Gli USA reclutano in totto il mondo per la guerra in Afghanistan

Stop NATO
January 13, 2010

Gli USA reclutano in totto il mondo per la guerra in Afghanistan
Rick Rozoff

Tradotto e segnalato per Voci Dalla Strada da VANESA http://www.vocidallastrada.com/2010/01/gli-usa-reclutano-in-tutto-il-mondo-per.html

I primi dei 33.000 soldati aggiuntivi degli USA sono arrivati in Afghanistan per un’ “ondata” natalizia e presto se ne aggiungeranno fino a 10.000 non statunitensi che serviranno la NATO nell’ISAF (Forza Internazionale di Assistenza per la Sicurezza). Washington avrà un personale in divisa composto da più di 100.000 soldati e decine di migliaia di nuovi contrattisti militari nella zona della guerra sud asiatica, e con più di 50.000 soldati della NATO e di partner della NATO, la somma delle forze supererà i 150.000.

Con l’eccezione di un piccolo numero di soldati assegnati alla Missione di Addestramento della NATO- Iraq, a Baghdad, è stato ordinato agli stati membri, soprattutto ai nuovi, della NATO, e agli Stati candidati, che trasferiscano le loro forze dall’Iraq all’Afghanistan circa un anno fa, e stanno inviando soldati alle missioni in Kosovo, Libano e Ciad verso la stessa destinazione. Il fronte di battaglia afgano, quindi, ha la maggior quantità di forze militari stazionate di qualsiasi altra zona del mondo. [1]

Soldati provenienti da paesi della NATO stazionati in Bosnia, Repubblica Centrafricana, Ciad, Libano e al largo delle coste della Somalia sono attualmente assegnati a missioni nell’Unione Europea (navi da guerra europee sono coinvolte anche in interdizione navale nell’Oceano Shield NATO nelle acque della Somalia e il Golfo di Aden) e il loro trasferimento verso il fronte Sud della guerra asiatica indica l’intercambiabilità virtuale di unità militari assegnate alla NATO e all’Unione Europea. [2]

Fin dall’inizio dell’ escalation della guerra in Afghanistan quest’anno, e verso il vicino Pakistan, personalità pubbliche e mass media occidentali si sono occupati frequentemente e ampiamente del fatto che la guerra è un – o il- test per la NATO, apparentemente il maggior successo nella sua storia in 60 anni.

Quando il blocco, l’unica alleanza militare al mondo, ha invocato la clausola di aiuto reciproco dell’Articolo 5 a settembre del 2001 per sostenere il suo principale membro, gli USA, nella sua invasione ed occupazione dell’Afghanistan, l’Alleanza aveva appena vissuto la sua prima guerra: la campagna di 78 giorni di bombardamenti contro la Jugoslavia agli inizi del 1999, il primo attacco militare generalizzato contro una nazione europea dal periodo degli attacchi ed invasioni di Hitler e di Mussolini del 1939-1941.

Mediante l’attivazione dell’articolo 5,- “Le Parti accordano che un attacco armato contro uno o più di essi in Europa o NordAmerica sarà considerato un attacco contro tutte esse (e) aiuteranno alla Parte o le Parti attaccate”- la NATO si preparò per la sua prima guerra terrestre e la sua prima guerra in Asia.

Approfittò anche della sua situazione di guerra effettiva per lanciare la Operation Active Endeavor (Operazione Sforzo Attivo) all’ inizio di ottobre del 2001, un programma esaustivo, ermetico, di controllo ed interdizione navale in tutto il Mar Mediterraneo che monitora tutta l’attività nel nuovo mare nostrum della NATO e domina tutti i punti di accesso al mare più importanti del mondo: Lo Stretto di Gibilterra, lo Stretto dei Dardanelli e il Canale di Suez, che collega il Mediterraneo con l’Oceano Atlantico, il Mar Nero, il Mar Rosso e quindi con l’Oceano Indiano, rispettivamente.

L’alleanza guidata dagli USA ha ottenuto il controllo di questa vasta gamma di vie navigabili attraverso l’adozione di pretesti statunitensi precedenti all’11 settembre del 2001 di combattere il terrorismo e le armi di distruzione di massa. Il primo è stato il pretesto per invadere l’Afghanistan, il secondo per invadere l’Iraq.

Tre anni dopo l’inaugurazione dello Sforzo Attivo, che continua con tutta la sua forza fino ad oggi, il summit della NATO in Turchia, ha sviluppato l’Iniziativa di Cooperazione di Strasburgo che ha aggiornato la cooperazione militare con i membri del Dialogo Mediterraneo del blocco- Algeria, Egitto, Israele, Giordania, Mauritana, Marocco e Tunisia ed ha proposto ai sei membri del Consiglio di Cooperazione del Golfo- Bahrein, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Arabia Saudita e gli Emirati Arabi- di avere un rapporto simile, modellato secondo il programma di Cooperazione per la Pace che ha preparato a dodici nazioni europee orientali per il loro accesso alla qualifica di membro pieno della NATO durante l’ultimo decennio. [3]

In dieci anni il blocco militare si è esteso molto oltre i suoi limiti avuti durante la Guerra Fredda, Nord America, Europa Occidentale e Meridionale e a quasi tutto l’Europa Orientale, incluso gli Stati del vecchio patto di Varsavia e le repubbliche sovietiche e jugoslave. La divisione militare bipolare dell’Europa simbolizzata dal Muro di Berlino [4], che è caduto 20 anni fa, è stata sostituita da una espansione unilaterale dell’unico blocco militare del mondo verso le frontiere occidentali della Russia, del mar Baltico al Mar Nero e Adriatico. Da lì è arrivato, attraverso i suoi insediamenti e corporazioni verso il sud del Caucaso, Africa nord orientale e centrale, Asia centrale e del sud.

Se l’Afghanistan è una prova o il saggio della NATO nel suo 60° anniversario, non lo è per la NATO del 1949 ma per quella che importanti funzionari dell’Alleanza e altri difensori hanno chiamato negli ultimi anni: LA NATO del XXI Secolo, una NATO di spedizione, una NATO globale: Il primo intento nella storia di forgiare un’alleanza militare internazionale. Una rete armata internazionale che ha come suo fondamento e suo nucleo l’ autoproclamata superpotenza esclusiva del mondo e il suo arsenale nucleare.

La guerra “asimmetrica” in Afghanistan, che è al suo nono anno, è un’impresa seminale per la NATO sotto diversi aspetti. Oltre a rappresentare la prima guerra terrestre del blocco e la sua prima escursione coloniale fuori dal mondo euro-atlantico, la prolungata, ed in base a tutti gli indizi indefinita campagna nel sud dell’Asia è un laboratorio e campo di addestramento, poligono di tiro e punto di convergenza per la consolidazione statunitense di una forza globale di attacco e di occupazione provata per la prima volta in Kosovo nel 1999 con 50.000 soldati sotto il comando della NATO, dopo in Iraq nel 2004 con decine di migliaia di soldati della NATO, nuove nazioni della NATO e candidate al blocco. [5]

Adesso Washington e Bruxelles hanno obbligato contingenti armati di cinquanta nazioni di cinque continenti perché siano sotto il comando del generale Stanley McChrystal, capo di tutte le forze degli USA e della NATO in Afghanistan.

I nuovi Stati che contribuiscono sono anche paesi geograficamente lontani e diversi in altri sensi, come la Colombia, la Bosnia, Georgia, Montenegro, Mongolia, Armenia e Corea del Sud.Tutti, ad eccezione della Mongolia, sono stati scenari di guerre o potrebbero esserlo in qualsiasi momento. Come hanno stabilito numerose dichiarazioni di dirigenti politici e militari di nazioni che forniscono soldati alla NATO per la guerra afgana, quel campo di battaglia è un luogo e un’ opportunità ideale per ottenere esperienza reale di combattimento con il fine di applicarla in casa. La maggior parte dei paesi in questa categoria confinano con la Russia sui versanti nord occidentale e sud occidentale. [6]

Il ministro di Difesa austriaco, una delle poche nazioni europee che ancora non è completamente membro della NATO, recentemente si è lamentato che funzionari statunitensi stessero facendo pressione al suo paese perché fornisse più soldati per il loro attacco in Afghanistan, ed ha dovuto ricordare ai lettori di uno dei giornali del suo paese che il suo paese continua ad essere uno Stato sovrano. Come informa il Deutsche Welle, “L’Austria e gli USA, discutono per la quantità di soldati austriaci in Afghanistan. Il governo austriaco dice che sente una forte pressione da parte degli USA perché si inviino altri soldati alla missione della NATO”.

Il giornale sud coreano Dong-A Ilbo, il 21 dicembre scriveva che “La NATO ha invitato per la prima volta una delegazione militare coreana ad una riunione il prossimo anno dove ci saranno i paesi che inviano soldati in Afghanistan”.

