No End to Bloody U.S. War in Afghanistan

Jan 21, 2013

During an official visit to Washington by Afghan President Hamid Karzai on January 10, President Barack Obama promised to withdraw most of the 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of the year and end the war.

End the war? Think again. John Allen, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, recommended that the U.S. keep from 6,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops and Special Forces in Afghanistan after the 2013 deadline, possibly to carry out commando raids and even patrols.

For the U.S. the war has been a disaster. In the latest Pentagon “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” military officials found that the much hailed surge of American forces two years ago has provoked more violence in Afghanistan–levels of violence higher than before the surge.

And they’re not about to hand the country over to their puppet government. As the report said, government in Afghanistan is still “weakened” by widespread corruption. The Afghan military, which the U.S. has been building up and “training” for over a decade, is completely unable to operate independent of U.S. forces. Finally, armed resistance against the U.S. occupiers and their allies continues to grow.

The U.S. has also not succeeded in subduing the population. This war has instilled such hatred that 62 U.S. troops were killed by their own Afghan allies this year, more than twice as many as the year before. In one incident on September 29, U.S. and Afghan soldiers battled each other, leaving two Americans and four Afghans dead. In December, an Afghan policewoman shot and killed an American civilian adviser at national police headquarters in the capital, Kabul.

And not only are Afghan troops and police killing U.S. soldiers, they are also killing each other–in much higher numbers than before.

The disastrous U.S. war in Afghanistan is now in its twelfth year–the longest war in U.S. history–and shows no signs of ending.