NATO in disarray over military crisis in Afghanistan

Summing up the situation confronting the US-led occupation, a lengthy report published this month by the European-based thinktank Senlis declared: “Afghanistan’s security situation is unravelling. The international military coalitions have failed to realise the expectations they created in 2001. Both US-led Operation Enduring Freedom and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (NATO-ISAF) have missed the opportunity to bridge the gap between the Western and the Muslim worlds. On the contrary, they are currently fuelling frustration and resentment among the Afghan population who increasingly distrust the US and NATO-ISAF forces they first welcomed with hope.”

Condemning the entire occupation as a failure, the report wrote: “When international military forces first intervened in Afghanistan, much was made of the ‘winning of hearts and minds’, but this campaign has been lost. Locals assert that neither the ‘foreigners’ nor the Afghan government had made any efforts to counteract the detrimental effects of drought, poverty and poppy eradication in their provinces, and locals’ apparent fear of the international military forces show that the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign has failed. Anger is now commonly expressed in southern Afghanistan, and many Afghans who supported the international forces now speak of them with hatred.”

Similar assessments have been published in the US and British media. The British Financial Times wrote on September 5 that “the headlines coming out of Afghanistan have never been so bleak”. Drug money, it declared, “is fuelling the weapons trade as well as corruption, as poppy fields spread like a bloodstain across the country”. Afghanistan, the newspaper noted, “is breaking all records for producing opium”. The most recent UN estimate is that 6,100 tonnes of Afghan opium has been harvested, enough to cause world heroin production to soar by one third.

The New York Times on September 5 described areas of the province of Helmand as “the epicentre of a Taliban resurgence and an explosion in drug cultivation that has claimed the lives of 106 US and NATO soldiers this year and doubled American casualty rates countrywide”. The article provided a detailed account of the utter failure of the US occupation after the 2001 invasion to address the economic and social grievances of the population or provide stable government and law and order.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/afgh-s11.shtml