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PLAN: THE UNITED STATES federal government WILL REDUCE ALL MILITARY PRESENCE INAFGHANISTAN TO ZERO WITHOUT DELAY.


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OBSERVATION 1: THE STATUS QUO IN AFGHANISTAN

THE CRIMINAL PRACTICES OF IMPERIAL FOREIGN OCCUPATION OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARYFORCES HAS LED TO THE RISING DEATH TOLLS AS TENS OF THOUSANDS OF SOLIDERS ALL TOSUPPORT THE INTERESTS OF THE FEW FINANICAL ELITES LED BY THE ADMINISTRATION THATENCOURAGED CHANGE UNDERTHE WAVE OF ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT.

A TRUE GENUINE STRUGGLE TO END THE WAR DEMANDS FOR AN IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL OFUS TROOPS.

VAN AUKEN writer for the World Socialist Web.org, 2010 Bill-; U.S. death toll in Afghanistan Tops 1,000; AXIS OF LOGIC; May19http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_59920.shtml

The massive suicide bombing that ripped through a NATO convoy in Kabul Tuesday claimed the lives of fivemore US soldiers, a Canadian officer and a dozen Afghan civilians.The attack demonstrated the failure of more than eight years of US-led occupation, not to mention that ofthe puppet government of President Hamid Karzai, to secure even the center of the Afghan capital. It also

marked a grim milestone for American forces, bringing the total number killed in action in OperationEnduring Freedom to the 1,000 mark.There is little doubt that the Obama administration , like the BushWhite House before it, will seek to gloss over the significance of this casualty figure. A White House spokesmanissued a brief statement Tuesday praising American military forces for their extraordinary sacrifice, but made nomention of the number of American dead in this war having risen to 1,000. Such numbers, however, do have animmense significance and demand serious reflection. Behind them lie devastated family members and love ones,not to mention the tens of thousands more US troops who have seen their lives shattered by horrendousphysical wounds as well as the immense psychological toll of repeated tours of duty fighting a hostilepopulation as part of an army of occupation.In 2009, 17,538 military personnel were hospitalized for mentalpro blems, compared to 11,156 for injuries and battle wounds. War is difficult. It takes a toll, commented the Armyssurgeon general, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker.No doubt, the same can be said for any war. But when soldiers are sent tokill and die in a war based upon lies, a war whose human costs are covered up by the government and aservile media and a war that is waged to suppress popular resistance to foreign occupation , thispsychological toll is sharply intensified.For what have 1,000 US American soldiers died? What has justified the

shattered bodies and minds of many thousands more? And what can excuse the slaying and maiming of tens of thousandsof Afghans over the course of the last 103 months in this, the second longest war in US history?The Obamaadministrations claimsechoing the lies of Bush and Cheneythat US imperialism is fighting in

Afghanistan to prevent another terrorist attack on US soil have been discredited by the militarcommanders themselves, who estimate that no more than 100 Al Qaeda members are operating inside the country,and acknowledge that their counterinsurgency efforts are directed against indigenous resistance. It is, in short, a filthycolonial-style war consisting of the kind of pacification operations that US forces waged against Native

Americans in the 19th century or against Filipinos and Haitians in the early 20th. It involves criminalpracticesfamiliar to the armies of France, Portugal and Britain, in their attempts to crush anti-colonial movements in

Africa, Asia and the Middle East.US soldiers are dying to prop up the venal puppet regime of Hamid Karzaiwhich represents a group of brutal warlords and heroin traffickers on the CIA payroll, but , according to theUS militarys own surveys, enjoys no significant base of popular support in any part of the country.

