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Kabul (AFP) - US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Saturday said he had received assurances during a visit to Kabul that a long-delayed deal allowing US troops to stay in Afghanistan after 2014 would be signed "in a timely manner".
Kabul (AFP) - US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Saturday said he had received assurances during a visit to Kabul that a long-delayed deal allowing US troops to stay in Afghanistan after 2014 would be signed "in a timely manner".
It is amazing to watch politicians trying to weasel their way around their promises. President Obama is providing us with a good illustration of the art.
During the latest presidential campaign and in the final televised debates, both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were adamant in asserting that the US would be leaving Afghanistan and ending the war in that country at the end of 2014–a goal most Americans profoundly want.
Biden, in a heated debate with his Republican opponent Paul Ryan, said the US would “absolutely” be “out” of Afghanistan at the end of 2014. Obama, a week later, said, “By 2014, this process of transition will be complete and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.”
I’m reminded of President Clinton, a lawyer who, when pressed under oath by a special prosecutor hounding him over the details of whether he had had sex with a young White House intern, said that the answer hinged on “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
This past weekend, it was reported that Obama and the generals at the Pentagon are planning on keeping at least 10,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan indefinitely after that 2014 deadline for ending the war and withdrawing from that war-torn land.
Just to make it clear what we’re talking about here, 10,000 troops would represent an army half the size of the entire army of either the Netherlands or Denmark, two countries which currently have troops assigned to the NATO forces posted in Afghanistan as allies in the 12-year-long US war there.
The notion that these 10,000 post-2014 soldiers would just be “training” the Afghan military is simply absurd. Parris Island, the famed boot camp in South Carolina for the US Marine Corps, which boasts what probably is the toughest training program of any of the branches of the US military, churns out 17,000 new Marines a year with a training unit of 600 uniformed personnel. That’s one trainer per 170 recruits.
At that rate, the 10,000 US “trainers” in Afghanistan could be training 1.7 million new recruits for the Afghan army each year! Even allowing for the typical top-heaviness of the US military, if only a third of those 10,000 “trainers” were actually drill sergeants and their staff, we’re talking about a training force capable of producing over 500,000 new Afghan soldiers per year! But Afghanistan’s army today, which the US claims is already largely trained and ready to protect the country, has only a total of some 200,000 active duty soldiers altogether.
So let’s get serious here. These 10,000 soldiers that Obama and the Pentagon are talking about stationing in Afghanistan after the war is “ended” in December 2012 are not really going to be trainers.
Besides, how do you “end” a war by simply having one side say it’s over, unless you actually do stop fighting and walk away? Certainly the invading side in a foreign war can call that war quits, but if the other side doesn’t, and the invader stays on the battlefield — which in Afghanistan is the whole county — you haven’t ended it at all. The other side will continue to hit you until you’re gone.
In other words, clearly that force of 10,000 US troops, whatever they are called officially, will be in a state of war, because there is no way that the Taliban in Afghanistan will quietly allow them to be there training an army to fight them, without taking the battle to the “trainers.”
So how then, can Obama, Biden and the generals be promising that the war will be ended in 2014?
The answer is that they are not calling what will be happening after 2014 a “war.” They will be changing the definition of the word “war.”
It is totally predictable that the unfortunate soldiers who are ordered over as part of that 10,000-member force of “trainers” after 2014 will be subjected to attacks by Taliban fighters, by suicide bombers, and by IED mines. Their bases will be hit by mortars and rockets. When they travel, their vehicles will be the targets of RPGs. They will also be subject to attack by members of the Afghan military whom they are ostensibly training, since the Taliban have already learned that infiltration of the country’s army is a great way to get close to the American forces, the better to hit them when their guard is down or their backs are turned.
Inevitably, the US forces will be forced to fight back, and to take the offensive too. There will certainly continue to be US airstrikes, and we can be sure that armed attack drones will be widely employed also, guaranteeing the creation of plenty of new enemy forces sworn to punish and drive out the US.
None of this will, of course, be described as “war” by the US, or by the compliant corporate media in America.
There is a model for this kind of thing. America has been fighting a war in Colombia for years against the FARC, marxist rebels operating in the jungles of that country at the northern end of South America. Only this has never been described as a war in the US media or in reports from the Pentagon. The soldiers sent down there, we are informed, are just “training” and “advising” the Colombian military, which we are told is fighting against “drug lords.”
