In 2003 all the attention has been on America’s illegal invasion and colonisation of Iraq. It is rapidly becoming evident that winning the war and getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s murderous regime was the easy part. Ever since the official end of that war, the media has been full of daily stories of American (and British) troops being killed, wounded, abducted and ambushed. Iraqi anger at being occupied by foreign "liberators" started with protest rallies (which have a deadly tendency to be shot up by those liberators, leaving scores killed by that hardy perennial, "crossfire"), and rapidly moved to guerilla war, which the Americans last confronted, unsuccessfully, in Vietnam.

But what about the war before Iraq, the "war on terror", that was going to span the globe and continue forever? How’s that going? Who’s winning?

It gave birth to the Bush Doctrine, incorporated in the US National Security Strategy, as outlined by President George Bush, in September 2002. There are several key features:

• The US barely acknowledges the United Nations (and we saw that taken to its logical conclusion with the invasion of Iraq).
• It refuses to accept the jurisdiction of bodies such as the newly–created International Criminal Court (which will try war criminals and human rights abusers).
• It reserves the right to pre-emptively strike anywhere in the world, at any time (as in Iraq).
• It will increase its Intelligence infrastructure and reserves the right to spy on anyone.
• It intends to militarily dominate Space.
• It will not allow any other nation to challenge it militarily and will use any methods to eradicate that challenge.
• It states that the market system and free trade are the only model for the world to follow.

The declared military aim was to capture or kill both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. Nearly two years after the September 11, 2001, atrocities in the US, neither has happened and both men are assumed to be alive (as is Saddam Hussein). Undeniably, the US-led war has dealt heavy blows to bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, but definitely has not wiped it out (for example, see the Time cover story, "Why The War On Terror Will Never End", 26/5/03). There is no shortage of potential terrorist recruits in the Muslim world and the "war on terror" does nothing about the underlying causes. It doesn’t feature much in the media now, apart from some flare up such as another bombing atrocity somewhere.

Most recently there were the May 2003 deadly bombings in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), which demonstrated al Qaeda’s new tactic of striking in Muslim countries. Bin Laden is a Saudi (from a billionaire family) and his stated objective has been to get the US military out of Islam’s Holy Land (thousands of US military personnel have been in Saudi Arabia since the 1991 Gulf War). What didn’t get much publicity in the Western media was the actual target of those May 2003 bombings (they were nebulously described as "Western housing compounds"). Not just any Westerners. They were compounds housing employees of the Vinnell Corporation, which, under contract to the US Army, trains the Saudi National Guard. It has been a defence and security contractor in the country for nearly three decades. That is why bin Laden hates this shadowy corporation (which was the target of an earlier fatal bombing, in 1995). The US has been seeking for a dignified way to get its troops out of Saudi Arabia without appearing to concede victory to bin Laden – the 2003 Iraq War provided it. By overthrowing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq, the US no longer needs those troops in neighbouring Saudi Arabia. Basically they’ve been transferred to Iraq, which now replaces Saudi Arabia as the key US military asset in the Gulf (but the bases and non-uniformed personnel are staying in Saudi Arabia).

The US military swept into Afghanistan in 2001 and, very predictably, routed the medievalist and obscurantist Taliban regime in double quick time. A client regime, headed by the pro-American, Hamid Karzai, was installed (at least in Kabul, the capital) and US, and other military forces (including those from New Zealand), established an active presence in that benighted country. There are currently 11,000 foreign troops there. Then the story faded from the news, as the media followed Bush’s obsession about Saddam Hussein into the war on Iraq. So what’s the situation in Afghanistan now?

"America's two "great victories" since 11 September 2001 are unravelling. In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no authority and no money, and would collapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging. Regardless of showcase improvements, the situation of women and children remains desperate. The token woman in Karzai's Cabinet, the courageous physician Sima Samar, has been forced out of Government and is now in constant fear of her life, with an armed guard outside her office door and another at her gate. Murder, rape and child abuse are committed with impunity by the private armies of America's ‘friends’, the warlords whom Washington has bribed with millions of dollars, cash in hand, to give the pretence of stability.

"’We are in a combat zone the moment we leave this base’, an American colonel told me at Bagram Air Base, near Kabul. ‘We are shot at every day, several times a day’. When I said that surely he had come to liberate and protect the people, he belly-laughed.

