BY DOUG LORIMER
"The safety conditions in Afghanistan have deteriorated badly in the course of 2003 and one can't say that they have changed in a decisive, long-term or effective fashion. It is therefore hard to think of promoting repatriation [of Afghan refugees] in the immediate future", Luco Lo Presti, Afghanistan coordinator of the Italian section of Amnesty International, told a press conference in Rome on June 23.
Lo Presti released an Amnesty report, Afghanistan — invisible and forgotten: The fate of the Afghans who come home, in which the human rights organisation argues that the situation in the country makes it impossible for many Afghan refugees to return to their place of origin.
On the day before, 500 US troops began a military offensive, code-named Operation Unified Resolve, into areas on Afghan border with Pakistan. The offensive is targeted against the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan, an armed Islamic fundamentalist group that has launched repeated rocket attacks on US troops based in the city of Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan.
Hizb-i-Islami is led by former Mujaheddin commander Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. The Mujaheddin was the name of the CIA-organised counter-revolutionary army which in the 1980s fought against the left-wing Peoples' Democratic Party government and the Soviet troops backing the government.
After the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in early 1989, and the PDPA government collapsed in April 1992, Hekmatyar served several times as prime minister in the Mujaheddin government, before it was ousted from power in 1996 by the ultra-Islamist Taliban militia, organised and armed by Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI.
Hekmatyar has reportedly formed an alliance with the remnants of Osama bin Ladin's al Qaeda terrorist group and the Taliban militia, which was ousted from power in 2001 by the US-backed Northern Alliance — the coalition of anti-Taliban Mujaheddin factions based in northern Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the Saudi Arabia-born bin Laden was recruited by the CIA to organise Arab Islamists to fight the PDPA-Soviet forces.
Operation Unified Resolve is the latest in a long series of offensives launched the US-led coalition forces to suppress armed resistance to its occupation of Afghanistan.
In an article carried on the Asia Times web site on April 11, Mark Sedra, a researcher with the Bonn International Centre for Conversion, reported: "In the past eight weeks, there has been more than one rocket attack per day targetting coalition forces, and 50 civilians and government soldiers have been killed or wounded in insurgent violence in the south of the country... Under such conditions it hardly seems accurate to refer to Afghanistan as a post-conflict society."
Sedra's assessment was supported by a report released on June 18 by the US Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR) think-tank. The report, which drew on a task force of 60 people in the diplomatic, business and humanitarian fields, argued that the present strength of US and allied forces in Afghanistan "fails to address the growing security challenge" the US puppet government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai faces outside of Kabul.
There are 11,200 US troops in Afghanistan, plus 5000 troops from other countries — 3500 of them from Germany — operating as part of the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force.
"Instead", the report said, "the United States should be targeting a force of 27,000 men, including integrated militias, to give the central government a credible peace-keeping capability."
Entitled Afghanistan: Are We Losing the Peace?, it warned: "Unless the situation improves, Afghanistan risks sliding back into the anarchy and warlordism that prevailed in the 1990s and helped give rise to the Taliban. Such a reversion would have disastrous consequences for Afghanistan and would be a profound setback for the US war on terrorism."
The tribal warlordism of the 1990s was the result of the CIA's covert war against the PDPA government. Much of the fighting force of the Mujaheddin was recruited from tribal warriors with CIA money, and supplied with arms by the CIA and ISI.
After the defeat of the PDPA government, Washington lost interest in Afghanistan and the Mujaheddin government, lacking funds with which to bribe the various tribal warlords, lost control over most of the countryside. Factional battles within the Mujaheddin plunged the country's cities into anarchy and banditry.
In these conditions, the Taliban militia met little popular resistance when it launched its offensive from Pakistan into Afghanistan in 1996. Through religious totalitarianism, the Taliban suppressed warlord banditry.
When US President George Bush decided in September 2001 to implement plans drawn up by the previous administration of Bill Clinton to overthrow the Taliban regime, the CIA was instructed to win over and strengthen the position of the warlords.
Last November, Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, in his book Bush at War, revealed that the ultimate defeat of the Taliban was due largely to millions of dollars in hundred-dollar bills that the CIA handed out to Afghan warlords.
Beginning in late September 2001, six CIA paramilitary teams spread out through Afghanistan, bribing warlords to turn against the Taliban regime. By distributing US$70 million to the traditionally mercenary Afghan warlords during the last three months of 2001, they ensured the swift collapse of the Taliban militia, forcing it to retreat to the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
Since then, the warlords have reasserted their control over the regions they dominated in the 1990s, leaving the US-installed Karzai government in control only of Kabul.
The CFR report's findings were echoed a few days later by Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf, who called for an expansion of the international force in Afghanistan to 45,000 troops. He said there was an urgent need to wrest control of about 12 power centres from warlords.
In his April 11 Asia Times article, Sedra reported that a major reason for the failure of the US-led occupation forces to suppress the attacks against them is the brutality of the US military operations, which have generated growing hostility within much of the populace.
The US military's "indiscriminate use of air power, which has killed scores of civilians and its lack of sensitivity to indigenous laws and customs have been viewed with seething resentment", wrote Sedra. "According to recent reports in the Afghan press, US Special Forces, during routine sweeps of Afghan villages searching for weapons and members of resistance groups, have physically abused villagers, damaged personal property, and subjected women to body searches, a major affront to a family's honour."
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, July 2, 2003.
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