And, in the final analysis, they are dying in pursuit of a strategy of aggressionelaborated well before

9/11that is aimed at establishing US military hegemonyover energy supplies and oil pipeline routes that are ofimmense importance to the countries neighboring Afghanistanin particular, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistanand India.This strategy is designed to benefit a tiny ruling financial elite at the expense of working peoplenot only in Afghanistan, but in the US as well. Under conditions in which working people are being told that thereis no money to deal with unemployment, poverty and deteriorating social conditions, the Democratic controlledCongress is preparing this weekto pass another $59 billion emergency supplemental bill to finance the

Afghan war and its escalation.By this summer, as a result of the Obama administrations surge,thenumber of US troops occupying Afghanistan will be triple what it was when George W. Bush left office. Farfrom securing the country, the increased US military presence has only led to a steady escalation ofviolence and death.According to a report released by the US Government Accountability Office, US-led occupation forces were subjected to anaverage of more than 40 attacks each day in March, double the rate for the same month in 2009.Meanwhile, evenaccording to the Pentagons absurdly low estimates, the number ofunarmed civilians, the majority of them women
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and children, killed by US-led occupation forces in night raids, bombings, checkpoint shootings anddrive-by killings by US convoys also doubled during the first quarter of this year, compared to the number recordedfor the same period last year.The level of bloodletting is set to escalate sharply, with the resistance launching itsown summer offensive and US forces preparing for a siege of Kandahar, a city roughly the size of Detroit, which has been astronghold of the Taliban. Secretary of State Hillary Clintons statement last week that the US military did not intend todestroy Kandahar in the effort to save Kandahar was hardly reassuring.Thebroad popular hostility in the US to

this war, as well as to the continued occupation of Iraq, both launched under the Bush administration and continuedunder Obama, has not disappeared.But it can find no expression whatsoever within the two big businessparties or in the mass media, which largelyechoes the official line that the US is fighting a good war in

Afghanistan.There is no doubt a broad sensethat nothing can be done within the existing political setupparticularly after repeated elections in which masses of people have gone to the polls to express theiropposition to these wars and, in 2008, elected as president, Barack Obama, who had appealed to thesesentiments, only to take office and dramatically escalate US military aggression in both Afghanistan andPakistan.The experience of 15 months of the Obama administration has also exposed the

bankruptperspective of the middle class antiwar protest organizations that had maintained war could beopposed by supporting the Democrats against Bush. The Bush administration is gone, the Democrats control

both houses of Congress and the war crimes continue. For their part, the protest organizations havebecome largelyinactive, having adapted themselves to Obamas progressive agenda.Agenuine struggleagainst war can be waged only through the development of an independent socialist movement of the working classagainst the capitalist profit system, which is the source of militarism.This movement must demand the immediate

withdrawal of all US and other foreign troops from the Middle East and Central Asia. It must also fight for thedismantlement of the US war machine and the redirection of the trillions of dollars in military spending to pay forreparations to the populations ravaged by American wars of aggression and to deal with the deepening social crisisconfronting working people in the US itself.


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U.S. TROOPS HAVE ONLY SERVED TO STRENGTHEN THE PASHTUN RESOLVE. AMERICAN TROOPSINTO ETHNIC PASHTUN AREAS MAY ONLY GALVNIZE LOCAL PEOPLE CREATING GREATEROPPOSITION, FURTHERING INSTABILITY AND POSSIBLE THE COLLAPSE OF PAKISTAN.

KRISTOFF Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist for the New York Times2009Nicholas-; The Afghanistan Abyss; NEW YORK TIMES,September 5, op.ed.; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=1

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000American troops to Afghanistan and soon wildecide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group offormer intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops

would be a historic mistake.The groups concern dead right, in my viewis that sending more Americantroops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban inrepelling the infidels.Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtunareas is the problem, the group said in a statement to me. The more troops we put in, the greater theopposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase theopposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.The basic ignorance by our leadership isgoing to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome, the statement said.The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a formerambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense

