Ten years of occupation have failed to subdue Afghanistan

From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 1 October

The 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan has been marked by a series of resistance actions that prove that in all those 10 years the Nato marauders have totally failed to subdue the country.

In mid-September, an attack on the US embassy and the Nato HQ in the heavily fortified ‘green zone’ of central Kabul was followed a few days later by the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani. Rabbani was the member of the Afghan government most pivotal to the new US strategy of trying to bring various sections of the resistance into a peace process that might enable Nato to retreat from Afghanistan in a semblance of order.

The Kabul attack, incidentally, was the third spectacular assault in the capital in the past three months, following an attack on the British Council on 19 August and on the Intercontinental Hotel on 29 July.

The view is spreading in imperialist quarters that the policy of trying to win over sections of the resistance is a dead duck, and blame is being directed against the Haqqani network, a group based in Pakistan which is said to number 5,000-10,000 militants and to be supported by Pakistan’s security services.

The Haqqani network has almost become the new al-Qaeda for the imperialist media, as relations between the US and Pakistan continue to deteriorate. The Haqqanis, although characterised as deeply religious, are at the same time castigated as mafia-style criminals, their worst crime being the extraction of protection money from corporations engaged in lucrative road-building contracts, money supplied in the last analysis by the American taxpayer.

The other plank of US strategy in Afghanistan – to build up the puppet army and police to be able to take over from Nato as it reduces its forces – is also going badly as there is an almost total inability to recruit from the Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan. Those few who are recruited tend to be assassinated by the resistance not long afterwards.

Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane and Alissa J Rubin commented in the New York Times of 24 September: “After a decade of war, there is a growing sense among America’s diplomats, soldiers and spies that the United States is getting out of Afghanistan without ever figuring out how a maddeningly complex game is played.” (‘Brutal Haqqani crime clan bedevils US in Afghanistan’)

Meanwhile, many of the lucrative contracts, for instance in oil exploration, that imperialist companies were expecting to be able to extract from the country are instead going to Chinese companies. Since these enterprises offer much better terms, they are undermining the efforts of western economic hitmen to conclude oppressive, unequal contracts and recoup the costs of the predatory war. China is doing the same thing with the same effect in Iraq.