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[C. G. Estabrook]

New Year To Mark Intensification Of West’s War In Afghanistan And Pakistan
By Rick Rozoff
Global Research, January 1, 2011

No stranger to armed conflicts over the past 70 years, the United States has 
completed its first decade of continuous warfare: 2001-2010.

On January 1 the U.S. and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization 
will enter not only a new year but a second decade of war in Afghanistan.

The air and cruise missile attacks that commenced on October 7, 2001 and the 
insertion of U.S. and British ground troops that followed have been succeeded by 
a 48-nation, 152,000-troop occupation and counterinsurgency campaign that is 
also conducting almost daily deadly drone missile strikes and helicopter gunship 
raids into neighboring Pakistan.

The U.S. Defense Department announced that on September 1 American troop 
strength in Iraq was decreased to under 50,000 as the occupation was 
transitioned to so-called Operation New Dawn. Troops from approximately 40 other 
nations assigned to Multi-National Force – Iraq, most of them new NATO members 
and NATO candidates from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics in the South 
Caucasus and Central Asia, were withdrawn from 2006-2008. Rather not withdrawn, 
but transferred to Afghanistan, leaving behind only the remnants of a once 
160,000-strong American contingent and the NATO Training Mission-Iraq.

There are now over three times as many foreign troops in Afghanistan as there 
are in Iraq, from 48 official NATO Troop Contributing Nations. Also deployed in 
theater or pledged for that purpose are troops from several other countries in 
Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East, among them Bahrain, Colombia, 
Egypt and Kazakhstan.

The microcosm of a U.S. and NATO rapidly deployable, interoperable global 
expeditionary military force melded in combat. Killing and dying together on a 
common battlefield, the blood of thirty nations spilled in one country.

711 foreign troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2010, a nearly forty percent 
increase over 2009. By comparison, 60 foreign soldiers were killed in Iraq in 
2010, all of them American. Almost 500 U.S. and 213 non-U.S. troops lost their 
lives in Afghanistan in 2010.

Over 800 Afghan government soldiers were killed in the same period and 2,400 
civilians were killed in the first ten months of the year.

A Pentagon official in the Afghan capital estimated that 18,000 attacks were 
conducted against U.S. and NATO forces in 2010, twice as many as in the 
preceding year. [1]

Far from any prospect of a decrease in the death toll in the war-ravaged country 
during the new year, the spokesman for the NATO-led International Security 
Assistance Force, Germany’s Brigadier General Josef Blotz, this week stated that 
the Afghan war will only intensify in 2011, that “There is no end to the 
fighting season; we need to keep pressure on the Taliban all over the country.” [2]

As though to confirm Blotz’s claim, on December 30 two rockets landed in the 
main U.S. military base at the Bagram Airfield.

Fighting has increased in the north of Afghanistan where the bulk of 5,000 
German troops assigned to NATO are stationed, an area hitherto comparatively 
peaceful. Bundeswehr forces are engaged in ground combat operations for the 
first time since the Second World War. Berlin has lost 46 soldiers in the conflict.

Germany recently ordered the latest of 473 Eagle reconnaissance vehicles under a 
$165 million contract with the U.S. military contractor General Dynamics. The 
first armored vehicles were delivered to the German armed forces in 2009 and 
deployed to Afghanistan.

On the day before Christmas NATO troops raided the compound of a private 
security firm in Kabul, killing two Afghan nationals. Afterward, Afghan Interior 
Ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary announced his government has determined that 
“NATO is in violation of a security agreement in Kabul and is suspending an 
Afghan police general who helped the U.S.-led coalition carry out a raid in the 
capital that killed two private security guards.” [3]

On the same day New Zealand special forces serving under NATO launched a night 
raid in a factory in Kabul and slew two more security guards.

To indicate in the aftermath of the NATO summit in Portugal in November that the 
West is intensifying its concentration on the Afghanistan-Pakistan war front, 
since the summit ended on November 20 several major officials from NATO 
countries have visited Afghanistan: U.S. President Barack Obama and Defense 
Secretary Robert Gates, British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor 
Angela Merkel and Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Spanish Prime 
Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and First Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo 
Perez Rubalcaba, Romanian President Traian Basescu and Defense Minister Gabriel 
Oprea, French Defence Minister Alain Juppe, Canadian Governor General David 
Johnston and U.S. Secretary of the Navy Raymond Mabus.

Chancellor Merkel told German troops in Kunduz province: “What we have here is 
not just a warlike situation. You are involved in combat as in war.” [4]

Afghanistan is the cynosure of the Western military bloc’s worldwide military 
strategy, which now has expanded to include Pakistan.

2010 was the deadliest year of the over nine-year war in regard to U.S. unmanned 
aerial vehicle (drone) missile attacks in Pakistan’s Federally Administered 
Tribal Areas, where over 120 strikes killed 1,000 people. In 2009 the Central 
Intelligence Agency directed less than half that amount – 53 – of lethal 
operations in Pakistan. December was among the most deadly months of the year, 
with at least 123 people killed in twelve missile attacks. [5]

The intensity and ferocity of the strikes compelled Prime Minister Yousuf Raza 
Gilani to warn that “drone attacks were affecting efforts to end terrorism in 
the country, therefore we condemn it and we are against it.” [6]

On Christmas Day General David Petraeus, commander of all U.S. and NATO troops 
in Afghanistan, was in the war zone and stated, “there will be more coordinated 
military operations on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”

He insisted on more “hammer and anvil operations” after revealing that “there 
had already been coordinated operations on both sides of the border, with 
Pakistani forces on one side and NATO and Afghan troops on the other.” [7]

Two NATO helicopter gunships staged the latest violation of Pakistani air space 
shortly after Petraeus spoke, entering the Landi Kotal area of Khyber Agency in 
the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. NATO intrusions into Pakistan have been 
mounting since last September and on the 30th of that month a NATO helicopter 
attack killed three Pakistani soldiers.

The U.S. and NATO are slated to deploy troops to a Pakistani military base in 
Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province, which borders Iran and where the 
Pentagon and CIA have operated out of the Shamsi air base, southwest of the 
capital, for years. NATO helicopters have also entered the airspace of 
Balochistan, marking an expansion of operations from the tribal areas into the 
heart of Pakistan.

In recent weeks reports have disclosed that the U.S. will supplement CIA drone 
missile strikes and NATO helicopter gunship raids in Pakistan’s tribal areas 
with special forces operations.

A Russian analyst commented on that development in ominous tones:

“Till now US troops have invaded Pakistan only sporadically. The launch of an 
operation against the Taliban in Pakistan may create new problems for Washington 
and may lead to the expansion of the Afghan threat.” [8]

It is in fact the latest escalation of the Afghan war into Pakistan. One that 
will increase combat operations, deaths and destruction on both sides of the 
border in the new year beyond the record levels of the last.


Notes

1) Voice of Russia, December 27, 2010
http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/12/27/37888169.html
2) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, December 27, 2010
3) Associated Press, December 26, 2010
4) Agence France-Press, December 19, 2010
5) America’s Undeclared War: Deadly Drone Attacks In Pakistan Reach Record High
Stop NATO, September 26, 2010
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/americas-undeclared-war-deadly-drone-attacks-in-pakistan-reach-record-high
6) Trend News Agency, December 30, 2010
7) Associated Press, December 26, 2010
8) Yevgeny Kryshkin, NATO’s Afghan campaign goes off course
Voice of Russia, December 27, 2010
http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/12/27/37888169.html

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22595