"American troops are rarely seen in Afghanistan's towns. They escort US officials at high speed in armoured vans with blackened windows and military vehicles, mounted with machine-guns, in front and behind. Even the vast Bagram base was considered too insecure for the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, during his recent, fleeting visit. So nervous are the Americans that a few weeks ago they ‘accidentally’ shot dead four Government soldiers in the centre of Kabul, igniting the second major street protest against their presence in a week.

"On the day I left Kabul, a car bomb exploded on the road to the airport, killing four German soldiers, members of the international security force. The Germans' bus was lifted into the air; human flesh lay on the roadside. When British soldiers arrived to ‘seal off’ the area, they were watched by a silent crowd, squinting into the heat and dust, across a divide as wide as that which separated British troops from Afghans in the 19^th Century, and the French from Algerians and Americans from Vietnamese…

"’Search and destroy’, the scorched-earth tactic from Vietnam, is back. In the arid south-eastern plains of Afghanistan, the village of Niazi Qala no longer stands. American airborne troops swept down before dawn on 30 December 2001 and slaughtered, among others, a wedding party. Villagers said that women and children ran towards a dried pond, seeking protection from the gunfire, and were shot as they ran. After two hours, the aircraft and the attackers left. According to a United Nations investigation, 52 people were killed, including 25 children. ‘We identified it as a military target’, says the Pentagon, echoing its initial response to the My Lai massacre * 35 years ago " … (Outlook India, 24/6/03; "Bush’s Vietnam"; John Pilger). Pilger’s article includes a calculation that up to 20,000 Afghans may have died as an indirect consequence of American bombing, many of them drought victims denied relief. * The 1968 American massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, including children, at the village of My Lai, was one of the worst atrocities of that war. Ed.

Indeed, such is the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, that there has actually been a secret meeting, in 2003, between the US and the Taliban to discuss a political solution. This meeting in Pakistan, at which the US was represented by Federal Bureau of Investigation officials, was brokered by Pakistan’s all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, the original patron of the Taliban. The background to this remarkable meeting (which made little headway) is simply that the US, and other foreign troops, are subject to small hit and run attacks in most parts of the country, with heavier fighting around the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Time (21/7/03) ran an article about the Taliban, entitled "Undefeated", saying that that the alliance between the Taliban and al Qaeda had simply moved next door into Pakistan, specifically the border provinces controlled by Pakistan’s Islamist parties, from whence it is stepping up its operations in Afghanistan.

"Meanwhile the country continues to suffer from potentially crippling problems: corruption and lawlessness are pervasive; civil servants often don’t get paid; Karzai’s power is largely limited to Kabul; warlords rule the countryside; the Afghan National Army is years from being a legitimate security force; and Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani is warning that the massive proliferation of poppy production threatens to turn Afghanistan into a narco-state…A recent Council on Foreign Relations and Asia Society report "Afghanistan: Are We Losing The Peace?", warns: ‘Failure to stem deteriorating security conditions and to spur economic reconstruction could lead to a reversion to warlord-dominated anarchy and mark a major defeat for the US war on terrorism’".

Ironically the entire phenomenon of armed Islamic fundamentalists, which culminated in the Taliban (and its al Qaeda guests), was stoked to boiling point by the US as a means of defeating the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan during that 1979-89 war. Now those fundamentalists have turned on the US and bitten it hard (most notably, in the September 2001 attacks). This is a textbook example of what is called "blowback".

Islamic clerics have always been the most respected people in Afghanistan and since the successful war against the Soviets, they have been leading the fighters (the Taliban was a particularly militant theocracy). Now they are fighting the latest foreign occupiers of their country. For example, Hafez Rahim is the most respected cleric in the Kandahar region and he commands military operations in that mountainous area. The US mounted a major operation, in January 2003, to try and destroy Rahim and his men. This was the biggest battle since 2001. The clerics have combined with the warlords, who have always plagued Afghanistan – the most powerful of those now fighting the Americans is their former client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was a hero of the war against the Soviets and who has now forged ties with both the Taliban and al Qaeda’s Arab fighters.

