Surging to Resist More Troops to Afghanistan

In December, I asked whether there will be an anti-war movement in the United States after George Bush’s departure.  Many of you said, yes.  But there has been a lot of “wait and see” going on among people who had opposed Bush’s program, but who expected major change from Barack Obama.

So, now we’re seeing, and we can’t wait.

Obama announced Tuesday that 17,000 troops will be surged into Afghanistan.  The US military admits that the increase in civilians killed by US forces is destabilizing the Karzai puppet government, and driving people to support the Taliban.  But the U.S. will push its war for empire further into the Middle East.

Days after the inaugural, Obama ordered the continuation of pilotless “drone” missile attacks on Pakistan, which even mainstream news reports show are killing civilians.  40 such attacks have been made since August into Pakistan, creating such chaos that refugees are now leaving Pakistan to go into Afghanistan.

This must end! SIGN and circulate the letter to the anti-war movement. Here’s an excerpt:
The U.S. war on Afghanistan is an unjust war of aggression-the supreme war crime. The Bush regime occupied Afghanistan and drove out the Taliban regime, not to bring democracy and liberation to the Afghan people, but to control Afghanistan and spread the U.S. empire, with the goal of permanent domination of the Middle East.

The “war on terror” begun after 9/11 by the U.S. was not just a campaign against the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden, but a broad, global war to keep the U.S. as the unchallenged global superpower. This is not a war to free people from warlords of Islamic fundamentalism, a movement the U.S. funded and armed, and ironically, spread, when it was aligned with the U.S. against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

The war in Afghanistan is and will be fought the same way the war in Iraq is being fought. Most of the people killed are civilians, with the U.S. justifying collateral damage and collective punishment, secret prisons, denial of due process and torture. It is wrong, unjust, illegitimate and immoral. And it won’t be otherwise, no matter who is president. There is no such thing as a “good” war on terror. The U.S. occupiers consider any large gathering of Afghans inherently hostile, hence the repeated bombings of wedding parties. Even the U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai is warning the U.S. to stop killing civilians…

COME OUT on Thursday March 19 to protest six years of US occupation of Iraq, in the first national protests of Obama’s war.  List your event, or find one here

CNN Wednesday, “Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, predicted Wednesday that the additional 17,000 U.S. military forces to be sent to Afghanistan will remain there for as long as five years.  The commmander predicted the new troops will be operational before Afghan elections in August.‘This is not a temporary force uplift,” McKiernan said. “It will need to be sustained for some period of time, for the next three to four to five years.’  McKiernan made his comments a day after President Obama approved the troop increase for Afghanistan.”