by Jeffrey Steinberg
February 4, 2008 (LPAC)--Nearly seven years into the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, following the post-911 U.S. invasion, serious rifts are coming to the surface among the NATO allies, over how to proceed. Both American and European defense officials are nearly unanimous that the current course of action is not succeeding, and that the Afghan-Pakistani border region has become a new command and control hub for Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. In effect, the war has been hopelessly, irreversibly lost, from a military standpoint. And the 42,000 NATO troops currently deployed in Afghanistan are incapable of waging the kind of counterinsurgency campaign needed to unseat the insurgents--not to mention the skyrocketing opium production, which is generating an estimated $1 billion in black market revenue inside the country. In response to this crisis, which could reach disaster proportions in April-May of this year, when Afghan elections are scheduled, and a major Taliban offensive in expected, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has written to his counterparts in all of the other NATO countries, asking for a deployment of additional forces. However, Gates, himself, acknowledges that European NATO forces are not trained to conduct the kind of counterinsurgency warfare being proposed to disrupt and unseat the insurgency. And the Secretary was forcefully told by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to Pentagon sources, that the U.S. cannot afford to send any additional troops to Afghanistan, because the U.S. Army is “broken” and the Marine Corps is a close second. Despite these JCS warnings, which Secretary Gates reportedly endorsed, President Bush recently ordered the deployment of 3,200 U.S. Marines from the Second Marine Expeditionary Force into southern Afghanistan, to reinforce U.S. and British troops there.
As Lyndon and Helga LaRouche emphasized in statements in the past 24 hours, the Afghanistan situation is lost, from a military standpoint, and any kind of idea that a new “surge” of NATO forces can bring stability to the country and the region is pure folly. What’s more, the fragile nature of the parliamentary governments in most of Western Europe, including Germany, which leads the NATO contingent in Afghanistan, virtually insures that any increase in military operations, resulting in increasing casualties, will create further instability inside the European NATO community. Ultimately it could bring down more than one European government.
It is in this context that Lyndon LaRouche strongly denounced the latest scam by the neocon American Enterprise Institute, which is promoting a new American military “surge,” modeled on the Iraq surge, to add 12,000 American troops--three combat brigades--to the 26,000 American troops already deployed in Afghanistan. The AEI report, prepared in the past week by the same cast of characters, led by Fred Kagan and Gen. Jack Keane (USA-ret.), not only calls for the expansion of American counterinsurgency (“global war on terrorism”) operations inside Afghanistan. It also calls for American and NATO military operations inside Pakistan--unless the Pakistani government launches its own invasion into the Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (“FATA”) bordering Afghanistan. Such insane conduct by the Bush Administration, which is eminently capable of such stupidity, LaRouche warned, could assure the breakup of Pakistan, as well as the further unraveling of Afghanistan. And this is precisely the kind of “managed chaos” and “post-Westphalia” destabilization that has been Britain's longstanding policy towards this region.
Some U.S. military specialists have observed that, if the Bush Administration adopts the insane “surge” plan coming out of the AEI “Afghan Planning Group,” the one likely outcome will be the final demise of NATO, which outlived its usefulness the moment that the Soviet Union collapsed 16 years ago.
