Afghans have taken to the streets in recent protests with posters depicting Karzai as a U.S. puppet, showing mutilated women and dead bodies. They burned an effigy of Obama and shouted their anger at the corrupt government, the violence against women and night raids by U.S. troops, and demanded U.S. withdrawal.
In ten years of U.S. occupation, thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed in the fighting between the Taliban insurgents and U.S/NATO troops and in night raids and helicopter attacks by the occupying forces.
Now the Afghan government and the United States have finalized a strategic partnership extending the U.S. presence until 2024. Under the agreement, to be signed by Karzai and Obama and ratified by the Afghan parliament and the U.S. Congress, the U.S. military will cede final authority on night raids (but not drone attacks) to Afghan security forces, and control of Afghanistan’s prisons to Afghan authorities. It pledges $4 billion a year for the Afghan police and army, with the bulk coming from the U.S. until 2014.
U.S. Forces Will Stay
Many Afghans reacted with skepticism to Afghan National Security Adviser Rangin Dadfar Spanta’s remark that, “ the document provides a strong foundation for the security of Afghanistan, the region and the world,” since it allows an unstated number of U.S forces to stay in Afghanistan for 12 years, and ignores the long-term U.S. access to its 30+ military bases. Afghans know this military presence will continue the fighting and killing, with the U.S effectively using Afghanistan to maintain a permanent military presence in the region.
U. S. Ambassador Crocker said it cements a long-term strategic partnership between “two equal and sovereign states.” Afghans know this means the U.S will continue to prop up a government of thieves, warlords, drug dealers and war profiteers who run the country, continuing the misery and horror of daily life.
Taliban Jockies for Position
Meanwhile the Taliban — who withdrew from talks with the U.S. and Karzai governments after a U.S. Marine massacre of 27 Afghans last month — is also maneuvering for a position in the country’s affairs.
Violence moved to a new level when 35-40 suicide bombers launched coordinated attacks in Kabul and other cities on government buildings, Western embassies and NATO headquarters. The Taliban labeled the assault retaliation for U.S. military actions, the recent burning of Korans and the slaughter of 27 Afghan civilians.
The U.S. ambassador said, “...these attackers [are] part of the Haqqani network; they enjoy safe haven in northern Waziristan” (an area of western Pakistan bordering Afghanistan). Afghans suspected that the U.S. motive in singling out the Haqqanis is a tactic in a political game to advance U.S. demands in its on-again, off-again negotiations with the Taliban and the Karzai government. The Haqqani network is one of eight anti-government, anti-U.S. groups, each with distinct goals, territorial and economic interests that comprise the Taliban movement.
Richard Haass of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations outlined the strategy: make separate deals with different Taliban factions, carving Afghanistan into a “patchwork quilt” of territories overseen by various warlords and Taliban leaders. This would pacify areas protecting the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghan-Pakistan-India) pipeline which U.S. trans-nationals are planning and would safeguard permanent U.S. military bases. The Haqqanis have been included in the two-year talks with Taliban leaders. Hillary Clinton met with them in 2011.
Afghans, however, see no difference between the Taliban factions; they view all as terrorists. Neither do they trust U.S. rulers. They accuse them of using the insurgency to push the Strategic Partnership Agreement and continue the occupation. In addition, the targeting of the Haqqanis justifies more deadly drone attacks on Haqqanis bases in Pakistan, further destabilizing that country.
Best Friends
Once a White House guest, Jalaluddin Haqqani, was a mujahideen commander in the U.S proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. This previously unknown Afghan, along with other warlords, was on the CIA payroll, receiving millions of dollars and weapons, through Pakistan’s ISI (security service).
When the Taliban seized power in 1996, Haqqani became a government minister. After the 2001 U.S. invasion, he refused a position in the Karzai government, returning to Pakistan to expand his network. Today his son runs the network’s various business interests and funds a militia that rules by fear and violence in the territories it controls.
Contradictions between the Afghan working class and the fundamentalist warlords, drug dealers and war profiteers, both Afghan and foreign, who are now jockeying to maintain their position after 2014, are deepening at an alarming rate. Its present in downtown Kabul, where thousands displaced by the fighting and land-grabbing live in unspeakable squalor in shanties alongside new luxury buildings.
Political parties are forming to bring radical social change. Afghans once organized a movement that identified capitalism as the problem and communism the solution, to end the vast economic disparity between rich and poor. In 1978, a Marxist party, the PDPA, took power and for 12 years — despite fighting a war, the USSR occupation and its own errors — conditions for the Afghan working class improved tremendously.
(Next issue: the history of the struggle for communism in Afghanistan and how Afghans are fighting for those ideas today.)