Afghanistan: Prelude To Cold War II?

International polling shows the US is considered the greatest threat to world peace. This unilateralism is all too conspicuous and ominous. By claiming Canada’s present role in Afghanistan will not be reviewed until 2009 our prime minister makes the war a political football. He is playing with the lives of those most affected. It cannot inspire confidence in the population of that beleaguered country to know our commitment is tentative. It must delight the Taliban for the same reason, and it says to our troops stay alive ‘til 2009 and you might get to go home. More likely though he is trying to buy time knowing full well war has a momentum of its own and it is going to be extremely difficult to extricate our combat troops especially when Washington is giving the orders. The prime minister’s posturing blissfully ignores there are fundamental problems in how this war is being conducted and these must be addressed immediately. Afghanistan President, Hamid Karzai, has for years been pleading with his Western allies to use their military might more discriminately. His pleas continue to fall on deaf ears. Even to the casual observer it is painfully obvious there are too few troops to achieve effective results. Air power is being used indiscriminately. Civilian casualties are away too high. Peerless generals are clearly trying to fight a guerrilla war as a conventional war and losing on all sides. Canadian forces originally went to Afghanistan as non-combatants undertaking humanitarian and diplomatic initiatives. This has now been subverted into a combat roll where strategies and tactics are conspicuously flawed and counter productive. You cannot wage war and peace at the same time and to try and sell this notion is insolent. The vapid apologies of generals for civilian casualties have become passé. The indifference of politicians to this situation constitutes malfeasance and a profound complacency. Ulterior Motives For anyone who lived through the Cold War “balance of power,” “spheres of influence” and “MAD” are familiar terms. The Cold War was a stand-off between the USSR and the USA. It was a bilateral world -communist vs. capitalist. Though the world lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation it was unlikely to happen largely because the two super powers blunted each others power. Neither could risk attacking the other because the threat of a devastating retaliation was so great. This came to be known as MAD-Mutually Assured Destruction. Each of the super powers had their spheres of influence. For the USSR it was its satellite countries, for the USA it was dominance of North and South America. The Cold War was laced with minor skirmishes and intrigues as the two super powers vied for dominance without resorting to an all out confrontation. One such skirmish was the Cuban missile crisis. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev tempted fate by trying to install missiles in Cuba. This was clearly an invasion of the US sphere of influence and one the US could not allow. To have Soviet missiles 90 miles off its coast was simply unacceptable. Then US President John F Kennedy blockaded delivery of the missiles and forced Khrushchev to back down. When the US invaded Viet Nam it was clearly operating outside its sphere of influence, hoping to win a war on communist China’s doorstep. Even though a half million troops were deployed and massive military might brought to bear the war could not be won. The tonnage of bombs dropped on Cambodia alone was greater than in all of WWII. The Cold War showed where there was a balance of power among nations-in this instance two- major wars could be averted. It also showed that when superpowers operated outside their spheres of influence they did so unsuccessfully. For the US the logistics of fighting a war in Viet Nam- half way around the world- was a huge disadvantage. It is a reality of these wars that home turf is a huge advantage for indigenous fighters. It must be numbing for military strategists to realize that in conflicts such as Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan ill-equipped and innovative indigenous fighters can defeat and stalemate modern state of the art military forces. In 1979 the USSR sought to consolidate its sphere of influence by attacking Afghanistan. Even though this country was on its very borders victory was not possible. Victory was even more elusive because the US was supplying arms and intelligence to the Mujahadeen. After a decade of fighting and 15000 casualties the Soviets retreated. In the year the 2007 we have a very different world. The USSR has passed into history and the US has emerged as the overwhelming military superpower. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union many thought there was a peace dividend to be collected, but this was not to be the case. When, for example, US Senator Edward Kennedy rose in Congress and suggested military budgets could be slashed in favor of social spending his proposal fell on deaf ears. Already enslaved to the military industrial complex (in spite of Eisenhower’s warning) neo-conservative ideologues saw this as an opportunity for global domination, temporarily delayed by the Clinton presidency, their grand ambitions came to fruition in the second Bush administration. The present wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can be seen as a variation on the Cuban missile crisis – some forty odd years later. America is parking its military might on the door steps of China and Russia. It is no coincidence these two countries have held joint military exercises. US forces leaving Iraq is a fiction. It has already established huge air bases in the country and the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad signals an enduring American presence in the area. Among the nations of the world Afghanistan is one of the poorest, but for a super power pursuing global domination it has location-location-location. So far Russia and China have been fairly passive to American adventurism on their borders but the daunting question is: How far can America push before they start pushing back, or; start a new arms race by countering America’s military built up with