“L’invio di esercito coreano, programmato per luglio, probabilmente accelererà un’amplia cooperazione militare tra la Corea e la NATO”. La fonte ha aggiunto che la valutazione della Corea da parte della NATO sta cambiando con l’avvento del nuovo governo di Lee Myung-bak a Seul, dato che la Corea partecipa attivamente alla cooperazione internazionale sulla sicurezza, inclusa la decisione di inviare l’ esercito in Afghanistan e di unirsi pienamente all’ Iniziativa della Sicurezza della Proliferazione”. L’iniziativa della Sicurezza della Proliferazione (PSI) è un altro meccanismo vincolato al progetto dell’armata di migliaia di navi USA, così come l’Operazione di Active Endeavor NATO, per impegnare più e più nazioni di tutto il mondo in una rete militare internazionale diretta da Washington. [7]

La Corea è quella che dalla NATO viene identificato come Paese di Contatto partner, gli altri sono il Giappone, l’Australia e la Nuova Zelanda, come fondamento per una “NATO asiatica” in caso di emergenza anche Singapore e Mongolia- che hanno o avranno per la prima volta un esercito al servizio della NATO in Afghanistan- così come le Filippine, Tailandia, Brunei e future possibilità come l’India, Bangladesh e Cambogia e le cinque ex repubbliche sovietiche in Asia Centrale, così come l’Afghanistan e il Pakistan. [8]

Mentre si sposta verso est, il blocco del Nord Atlantico lo fa anche verso il Sud ed ha cominciato a penetrare formalmente l’Africa, con una missione di trasporto aereo verso la regione del Darfur nel Sudan nel 2005 ed insediamenti navali di fronte alla Somalia nel Corno dell’Africa dal 2007.

Il principale alleato militare di Washington in Sud America e in tutta l’America Latina, la Colombia, consegnando sette basi militari al Pentagono in un’azione che potrebbe provocare una guerra con i vicini Venezuela ed Ecuador, sta inviando una compagnia di soldati addestrati dagli Stati Uniti, alla missione dell’ISAF della NATO. Daranno la propria esperienza bellica alla nazione sud asiatica e ritorneranno a casa, come i loro equivalenti militari georgiani e sud coreani, allenati anche dagli USA, meglio preparati per conflitti armati contro gli Stati vicini.

A parte la Gran Bretagna, Francia e Paesi Bassi sono tenuti a fornire i propri possedimenti coloniali in America Latina e le loro coste al loro alleato statunitense della NATO da usare contro i paesi membri dell’Alleanza Bolivariana per i Popoli della Nostra America (ALBA), Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, Nicaragua e Venezuela (Honduras post golpe si è ritirato) sono state adottate misure negli ultimi quindici anni per espandere i legami della NATO con altre nazioni latinoamericane. [9]

Nel 1995 il Cile e l’Argentina (sotto la presidenza Menem) hanno inviato truppe perché servissero la NATO in Bosnia, il primo attacco militare dell’Alleanza fuori dal territorio di uno Stato membro. Questa settimana il Cile ha accettato la continuazione dell’insediamento di esercito in questo paese- la missione è stata trasferita dalla NATO all’UE- ed un funzionario del governo ha dichiarato: “Abbiamo visto il Cile insieme alla NATO in un paese europeo, e l’interazione delle nostre forze armate con eserciti di prima categoria nel mondo”. [10]

La guerra e la storia militare dei candidati alla NATO e agli Stati partner della NATO durante gli ultimi 15 anni si sono estesi dalla Bosnia al Kosovo, alla Macedonia e all’Iraq, e finalmente all’ Afghanistan. Le forze armate cilene, chiunque vinca il ballottaggio delle elezioni presidenziali, potrebbero essere inviate in Afghanistan.

Dal rafforzamento dei legami con il Cile, che è coinvolto nella controversia in corso multinazionale per i diritti nell’Antartide, e con il Sud Africa, dove hanno attraccato navi da guerra della NATO e realizzato esercitazioni navali durante gli ultimi due anni, oltre all’Australia che ha il più grande contingente di paesi non membri della NATO in servizio in Afghanistan, l’ Alleanza si posiziona per la corsa all’estremo sud del pianeta [11] come lo è attualmente per la parte superiore del mondo. [12]

Due mesi prima della demolizione del Muro di Berlino e la fine effettiva della Guerra Fredda, si è tenuto un summit triennale del Movimento dei Non-Allineati a Belgrado, Jugoslavia. Erano presenti i rappresentanti di 108 nazioni che sono stati definiti come non–allineati militarmente.

Venti anni più tardi, e con più di venti paesi supplementari nel mondo dopo la disintegrazione dell’Unione Sovietica, della Cecoslovacchia e Jugoslavia e l’indipendenza di Timor Est,di aderire agli accordi militari, associazioni, l’esercizio e la creazione di basi USA e della NATO è più intenso che durante la Guerra Fredda.

La recente attivazione del Comando Africa degli USA, conta solo 53 nazioni per associazioni individuali e collettive con il Pentagono. La guerra in Afghanistan oggi è un banco di prova più ampio a livello mondiale nella militarizzazione del mondo. Washington fa pressione su tutto il mondo perché contribuisca con eserciti, logistica e risorse finanziarie ed usa la guerra per stabilire legami bilaterali militari e l’interoperabilità di armi e tecnologia militare con le nazioni di tutto il mondo.

Il primo decennio del nuovo millennio è stata una guerra, che iniziò seriamente in Afghanistan, e l’espansione di basi e di eserciti statunitensi in Europa Orientale, Medio Oriente, Africa, Sud America e Asia Centrale e del sud. Aree che erano finora state risparmiate la presenza permanente del Pentagono.

1) U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan’s History
Stop NATO, September 24, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/u-s-nato-poised-for-most-massive-war-in-afghanistans-history

2) UE, NATO, USA: L’alleanza del secolo per il dominio globale
Stop NATO, February 19, 2009

http://www.vocidallastrada.com/2009/03/ue-nato-usa-lalleanza-del-secolo-per-il.html

3) NATO In Persian Gulf: From Third World War To Istanbu
Stop NATO, February 6, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/nato-in-persian-gulf-from-third-world-war-to-istanbul

4) 1989-2009: Moving The Berlin Wall To Russia’s Borders
Stop NATO, November 7, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/1989-2009-berlin-wall-moves-to-russian-border

5) Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army
Stop NATO, August 9, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-builds-historys-first-global-army

6) Afghan War: NATO Trains Finland, Sweden For Conflict With Russia
Stop NATO, July 26, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-trains-finland-sweden-for-conflict-with-russia

7) Proliferation Security Initiative And U.S. 1,000-Ship Navy: Control Of
World’s Oceans, Prelude To War
Stop NATO, January 29, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/proliferation-security-initiative-and-us-1000-ship-navy-control-of-worlds-oceans-prelude-to-war

8) Global Military Bloc: NATO’s Drive Into Asia
Stop NATO, January 24, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/global-military-bloc-natos-drive-into-asia

U.S. Expands Asian NATO Against China, Russia
Stop NATO, October 16, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/u-s-expands-asian-nato-against-china-russia

9) Twenty Years After End Of The Cold War: Pentagon’s Buildup In Latin
America
Stop NATO, November 4, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/stop-nato

10) Xinhua News Agency, December 22, 2009
11) NATO Of The South: Chile, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica
Stop NATO, May 30, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/nato-of-the-south-chile-south-africa-australia-antarctica

12) NATO’s, Pentagon’s New Strategic Battleground: The Arctic
Stop NATO, February 2, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/natos-pentagons-new-strategic-battleground-the-arctic

U.S., NATO Expand Afghan War To Horn Of Africa And Indian Ocean

Stop NATO
January 8, 2010

U.S., NATO Expand Afghan War To Horn Of Africa And Indian Ocean
Rick Rozoff

In parallel with the escalation of the war in South Asia – counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and drone missile attacks in Pakistan – the United States and its NATO allies have laid the groundwork for increased naval, air and ground operations in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden.

During the past month the U.S. has carried out deadly military strikes in Yemen: Bombing raids in the north and cruise missile attacks in the south of the nation. Washington has been accused of killing scores of civilians in the attacks in both parts of the country, executed before the December 25 Northwest Airlines incident that has been used to justify the earlier U.S. actions ex post facto. And, ominously, that has been exploited to pound a steady drumbeat of demands for expanded and even more direct military intervention.

The Pentagon’s publicly disclosed military and security program for Yemen grew from $4.6 million in 2006 to $67 million last year. “That figure does not include covert, classified assistance that the United States has provided.” [1]

In addition, “Under a new classified cooperation agreement, the U.S. would be able to fly cruise missiles, fighter jets or unmanned armed drones against targets in the country, but would remain publicly silent on its role in the airstrikes.” [2]

On January 1 General David Petraeus, the chief of the Pentagon’s Central Command, in charge of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as operations in Yemen and Pakistan, was in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad and said of deepening military involvement in Yemen, “We have, it’s well known, about $70 million in security assistance last year. That will more than double this coming year.” [3]

The following day Petraeus was in the capital of Yemen where he met with the country’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to discuss “continued U.S. support in rooting out the terrorist cells.” [4]

White House counterterrorism adviser (Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism) John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama on Petraeus’ visit to Washington’s new war theater and afterward stated “We have made Yemen a priority over the course of this year, and this is the latest in that effort.” [5]

The alleged terrorist cells in question are identified by U.S. and other Western governments as being affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). However, on January 4 CNN reported that “A senior U.S. official cited a rebellion by Huti [Houthi] tribes in the north, and secessionist activity in the southern tribal areas” as of concern to Washington. [6]

The Houthis’ confessional background is Shi’a and not Sunni Islam and the opposition forces in the south are led by the Yemeni Socialist Party, so attempts to link either with al-Qaeda are inaccurate, self-serving and dishonest.