University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, wasstation chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.s CounterterrorismCenter. We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff, Mr. Miller said.Mr. Hart, who helped organizethe anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just dont understand the toughnessdetermination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result

will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there possibly even the collapse ofPakistan.These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to go public with their concerns. Andtheir views are widely shared among others who also know Afghanistan well.Weve bitten off more than we can chew

were setting ourselves up for failure, saidRory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is notrunning a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan asnonsense.Im writing about these concerns because I share them. Im also troubled because officials in Washington seemto make decisions based on a simplistic caricature of the Taliban that doesnt match what Ive found inmy reporting tripstoAfghanistan and Pakistan. Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into Taliban or non-Taliban.Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and fears.Many Pashtuns Ive interviewed are appalled bythe Talibans periodic brutality and think they are too extreme; they think theyre a little nuts. But these Pashtuns alsoadmire the Talibans personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials aroundPresident Hamid Karzai.Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elderssuggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because its a way toearn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land particularly because theforeigners havent brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated. Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes

without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and some commanders in the field have beensuperb in building trust with Afghans. That works. But all commanders cant be superb, and overall, our increasedpresence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=1http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=1http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01military.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01military.htmlhttp://www.heritage.org/research/middleeast/images/bg2076_map1-lg.jpghttp://ciahart.blogspot.com/http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/rory-stewart/%28page%29/facultyhttp://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/rory-stewart/%28page%29/facultyhttp://www.turquoisemountain.org/http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?match=any&query=afghanistan+pakistan&submit.x=14&submit.y=11&submit=Searchhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?match=any&query=afghanistan+pakistan&submit.x=14&submit.y=11&submit=Searchhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?match=any&query=afghanistan+pakistan&submit.x=14&submit.y=11&submit=Searchhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?match=any&query=afghanistan+pakistan&submit.x=14&submit.y=11&submit=Searchhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?match=any&query=afghanistan+pakistan&submit.x=14&submit.y=11&submit=Searchhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html?match=any&query=afghanistan+pakistan&submit.x=14&submit.y=11&submit=Searchhttp://www.turquoisemountain.org/http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/rory-stewart/%28page%29/facultyhttp://ciahart.blogspot.com/http://www.heritage.org/research/middleeast/images/bg2076_map1-lg.jpghttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01military.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01military.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01military.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=1


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INSTABILITY IN THIS REGION OF THE WORLD RISK NUCLEAR EXCHANGE

AHARI Professor of National Security and Strat @ Warfighting School2001M. Ehsan Ahrari Professorof National Security and Strategy of the Joint and Combined Warfighting School at the Armed Forces Staff CollegeinNorfolk, Virginia JIHADI GROUPS, NUCLEAR PAKISTAN, AND THE NEW GREAT GAMEwww.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ssi/jihadi.pdf

South and Central Asia constitute a part of the world where a well-designed American strategy might help avoidcrises or catastrophe. The U.S. military would provide only one component of such a strategy, and a secondary one at that

but has an important role to play through engagement activities and regional confidence-building. Insecurity has ledthe states of the region to seek weapons of mass destruction, missiles, and conventional arms. It has alsoled them toward policies which undercut the security of their neighbors. If such activities continue, theresult could be increased terrorism, humanitarian disasters, continued low-level conflict and potentiallyeven major regional war or a thermonuclear exchange. A shift away from this pattern could allow the states of theregion to become solid economic and political partners for the United States, thus representing a gain for all concerned.

PARTICULARLY PAKISTANI COLLAPSE COULD USE TO THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

BROOKES Senior Fellow @ Heritage2007Peter-; Baracks Blunder, 8/2/2007,http://www.nypost.com/seven/08022007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/baracks_blunder_opedcolumnists_peter_brookes.htm?page=2

The last thing we need is for Islamabad to fall to the extremists. That would exacerbate the problem ofthose terrorist safe havens that Obama apparently thinks he could invade. And it would also put Pakistan's nuclear arsenalinto the wrong hands. That could lead to a number of nightmarish scenarios - a nuclear war with Indiaover Kashmir, say, or the use of nuclear weapons by a terrorist group against any number of targets,including the United States.

PAKISTANI NUKES SEND OFF A CHAIN REACTION ENDING MOST LIFE ON EARTH.