"Hands up those who know that al Qaeda has a radio station operating inside Afghanistan, which calls for a holy war against America? Hands up again anyone who can guess how many of the daily weapons caches discovered by US troops in the country have been brought into Afghanistan since America’s ‘successful’ war? Answer: up to 25%. Have any US troops retreated from their positions along the Afghan-Pakistan border? None, you may say. And you would be wrong. At least five positions, according to Pakistani sources on the other side of the frontier, only one of which has been admitted by US forces. On 11 December (2002), US troops abandoned their military outpost at Lwara after nightly rocket attacks which destroyed several American military vehicles. Their Afghan allies were driven out only days later and al Qaeda fighters then stormed the US compound and burnt it to the ground" (Independent, 5/3/03; "Don’t mention the war in Afghanistan", Robert Fisk).

And what of the Afghan women, who found themselves suddenly cited as a post-invasion reason for overthrowing the Taliban? "On April 22 (2003), Human Rights Watch reported that ‘a climate of fear [exists within Afghanistan] not unlike under the Taliban…religious fundamentalism is on the rise with new restrictions on expression and movement of women and girls. Gains in education are now at risk, as many parents, afraid of attacks by troops and other gunmen, keep their daughters out of school" (Listener, 10/5/03, "Veiled Threats", Gordon Campbell). That Human Rights Watch report concluded that the warlords were back in charge of the country, and terrorising the people, by means of kidnappings, arbitrary arrests, armed robbery, extortion and beatings. A later (July 2003) Human Rights Watch report is even more graphic, with the ominous title "Killing You Is A Very Easy Thing For Us".

In addition to the US military dealing out death from on high or afar, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has also been responsible for killings of a much more up close and personal nature. In March 2003 the story broke that two Afghan prisoners had been beaten to death, while undergoing interrogation by the Americans, at Bagram Air Base, in December 2002. The deaths were being investigated as homicides. Torture is routinely practised at Bagram, where America’s most valuable prisoners are kept in metal shipping containers in an area sealed off from the rest of the base. "Former inmates at the base claim that detainees are chained to the ceiling, shackled so tightly that the blood flow stops, kept naked and hooded and kicked to keep them awake for days on end" (Guardian, 7/3/03; "Afghan Prisoners Beaten To Death At US Military Interrogation Base", Duncan Campbell).

When the US does want somebody unambiguously tortured, then it has him shipped off to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan or Egypt. President Bush has no qualms. During his January 2003 State of the Union Address, he talked of al Qaeda members meeting a "different fate… Let’s put it this way, they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies" (Independent, 7/3/03; "America admits suspects died in interrogations", Andrew Gumbel). One anonymous US official said: "We don’t kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them" (Washington Post, 26/12/02; "US Decries Abuse But Defends Interrogations. ‘Stress And Duress’ Tactics Used On Terrorism Suspects Held In Secret Overseas Facilities", Dana Priest and Barton Gellman). Another anonymous official contradicted that by saying: "Our guys may kick them around a little bit in the adrenalin of the immediate aftermath" (ibid.).

The world got a glimpse of some "stress and duress" techniques when the US publicly paraded the first prisoners to be flown to the detention centre at its Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. They were shackled, and subject to sensory deprivation, forced to wear earmuffs and spray painted goggles. Of the 3,000 odd prisoners held without trial or charge, at least 680 are held in tiny cages at Guantanamo. Since being established in 2001, in one of the first acts of the "war on terror", Guantanamo has been both kept off limits to the world and taken on an air of permanence. Most recently, plans were floated to establish the camp’s own death row and execution chamber, meaning that prisoners could be tried by US military tribunals, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without recourse to a jury or a right of appeal. Everything about the place is an institutionalised affront to human rights and the rule of law, starting from the status of the prisoners as "illegal combatants" with absolutely no rights, rather than prisoners of war. Kids of 16 and younger are being held there. Several bewildered prisoners have been released and returned to Afghanistan or Pakistan because the US obviously recognised that they had simply been caught in a dragnet. The first Pakistani to be freed said of his detention: "We were animals. We weren’t like humans at all" (Press, 7/11/02).