In both the north and south the United States, its NATO allies – Britain and France closed their embassies in Yemen earlier this week in unison with the U.S. – and Saudi Arabia are working in tandem to support the Saleh government in what over the past month has become a state of warfare against opposition forces in the country. Saudi Arabia has launched regular bombing raids and infantry and armored attacks in the north of the country and, according to Houthi rebel sources, been aided by U.S. warplanes in deadly attacks on villages. Houthi spokesmen have accused Riyadh of firing over a thousand missiles inside Yemen, and in late December the Saudi Defense Ministry acknowledged that its military casualties over the preceding month included 73 dead, 26 missing and 470 wounded. In short, a cross-border war on the Arabian Peninsula.

The West, though, has even larger plans for Yemen, ones which include integrating military operations from Northeast Africa to the Chinese border. Typical of recent statements by U.S. officials and their Western allies, last weekend British Prime Minister Gordon Brown disingenuously claimed that “The weakness of al Qaeda in Pakistan has forced them out of Pakistan and into Yemen and Somalia.” [7]

Brown told the BBC on January 3 “Yemen has been recognized, like Somalia, to be one of the areas we have got to not only keep an eye on, but we’ve got to do more. So it’s strengthening counter-terrorism cooperation, it’s working harder on intelligence efforts.” [8] It is up to Mr. Brown to explain why, if al-Qaeda has been “forced out” of Pakistan, he is adding soldiers to the U.S. and NATO surge that will soon bring combined Western troop numbers to over 150,000 in Afghanistan while intensifying deadly attacks inside Pakistan itself.

The British prime minister has also called for an international meeting on Yemen for later this month and announced that “The UK and the US have agreed to fund a counter-terrorism police unit in Yemen….” [9]

In Western news reports, or rather rumor peddling, Yemeni rebels are accused of supplying weapons to Somali opposite numbers and the second are reported to have offered fighters to the former.

In short the officially discarded but in fact revived and expanded “global war on terrorism” is now to be fought in a single theater of war that extends from the Red Sea to Pakistan. A joint endeavor by the Pentagon’s Central and Africa Commands and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to build upon the consolidation of almost the entire European continent under NATO and Pentagon control and the ceding of the African continent to the new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). (Except for Egypt, an individual Pentagon asset and NATO Mediterranean Dialogue partner.)

In fact the Central Command was inaugurated by the Ronald Reagan administration in 1983 on the foundations of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) that his predecessor Jimmy Carter activated three years before. [10] The latter developed out of the Rapid Deployment Forces (RDF) launched directly to counter developments in Afghanistan and Somalia in 1979 (an integral component of the Carter Doctrine) and was deliberately designed to establish military control of the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Sea and the Western Indian Ocean.

Administrations may depart – George W. Bush and Tony Blair have left public office – and names may change – the global war on terror has been rechristened overseas contingency operations – but Washington’s global geopolitical ambitions, limitless since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in 1991, have only grown more universal and the military means employed for their realization more aggressive.

The White House and its European allies have of late resuscitated and inflated the al-Qaeda specter to a degree not witnessed since the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001.

Under the guise of protecting the American homeland from this shadowy and ubiquitous entity, the Pentagon is involved in military operations from West Africa to East Asia against among other decidedly non-Osama bin Laden-linked forces left-wing groups in Colombia, the Philippines and Yemen; Shi’a militias in Lebanon and Yemen; ethnic rebels in Mali and Niger; a Christian extremist rebellion in Uganda.

Like the notorious 19th century “body snatchers” William Burke and William Hare, paid so well to provide cadavers to the Edinburgh Medical College that, running out of corpses to sell, created them, al-Qaeda is a dependable villain to be evoked as needed.

Al-Shabaab fighters in Somalia can be conflated with pirates in the Gulf of Aden to provide the pretext for a permanent NATO and allied European Union naval presence in a nexus that includes the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea leading into the Persian Gulf and most of the eastern coast of Africa.

The American component of the Greater Afghan War is Operation Enduring Freedom, which takes in Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay Naval Base), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

Djibouti, which hosts some 2,500 U.S. military personnel in the Pentagon’s first permanent base in Africa, is also the headquarters of the U.S.’s Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), set up in 2001 several months before Operation Enduring Freedom and overlapping with it in many respects. The CJTF-HOA, based in the French military base of Camp Lemonier, was transferred from the Pentagon’s Central Command to its Africa Command on October 1, 2008 when AFRICOM was formally activated.

Its area of responsibility includes Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Yemen. Its areas of interest are Comoros, Mauritius, and Madagascar. The last three are, like Seychelles, island nations in the Indian Ocean. The U.S. expanded Camp Lemonier to five times its original size in 2006 and troops from all branches of the U.S. armed services “use the base when not working ‘downrange’ in countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia and Yemen.” [11]

In announcing recently that “Yemen has received military equipment from the United States to aid the government’s fight against the al-Qaeda network in the south of the country,” a German news agency added this background information: “Yemen, in the 1990s, welcomed back Arab fighters who left Afghanistan after the fall of the Soviet Union.” [12]

As with Afghanistan itself and other locations where the American military is fighting insurgent groups – the Philippines, Somalia and Yemen – the Pentagon is frequently confronting fighters funded, armed and trained by its own government in Pakistan from 1978-1992 under Operation Cyclone, the largest-ever CIA covert undertaking.

A 2008 edition of U.S. News & World Report, a magazine that can hardly be accused of being unfriendly to the White House and the Pentagon, wrote of the war in Afghanistan that “two of the most dangerous players are violent Afghan Islamists named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, according to U.S. officials.” [13]

An assessment repeated in the August 30, 2009 Commander’s Initial Assessment of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The report, the basis for the White House increasing troop strength in the war theater to over 100,000, stated that “The major insurgent groups in order of their threat to the mission are: the Quetta Shura Taliban (05T), the Haqqani Network (HQN), and the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HiG).”

The U.S. News & World Report feature provided this background information:

“[T]hese two warlords — currently at the top of America’s list of most wanted men in Afghanistan — were once among America’s most valued allies. In the 1980s, the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition to help them battle the Soviet Army….Hekmatyar, then widely considered by Washington to be a reliable anti-Soviet rebel, was even flown to the United States by the CIA in 1985.”

“U.S. officials had an even higher opinion of Haqqani, who was considered the most effective rebel warlord….Haqqani was also one of the leading advocates of the so-called Arab Afghans, deftly organizing Arab volunteer fighters who came to wage jihad against the Soviet Union and helping to protect future al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.” [14]

In the name of combating the very same bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the U.S. and its NATO allies are now, in addition to increasing combined military forces waging a war in Afghanistan now in its ninth year to over 150,000, more than the Soviet Union ever deployed to that nation:

Intensifying deadly drone missile, helicopter gunship and commando attacks inside neighboring Pakistan. A recent government report in that nation tabulated that 708 people had been killed last year in CIA drone attacks alone. Only five of those were identified as al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects. [14] On January 6 at least thirteen more were killed in a missile attack in the Pakistani tribal agency of North Waziristan.

Last month an American military newspaper reported that “A 1,000-strong Marine combat task force capable of rapidly deploying to hot spots could soon be at the disposal of the new U.S. Africa Command,” which announcement came “just a few months after U.S. Special Forces staged a daring daylight raid deep inside southern Somalia” and after another Marine force “had already deployed in support of training missions in Uganda and Mali.” [15]

In late October of last year NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was in the United Arab Emirates [UAE] to rally NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative partners for a future confrontation with Iran. Addressing a conference on NATO-UAE Relations and Future Prospects of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, he expanded his mission to recruit the Persian Gulf monarchies for the ever-expanding Greater Afghan War. “We have a shared interest in helping countries like Afghanistan and Iraq to stand on their feet again, fostering stability in the Middle East…and preventing countries like Somalia and Sudan from slipping deeper into chaos.” [16]

Two months earlier it was reported that “About 75 U.S. military personnel and civilians will be headed to the Seychelles islands in the coming weeks to set up…Reaper operations, which could start in October or November. U.S. Africa Command is calling the Navy-led mission Ocean Look.

“The U.S. will base the Reapers – to be used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – at Seychelles’ Mahe regional airport….” [17] The Reaper is the Pentagon’s newest “hunter-killer” unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) which is equipped with fifteen times the firepower and travels at three times the speed of its Predator forerunner, used to devastating effect in Pakistan and Somalia. Last October Somali rebels claimed to have shot down an American drone and local “residents routinely report suspected US drones flying over [their city]. The drones are believed to be launched from warships in the Indian Ocean.” [18]

The permanent stationing of U.S. military forces in Seychelles is part of a pattern in recent years of basing American troops to man missile batteries, interceptor missile radar sites, air bases, counterinsurgency forward bases and other installations in countries where their presence would have been inconceivable even a few years ago: Afghanistan, Colombia, Bulgaria, Djibouti, Iraq, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Poland and Romania. A report of January 7 claims that the U.S. plans to establish an air base in Yemen in the Socotra archipelago in the Indian Ocean. [19]

Later it was revealed that “In addition to the Reaper UAVs, the U.S. military is also considering basing Navy P-3 Orion patrol aircraft in the Seychelles for a limited time. Like the Reaper, the Orion can survey a large region….” [20]

A Middle Eastern news source reported on this development as follows:

“The United States is taking its military venture in Africa to new levels amid suspicions that Washington could be advancing yet another hidden agenda.

