“The president wanted to make it clear that the United States is committed to Afghanistan for the long haul and to send a signal to our allies that at the same time we are asking them to commit additional troops to Afghanistan that they know that we will also continue to have a significant troop presence there…regardless of the situation in Iraq,” said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
A report published in the Washington Post on Saturday said, “The pledge comes as violence and insurgent activity is spiking in parts of Afghanistan. The administration’s promise of more troops could indicate the beginning of a push, similar to the buildup of (US) forces in Iraq over the past year, to step up counterinsurgency operations next year. Such a decision would probably fall to Bush’s successor, but Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates said he senses bipartisan support.”
The Post quoted Gates as telling American reporters traveling with him on Friday as he left the Bucharest summit for a Middle East trip, “I think that no matter who is elected president, they will want to be successful in Afghanistan.”
The Post said that US National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley signaled the commitment to sending additional American troops to Afghanistan in 2009 during a media briefing in Bucharest on Thursday. “We have plans to contemplate additional contributions of troops in Afghanistan in the south in 2009,” Hadley said, adding that “these are all in addition to the 3,500 Marines now going to Afghanistan.”
But neither Hadley nor Gates indicated how many troops. The Post report noted that “commanders in Afghanistan have said they could use as many as two or three additional brigades, or nearly 10,000 troops. The report quoted Gates as saying that he would like to wait until after the US Marines in Afghanistan return home later this year to decide on 2009 troop levels.
Meanwhile, General David W. McKiernan, the nominated commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that the United States should examine options for deploying more brigades. “There are certainly no signs that the insurgency is ready to collapse,” McKiernan said.
In plain words, all this suggests that the US and ISAF forces are getting increasingly bogged down in the quagmire that is Afghanistan today, and are making little headway in their efforts to defeat what they call the “insurgency”.
What they are actually facing, however, is not an “insurgency” but a resistance movement made up of Afghans who want to get rid of the foreign forces that have occupied their country.
The Geneva Convention, to which the United States and all the other NATO countries are signatories, says that it is perfectly legal for the citizens of a country occupied by foreign troops to attack those troops in an effort to drive them out. The US-led ISAF is not an “international security assistance force”; it is a foreign occupation army that has no business being in Afghanistan in the first place.
When General McKiernan said that “there are no signs that the insurgency is ready to collapse,” he should have known that history shows that the Afghani people have never accepted the occupation of their country by foreign troops and have never stopped fighting them – as the Soviet Union learned to its cost in the 1980s when it had an occupation force of more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. More than 10,000 Soviet troops were killed and 37,000 wounded in ten years of fighting between anti-Communist Muslim Afghan guerillas (mujahideen) and Afghan government and Soviet forces.
The conflict had its origins in the 1978 coup that overthrew Afghan president Sardar Muhammad Daud Khan, who had come to power by ousting his cousin King Zahir Shah in 1973. Daud was assassinated and a pro-Soviet Communist government under Noor Mohammad Taraki was established. In 1979 another coup, which brought Hafizullah Amin to power, provoked an invasion (in December 1979) by Soviet forces and the installation of Babrak Karmal as president.
The Soviet invasion, which sparked Afghan resistance, initially involved an estimated 30,000 troops, a force that ultimately grew to over 100,000. In the beginning, the mujahideen fought the Soviet troops on their own, using little more than antiquated rifles against Soviet troops equipped with massive firepower. It wasn’t until about two years later (when the world saw that the mujahideen were more than holding their own against the mighty Soviet military machine) that outside aid began to flow to the Afghan fighters. The mujahideen were supported by aid from the United States, China and Saudi Arabia, channeled through Pakistan, and from Iran.
Although the Soviet Union had superior weapons and complete air control (just as the US forces have today), the Afghan guerillas successfully eluded them. The conflict largely settled into a stalemate, with Soviet and puppet Afghan government forces controlling the urban areas, and the Afghan guerillas operating fairly freely in mountainous rural regions. As the war progressed the Afghan guerillas improved their organisation and tactics, and began to use imported and captured weapons, including US anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, to neutralise the technological advantages of the Soviet Union.
In 1986, Babrak Karmal resigned and Mohammed Najibullah (who until then had been chief of the infamous Afghan intelligence agency) became head of a collective leadership. In 1988, following several rounds of the so-called “proximity talks” in Geneva between Soviet officials and Pakistani government officials, then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of Soviet troops, which was completed in February 1989.
In the spring of 1992, Najibullah’s government collapsed. Najibullah himself (probably the most hated man in Afghanistan at the time) ended up being publicly hanged. After 14 years of rule by the pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party, Kabul fell to a coalition of mujahideen groups under the military leadership of Ahmed Shah Massoud.
Years of internecine fighting between the various mujahideen groups followed, in which much of Kabul was reduced to rubble by artillery shelling. In November 1996, Kabul fell to Taliban forces advancing from their southern stronghold of Kandahar.
The war left Afghanistan with severe political, economic and ecological problems. Most of the country’s infrastructure had been destroyed. Economic production was drastically curtailed, and much of the land was laid waste. More than 1 million Afghans died in the war and 5 million became refugees in neighbouring countries, including 3 million in Pakistan, which welcomed them with open arms and has continued to look after them to this day, despite the fact that Afghanistan was the only country which had voted against Pakistan’s entry into the United Nations in 1948.
At the end of the war against the Soviet Union, more than 5 million Soviet landmines littered vast tracts of the countryside, where they will continue to pose a threat to human and animal life well into the 21st century.
In response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon building in Washington, the United States and the United Kingdom launched a war against Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. It was the beginning of the Bush administrations so-called “war on terrorism”.
The stated purpose of the invasion was to capture Osama bin Laden, destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban regime.
More than six years down the road, neither the first nor the second of the three US objectives has been achieved. And while the Taliban regime in Kabul was ousted within a few days of the start of the invasion, it was more a case of the Taliban fighters withdrawing from the capital and melting away into the countryside than a case of a military victory for the United States.
Now, the US-led ISAF and NATO forces are facing an increasingly resurgent Taliban, who control much of the countryside in the south.