re: 2011: U.S. And NATO To Extend And Expand Afghan War
« Reply #1 on: January 04, 2011, 06:55:16 PM »
How Afghanistan Became a War for NATO
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service

Published on Monday, January 3, 2011

   WASHINGTON - The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the countries providing troops there.In fact, however, NATO was given a central role in Afghanistan because of the influence of U.S. officials concerned with the alliance, according to a U.S. military officer who was in a position to observe the decision-making process.

"NATO's role in Afghanistan is more about NATO than it is about Afghanistan," the officer, who insisted on anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the subject, told IPS in an interview.

The alliance would never have been given such a prominent role in Afghanistan but for the fact that the George W. Bush administration wanted no significant U.S. military role there that could interfere with their plans to take control of Iraq.

That reality gave U.S. officials working on NATO an opening.

Gen. James Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 2003 to 2005, pushed aggressively for giving NATO the primary security role in Afghanistan, according to the officer.

"Jones sold [Defense Secretary Donald]Rumsfeld on turning Afghanistan over to NATO," said the officer, adding that he did so with the full support of Pentagon officials with responsibilities for NATO. "You have to understand that the NATO lobbyists are very prominent in the Pentagon - both in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on the Joint Staff," said the officer.

Jones admitted in an October 2005 interview with American Forces Press Service that NATO had struggled to avoid becoming irrelevant after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. "NATO was in limbo for a bit," he said.

But the 9/11 attacks had offered a new opportunity for NATO to demonstrate its relevance.

The NATO allies were opposed to the U.S. war in Iraq, but they wanted to demonstrate their support for stabilising and reconstructing Afghanistan. Jones prodded NATO member countries to provide troops for Afghanistan and to extend NATO operations from the north into the west and eventually to the east and south, where U.S. troops were concentrated.

That position coincided with the interests of NATO's military and civilian bureaucrats and those of the military establishments in the member countries.

But there was one major problem: public opinion in NATO member countries was running heavily against military involvement in Afghanistan.

To get NATO allies to increase their troop presence in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, Jones assured member states that they would only be mopping up after the U.S. military had defeated the Taliban. On a visit to Afghanistan in August 2004, Jones said, "[W]e should not ever even think that there is going to be an insurrection of the type that we see in Iraq here. It's just not going to happen."

Reassured by Washington and by Jones, in September 2005, NATO defence ministers agreed formally that NATO would assume command of southern Afghanistan in 2006.

But conflicts immediately arose between the U.S. and NATO member countries over the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Britain, Germany, Canada and the Netherlands had all sold the NATO mission to their publics as "peacekeeping" or "reconstruction" as distinct from counterinsurgency war.

When the Bush administration sought to merge the U.S. and NATO commands in Afghanistan, key allies pushed back, arguing the two commands had different missions. The French, meanwhile, were convinced the Bush administration was using NATO troops to fill the gap left by shifting U.S. troops from Afghanistan to Iraq - a war they strongly opposed.

The result was that one NATO member state after another adopted "caveats" that ruled out or severely limited their troops from actually carrying out combat in Afghanistan.

Even as the Bush administration was assuring its NATO allies that they would not have to face a major Taliban uprising, U.S. intelligence was reporting that the insurgency was growing and would intensify in spring 2006.

Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who had just arrived as commander of all U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2005, and newly appointed U.S. Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann were warning Washington that the well-publicized domestic debates in NATO member states over troop commitments were "generating a perception of NATO political weakness", as Neumann recalls in his memoirs on Afghanistan published in 2009.

Neumann wrote that both he and Eikenberry believed "the insurgents would see ISAF's expansion and the U.S. contraction as the moment to rekindle the war."

But Eikenberry assured the news media that the insurgency was under control. In a Dec. 8, 2005 press briefing at the Pentagon, Eikenberry asserted that the more aggressive Taliban tactics were "very much a sign of weakness".

Asked if he wasn't concerned that the situation in Afghanistan was "sliding towards an Iraqi scenario", Eikenberry replied, "[W]e see no indications that such is the case..."

A few weeks later the Taliban launched the biggest offensive since its regime was ousted in 2001, seizing control of much of Helmand, Kandahar and several other southern provinces.

Eikenberry, clearly under orders from Rumsfeld, continued to carry out the policy of turning the south over to NATO in mid-2006. He was rewarded in early 2007 by being sent to Brussels as deputy chairman of NATO's Military Committee.

Eikenberry acknowledged in testimony before Congress in February 2007 that the policy of turning Afghanistan over to NATO was really about the future of NATO rather than about Afghanistan. He noted the argument that failure in Afghanistan could "break" NATO, while hailing the new NATO role in Afghanistan as one that could "make" the alliance.

"The long view of the Afghanistan campaign," said Eikenberry, "is that it is a means to continue the transformation of the alliance."

The Afghanistan mission, Eikenberry said, "could mark the beginning of sustained NATO efforts to overhaul alliance operational practices in every domain." Specifically, he suggested that NATO could use Afghan deployments to press some member nations to carry out "military modernization".

But Canadian General Rick Hillier, who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan from February to August 2004 and was later chief of staff of Canadian armed forces from 2005 to 2008, wrote in his memoir "A Soldier First", published in 2009, that NATO was an unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.

He recalled that when it formally accepted responsibility for Afghanistan in 2003, NATO had "no strategy, no clear articulation of what it wanted to achieve" and that its performance was "abysmal".

Hillier said the situation "remains unchanged" after several years of NATO responsibility for Afghanistan. NATO had "started down a road that destroyed much of its credibility and in the end eroded support for the mission in every nation in the alliance," Hillier wrote.

"Afghanistan has revealed," wrote Hiller, "that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse decomposing..."

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Copyright © 2010 IPS-Inter Press Service