“American operatives are expected to fly pilot-less surveillance aircraft over the Seychellois [Seychelles] territory from US ships off its coast, in what Washington claims are [deployments] meant to spy on Somali pirates….[S]imilar pretexts were used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan, the missile attacks in Pakistan, and its waning military operations in Iraq….Washington has also started to equip Mali with USD 4.5 million worth of military vehicles and communications equipment, in what is reported to be an increasing US involvement in Africa.” [21]

It did not take long for the U.S. to put the Reapers into operation. In late October Associated Press reported “U.S. military surveillance drones are patrolling off Somalia’s coast for the first time….U.S. military officials say unmanned drones called Reapers, stationed in the island nation of Seychelles, are patrolling the Indian Ocean. [22]

“The developments come as the White House seeks grounds to establish a major military presence in Africa.

“The US military says it has deployed its drones ['the size of a jet fighter'], capable of carrying missiles to patrol waters off Somalia….” [23]

Washington’s attempt to establish an Afghanistan-Pakistan-Somalia-Yemen connection is intimately connected with its plans for Africa as a whole. [24]

On January 4 a U.S. military website published this update:

“U.S. Africa Command has bolstered its anti-piracy forces with the recent addition of maritime patrol aircraft and more personnel in the Seychelles islands.

“The Navy last month deployed three P-3 Orion aircraft from the Maine-based VP-26 Tridents, along with 112 sailors, to the Seychelles to patrol the waters off East Africa….Patrol Squadron 26′s insignia, a skull over a compass and two bombs or torpedoes that form an X, resembles the Jolly Roger flag, which symbolizes piracy.” [25]

What sort of pirates the Pentagon is using as the pretext for its military buildup in the Horn of Africa and Eastern Africa as a whole was demonstrated last September when “Foreign troops in helicopters strafed a car…in a Somali town…killing two men and capturing two others who were wounded, witnesses said. U.S. military officials said American forces were involved in the raid.”

“Two U.S. military officials said forces from the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command were involved.” [26] The Joint Special Operations Command was headed up by Stanley McChrystal from 2003 to 2008. He has moved on from overseeing counterinsurgency operations in Iraq during those years to assuming control over all U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan.

A witness also reported that “the helicopters took off from a warship flying a French flag” [27] and a rebel source said “We are getting information that French army gunships attacked a car, destroying it completely and taking some of the passengers.” [28]

French military forces remain in the former colony of Djibouti where they train for operations not only in Afghanistan but in several former African possessions. Troops, warplanes and armored vehicles from NATO nations – under the flags of NATO itself, the European Union, France and the United States – have intervened in civil and cross-border conflicts across the entire width of Africa over the past few years: Somalia, Djibouti-Eritrea, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Darfur region of Sudan and the Ivory Coast; from the Horn of Africa to the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea.

A report from last month provides some indication of the French role on the continent. Radio France Internationale described “French soldiers in Djibouti train[ing] for Afghanistan and keep[ing] an eye on Africa” with the following details:

“Twelve special forces commandos arrived first” and “the army…storm[ed] the beach….The exercise, seen as crucial for battle preparedness in a region infamous for its fractious politics, included all the country’s military sectors – sea, land and air.

“As desert tanks zoomed onto the shore Mirage jets criss-crossed the open sky. Meanwhile, land troops were dispatched from the mouths of armoured personnel carriers and helicopters airlifted artillery guns onto the ground.

“‘It’s a show of force. It shows what France is able to do militarily,’ said one army officer.

“In recent years French troops in Djibouti have been involved in a number of…military missions in Africa. They helped reinforce the UN brigade patrolling Cote d’Ivoire and last year provided logistical and tactical help to Djiboutian soldiers warding off an attack from neighbouring Eritrea.

“For the time being, the first theatre of combat these troops will see is Afghanistan, where France is part of the Nato contingent. The mountainous, arid countryside closely resembles Djibouti’s own undulating moonscape.

“The troops taking part are a contingent of a 2,500-strong force based in Djibouti.” [29]

In addition to intermittent armed clashes between troops from Djibouti and Eritrea, in the past weeks reports have surfaced of deadly fighting within Eritrea and between that nation and neighboring Ethiopia. Djibouti and Ethiopia are the West’s client regimes and military proxies in the Horn of Africa and, as is demonstrated above, the integration of the South Asian and Northeast African war fronts is proceeding rapidly.

Starting in the autumn of 2008 NATO began what it calls counter-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia and further into the Gulf of Aden, often in league with comparable deployments by the European Union, with which it shares warships, commanders and “common strategic interests” under the Berlin Plus and other arrangements. [30]

The NATO naval surveillance and interdiction operation in and near the Horn of Africa is an extension of its effective takeover of the entire Mediterranean Sea with Operation Active Endeavor [31] initiated in 2001 under the Alliance’s Article 5 mutual military assistance clause and augmented by the blockade of Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast by NATO nations’ warships under UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) auspices that began after Israel’s assault on the country in 2006. The latter’s Maritime Task Force (MTF) “has hailed some 27,000 ships and referred nearly 400 suspicious vessels to Lebanese authorities for further inspection.

“Thirteen countries – Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Turkey – have contributed naval units to the MTF.” [32]

The NATO and EU deployments in the Gulf of Aden are the first such naval operations in the region in both organizations’ history and the EU’s first in African coastal waters.

The expansion of military presence into the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea gives NATO nations control of waterways ranging from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Strait of Hormuz.

As veteran Indian diplomat and analyst M K Bhadrakumar described it in 2008, “By acting with lightning speed and without publicity, NATO surely created a fait accompli.

“NATO’s naval deployment in the Indian Ocean region is a historic move and a milestone in the alliance’s transformation. Even at the height of the Cold War, the alliance didn’t have a presence in the Indian Ocean. Such deployments almost always tend to be open-ended.

“In 2007, a NATO naval force visited Seychelles in the Indian Ocean and Somalia and conducted exercises in the Indian Ocean and then re-entered the Mediterranean via the Red Sea in end-September.” [33]

He added: “US officials are on record that Africom and NATO envisage an institutional linkup in the downstream.

“The overall US strategy is to incrementally bring NATO into Africa so that its future role in the Indian Ocean (and Middle East) region as the instrument of US global security agenda becomes optimal.” [34]

Last August the chief of AFRICOM, General William Ward, said that Somalia was “a central focus of the U.S. military on the continent.”

To indicate the scope of Pentagon plans in not only Somalia but the region, “General William Ward has pledged continued support to Somalia’s transitional federal government….He made his remarks during a visit to Nairobi, Kenya, which is a key U.S. ally in the region.

“When asked about U.S. warnings to Eritrea against its alleged support of
al-Shabab, the U.S. general condemned any outside support for the Somali rebels.” [35]

U.S., British and other Western officials have been straining to establish (the most) tenuous connection between the so-called AfPak war front and the need for direct military intervention in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, as was seen earlier with the British prime minister’s risible claim that NATO has been so successful in expelling alleged al-Qaeda elements from Pakistan that they have sought refuge in Somalia and Yemen. Rather than, more logically, in locations like Kashmir, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Similarly, Western governments are sparing no effort to fabricate or exaggerate links between the numerous armed conflicts in the Horn of Africa. Somali rebels are accused of supporting the government of Eritrea in its border conflict with Djibouti; they are also accused of offering fighters for the internal conflict in southern Yemen.

In return, Yemeni rebels are accused of providing arms for Somalia’s al-Shabaab fighters and hovering over it all is the implication that Iran is sponsoring Arab Shi’a forces in Yemen’s north.

There is a plethora of evidence, however, documenting genuine foreign intervention in the region: U.S. missile, bombing, helicopter and special forces attacks in Somalia and Yemen and coordination with the armies of Djibouti and Ethiopia in conflicts inside Somalia and with Eritrea. Saudi air and land assaults in Yemen with the resultant deaths of hundreds and displacement of thousands of civilians. French commando operations in Somalia and combat training in Djibouti for warfare in the area and beyond.

The true outside forces engaged in military actions are ignored in the West in favor of unsubstantiated contentions that the region is being inflamed by the same adversaries the U.S. and NATO are waging war against on the Indian subcontinent and that the villains in and near the Horn of Africa are, in addition to being the local al-Qaeda franchise, inextricably linked and moreover somehow tied with piracy operations. Such are the tortured logic and far-fetched subterfuges used to prepare Western publics for an escalation of military intervention over 3,000 kilometers across the Indian Ocean from the Afghanistan-Pakistan war theater.

NATO warships are bridging the two extremes. Last August the military bloc launched its second naval operation off the coast of Somalia the name of which, Ocean Shield, alone indicates the scope of the Alliance’s objectives in the Africa-Asia-Middle East triangle. The mission includes military ships from Britain, Greece, Italy, Turkey and the U.S. and according to NATO “other countries are thinking of coming to reinforce the operation which could evolve at any moment.” A NATO spokesman said at the time, “No timeframe has been set for this long-term operation, which will last as long as it’s deemed necessary.” [36]

The European Union is conducting a complementary mission, Operation Atalanta, “which has six frigates and works with fleets from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the U.S.-led coalition” and “operates in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean…from Somali territorial waters east to 60 degrees longitude, which runs south from the eastern tip of Oman and 250 miles east of the Seychelles.” [37] Rear Admiral Peter Hudson at the fleet’s command center in Britain announced last month that the operation may expand its range even further, taking in most of the western Indian Ocean.

