Vol. 76/No. 18      May 7, 2012

There are currently some 90,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with 22,000 scheduled to leave by Sept. 30, according to the New York Times. No schedule has been set for the pullout of the remaining 68,000 soldiers, the paper said.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is planning a major offensive for later this year in the eastern part of the country that could include an additional 5,000 troops, reported the National Journal April 4.

After more than a decade of waging war against the Taliban and other Islamist groups in Afghanistan, Washington still faces major obstacles in cobbling together an Afghan army and police force that can prop up a regime that will defend U.S. imperialist interests.

In testimony before the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee March 20, U.S. Defense Department spokesperson James Miller said that attrition in the Afghan army was down from 36 to about 24 percent a year.

At a March 26 forum at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, talked about “an erosion of trust” between the Afghan and U.S. forces and Taliban infiltration of Afghan forces. According to the New America Foundation, 71 NATO troops have been killed by Afghan soldiers or police since September 2009.

Allen pointed to recent U.S. actions as exacerbating the problem, behavior that reflects on the nature of the imperialist armed forces: burning of Korans by U.S. soldiers at Bagram Air Base in February, the slaughter of 17 civilians by U.S. Sgt. Roger Bales on March 11 and a video that became public in January of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban soldiers. Three weeks after Allen’s speech, the Los Angles Times released photos taken in February 2010 of soldiers from the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division posing with severed limbs of dead Afghan suicide bombers and their victims.

At the same time Washington is also pursuing negotiations with the Taliban over terms that likely include the scope of Taliban involvement in a future Afghan government.

Drone attacks in Yemen, Pakistan

The Washington Post reported April 19 that the CIA was pushing for permission to expand its use of drones in Yemen, where there have already been eight strikes this year. The spy agency wants to use “signature strikes,” modeled on those carried out in Pakistan that are based not on individual targets for assassination but “patterns of suspicious behavior.”

The Long War Journal, a website that tracks U.S. drone attacks, reports 27 strikes in Yemen since 2009 killing nearly 250 people, at least 48 of them civilians.

Washington restarted drone attacks in Pakistan Jan. 10, after a 55-day hiatus. Since then there have been 12 strikes and 87 people killed, according to the South Asia Intelligence Review.

The drone strikes there were temporarily halted after U.S. airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border in November and Islamabad blocked supply routes in protest. A Pakistani parliamentary review in April called for an immediate end to the drone strikes, which are extremely unpopular. But an April 20 article in Dawn, said that the two governments are now “exploring various options for joint ownership of drone attacks against militant targets.”  
 
 
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