CALDICOTT Founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility2002 Helen-; The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bushs Military-Industrial Complex

The use of Pakistani nuclear weapons could trigger a chain reaction. Nuclear-armed India , an ancient

enemy, could respond in kind. China, India's hated foe, could react if India used her nuclear weaponstriggering a nuclear holocaust on the subcontinent. If any of either Russia or America's 2,250 strategic weapons on hair-trigger alert were launched either accidentally or purposefully in response, nuclearwinter would ensue, meaning the end of most life on earth.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ssi/jihadi.pdfhttp://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ssi/jihadi.pdfhttp://www.nypost.com/seven/08022007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/baracks_blunder_opedcolumnists_peter_brookes.htm?page=2http://www.nypost.com/seven/08022007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/baracks_blunder_opedcolumnists_peter_brookes.htm?page=2http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ssi/jihadi.pdf


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OBSERVATION 3: IMPERIALISMOUR INTERVENTIONIST MILITARY RESPONSE IN AFGHANISTAN IS AN EXAMPLE OF WESTERNEXCEPTIONALISM WHICH LIES AT THE HEART OF IMPERIALISM.

GREGORY, Derek[geographer and professor of geography at the University of British Columbia], The Colonial Present: Afghanistan,

Palestine, Iraq

,2004

Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar is understandably more skeptical about this post-imperial world, and his argument has aradically different ring. Yet he reaches a similar conclusion. Cooper hesitates over the place of the United States in hisgeographical imaginary - the rupture between America and"old Europe" over the war in Iraq makes his reluctance all the more revealing - but Sanbar makes no bones aboutsaying that"globalization is in the process of transforming everywhere into a domestic American space." Inconsequence, he claims that: [T]he notions of interior and exterior, of domestic and foreign policy, will be called upon todisappear in favour of Washington's supremacy, which is gradually becoming the enthroned capital of the world .... It isnot a question of a new occupation of foreign territories but of an integration - an annexation, I shouldsay - of all humanity within the borders of the United States. 33 This is the ideology of American Empireto be sure, of the New American Century in which America is cast not only as theglobal superpower but also as theuniversal(Hollywood actor. But unless one understands "humanity" in Sanbar's last sentence in the always conditiona

sense produced by the excision - the ex-ception - of homo sacer, it is not the practice of American Empire. For over 200years, as VeenaDas cogently reminded us, "the distinction between an 'inside' in which values of democracyand freedom were propagated and an 'outside' which was not ready for such values and hence had to besubjugated by violence in order to be reformed has marked the rhetoric and practice of colonialism andits deep connections with Western democracies."" Has had good reason to say this in the aftermath ofSeptember 11, and the subsequent unfolding of "the war on terror" in Afghanistan and its violent extensions intoPalestine and Iraq (and beyond) have demonstrated not the slackening but the tightening of this coloniaspacing. For colonialism's promise of modernity has always been deferred - always skewed by the

boundary between "us" and "them" - and although that partition is routinely crossed, even transgressed, the dismalfact is that no colonial anxiety, no colonial guilt has ever erased it altogether. If this is still the primarymeridian of imaginative geography, however, it is no simple geometry. It is, as I have repeatedly insisted, a topologythat also marks the threshold, the space of the exception, whose seams are folded, stretched, and torn into new, ever more

wrenching constellations. Borders are not only lines on maps but spacings dispersed across multiple sites

embassies, airports, detention centers that radically contort conventional mappings of territory. Evenhybrid "borderlands" bear the scar tissue of those boundaries. Through these twists and turns the divide may be annulledin some registers (in these ways, you may be modern: like "us") while it is simultaneously reaffirmed in others (in these