Last September the commander of NATO’s Maritime Group 2 in the Gulf of Aden met with officials of Somalia’s Puntland autonomous region to plan operations.

In mid-December NATO made a direct link between its South Asian war and its expansion into the Indian Ocean by announcing it was considering dispatching AWACS surveillance aircraft to the second location. “Commanders are seeking to back up a five-ship counterpiracy task force with one of the airborne warning and control system surveillance planes, possibly sharing it with the allied International Security Assistance Force fighting in Afghanistan.” [38]

On the first day of this year a Canadian news agency, in a feature titled “Canada to help defend Yemen from al-Qaida reinforcements,” revealed that “A NATO spokeswoman said warships patrolling international shipping lanes through the Gulf of Aden, which separates Somalia from Yemen, were aware al-Shabab, an al-Qaida-inspired armed group based in Somalia, had announced plans to send fighters to Yemen” and as a result “A Canadian warship involved in NATO-led counter-piracy operations off Somalia’s coast now has an additional task….” [39]

….

Somalia and Yemen lie across from each other on either end of the Gulf of Aden where the Red Sea meets the Arabian Sea and the Mediterranean is connected with the Indian Ocean. An arc that effects the conjunction of three of the world’s five most important continents. Territory too important for the United States, whose head of state last month proclaimed himself commander-in-chief of the world’s sole military superpower, and what for the past decade has declared itself expeditionary and global NATO to leave untouched.

1) Reuters, January 1, 2010
2) Russian Information Agency Novosti, December 30, 2009
3) Reuters, January 1, 2010
4) CNN, January 4, 2010
5) CNN, January 2, 2010
6) CNN, January 4, 2010
7) Agence France-Presse, January 4, 2010
8) Xinhua News Agency, January 4, 2010
9) Press TV, January 3, 2010
10) Cold War Origins Of The Somalia Crisis And Control Of The
Indian Ocean
Stop NATO, May 3, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/cold-war-origins-of-the-somalia-crisis-and-control-of-the-indian-ocean/

11) Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa, April 17, 2009
12) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 1, 2010
13) U.S. News & World Report, July 11, 2008
14) Ibid
15) Stars And Stripes, December 16, 2009
16) Al Arabiya, November 1, 2009
17) Stars and Stripes, August 29, 2009
18) Press TV, October 19, 2009
19) Press TV, January 7, 2010
20) Voice of America News, September 2, 2009
21) Press TV, October 21, 2009
22) Associated Press, October 23, 2009
23) Press TV, October 25, 2009
24) AFRICOM: Pentagon Prepares Direct Military Intervention In Africa
Stop NATO, August 24, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/africom-pentagons-prepares-direct-military-intervention-in-africa

AFRICOM Year Two: Seizing The Helm Of The Entire World
Stop NATO, October 22, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/africom-year-two-taking-the-helm-of-the-entire-world

25) Stars and Stripes, January 4, 2010
26) Associated Press, September 14, 2009
27) Ibid
28) Agence France-Presse, September 14, 2009
29) Radio France Internationale, December 11, 2009
30) NATO

http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_49217.htm

31) NATO http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_7932.htm
32) UN News Centre, August 31, 2009
33) Asian Times, October 20, 2008
34) Ibid
35) Voice of America News, August 21, 2009
36) Agence France-Presse, August 17, 2009
37) Bloomberg News, December 11, 2009
38) Bloomberg News, December 21, 2009
39) Canwest News Service, January 1, 2010

Die einzige militärische Supermacht der Welt führt mit zwei Millionen Soldaten Kriege, die bisher schon eine Billion Dollar verschlungen haben

Stop NATO

January 7, 2010

Die einzige militärische Supermacht der Welt führt mit zwei Millionen Soldaten Kriege, die bisher schon eine Billion Dollar verschlungen haben
Rick Rozoff

Quelle und Übersetzung: Wolfgang Jung

http://www.linkezeitung.de/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7945&Itemid=249

———-
Obwohl von den fast 7 Milliarden Menschen auf der Erde nur ein paar mehr 300 Millionen US-Amerikaner sind, entfallen auf die USA mehr als 40 Prozent aller offiziell bestätigten Militärausgaben der Welt; bei einem Bevölkerungsanteil von etwa 4 Prozent ist das ein Missverhältnis von 10 zu 1.

Zusätzlich zu seinen 1.445.000 aktiven Soldaten kann das Pentagon auf 1,2 Millionen Nationalgardisten und andere Reservisten zurückgreifen. Etwa 30 Prozent der Soldaten, die in Afghanistan und im Irak eingesetzt werden, sind einberufene Reservisten. Die Nationalgarde der Army hat seit Beginn des Afghanistan-Krieges mehr als 400.000 Soldaten reaktiviert; im März 2009 waren etwa 125.000 Nationalgardisten und andere Reservisten im aktiven Dienst eingesetzt.

Die Verteidigungsministerium beschäftigt in den USA und weltweit über 800.000 Zivilangestellte. Das Pentagon kann also ständig auf mehr als 3,5 Millionen Menschen zurückgreifen, wobei das Personal der Kontraktfirmen, die militärische Hilfsdienste leisten, noch nicht einmal mitgezählt ist.

Obwohl bereits mehr als eine Billion Dollars für die Kriege in Afghanistan und im Irak verschwendet und mehr als zwei Millionen US-Staatsbürger in diesen beiden Ländern eingesetzt wurden, haben das militärische Establishment der USA und sein Friedenspräsident bereits Vorbereitungen für weitere Kriege getroffen. Die Rüstungsfirmen Boeing, Raytheon und General Electric werden nicht mehr lange warten müssen.
———-

In seiner Rede bei der Verleihung des Friedensnobelpreises am 10. Dezember bezeichne­te der Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten sein Land als “die einzige militärische Super­macht der Welt” und sich selbst als “den militärischen Oberbefehlshaber einer Nation, die zwei Kriege führt”.

Das war wohl das erste Mal in der Geschichte, dass ein amerikanisches oder sonstiges Staatsoberhaupt sein Land als unangefochten führende Militärmacht unseres Planeten ge­rühmt hat, und wird zweifellos das einzige Mal bleiben, dass ein Friedensnobelpreisträger sich dazu bekennt, nicht nur einen, sondern gleich zwei Krieg zu führen.

Unabhängig davon, ob die Verleihung des angesehensten Friedenspreises der Welt durch das norwegische Nobelpreis-Komitee der richtige Ort und die passende Gelegenheit für solche Töne waren, bleibt Barack Obama wenigstens die Entschuldigung, dass seine Be­hauptungen wirklich zutreffen.

Als Oberbefehlshaber ist er tatsächlich für zwei große und mehrere kleinere Kriege verant­wortlich, und sein Staat ist zweifellos die erste militärische Weltmacht, die seit Jahrzehnten uneingeschränkt auf fünf von sechs bewohnten Kontinenten operiert und Truppen auf al­len sechs stationiert hat. Die US-Streitkräfte unterhalten in vielen Staaten insgesamt 820 Miliärbasen, die mit Soldaten und Waffen – einschließlich Atomwaffen – ausgestattet sind.

Die Vereinigten Staaten haben kürzlich sieben neue Basen in Bulgarien und Rumänien er­richtet, die Tausende von Soldaten aufnehmen können (s. dazu http://rickrozoff.word­press.com/2009/10/25/bulgaria-romania-u-s-nato-bases-for-war-in-the-east ) [1], als erstes Land ausländische Truppen in Israel stationiert, die eine Radarstation zum Erfassen anflie­gender Raketen in der Wüste Negev betreiben (Zusatzinformationen s. http://www.luftpost­kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP 08/LP 1 8508 03 1008. pdf u nd http://www.luftpost-kl.de/luftpost-ar­chiv/LP_09/LP25409_161 109.pdf ) [2], und letzte Woche ein Abkommen über die Statio­nierung von Patriot-Raketen mit Polen geschlossen, denen bald noch landgestützte Aegis Standard Missile 3 / SM-3 folgen sollen, die bisher auf Schiffen stationiert waren (s. http://www.luftpost-kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP 09/LP 1 8609 3 1 0809.pdf ); die US-Soldaten, die mit den Patriots kommen, werden die ersten ausländischen Truppen in Polen seit der Auflösung des Warschauer Paktes im Jahr 1991 sein.

Der US-Militärhaushalt, der wieder auf dem Niveau des Kalten Krieges angekommen und der höchste seit Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs ist, beträgt nach dem Report 2008 des Stockholm International Peace Research Institute / SIPRI mehr als 41 Prozent der offiziell bestätigten internationalen Militärausgaben: 607 Milliarden Dollar von 1,464 Billionen Dol­lar, die weltweit für militärische Zwecke ausgegeben werden. Am 28. Oktober hat Präsi­dent Obama die Gesetzesvorlage zum Militärbudget 2010 unterzeichnet, das 680 Milliar­den Dollar umfasste, einschließlich der 130 Milliarden Dollar für die Kriege in Afghanistan und im Irak.

