Commentary
Obama
Escalates War Against Afghanistan
On November 30, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was authorizing the dispatch of 30,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan. Obama claimed that U.S. “national interests” could not afford failure in Afghanistan. At the same time he promised that troop withdrawals would begin in 2011 on an unconditional basis. Of course, the promise of unconditional troop withdrawals contradicts the claim that failure is unacceptable, but most commentators dismissed it as a sop to those within his own party who are opposed to the continuation of the war against Afghanistan.
Obama also demanded that NATO send 5,000 to 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan and NATO was quick to respond. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared that the spirit of multilateralism demanded that NATO countries step up their commitment, as well, and within days various NATO and non-NATO countries had pledged another 7,000 troops. If the promised soldiers actually arrive in Afghanistan it will push the number of occupation troops to almost 150,000, even more than the Soviet Union had there in the 1980s.
Obama’s announcement exposes the sham promise that his administration would change the direction set by the Bush administration. Not only has Obama continued the war in Iraq, he has escalated the war in Afghanistan. It is also clear that he has extended the war into Pakistan and that the increased troops are, in part, to expand the U.S. forays into Pakistani territory.
The response of NATO also exposes the true nature of the multilateralism espoused by numerous European governments and social democratic parties. Multilateralism is often presented as a rein on U.S. imperialist aggression, if not actually a form of “anti-imperialism”. Those who make such claims define imperialism as a set of militaristic policies in general and the policies of the Bush administration in particular. They refuse to acknowledge that imperialism is an inherent feature of monopoly capitalism and that it is a system, not a policy. Some go so far as to claim that the only imperialist country today is the United States.
Lenin described imperialism as a system of states colluding and contending for global hegemony. It is a system dominated by a handful of big powers but including numerous other smaller states, including the puppet states in the colonial and neo-colonial countries. Rasmussen’s comments show that multilateralism is neither anti-imperialist nor anti-U.S. imperialist. Rather, it is an arrangement within the imperialist system of states that determines which states will be at the table to divide up the spoils. However, multilateralism still recognizes the U.S. as the leading and dominant power within this arrangement and does nothing to blunt the aggressiveness of the U.S. On the contrary, after Bush’s disastrous attempt to go it alone, U.S. imperialism has now concluded that a multilateral approach is indispensible in order for it to maintain its dominant position within the imperialist system of states, despite its declining economic power.
Finally, Obama’s announcement exposes the illusions of those on the “left” and within the anti-war movement that Obama is somehow “better” than Bush. Obama is better than Bush only from the perspective of the imperialists. The U.S. imperialists are happy that Obama has succeeded in patching over some of the contradictions with its European allies, while the European imperialists are happy that they have been allowed back at the trough. However, can it be said that Obama is better than Bush from the perspective of the people of Afghanistan or from the perspective of the people of Pakistan? Hardly.