ways you will never be modern: always irredeemably "other"). Our "six degrees of separation" mean that themodern world is marked by spacings of connection, which are worked by transnational capital circuits andcommodity chains, by global flows of information and images, and by geopolitical alignments and militarydispositions. These have their own uneven geographies - they do not produce a single, smooth surface and they are madeintelligible through their own imaginative geographies. But the modern world is also marked by spacings ofdisjuncture between the same and the other that are installed through the same or parallel economic, cultural, andpolitical networks but articulated by countervailing imaginative geographies that give them different force and sanction.Imaginative geographies are thus doubled spaces of articulation. Their inconstant topologies are mappings of connectivedissonance in which connections are elaborated in some registers even as they are disavowed in others. These are all"gravity's rainbows." In his novel of (almost) that name, Thomas Pynchon described the arc of the V-2 rocketslaunched against Britain from occupied Europe in the dying days of the Second World War as a "screaming coming acrossthe sky." Several writers have used the same image to describe the events of September 11. Hijacked aircraft crashing intothe Twin Towers, cruise missiles and "daisy-cutters" raining down on Afghanistan: so many "screamingsacross the sky" whose terrifying arcs at once marked and made viscerally physical connections ." But theyalso made disconnections, marked by an unwillingness to see an altogether more solid geometry and to hear analtogether different sound: the misshapen bodies of the dead and the screamings of the injured as they layamong the rubble. Imaginative geographies are like gravity's rainbows. They map the twists and turns of engagementand estrangement. Mappings of engagement and estrangement articulate contemporary cultures of travel. Bauman'stourists probably know this without being told; at least those accustomed to move from one exotic site/sight to another,gazing upon the other but always able to withdraw to the security of the familiar, know this. As the young Britishprotagonist in Will Rhode's Paperback Raita puts it, "Half the attraction of coming to India is the ability to leave it."Tourists move in the folds between compression and expansion, and, cultures of travel are some of the most commonplacemeans through which colonialism is abroad in our own present. as.Urry once remarked, it is now the case that in the first


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world "people are much of the time tourists, whether they like it or not," it is also the case that they ~- we - are implicatedin the performance of the colonial present." Ironically one of the immediate consequences of September 11 was to contractthe space of American tourism as flights were cancelled and aircraft flew half-empty. Two weeks later Bush toldenthusiastic airline employees at Chicago's O'Hare airport that "one of the great goals of this war is to tell the travelingpublic: Get on board."" This must count as one of the most bizarre reasons for waging war in human history, and yet it alsospeaks a powerful truth. Modern metropolitan cultures privilege their own mobility. "Privilege" has to be understood

literally; there are other cultures of travel within which movement is a burden, an imposition, even a tragedy." What, thenof Bauman's vagabonds? Three weeks after September 11 the metropolis reasserted its customary powersand privileges as military action was launched against Afghanistan, and thousands of refugees weredisplaced by these time-space compressions. Many of them were trapped at borders - not only at Afghanistan's

borders but at other borders around the world. Here is Gary Younge on their experience almost in Britain: [S]hould thosewhom we seek to protect [by our international military actions] arrive on our shores, all apparent concern evaporates in ahaze of xenophobic bellicosity. Whatever compassion may have' been expressed previously is confiscated atthe border. As soon as they touch foot on British soil they go from being a cause to be championed to aproblem to be dealt with. We may flout international law abroad, but God forbid any one should breachimmigration law here.... We love them so we bomb them; we loathe them so we deport them.'9 Thousands of displacedpeople, refugees, and asylum-seekers found that, in the very eye of these wrenching time-space compressions, time andspace had dramatically expanded for them. Then in April 2003 the British government began the forcible repatriation of

Afghan refugees. According to the Home Office, "the deportation was aimed partly at testing the situation in Afghanistan."The refugees were the creatures of a cruel experiment: "We need to ensure that the process is sustainable and that there isadequate infrastructure and security on the ground to receive them." There are, of course, other - less violent - ways ofinvestigating conditions on the ground than sending desperate human beings back to the danger zone. In fact, there iscredible, compelling evidence that Afghanistan is not safe, and the British government continues to advise its own citizensagainst travelling there.2 But refugees are allowed few rights. "The globe shrinks for those who own it," Homi Bhabhaonce remarked, but "for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than thefew feet across borders or frontiers. ,2' The figure of the refugee - as both wanderer and prisoner - throws into crisis what

Agamben calls "the originary fiction of sovereignty" because it calls into question the connective imperative that makesnativity the foundation of nationality and hence of the sovereign space of the nation-state. The refugee is, figurativelyand physically, a border figure who, if not excluded or confined, threatens to perforate the territorialintegrity of the state."