In dieser Summe sind die Militärausgaben, die nicht im Verteidigungshaushalt ausgewie­sen werden, noch nicht enthalten. Die US-Regierung überträgt seit Jahrzehnten in allen Bereichen staatliche Aufgaben an Firmen aus der Privatwirtschaft, und das Pentagon ist von dieser Praxis ganz sicher nicht ausgenommen. Nach verschiedenen Schätzungen be­laufen sich alle mit dem US-Militär zusammenhängenden Ausgaben – einschließlich des offiziellen Verteidigungshaushalts – pro Jahr auf insgesamt 1,16 Billionen Dollar; das ist fast die Hälfte aller staatlichen Ausgaben, die im letzten Jahr von den 192 Staaten der Welt – einschließlich der USA – getätigt wurden.

Obwohl von den fast 7 Milliarden Menschen auf der Erde nur ein paar mehr als 300 Millio­nen US-Amerikaner sind, entfallen auf die USA mehr als 40 Prozent aller offiziell bestätig­ten Militärausgaben der Welt; bei einem Bevölkerungsanteil von etwa 4 Prozent ist das ein Missverhältnis von 10 zu 1.

Die USA haben nach neuesten Schätzungen mit mehr als 1.445.000 Männern und Frauen unter Waffen die zweitgrößte Berufsarmee der Welt. Sie werden nur von China übertrof­fen, dessen Armee aus 2.255.000 Soldaten besteht. China hat eine Bevölkerung von über 1,325 Milliarden Menschen – mehr als viermal so viele, wie die USA – und setzt – anders als die USA – neben seinen Streitkräften keine zusätzlichen Hilfstruppen von Privatfirmen ein. Im Gegensatz zu den USA hat es auch keine Truppen im Ausland stationiert. Indien hat bei einer Bevölkerung von 1,140 Milliarden Menschen nur eine Armee von 1.415.000 Soldaten, die kleiner als die US-Armee ist.

Die USA und Großbritannien sind wahrscheinlich die einzigen Staaten, die Reservisten kämpfen lassen; im Februar 2009 gab Admiral Mike Mullen, der Chef des US-General‑
stabs bekannt, dass seit 2001 im Bereich des Central Command (s. dazu auch http://ww­w.luftpost-kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP 09/LP27209 071209.pdf ), das für die Kriege in Afgha­nistan und im Irak zuständig ist, 600.000 Reservisten eingesetzt wurden. Zusätzlich zu sei­nen 1.445.000 aktiven Soldaten kann das Pentagon auf 1,2 Millionen Nationalgardisten und andere Reservisten zurückgreifen. Etwa 30 Prozent der Soldaten, die in Afghanistan und im Irak eingesetzt werden, sind einberufene Reservisten. Die Nationalgarde der Army hat seit Beginn des Afghanistan-Krieges mehr als 400.000 Soldaten reaktiviert; im März 2009 waren etwa 125.000 Nationalgardisten und andere Reservisten im aktiven Dienst eingesetzt.

Das Verteidigungsministerium beschäftigt in den USA und weltweit über 800.000 Zivilan­gestellte. Das Pentagon kann also ständig auf mehr als 3,5 Millionen Menschen zurück­greifen, wobei das Personal der Kontraktfirmen, die militärische Hilfsdienste leisten, noch nicht einmal mitgezählt ist.

In den letzten 48 Stunden sind zwei beispiellose Schwellen überschritten worden. Am Mor­gen des 19. Dezember traf sich der US-Senat in einer seltenen Samstagsitzung, um über den Militärhaushalt von 636,3 Milliarden Dollar für das nächste Jahr zu entscheiden. Er wurde mit 88 zu 10 Stimmen verabschiedet; das Repräsentantenhaus hatte ihn bereits am 16. Dezember mit 395 zu 34 Stimmen gebilligt. In beiden Fällen bedeuten die Nein-Stim­men nicht notwendigerweise eine Ablehnung der Kriegsausgaben; sie waren eher Teil des labyrinthischen US-Gesetzgebungsverfahrens, das von Absprachen, Koppelgeschäften und Geschacher in anderen Fragen bestimmt ist, die mit dem Sachverhalt, über den gera­de abgestimmt wird, überhaupt nichts zu tun haben müssen. In der Umgangssprache wird dieses Verhalten mit Kuhhandel, Stimmenkauf oder anderen schillernden Begriffen be­schrieben. Eine Nein-Stimme im Repräsentantenhaus oder im Senat ist also nicht automa­tisch ein Zeichen für die Ablehnung des Krieges oder für eine konservative Einstellung zur Haushaltspoliti k.

In der Pentagon-Vorlage sind auch 101 Milliarden Dollar für die Kriege in Afghanistan und der Irak enthalten. Erst im Juli 2009 hatte Obama ein Nachtragsbudget von 106 Milliarden Dollar für die Kriege im Irak und in Afghanistan unterzeichnet. Auch 2010 dürfte es wieder Nachforderungen für “Notfallmaßnahmen” in Afghanistan geben. Der erste Nachtrags­haushalt über 30 Milliarden Dollar ist schon zum Jahresbeginn zu erwarten – für die Ent­sendung der zusätzlichen 33.000 Mann, mit denen die Gesamtzahl der US-Soldaten in Af­ghanistan auf über 100.000 anwachsen wird.

Am Tag der Abstimmung im Senat zitierte BLOOMBERG NEWS den Congressional Re­search Service (den wissenschaftlichen Dienst des US-Kongresses), der die bisherigen Gesamtkosten für die Kriege in Afghanistan und im Irak mit über einer Billion Dollar bezif­fert hat: “Sie setzen sich aus 748 Milliarden Dollar für den Irak-Krieg und 300 Milliarden Dollar für den Afghanistan-Krieg zusammen, heißt es in einem Report des Research Ser­vice vom 28. September (2009).”

Der beschlossene Beschaffungsplan des Pentagons “sieht auch 2,5 Milliarden Dollar für 10 zusätzliche C-17-Transportflugzeuge der Firma Boeing vor, die das Pentagon über­haupt nicht angefordert hat. Die in Chicago angesiedelte Rüstungsfirma Boeing erhält wei­tere 1,5 Milliarden Dollar für 18 Kampfjets des Typs F/A-1 8F Super Hornet; auch das sind neun Maschinen mehr, als die Regierung beschaffen wollte.

Die Finanzierung von Flugzeugen, die das Verteidigungsministerium oder das Weiße Haus überhaupt nicht oder nur in geringerer Stückzahl haben wollten, ist ein weiterer be­zeichnender Bestandteil der US-Beschaffungspolitik. Die Bestellungen werden den Abge‑

ordneten, die angeblich das amerikanische Volk vertreten, direkt von den Rüstungsfirmen diktiert – und nicht nur von Rüstungsfirmen aus den USA. William Lynn, der derzeitige stellvertretende Verteidigungsminister, hat zum Beispiel vorher die Abteilung für Regie­rungsoperationen und Strategie der Rüstungsfirma Raytheon geleitet. Aufschlussreich sind auch die folgenden Passagen aus dem Bericht der BLOOMBERG NEWS:

“Verteidigungsminister Robert Gates hat am 6. April 2009 empfohlen, die C-17-Fertigung einzustellen, wenn Boeing gegen Ende des Jahres 2010 die letzten von 205 bestellten Transportflugzeugen des Typs C-17 ausgeliefert hat. Die Firma Boeing, der zweitgrößte Empfänger von Rüstungsaufträgen, hat sofort angekündigt, sie werde ihr Werk in Long Beach, Kalifornien, 2011 schließen, wenn keine neuen Bestellungen kämen.

Im Verteidigungshaushalt sind auch 465 Millionen Dollar für die Nachrüstung des Trieb­werks des Kampfjets F-35 Joint Strike Fighter vorgesehen. Das Triebwerk wird von der in Fairfield, Connecticut, angesiedelten Firma General Electric Co. und der Rolls Royce Plc. in London gebaut. Dabei hatte die Regierung vorher damit gedroht, den kompletten Vertei­digungshaushalt zurückzuziehen, wenn darin Geld für die Nachrüstung dieses Triebwerks eingestellt werden sollte.” (Der komplette BLOOMBERG-Artikel ist aufzurufen unter http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601209&sid=aXweGzTkFKyo .) [3]

Das Pentagon und sein Chef Gates können Kämpfe mit dem Kongress und sogar mit dem Weißen Haus gewinnen, wenn es um den Einsatz militärischer Gewalt im Ausland geht, aber gegen die Rüstungsfirmen und die Kongressabgeordneten, deren Wahlkämpfe diese Firmen finanzieren, ziehen die Lamettaträger des Militärs immer den Kürzeren.

Zusätzlich zu der jährlich (mit 336,3 Milliarden Dollar, also) mit fast zwei Dritteln einer Billi­on Dollar gefüllten Kriegskasse des Pentagons verschaffen die andauernden Kriege im Mittleren Osten, die bereits über eine Billion Dollar verschlungen haben, den Großhänd­lern des Todes und ihren politischen Handlangern einen wahren Geldregen.

