America's New War and the Politics of Global Domination

The Bush administration has labelled its new war as a war on terrorism. Others have labelled it a war on Islam. But both labels cover up the true objectives of the current U.S. campaign.

Afghanistan, though a poor and underdeveloped country has enormous strategic importance to any imperialist power hoping to subjugate Asia. It lies at the crossroads of the Middle East and South Asia. It borders on Iran, Pakistan, Kashmir, China and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. It is not accidental that the last decade of the Cold War hinged on control of this country. Nor is it accidental that the Soviet bloc collapsed mere months after the defeat of the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

While economically of marginal value to a colonial power, control of Afghanistan opens a path to control of the oil and gas reserves of the southern and eastern Caspian area. Military bases in Afghanistan would permit strikes south against Pakistan and India, west against Iran and north against Russia.

The end of the bi-polar division of the world in 1989-90 led immediately to a new wave of military expansionism by U.S. imperialism, the sole remaining superpower. Its first adventure in the new conditions was in the Persian Gulf. The 1979 Iranian revolution deprived the U.S. of a major military ally in the region, while its support for Israel prevented any Arab state from allowing the U.S. to station troops on its soil. The U.S. solved this problem by encouraging its former ally Saddam Hussein of Iraq to invade Kuwait in 1990. This provided the U.S. with a pretext for launching a war against Iraq. The fact that the U.S. stopped short of overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War is sometimes pointed to as a failure of U.S. policy. But was that, in fact, its aim? The end of Saddam Hussein's regime would also end the justification for the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The perpetual crisis in the region represents not the failure of U.S. policy, but rather its success.

The second adventure of the U.S. was in the Balkans, another strategically important region where prior to 1990 the U.S. had little or no influence. Once again, the U.S. engineered a crisis to justify its military intervention. On the one hand it financed and armed separatist movements in Croatia and Bosnia, while on the other hand secretly encouraging the Yugoslav regime to defend its territorial integrity. For the past decade, the U.S. has continued to engineer one crisis after another in the region in order to justify its permanent military occupation there.

If the history of the past decade is any indication, the U.S. policy towards Afghanistan will follow the same pattern. The last thing that the U.S. wants is a quick and decisive war which eliminates its "enemies" - Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. What it really needs is a prolonged crisis which will justify its permanent occupation of sections of Afghanistan. The fact that a prolonged crisis will inevitably lead to the death of hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Afghans is of no more concern to the U.S. than were the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs or millions of Iraqis. As former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright so bluntly stated in 1996 in response to a question about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children as a result of the U.S.-imposed economic sanctions against Iraq, the price in human lives is worth it, so long as the U.S. achieves its aim of global domination.