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The Afghan war could wreck NATO alliance

NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, may be losing the only war the 61-year old pact ever fought. All its soldiers, heavy bombers, tanks, helicopter gunships, armies of mercenaries, and electronic gear are being beaten by a bunch of lightly-armed Afghan farmers and mountain tribesmen.

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This weekend in Lisbon, NATO’s 28 members faced deepening differences over the Afghanistan War as public opinion in the United States, Canada and Europe continued to turn against 
the conflict.

President Barack Obama again painfully showed he is not fully in charge of US foreign policy. His pledge to begin withdrawing some US troops from Afghanistan next July has been scornfully contradicted by US generals and resurgent 
Congressional Republicans.

Obama, fresh from grovelling before Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, pleaded with Israel for a token freeze on settlement building in exchange for a huge bribe from Washington of advanced US F-35 stealth warplanes, promises of UN vetoes, and raising to $1 billion US arms stockpiled for Israel’s use.

Israel will likely take Obama’s bribe, with more sweeteners, but not before rubbing his face in the dirt to show who really runs US Mideast policy. The last US president to challenge Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, George H. W. Bush, was ousted in 1992 after one term.

Obama appears to want out of the Afghan War. His final gamble of sending 30,000 more troops into the $7.5 billion monthly war has so far failed to produce the hoped-for decisive victory. But powerful pro-war groups, including the Pentagon, the arms industry and Republicans, are thwarting his attempts to wind 
down the war.

US, Canadian and European politicians who backed the Afghan War fear admitting the conflict was a huge waste of lives and treasure. Their political careers hang in the balance.

While the US heads deeper into war and debt, its European allies are fed up with what was supposed to have been a limited “police action” to eliminate 
Al Qaeda bases.

Instead, Europe got a full-scale war against Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes raising uneasy memories of its 19^th century colonial “pacifications.”

France’s new defense minister, Alain Juppé, openly called the Afghan conflict a “trap” for NATO and called for an 
exit strategy.

By contrast, British Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards, warned, “NATO now needs to plan for a 30 or 40 year role.” In short, permanent occupation.

The US-installed Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, is demanding the US scale back military operations and night raids that inflict heavy civilian casualties. Washington counters that Karzai is mentally unstable.

America’s rational for invading Afghanistan was to destroy Al Qaeda. But CIA chief Leon Panetta recently admitted there were no more than 50 Al Qaeda operatives left in Afghanistan. The rest — no more than few hundred - fled to Pakistan years ago. So what are 110,000 US troops and 40,000 NATO troops doing in Afghanistan? Certainly not nation-building. Most reports show Afghanistan is in worse poverty and distress than before 
the US invasion.

While synthetic optimism flowed thick at Lisbon, giant US Army bulldozers, demolition teams and artillery were busy leveling wide swathes of Afghan homes around the Pashtun stronghold, Kandahar. In 2006, US Marines conducted a similar ruthless campaign to crush the rebellious Iraqi city of Falluja.

The US is using the same punitive tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq as Israel employs on the occupied West Bank: targeted assassinations, death squads, demolishing buildings or whole neighbourhoods.

The US military establishment is determined the mighty US military must not be defeated by Afghan tribesmen. Defeat in Afghanistan would bring demands for major cuts in the bloated US military, which consumes 50 per cent of world military spending. Failure in Afghanistan would also threaten the entire NATO alliance.

Europe is slowly re-emerging as a world power, however, fitfully and painfully. NATO has been the primary tool of US geopolitical control of Western Europe since the late 1940’s.

If the US loses the Afghan War, its reluctant allies would call into question the reason for the alliance. Europe would hasten building an integrated military independent of US control.

That is why Afghanistan so unnerves Washington’s right-wingers. The defeat of Soviet armies in Afghanistan in 1989 began the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Could the same fate be in store for the American Raj?

Eric Margolis is a veteran US journalist