THE WAR ON TERROR IS A CRITICAL COMPONENT OF THE US DRIVE FOR IMPERIALISM ITJUSTIFIES THE NEW FORM OF HEGEMONIC CONTROL

REID, Lecturer in International Relations, Department of War Studies, Kings College London,2005 [Julian 'The Biopolitics of the War onTerror: a critique of the 'return of imperialism' thesis in international relations , Third World Quarterly,http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/265145_731199548_713720198.pdf]

The war on terror is widely regarded as instigating a major regression within the development of theinternational system. Processes of globalisation are being challenged, it is argued, by a reassertion of thesovereign power of nation-states, most especially the USA. In more overt terms this regression isrepresented as a return of a traditional form of imperialism . This return of imperialism thesischallenges the claims of theories developed during the 1990s which concentrate on the roles ofdeterritorialisation and the development of biopolitics in accounting for the constitution of thecontemporary international order. In contrast this paper seeks to detail the important respects in which

biopolitical forces of deterritorialisation continue to play an integral role within the strategies of powerthat make the war on terror possible . Rather than understanding the war on terror as a form of

regression it is necessary to pay heed to the complex intertwinings that continue to bind sovereign andbiopolitical forms of power in the 21st century. Such an understanding is urgent in that it provides fordifferent grounds from which to reflect on the processes by which international order is currently beingreconstituted and to help think about how to engage in reshaping them.


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THE INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN HAS INCITED SOME OF THE MOST BRUTAL OF IMPERIALACTIONS.

SHOLA, (Jawid, Voice of the Communist Party of Afghanistan, Afghanistan After Seven Years Of The Invasion,http://www.sholajawid.org/english/main_english/afg_after7years041108.html) 2008

This war launched with the pretexts of a "war on terror" and "freeing the people of Afghanistan" was infact a war of aggression aimed at serving the interests of the U.S. and the other imperialists, regionalinterests given greater importance by their global context . But the achievement of the war's aims has run upagainst obstacles arising from its unjust and reactionary nature. This is something that the arrogant imperialists could notand did not want to foresee. All the various imperialist countries, whether ruled by open right-wing regimes or socialdemocratic governments, obeyed only one logic: the interests of monopoly capital and imperialist power relations. Theytook advantage of 9/11 and the anti-woman brutality of the Taleban regime to legitimise their invasion of Afghanistan.They never doubted that victory would come quickly and easily. However, "Operation Enduring Freedom", as theinvasion was labelled, brought the people of Afghanistan no freedom at all. Instead, the result has beenall kinds of misery imposed on the people in various forms by both the occupiers and thefundamentalists. In addition to frequent bombardments of villages in the contested areas of the southand east, the invaders carry out torture at Bagram (the former Soviet base near Kabul now run by theU.S.) and other military facilities. They harass the people and worse on the streets and in their homes

Instead of the promised economic reconstruction, the country's economy has become dependent on the drug trade. Some40 percent of the people suffer absolute poverty, and 20 million - more than 70 percent of the population - live under thepoverty line. The invaders have entrusted the government and parliament to the most corrupt and brutalcriminals, reactionaries whom the people have known and hated for the last 30 years . Further, theoccupation of Afghanistan has drawn Pakistan deeply into this war, risking a wider and more complex conflict that couldpull in other countries in the region, such as Iran and even conceivably India.


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OBSERVATION 4: SOLVENCY

U.S. MILITARY PRESENCE IN AFGHANISTAN IS MORE OF THE PROBLEM. THERE IS A NEED FORDRASTIC REVISION OF U.S. STRATEGIC THINKING. CURRENT MILITARY FORCES HAS ONLY GROWN

WORSE, CREATING HATRED AND DESTABILIZING PAKISTAN. WE MUST ALLOW NON-MILITARY ANDNEUTRAL INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS FREE OF GEOPOLITICAL TAINT TAKE OVER IN

AFGHANISTAN.