Am 18. Dezember wurde auf mehreren Websites der US-Streitkräfte ein Bericht veröffent­licht, dem zu entnehmen war, dass seit Beginn des Überfalls auf Afghanistan im Oktober 2001 insgesamt 3,3 Millionen US-Soldaten nach Afghanistan und in den Irak geschickt wurden. Das war nur möglich weil “793.000 Männer und Frauen der über 2 Millionen Sol­daten der US-Streitkräfte mehrmals an die Front geschickt wurden”. (s. dazu http://www.- marinecorpstimes.com/news/2009/12/military deployments 1 21 809w/ )

Von den einzelnen Waffengattungen kamen:

mehr als 1 Million Soldaten von der Army.

mehr als 389.900 von der Air Force.

mehr als 367.900 von der Navy (der Marine) und

mehr als 251.800 von den Marines (der Marineinfanterie).

Allein im Oktober 2009 waren 172.800 Soldaten der Army, 31 .500 Soldaten der Air Force, 30.000 Matrosen und 20.900 Marineinfanteristen auf den beiden Kriegsschauplätzen ein­gesetzt. [4]

Die Masse der US-Berufsarmee wird zwar in Afghanistan und im Irak gebraucht, es blei­ben aber noch genügend Soldaten übrig, um die neuen Basen in Osteuropa zu beman­nen, um sie in andere Länder im Mittleren Osten zu schicken, um den Transitflughafen Manas in Kirgisistan zu betreiben, um sieben neue Militärbasen in Kolumbien zu überneh­men, um im Camp Lemonier in Dschibuti, dem ersten dauerhaften US-Militärstützpunkt in

Afrika, 2.400 Soldaten für regionale Operationen zu stationieren und um auf den Philippi­nen, in Mali, in Uganda, im Jemen und in Pakistan gegen “Aufständische” zu intervenie­ren.

Kürzlich berichtete eine US-Militärzeitung in unter dem Titel “AFRICOM could add Marine Air Ground Task Force” (AFRICOM könnte eine Sondereinsatzgruppe von Fallschirmjä­gern der Marineinfanterie erhalten), dass “AFRICOM bald eine 1.000 Mann starke Kampf­truppe der Marines für schnelle Einsätze an Krisenherden (in Afrika) zur Verfügung stehen könnte”.

In dem Artikel hieß es weiter, dass eine Einheit der Marines, die kürzlich AFRICOM unter­stellt wurde, “bereits zur Unterstützung von Trainingsmissionen in Uganda und Mali einge­setzt worden sei”; die Armee Ungandas kämpft gegen die Lord’s Resistance Army (die Wi­derstandsarmee des Herrn) und die Armee Malis gegen die Tuareg-Rebellen. (s. http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=66690 ) [5]

Im Jemen haben Quellen der Houthi-Rebellen am 15. Dezember “die US-Air Force be­schuldigt, sich an Luftangriffen gegen sie beteiligt und mindestens 120 Menschen im Nor-den dieses armen arabischen Staates getötet zu haben”. (s. dazu auch http://www.luft­post-kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP 09/LP28709 231209.pdf )

Ihr Informationsbüro teilte dazu mit: “Das schlimme Verbrechen der US-Air Force zeigt das wahre Gesicht der Vereinigten Staaten.” [6]

ABC NEWS berichtete: “Auf Befehl des Präsidenten Barack Obama startete das US-Militär am Morgen des 17. Dezember Cruise Missiles (Marschflugkörper) gegen zwei vermutete Al-Qaida-Camps im Jemen”. [7] Gleichzeitig gehen die Drohnenangriffe in Pakistan weiter.

Weil die Houthi-Rebellen Schiiten sind, ist jeder Versuch, sie mit Al-Qaida in Verbindung zu bringen, nur ein Vorwand, um die Bombardierung ihrer Dörfer zu rechtfertigen.

Zur gleichen Zeit hat sich General Roger Brady, der Kommandeur der US-Air Force in Eu­ropa und der NATO Allied Air Component (die beide ihr Hauptquartier auf der US-Air Base Ramstein haben, s. http://www.luftpost-kl.de/luftpost-archiv/LP 09/LP27209 07 1209. pdf ), nachdem er gerade von einer Inspektionstour in die Kaukasus-Staaten Aserbaidschan und Georgien zurückgekommen war, auf dem Trainingsflugplatz Adazi in Lettland mit dem Ver­teidigungsminister dieses Landes und dessen Kollegen aus Estland und Litauen getroffen; dabei wurden Pläne zu “einer engeren militärische Zusammenarbeit in Sicherheitsfragen zwischen dem Baltikum und den USA besprochen, die auch gemeinsame Übungen in der Ostsee-Region vorsehen” [9] Alle fünf genannten Staaten – Aserbaidschan, Georgien, Estland, Lettland und Litauen – grenzen an Russland.

Auf der in der gleichen Woche in Havanna auf Cuba abgehaltenen Konferenz der Alianza

Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, / ALBA (der Bolivarianischen Allianz für die Völker unseres Amerikas, s. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarianische_Allianz_f %C3%BCr Amerika ), sagte Raul Castro, der Präsident des Gastgeberlandes, über den jüngsten Aufmarsch des Pentagons in Kolumbien: “Die Errichtung von US-Militärbasen in dieser Region ist … ein Akt der Aggression gegen Lateinamerika und die Karibik.” [9]

Weniger als eine Woche später gab die Regierung Kolumbiens – des drittgrößten Empfän­ger von US-Militärhilfe auf der Welt – bekannt, dass sie eine neue Militärbasis in der Nähe der Grenze mit Venezuela bauen werde. “Verteidigungsminister Gabriel Silva sagte am 18. Dezember, die auf der Halbinsel Guajira in der Nähe der Stadt Nazaret entstehende Basis werde bis zu 1.000 Soldaten beherbergen. In anderen Grenzgebieten würden zwei Luftwaffen-Bataillone aktiviert. General Oskar Gonzalez, der Chef des Heeres, kündigte am folgenden Tag an, insgesamt werde man sechs Luftwaffen-Bataillone aktivieren, davon zwei an der Grenze mit Venezuela.” [10]

Obwohl bereits mehr als eine Billion Dollars für die Kriege in Afghanistan und im Irak ver­schwendet und mehr als zwei Millionen US-Staatsbürger in diesen beiden Ländern einge­setzt wurden, haben das militärische Establishment der USA und sein Friedenspräsident bereits Vorbereitungen für weitere Kriege getroffen. Die Rüstungsfirmen Boeing, Raytheon und General Electric werden nicht mehr lange warten müssen.

Anmerkungen

1) Bulgarien, Rumänien: US- und NATO-Basen für den Krieg im Osten

Stop NATO, 24. Oktober 2009,

2) In Israel wurde der Raketenabwehrschild der NATO geschmiedet und der Krieg gegen den Iran geprobt, Stop NATO, 5. November 2009

3) Bloomberg News, 19. Dezember 2009

4) Michelle Tan, 2 Millionen Soldaten waren sich seitdem 11.09. an der Front, 18. Dezem­ber 2009

5) Stars and Stripes, 16. Dezember 2009

6) Reuters, 16. Dezember 2009

7) Abc News, 18. Dezember 2009

8) Verteidigungs-Fachleute, 14. Dezember 2009

9) Russische Nachrichtenagentur Novosti, 14. Dezember 2009

10) Agence France Presse, 19. Dezember 2009

West’s Afghan War: From Conquest To Bloodbath

Stop NATO
January 5, 2010

West’s Afghan War: From Conquest To Bloodbath
Rick Rozoff

———
“When the commander in Kabul asked Obama for the extra troops, he knew the USA would end up with one achievement, and that is more civilian casualties.”

“Every time an American soldier gets killed, they bomb an entire village.”

“This thing is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That’s what we probably should expect. And that’s light casualties.”
———

On December 29 the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released figures demonstrating that Afghan civilian deaths had risen by 10 percent in the first ten months of 2009, from 1,838 during the same period a year earlier to 2,038. The majority of the killings were attributed to insurgent attacks, including those directed against U.S., NATO and government targets, but almost 500 civilians were killed by American and NATO forces.

Matters only grew worse last November and December, culminating in several massacres of Afghan civilians by Western forces at the end of the year.

In early December a NATO air strike killed thirteen civilians in Laghman province. One account also documents a deadly raid by American special forces there. “According to witnesses, US troops entered a number of houses near the provincial capital, Mehtar Lam, in an overnight operation. The victims included Mohammed Ismail, whose 10-year-old son, Rafiullah, described what happened: ‘When the soldiers came to our house, my father asked them, “Who are you?” Then they shot him in the head and told us, “Be quiet and tell us where the weapons are.”‘” [1]

The chairman of the Laghman provincial council presciently commented on the killings that “When the commander in Kabul asked Obama for the extra troops, he knew the USA would end up with one achievement, and that is more civilian casualties.” [2]

On the same day that the above-cited UN report was made public an air attack by U.S.-led warplanes killed four Afghans in the northern province of Baghlan. According to one report “A father and his three sons were reportedly among the [fatalities]. The raid also wounded eight others.” [3]

A member of parliament from a neighboring province, Haji Farid, said after the aerial onslaught that “Every time an American soldier gets killed, they bomb an entire village.” [4]

The following day a NATO missile strike killed seven Afghan civilians in Helmand province. According to the New York Times, “Neither NATO forces nor the Helmand governor’s office gave a definitive number of dead, but reports from local people said that five to seven civilians had been killed, including three children.” [5] Later a spokesman for the governor of the province confirmed that seven civilians had been slain and another wounded.

