Is Afghanistan Strategic?

One of the first points in the fine new Freedom Road statement released on the occasion of the 6th anniversary of the occupation of Iraq is the interesting assertion that Afghanistan is less about the strategic interests of US imperialism than about bourgeois politics here at home:

The war in Afghanistan is not mainly about oil or gas pipelines nor, at this point, is it principally about al Qaeda. If the war there were central to US ruling class interests, the George Bush administration would not have low-balled it for eight years. If Afghanistan were a central strategic focus, the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations wouldn’t have completely ignored it from the Soviet defeat there in 1989 right through to 9/11/01.

Afghanistan is a pawn in the game of US domestic politics. Obama ran on Bush’s failure to keep his promise to capture Bin Laden, and in his statements during the campaign and since has repeatedly made his own pledge―Victory in Afghanistan. Yet no one in the administration can say what that would look like and it is acknowledged that so far there exists neither an overall strategic plan, clear goals nor an exit strategy.

I just ran across an interesting confirmation of that assertion, in an Agence France-Presse article tellingly entitled "West lowers sights in Afghanistan":

"We are lowering our ambitions," a senior French official admitted to AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The Americans are now looking for a way out, they no longer regard Afghanistan as strategic. It'll take two to five years, but we're in a logic of disengagement."

They want out because they are losing (as the FRSO/OSCL statement points out) and there's no way to "win" by practically any definition of the word, and because the real strategic problems for the US in the region remain Iraq, Iran and Pakistan.

I won't insult FotM readers by explaining why this does not mean that anti-war activists can breathe a sigh of relief and turn our attention to other issues. Let us rather take up the call made in the recent--and eloquent--open letter of IVAW, MFSO and VFP to the peace movement (available here):

We ask all those who have stood with us in the past to stay faithful to the cause.

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Bite Size Bad News 3--Oil

The benchmark price of crude oil, which was well below $70 a barrel a year ago, is now flirting with $120.

Think it’s a speculative bubble? Check out the announcement by Petrobras that it has discovered two large new offshore oil fields it hopes will make Brazil one of the world’s largest oil exporters.

There are only few problems, starting with the fact that new technology will have to be developed to deal with a couple of small technical difficulties:

• Much of the oil is 32,000 feet below the ocean’s surface (the world’s current deepest well is about 9,000 feet).
• That means pressures of 18,000 pounds per square inch, enough to crush a pickup truck into an unrecognizable hunk of scrap.
  
• And temperatures of 500 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt some metals traditionally used in energy production.
• Oh, yeah, layers of salt on top of the oil, a mile or more thick, absorb seismic waves and make pinpointing where to drill much harder than usual.

Get the feeling that if Brazil does get this oil out, it won’t be cheap?

That doesn’t mean that prices will never fall from current levels, especially as the incipient global recession deepens. But upward pressures are growing too—the effort to slow the growth of petroleum consumption in the US, Europe and Brazil by mixing in agricultural ethanol into gas and diesel have been the largest contributing factor in the sudden appearance of an international food crisis, characterized by shortages and spiking prices of staple grains. That looks more like a whipsaw than twin bubbles to me.

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France To Play In U.S. Bathtub?

Bleary-eyed, I see this morning's business news is dominated by a sharp drop in East Asian stock indexes and an even steepeer one in India. The US markets, which are experiencing an ugly new year already, are closed today for the MLK holiday, so tomorrow could be real interesting.

I want to pull the coattails of FotM readers to another recent development which could be of greater importance in the long term, one that the stock market stuff is likely to drive out of the news entirely. This is the just-announced agreement between France and the United Arab Emirates to establish a French naval base in Abu Dhabi, with 500 personnel stationed there. In what has been pretty much exclusive American turf as far as imperialist military presence goes, this is a big deal.

Commentators have pointed to a variety of short-term factors in the move--new French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy buddying up to Bush and the US, the Gulf States' nervousness about both Iran and US war talk against Iran, firming up French nuclear and arms sales in the region, and more.

But the big picture tells a different story. Bush will be gone soon, Sarkozy eventually, while French capital will now have a military toehold in the heart of the Middle East. Given that the invasion of Iraq was a US bid to keep a hegemonic hand on the region's oil, given that one major nightmare for the US ruling class is that oil-producing states will dump the sinking dollar in favor of the euro for petroleum sales, given that the Bush administration has created a world historic defeat for the US in Iraq, this would seem to be an objective intensification of the contention between US and European bourgeoisies for world domination, as well as an example of rulers in the Gulf States seeking to play on the contradictions between imperialist blocs.

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