FULLERFormer CIA Station Chief in Kabul and noted author on Islam 2009Graham E.-a former vice-chair of the CIA's National Intelligence Council;Obama's Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan; THEHUFFINGTON POST, May 10; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/graham-e-fuller/global-viewpoint-obamas-p_b_201355.html

For all the talk of "smart power," President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistanmarked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking. -- Military force will not win the day in eitherAfghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse underthe U.S. military footprint.-- The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also alethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban -- like them or not -- as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtunpower in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobicpeoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they

are Islamist.-- It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The "Durand Line" is anarbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns inPakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan's 28million Pashtuns.-- India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore alwaysmaintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan -- inthe intelligence, economic and political arenas -- that chills Islamabad.-- Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties orabandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtunshostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.-- Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. islearning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although manyare indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.-- The U.S. had every reason to strike

back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children foran incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fightanother day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible -- with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran

Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives -- to force the Taliban to yield upal-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences ofthatwar are balefuldebilitating and still spreading.-- The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a directconsequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan warover the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations -- the classic responseto a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?-- The deeplyentrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not betransformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embeddedsocial and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.-- Pakistan is indeednow beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-Americanimpulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctantacquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.Only the withdrawal of American and NATOboots on the ground

will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region tostart to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists

under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in theMuslim world. But U.S. policies have nowdriven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combinedfever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan,Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.The Pakistani army is more than capable ofmaintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalistrevolutionary spirit could change that -- something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington canstill succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter ofmilitary rule -- not what Pakistan needs -- will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad's basic policies wilnot change, except at the cosmetic level.In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over theradicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the externalinvader. Sadly, U.S. forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread femalerights and education -- areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to
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happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the countryover 30 years.Al-Qaida's threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that haslong since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national

voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadiperspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.

What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international

organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of statestructures.If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could

be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening ofthe prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence hasnow become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.


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THE WAR ON TERROR IS THE LINCHPIN OF THE IMPERIALIST MINDSET THE APPARATUS OFPOWER FAVORS U.S. IDEALS TROOP WITHDRAWAL SERVES AS A MECHANISM TO UNDERMINETHE IMPERIALISTIC MIND OF SUCH A GLOBAL HEGEMONIC POWER KEY TO ACCESS SOLVENCY.

REID ,LECTURER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF WAR STUDIES, KINGS COLLEGE LONDON, 2005[Julian 'TheBiopolitics of the War on Terror: a critique of the 'return of imperialism' thesis in international relations , Third World

Quarterly,http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/265145_731199548_713720198.pdf]

Those who assert we have witnessed a regression in the organisation of power internationally since 9/11point to the contingencies of the global political order during the 1990s.13 The end of the Cold War, it issaid, bequeathed the USA a preponderance of power internationally. The absence of a symmetrical threatallowed it, under the auspices of the Clinton administration, to embark upon a multilateral strategy that involved thecultivation of the very forms of interdependence and connectivity that Hardt and Negri, among others, assumed to signifya permanent and necessary change in the organisation of international politics. The shift in administrative powernationally within the USA, coupled with the World Trade Center attack, provided the grounds, it is nowsaid, for a change of direction in US foreign policy and the consequent return to a more traditionallyunipolar and, ultimately, imperialist world order.14 As Michael Cox describes it, the intellectualgroundwork for a reassertion of US imperialism had been carried out some years in advance of the 9/11attack. As early as 1997 the neo -conservative think -tank, Project for the New American Century,dedicated to the reframing of the Republican agenda, was arguing for the restoration of a foreign policyof American leadership based on the three Ms of American foreign policy. . .Military strength, Morality,and Mastery.15 BIOPOLITICS OF THE WAR ON TERROR 241 Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin] At: 18:2516 July 2010 Not only was it the case that the increasingly multilateral character of international politicsduring the 1990s was perceived to threaten the national interest of the USA. There was also a sense in