their own? The US has shamelessly exploited and overstated the war on terror using it as a ploy to justify its expansionism. Instead of mollifying the threat of terrorism it is actually provoking it. Leaders such as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair are oblivious to the fact that terrorist acts are reprisals for the heavy-handed militarism Western forces are practicing in Iraq and Afghanistan. He thinks Arabs can be slaughtered with impunity and then cries foul when London is attacked. Similarly, the wizards of Washington propound the imminent threat of the “axis of evil.” Here too the threat is exaggerated and tailored to Washington’s unilateralist agenda. It is much more likely existing nuclear powers would use nuclear weapons than countries like Iran or North Korea. An existing nuclear power like Russia or the US, especially the US, might get away with dropping a bomb or two where as one of the so called rogue states would suffer swift and devastating retaliation if it so much as exploded a primitive dirty bomb. Most likely rogue states want the bomb as a deterrent; to actually attempt to use it would be an act of insanity. The nuclear capability of the rogue states is part of the big lie. Iran does not even have the bomb yet and when it does it will be a primitive device, with no sizeable arsenal or an effective delivery system. When the US claims Missile Defense is essential to its national security. It is really talking about an offensive capability. It now spends more on “defense” than all other nations combined. With this being the case its motives become highly suspect. The nuclear jitterbug The nuclear jitterbug is a dated dance going back to the time of the Cold War. It is a dangerous dance that no country does well but it seems it cannot be consigned to an ignominious place in History’s Hall of Infamy. There is a crazed addiction to the dance where a misstep could be catastrophic. Even at the best of times it is debilitating. Where the 20th century was punctuated by WWI, then WWII, it now appears the US is not content we have one Cold War but is intent on CWII. The dynamics of this new Cold War are even more dangerous than the first as the concept of MAD has been destroyed. The US has a huge military advantage in nuclear weapons. They have been retiring older nuclear warheads but at the same time are creating newer and more deadly weapons that are extremely accurate. The US now has enough nuclear kilotonnage to blow the earth off its axis. One kiloton equals 1000 tons of TNT; and the new generation of warheads are rated at 455-1200 kilotons each! The concept of MAD-Mutually Assured Destruction – only applies where there is a balance of power. Where there is only one super power practicing a very aggressive unilateralism and only one sphere of influence the potential for war rises dramatically. In the current edition of Atlantic Monthly, Kier D. Lieber and Darryl G. Press co-author; Superiority Complex. The authors outline how America’s nuclear supremacy may very well lead to war with China. The article leads off: In the coming years, as China’s economy booms and its armed forces grow, the United States will seek to curb Chinese military power and influence. The US China rivalry is poised to become the world’s most dangerous strategic relationship. Lieber and Press’s opening statement suggests China has imperial ambitions to match those of the US. While China is emerging as the global economic power it shows no signs of wanting to be a military power. So far the military build up is entirely one sided. Where China has 18 obsolete nuclear weapons, a carry over from the Cold War, the US has gone on to develop a state on the art arsenal numbering in the thousands. It is as if the US is out to establish an overwhelming nuclear presence to compensate for its waning economic power. The operative words here are “curb” and “rivalry.” If there is curbing to be done it seems the US will be the instigator. The rivalry is felt more by the US than China. Where China appears to be quite content to exist in its sphere of influence, economic and geopolitical, the US is out to establish a singular global sphere of influence that it dominates and can be maintained by military force as necessary. Lieber and Press outline how fevered little men in some sub-basement of the Pentagon construct various scenarios for war; first strike, counter strike and preemptive. What haunts these men though is that if they miss targeting only one of China’s 4000 kiloton bombs an American city could be vaporized. US Military planners talk about ‘crisis instability’- the point at which, the adversary, in this instance China and/or Russia, undertake a build up of their own thus creating a new arms race and the greater chance of war. In other words, we are marching back to the nuclear madness of Cold War I. The nuclear jitterbug is back more menacing than ever and it demands a heavy toll. No population should have to live under the threat of nuclear annihilation When Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin urges George Bush to put the brakes on Missile Defense this is Russia’s perfectly reasonable request. Even as this article is being finalized Russia has withdrawn from an important arms control treaty to try and forestall further development of Missile Defense. There is the persistent perception the US, in its servitude to the military industrial complex, finds itself continually intent on war. To justify the massive expenditures and this massive military presence enemies must be manufactured. Where they do exist their lethality is exaggerated. There is an invidious determination not to collect a peace dividend. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq may very well be stepping stones to a new Cold War. If this comes about it will be an inexcusable and catastrophic failure of political leadership. At this time the world can ill-afford to divert massive expenditures into military spending in the form of another Cold War. Robert Billyard © _________________________________________ Robert Billyard is an artist and writer living in Mission BC This article may be freely distributed as long as it is properly credited and not altered in any way.