Posted by John, December 2nd, 2009 - under Imperialism, United States, US foreign policy, US imperialism, US politics.

Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama

All the old Bush lies were there.

According to Barack Obama, invading Afghanistan was and is about stopping terrorism. It was and is about preventing more September 11s. It was and is about stopping the Taliban. It was and is about stopping new attacks on the United States.

None of this is true. All Obama has done is repeat the lies of Bush to justify doubling the number of American troops in Afghanistan (30,000 this time and the 21,00 earlier this year.)

And his praise for the warlord government of Hamid Karzai was sickening. That corrupt cabal used massive fraud to win the recent election.

That doesn’t matter to Obama. What matters is a subservient pro-US regime as part of the imperialist competition with China and the need to rule the world.

Afghanistan is now Obama’s war. And the troop surge will drag Pakistan further into the quagmire of defeat and spread the resistance.

All of this, and wrapping himself in the grotesque nationalism of the American ruling class, shows that Obama is not only continuing Bush’s imperialist project in Afghanistan; he is accelerating it.

The idea that the Afghan puppets will be able to take over responsibility for defeating the resistance when the US can’t do that is laughable.

Obama’s pledge to bring the extra troops home starting in 18 months time is an outrageous lie or an admission already of defeat. Time will show us which but to me it has the smell of withdrawal in the face of the overwhelming opposition from the Afghan people.

The 100,000 NATO and Western troops won’t win. The invasion created the resistance. More troops means more resistance.

Millions of Americans voted for change. They didn’t expect Obama to be to the right of Bush on foreign wars. His announcement last night to further increase Americans troops in Afghanistan shows he is.

The logic of US imperialism is expansionist and militaristic.

As Thomas Friedman (one of the most influential journalists in the US) wrote some years ago in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

It is the logic of American capitalism that mandates it bend the rest of the world to the wants and needs of its capital accumulation process, and in many cases subjugate nations and peoples.

In today’s world, the main threat to US imperialism is the developing strength of Chinese imperialism.

All the actions of the US ruling class have to be seen in that light, including the invasion of Afghanistan which gave the US a beachhead into Central Asia and is part of the ongoing encirclement of China.

Democrat presidents over forty years ago thought that increasing troop numbers in Vietnam would stop the spread of ‘communist’ (that is Stalinist) influence. They too thought that war was winnable.

50,000 dead Americans and perhaps 2 million Vietnamese showed they were wrong.

That is the fate that awaits US imperialism in Afghanistan.

The left in the United States has an historic opportunity and duty to rebuild the anti-war movement and force their murdering leaders out of Afghanistan.

Readers might also like to look at Afghanistan: the death knell for Obama’s presidency?