According to the McClatchy news service, U.S. intelligence officials believe that “time is running out in Afghanistan.”
 Protest against U.S. occupation in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Dec. 30. |
The Pentagon-led colonial-style occupation of the country is in serious trouble.
In 2009, 318 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan, the highest yearly total of the war. Over 60 percent of the deaths resulted from improvised explosive device attacks. Resistance fighters carried off 7,228 IED attacks in 2009.
On Dec. 30, seven CIA officers were killed at a U.S. airbase in Khost. The suicide attack— one of many recent bombings that have been carried out by infiltrators in the army and police forces—happened in a heavily fortified compound, Forward Operating Base Chapman. The base in Khost is being used to launch attacks on Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.
Also on Dec. 30, multiple protests were held in eastern Afghanistan in reaction to the killing of over 10 civilians, mostly teenagers, at the hands of U.S. troops in the village of Ghazi Khan. In Jalalabad, hundreds of students took to the streets chanting, “Obama! Obama! Take your soldiers out of Afghanistan!”
Over 2,000 civilians were killed in 2009 alone, according to the United Nations.
In recent years, the Taliban and other forces fighting the occupation have grown in numbers and have resumed control in as much as 80 percent of the country. Shadow governors have been set up in 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. According to reports, a government in waiting has already been organized.
Now, resistance forces are within striking distance of cutting off U.S. supply routes into the country.
After eight years and billions of dollars spent, the United States has not been able to set up a stable colonial-style occupation of the country. In fact, the United States cannot win in Afghanistan. The people of the region will never accept the rule of the Pentagon, Washington and Wall Street. Afghanistan belongs to the people of Afghanistan, who are allies in the struggle to end war and racism.
Unable to come up with any other option in their approach to the war on Afghanistan, the Obama administration is rushing tens of thousands of troops and intelligence officers to the region in order to ramp-up the violence on the Afghani people.
A defeat or retreat in Afghanistan would be a serious blow to U.S. imperialism’s floundering attempts to reorganize the wider region into client and dependent states with permanent U.S. military bases spanning the Middle East and Central Asia.
We have everything to gain if U.S. imperialism loses in Afghanistan. The money being spent to dominate the region should be spent on jobs, education, health care and more. The people of the United States should fight to bring all the troops home now and end the war immediately.
