How many Afghans will die in Obama’s war?

The dispatch of an additional 30,000 US troops, reinforced by at least 7,000 more from other NATO countries, means a colossal increase in the level of violence. By the time the Obama surge is complete, the size of the US military force in Afghanistan will be triple the number stationed there in the last years of the Bush administration.

In the cynical doublespeak of the Pentagon, the counterinsurgency warfare strategy developed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, is aimed at “protecting the population” and “degrading the Taliban.” What this means in practice is that those Afghans who resist foreign occupation will be considered to be Taliban and targeted for destruction.

The counterinsurgency doctrine developed in Iraq by McChrystal and the current head of the US Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, is not a military innovation, but rather the revival of the methods applied by American imperialism in Vietnam (as well as by France in Algeria and Britain in countless colonial wars). The largely rural population of Afghanistan is to be herded into large aggregations where they can be more easily controlled, especially in the country’s major cities like Kabul and Kandahar, and those who resist will be classified as supporting the insurgents.

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