The same was true for years in El Salvador, a little country in Central America that endured a decade-long revolution and civil war, in which the US was backing a vicious oligarchy and supporting a brutal military that regularly sent death squads out into the slums and the countryside to murder those who supported the rebels. American forces there were always described as “trainers” or “advisors,” though their roles were far more active, and bloody, than that, as was occasionally exposed when they’d get caught in rebel ambushes (as happened to the 12 Green Berets staying at a hotel that rebels temporarily captured during an offensive in the country’s capital).
Putting military forces in a country and calling them advisors or trainers is an old propaganda stand-by for the US. The only thing that sets this latest fraud apart from earlier imperial interventions by US military forces this time is the numbers involved. Even that legendary Bill Clinton obfuscator would have a hard time making anyone believe that a force of 10,000 heavily armed US troops are just “trainers.”
By the way, the last time the US had 10,000 “trainers” and “advisors” in another country that was a war zone was 1962. The country was Vietnam, and the advisors were actively fighting what later became a war involving as many as 500,000 US troops.
Afghan minister tells Hagel security pact will be signed
Kabul (AFP) - US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Saturday said he had received assurances during a visit to Kabul that a long-delayed deal allowing US troops to stay in Afghanistan after 2014 would be signed "in a timely manner".
The Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) has been at the centre of a public dispute between the allies, with the US increasingly frustrated by President Hamid Karzai's negotiating tactics over the deal.
After meetings in the Afghan capital, Hagel told reporters that Defense Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi "assured me the BSA would be signed in a timely manner".
Washington and NATO have repeatedly appealed to Karzai to sign the BSA, which lays out the rules for US-led troops to operate in Afghanistan after 2014 on a mission focused on training and countering Al-Qaeda-linked extremists.
The Afghan president, who will stand down next year after two terms in power, recently refused to sign the pact promptly despite a "loya jirga" national assembly that he convened voting for him to do so.
President Barack Obama's deputies have warned that unless Karzai relents before the end of the year, there will be no option but to prepare for a full US exit -- the so-called "zero option".
The NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Joseph Dunford, said Saturday that he had not started planning for a total US withdrawal but that he would have to within "weeks" without the BSA being signed.
"In some weeks, I expect we'll start to plan for something other than 'Resolute Support'," Dunford told reporters, referring to NATO's current post-2014 plan.
Dunford said the military would have to "look at a couple of different possibilities".
With no US boots on the ground, Afghanistan would face the risk of a Taliban resurgence and likely lose out on a billions of dollars of military and other international aid.
There are currently 46,000 American troops and 27,000 soldiers from other coalition countries in Afghanistan, and almost the entire NATO-led force is scheduled to pull out by the end of next year.
Under the proposed post-2014 mission, roughly 12,000 troops -- mostly American -- would remain in the country, under rules that would allow controversial house raids by NATO forces only in special circumstances.
Washington had initially set an October deadline for clinching the security agreement and later insisted on a signature by the end of this year.
President Karzai's spokesman Aimal Faizi had told AFP that Hagel was due to met with Karzai and have dinner with him, but Faizi later said no meeting would take place.
"I never asked for a meeting with President Karzai," Hagel told reporters. "That was not the purpose of my trip.
"There's not much I can add in a meeting with President Karzai to what's already been said.
"The people of Afghanistan through the body that he empaneled, the loya jirga, spoke rather plainly and clearly and dramatically about the interests for this country going forward."
Hagel said his visit was primarily to thank US soldiers for serving in Afghanistan.
"The United States has made its position on the BSA clear," a senior US defence official told reporters.
"And just two days ago, President Karzai repeated his position to senior US officials that he is not yet ready to sign the BSA and provided no timeline or practical step for doing so."
Faizi said Afghanistan's two sticking points over the BSA were an "absolute end of (US) military operations on Afghan homes" and a "meaningful" launch of a peace process with the Taliban.
"We don’t want our people to get killed by US troops again and again," Faizi said in a reference to Afghan anger over civilian casualties.
"Especially after the signing of this agreement, as this agreement will open up another chapter of 10 years of relations between Afghanistan and the United States."
Hagel arrived in Kabul after a visit to Bahrain, while Karzai is due to visit Tehran on Sunday.
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