Far more atrocious news broke the same day, December 30, when, according to the next day’s edition of The Times of London, “American-led troops were accused…of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead” in Kunar province near the Pakistani border. [6]

U.S.-installed and -supported President Hamid Karzai dispatched an investigative team headed by former governor of Helmand province Assadullah Wafa to the scene of the massacre, dubbed by at least one news source as an Afghan My Lai.

A statement was later issued on the official website of the Afghan president that said in part: “The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead.”

The delegation’s head, Wafa, added that “US soldiers flew to Kunar from Kabul, suggesting that they were part of a special forces unit,” and was quoted as saying “I spoke to the local headmaster. It’s impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent. I condemn this attack.” [7]

The investigation he led established that eight of the victims were between the ages of 11 and 17. The slain students’ headmaster, Rahman Jan Ehsas, described the details of Barack Obama’s and top U.S. and NATO military commander Stanley McChrystal’s new special operations-led counterinsurgency approach as it was applied to his pupils:

“Seven students were in one room. A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.” [8]

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) attempted to both widen and evade responsibility for the murders by claiming “the raid was a joint operation and it was still under investigation,” a ploy quickly exposed when “Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman Zaher Azimy said Afghan troops had not taken part.” [9]

Demonstrators, particularly university students and their instructors, took to the streets in the provinces of Kabul and Nangarhar denouncing the rapidly escalating and by now routine slaughter of civilians, including children, by U.S. and NATO troops and warplanes. Their chants included “Obama! Obama! Take your soldiers out of Afghanistan!” and “Stop killing us!”

Professors and students at Kabul University passed a resolution demanding that NATO troops leave Afghanistan. [10]

Referring to the first of December’s massacres, a Middle Eastern newspaper wrote, “The raid in the eastern province of Laghman this month followed a pattern that has become sadly familiar in Afghanistan over recent years. As is often the case, international forces insisted militants were killed, but local officials and villagers claimed the dead were civilians.” [11]

With the increase of U.S. and other NATO nations’ and partners’ troops to over 150,000 in the near future and the announced shift from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency operations, the killing of Afghan civilians will grow exponentially.

On the other side of the border, Washington’s and NATO’s proclaimed AfPak war is no less murderous.

On January 2 Dawn News, Pakistan’s first 24-hour English news channel, reported on its website that 44 CIA-directed Predator drone missile attacks last year had killed 708 people, only five of them alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. “According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.

“For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities….On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every month, 12 persons every week and almost two people every day.” [12]

There has been no diminution of such attacks. In the waning days of 2009 they were intensified. On December 27 “At least 13 people were killed in a suspected United States drone attack” in North Waziristan. “Following the strike, a U.S. B-52 jet plane, along with other spy planes, continued their flights over the tribal areas….” [13]

The preceding day another U.S. missile attack in North Waziristan killed three and wounded two people. “A statement from the [Pakistani] military Saturday said that a targeted airstrike at a compound in Orakzai had killed some civilians along with eight suspected militants.” [14]

The U.S. launched deadly drone missile attacks in Pakistan’s North Waziristan on both ends of the New Year. On December 31 “Five people were killed and at least two more injured” and on January 1 “A US pilotless aircraft fired a missile into Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal district” and “the attack destroyed [a] car and killed three people.” [15]

In the second case a regional security official was quoted by Reuters as stating “The bodies were burned beyond recognition. We are trying to determine their identity.” [16]

On January 3 five more people were killed in the same part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas by American drone attacks. However much the U.S., NATO and the Western media attempt to sanitize these killings, the Pakistani government figure – that over 99 percent of the victims are civilians – is a damning indictment of what can only be characterized as wanton war crimes.

A yearender feature in the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes reflected on 2009 and looked forward to this year.

“When President Barack Obama took office in January, he inherited a drifting and under-resourced war in Afghanistan, being fought with roughly 35,000 U.S. troops.

“Obama ordered 21,000 additional troops in March and then 30,000 more in December.

“In a little over a year, he will have nearly tripled their numbers, taking ownership of what he calls ‘the war we must win.’

“[E]very step the president has taken represents an escalation of the war, now in its ninth year.” [17]

Afghan and Pakistani civilians deaths have climbed correspondingly. They will rise even more in 2010 as the war, in its tenth calendar year, is broadened further and intensified in earnest.

For all the carnage wreaked on innocent Afghans and Pakistanis, a senior NATO intelligence officer told Western media representatives at a briefing on December 27 that “The Afghan Taliban have expanded their influence across Afghanistan and are now running a ‘full-fledged insurgency’ with their own ‘governors’ in all but one of the country’s provinces.” [18]

“In 33 out of 34 provinces, the Taliban has a shadow government…has a government-in-waiting, with ministers chosen” for the day the government falls in the unnamed official’s words. [19]

Over eight years of bombing villages, conducting deadly raids against civilian households, multiplying projected American and NATO troop strength by a factor of fifteen since 2003 and extending the war into Pakistan have produced this result.

NATO’s first ground war and its first armed conflict outside Europe has also cost the citizens of its own member states both blood and treasure.

Jeff Loftin, press officer of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, was recently quoted as confirming that last year 512 Western troops were killed in Afghanistan, the highest total for any year in the over eight-year war.

That number is over a third of the 1,481 ISAF fatalities (excluding American troops assigned to Operation Enduring Freedom) since the war began on October 7, 2001. The deaths include those of soldiers from NATO partner states Finland, Sweden and South Korea.

Germany, engaged under NATO command in its first combat operations since World War II, lost five soldiers last year, its highest number to date, and “Some 13,900 German soldiers served in Afghanistan this year [2009], up 1,700 from in 2008.” [20]

“At least 70 Western soldiers died each month from July through October, virtually double the rate of the previous summer. In the past year, nearly 500 foreign troops have lost their lives in Afghanistan, including more than 300 Americans.” [21]

On December 27 NATO announced the death of an American service member in a bomb attack in Afghanistan and the icasualties.org website calculated it to be the U.S.’s 310th of the year, double the 155 figure for 2008.

That number was also twice that of U.S. military deaths in Iraq in 2009, 148, the first time since 2003 that deaths in the first theater have been higher than in the second, and “Afghanistan is likely to become an even deadlier place for American forces as reinforcements are rushed there to battle insurgents.” [22]

How much deadlier was first revealed on January 3 when four U.S. soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb attack in southern Afghanistan.

Former U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey, now an adjunct professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, recently “traveled to the war zone…as an academic from West Point at the invitation of theater commander Gen. David Petraeus, commander of Central Command, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the operational commander in Afghanistan” and upon returning was cited by an armed forces news source as asserting that “Americans should prepare to accept hundreds of U.S. casualties each month in Afghanistan during spring offensives with enemy forces.”

Regarding the New Year’s surge, which will push U.S. troop strength to over 100,000 and combined U.S. and NATO numbers to over 150,000, he predicted that “this thing is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That’s what we probably should expect. And that’s light casualties.” [23]

As many 500 American soldiers killed and injured monthly is in McCaffrey’s estimate light casualties.

Another milestone in U.S. losses was marked on December 30 when a reported suicide bombing at the Forward Operating Base Chapman killed seven CIA agents, including the agency’s station chief. The Wall Street Journal quoted a former American intelligence official describing the event as “Pearl Harbor for the agency,” the second-largest loss in one day in the CIA’s history, only the 1983 attack on the U.S.’s embassy in Lebanon, which resulted in eight agency deaths, exceeding it. “The base played a critical role in the CIA’s significant operations in the country, including helping with drone attacks and informant networks in Pakistan.” [24]

According to a former agency official interviewed by the newspaper, “That was one of the bases where they were paying people and running people and sending them into Pakistan.” [25]

The White House of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient and the Pentagon of former CIA director Robert Gates, who in the past boasted of funding and arming the founders of two of the three groups he is now waging war against in Afghanistan and Pakistan [26], have promised to increase the bloodshed in South Asia this year to an unprecedented level. In this instance if in no other the government can be trusted to faithfully fulfill its pledge.

1) The National (United Arab Emirates), December 28, 2009
2) Ibid
3) Press TV, December 29, 2009
4) Ibid
5) New York Times, December 31, 2009
6) The Times, December 31, 2009

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6971638.ece

7) Ibid
8) Ibid
9) Reuters, December 30, 2009
10) Pakistan Observer, January 4, 2010
11) The National, December 28, 2009
12) Dawn News, January 2, 2010

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/18-over-700-killed-in-44-drone-strikes-in-2009-am-01

13) Xinhua News Agency, December 27, 2009
14) Associated Press, December 26, 2009
15) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 1, 2010
16) Press TV, January 1, 2010
17) Stars and Stripes, December 31, 2009
18) Reuters, December 27, 2009
19) Agence France-Presse, December 28, 2009
20) Brunei News, Agencies, January 1, 2010
21) Stars and Stripes, December 31, 2009
22) USA Today, December 31, 2009
23) Army Times, January 4, 2010
24) Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2010
25) Ibid
26) Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed By the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns
On U.S. Troops
U.S. News & World Report, July 11, 2008

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/world/2008/07/11/afghan-warlords-formerly-backed-by-the-cia-now-turn-their-guns-on-us-troops.html?PageNr=2