From Workers World September 19, 2002

EDITORIAL: U.S. DOMINATION IN AFGHANISTAN

Stability--U.S. style. That's what the people of Afghanistan are enduring today, at Ground Zero of the Pentagon's war on their impoverished country. The Sept. 5 assassination attempt on the country's president, Hamid Karzai, and the car bomb explosion in Kabul that killed at least 30 people earlier the same day, illustrate that the United States has not and will not be able to establish a stable government in Afghanistan.

The grueling conditions in the war-torn country are generating anger, resentment and resistance from sectors of the population.

Some 1.5 million people were turned into refugees by the devastation of U.S. bombing raids and destruction of the infrastructure. On Sept. 7 the Pentagon admitted that scores of civilians were killed or injured in a U.S. air strike on a string of Afghan villages in July. According to Afghan investigators, what Washington called "valid military targets" were really wedding parties.

After a quarter of a century of U.S.-instigated wars, 10 million land mines remain buried in the earth, killing or injuring some 400 people every month. And, the United Nations estimates, 6 million people face starvation this winter.

Very little of the billions of dollars promised by Washington and other Western powers has arrived.

The Karzai government is the lightning rod for a great deal of anger--which is why the United States installed this puppet regime to enforce its imperial bidding. Those placed as titular heads of Afghanistan are certainly beholden to U.S. interests in the region.

Karzai, it should be recalled, is a former consultant for the U.S. oil company Unocal. He helped Unocal plan a proposed 1,500-kilometer gas pipeline starting in Turkmenistan, stretching across Afghanistan, and ending in Pakistan. In May, while he was still acting as interim leader, Karzai and the presidents of Pakistan and Turkmenistan signed an agreement to move ahead with the pipeline. Unocal was said to be the frontrunner to head the multi-billion-dollar project.

Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani reportedly worked for the World Bank after nearly a decade as a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Anwar Ahady, governor of Afghanistan's central bank, taught political science at Providence College in Rhode Island and worked as a banker in Chicago before returning home.

These are just the most prominent individuals who guarantee the United States nearly absolute control over all financial and economic decisions made in Kabul.

Instability in Afghanistan is guaranteed as long as U.S. military brass steer from the helm toward their course of economic and strategic interests in the region.

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