In July 2003, Bush decided that six prisoners (including two Britons and an Australian) should face trial in a military tribunal, rather than a regular court. Stephen Jakobi, of the British group Fair Trials Abroad, said: "After 18 months, six people out of over 600 are to be tried and the rules have to be fixed, otherwise there might not be convictions. The US Department of Defense will appoint the judges and prosecutors, control the defence and make up the rules of the trial. It appears to have only one objective – to secure a conviction. If they were prepared to take these people to American soil and try them under normal US prosecution, the evidence wouldn’t stand up" (BBC News, 4/7/03, "US terror trials condemned").

The "war on terror" has seen the CIA resume its paramilitary role, rather than simply collecting and analysing intelligence. The most detailed coverage of this was in the Time cover story (3/2/03; "The CIA’s Secret Army"), which described the role of its Special Operations Group (SOG) in the war in Afghanistan. Of course, the CIA has a long murky history of paramilitary operations (the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba being probably the most famous). Most of the 79 agents that it publicly acknowledges as having been killed in the course of duty were from its special operations wing (the most recent being one killed in Afghanistan, in 2001).

As a result of the 1970s’ Senate hearings into its covert operations, this side of its operations was reined in and the emphasis was shifted elsewhere. But paramilitary operations never went away, the CIA simply switched to relying on local proxies, such as the Nicaraguan contras (to fight the former Sandinista government) and the Afghan mujahedin (to fight the Soviet occupiers and the Afghan Communist government), both in the 1980s. Post– September 11 the CIA has switched back aggressively to covert paramilitary operations. This has been done under the direction of Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, who is an unabashed fan of this Ramboesque approach to war. In Afghanistan, approximately 100 CIA SOG agents were primarily used to get behind enemy lines and call in devastating air strikes. Each branch of the US military has its own Special Force (totalling tens of thousands as opposed to the SOG’s few hundred) and they did not take kindly to the CIA muscling into their territory (by the time of the 2003 Iraq War, those military Special Forces had been promoted by Rumsfeld to being the key component of the invasion). The CIA retorts that SOG can do the job better than their military rivals. The fact remains however that none of the US Special Forces in Afghanistan – CIA or military – has succeeded in capturing or killing bin Laden or Mullah Omar, their primary stated goal for being in that country.

The "war on terror" has introduced some new and ominous features. The CIA has its own air arm, including remote-controlled Predator drones, which have been used to launch Hellfire missiles to assassinate alleged al Qaeda figures, in both Afghanistan and Yemen. The November 2002 Yemen attack was particularly controversial, because among those killed was a US citizen (the CIA justified his killing by branding him an "enemy combatant"). Clifford Beal, the editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly, said: "To have a drone that engages and kills people, that is quite a threshold to cross. This is the beginning of robotic warfare. There is underlying tension in the military about using it. The CIA does not have any qualms. This is really the first success story of this system" (Guardian, 6/11/02; "Killing probes the frontiers of robotics and warfare. ‘War on terror’ tag allows US to attack anywhere, argues lawyer", Brian Whitaker and Oliver Burkeman. The lawyer in question was Professor Anthony D’Amato, who argued that Yemeni consent, or lack of it, was irrelevant. "In a war you have the right to shoot the combatants of the other side, and one of the things Bush accomplished when he called it a war against terrorism was to turn questions like this in his favour"). Rumsfeld approves of such remote-controlled State assassinations, saying (of the principal victim of the attack): "It would be a very good thing if he were out of business" (Press, 6/11/02, "US attack kills six; al Qaeda targeted"). Back in May 2002, the same method was unsuccessfully used in an attempt to kill Afghan warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyr. The US has become so enamoured of killer drones that the Pentagon hopes, within two decades, to develop one that could strike any spot on Earth from the continental US within two hours.

As a sideline, it is worth mentioning the ironic obsession of Hollywood popular culture (as in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s "Terminator" series) with the "machines" taking over the world, waging a ruthless war on a hardy band of humans, invariably Americans. In fact, the reverse is true, with the US depending more and more on machines to wage war on its numerous real or imagined human enemies.

And, of course, New Zealand has been actively involved in the "war on terror", from its 2001 outset. The then Labour/Alliance government committed the Special Air Service (SAS) – this precipitated the split in the Alliance, which led to its disappearance from Parliament at the 2002 election. There has always been absurd official mystery about anything to do with the SAS and the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has followed that script to a T. Of course, it’s purely coincidental that opinion polls revealed that a majority of Labour voters opposed New Zealand sending troops to Afghanistan.