which a more fundamentally normative commitment to the defence of the international state system wasat stake. The war on terror itself has been conceived within the USA in terms of an attempt to defend the

very form of the nation-state and the international state system from the incursions of a threat shapedand conditioned by globalisation . International terrorism is not dangerous because it can defeat us in a

war, but because it can potentially destroy the domestic contract of the state by further undermining itsability to protect its citizens from attack wrote Audrey Kurth Cronin after the 9/11 at tack.16 The form ofthreat posed by Al-Qaeda as well as by other international terrorist organisations appears to have beeninterpreted by the Republican right within the USA as that of an advanced expression of thedeterritorialising forces of globalisation. The war on terror has been articulated within areas of the US

foreign policy establishment as a commitment to defence of the traditional values and institutions of thenation- state against that deterritorialising threat. The current strategy of the USA is articulated in theseterms as an attempt to force a regression within the international system to an older more reliable formof order. A regression that secures and re- enforces boundaries against the encroachments and maligninsecurities forged through processes of globalisation. One of the most appealing ways to account for 21stcentury US strategy as initiating a return to imperialism is to consider the copious amounts of imperialist rhetoricsurrounding the current Bush administration. One of the most remarkable features of the current articulation of USforeign policy is the apparently naked commitment to imperialism. The USA has throughout much of its history

been accused of pursuing an imperialist agenda.17 Customarily its foreign policies have beeaccompanied by discursive commitments to democratically anti-imperialist ends. Yet the currentreassertion of American power is , it would appear , avowedly imperialist . Mastery is a positive term ofreference within the current foreign policy lexicon and its concomitant condition of possibility

enslavement-an inferred aim of US strategy. Traditionally, international relations theorists are used to

dealing with orthodoxies that either discount the role of structural economic and political inequalities within the international system as unimportant for our understanding of how that system functions(realism) or which account for those inequalities as contingencies that the system itself is in the processof overcoming through the development of democratisation (liberal internationalism). In turn we aretraditionally accustomed to critiques of those orthodoxies which demonstrate how essential theproduction of inequality and unevenness is to the existence of the international system .At the turn of the21st century we appeared to witness a puzzling reversal in the order of these debates. Neo-conservative discourses on theinternational system appeared to be naked in their ambitions for the possibility and pursuit of imperialism, while thedefinitively critical account of international politics JULIAN REID 242 Downloaded By: [University of Texas Austin ] At18:25 16 July 2010 was still insisting upon the permanence and necessity of the post-imperialist order. The current stateof world politics has made, from the perspective of many, Hardt and Negris claims about the permanence and necessity ofthe postimperialist moment in international politics look na ve . Critical appraisals of the war on terrorcontinually make reference to the discourse of the neoconservative wing as if it were an


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unproblematically descriptive account of the deployment of US power.18 Yet such critiques of the war onterror that buy into the regimes own account of it as a return to imperialism ignore the vital roles playedin its conduct by agencies, practices and discourses of biopolitical form. The discursive attempts amongthe Republican right to qualify US foreign policy today in terms of imperialism are, in a certain sense,curiously out of synch with the actual deployment of the sovereign power of the USA internationally. Theassertion of the USAs sovereign power occurring amid the war on terror remains conditioned by the

continuing roles of the agencies and practices that Hardt and Negri identified in the 1990s with thedeterritorialisation of nation-state sovereignty and the advance of biopolitics. Here I am thinking chiefly ofthe roles of the United Nations and the range of non-governmental actors who defined the shifts in power that Hardt andNegri otherwise describe. These agencies and their practices remain crucial both to the logistical efficacy andthe assertions of legitimacy accompanying the reassertion of US sovereign po wer. It is fair to say thatHardt and Negris account of Empire placed too large an emphasis on the prevalence of biopolitical anddeterritorialised forms and forces at the expense of the traditional units of sovereign power.Nevertheless, in order to comprehend the strategy of power at work in the organisation of powerinternationally today it is necessary still to pay heed to the role of these agencies and their practices . Thispaper seeks to redress this imbalance.

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