In September 2002, Green MP, Keith Locke, pointed out that more could be learned from American Websites than from the Government about what the SAS was up to in Afghanistan. A November 2002 Listener article (30/11/02; "Where The Boys Are", Gordon Campbell) filled in some more details. "All year, some 40 SAS troops have been taking part in hunter/killer sorties within a wider ‘special ops’ force that has bases near Kandahar in the south and Khost in the east, under the operational control of US officers". It is believed that SAS troops helped their US counterparts mount cross-border raids into Pakistan. Campbell’s article also pointed out that despite the Government’s public adherence to international law, the practice in Afghanistan is rather different - the Military Technical Agreement that establishes the foreign military presence in that country grants immunity to all those foreign troops from being brought before any international tribunal for any war crimes.

As usual, it was left to the indefatigable Nicky Hager to tell New Zealanders just what the SAS had been doing in our name. He did so in a Sunday Star Times article (16/2/03) entitled "Our secret war: What the Government did not want you to know". Hager confirmed that the SAS worked as part of the US Special Forces, whose main job was as "forward air controllers" directing bombers onto targets (such as in the March 2002 Operation Anaconda, aimed at destroying al Qaeda and Taliban remnants which had been regrouping in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan). Discussing the Afghanistan War in general, Hager said: "On one side was the most technologically advanced military on Earth, dropping bombs with impunity and on the other were mostly poor, low-tech soldiers who died, surrendered or fled. New Zealand’s role in such a bloody operation may help explain why Clark preferred the public simply not to know". Mountain warfare in Afghanistan fits in exactly with the regular mountain training that the SAS does with its British counterpart, in the Mount Cook region. "The military also had its own agenda in going to Afghanistan. Although it is 18 years since the official end of the ANZUS alliance, most intelligence and military activities have remained closely integrated with the US. Yet many senior officers regularly push for even closer ties. Inside sources say that defence officials have privately used their activities in Afghanistan to lobby our Government and US military authorities for new training opportunities in the US, joint US-NZ exercises and new US military equipment".

That 12 month SAS deployment ended, in December 2002, and they came home, still in total secrecy. But New Zealand’s military involvement in Afghanistan is far from over. The Navy had a frigate patrolling the Persian Gulf to intercept any terrorists moving by sea (none were found), supported by an Air Force Orion surveillance plane. An Air Force Hercules has been deployed to neighbouring Krygyzstan to assist Operation Enduring Freedom (to give the Afghanistan War its official title). In June 2003 the Government announced that it planned to contribute a further 100 military personnel, primarily to the embryonic Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), plus send two Army officers to help in training the new Afghan Army. The PRTs have been described as a desperate attempt to extend the authority of the Americans’ puppet, President Hamid Karzai, beyond his enclave in the capital, Kabul. Aid agencies working in Afghanistan have condemned the involvement of military personnel in humanitarian work.

And what is the "war on terror" really about? Well, as Watchdog has previously said, it can be summed up in one word – oil. This was glaringly obvious in the Iraq War but also the whole American drive into Central Asia, which began with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, is a naked grab for that region’s oil and gas assets. There is an excellent article in the British magazine Lobster * (number 45, Summer 2003) entitled "The Crux of the Matter", by Alfred Mendes. That succinctly provides a country summary for Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. There is one common theme – they all have lots of oil and gas, and strategically vital pipelines that the US is anxious to keep out of Russian or Iranian control. They all are close to Afghanistan and Iran, the two main American targets in that part of the world, and several of them now host brand new US military bases. * Lobster’s Web address is http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/ but note that it does not have an online edition.

So, it’s about empire building, by the tried and true method of State violence and coercion. It’s about removing challenges to the imperial Power, either from states such as Iraq or "asymmetrical war practitioners" such as al Qaeda. It’s about grabbing vital resources such as oil to ensure that the Empire doesn’t grind to a halt. And it’s about massive power projection into strategic areas of the world, Central Asia in the case of Afghanistan and its neighbours. There’s no end in sight and no victory is likely to be declared in the foreseeable future. It’s an extremely murky business for New Zealand to be involved in, and it is critical that we tell the Labour government in no uncertain terms to get us out of it as soon as possible.