Within days of being sworn in as President, Barrack Obama authorised bombings in Afghanistan and the tribal border areas of Pakistan. As in the past, dozens of civilians were murdered in these attacks. While in Pakistan, there have been massive public protests against the violation of the sovereignty of that country, in Afghanistan, even the puppet President Karzai has been forced to condemn the repeated bombings of entire villages by the American occupation forces.

The Obama administration has made it clear it will escalate the war to subjugate the Afghan people, intensify US military strikes on targets inside Pakistan and continue the occupation of Iraq indefinitely. A brutal escalation of war and widening of area of conflagration in South Asia is on the cards. 

The testimony of Defence Secretary Robert Gates before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees can leave no one in doubt on the war agenda of Obama. The very act of retaining Gates, who served the Bush administration in the same post for the past two years and directed the escalation of war in Iraq, is a message to the American people and to the world that US imperialism is going to escalate wars against other peoples.

Gates told the senators: “There is little doubt that our greatest military challenge right now is Afghanistan. As you know, the United States has focused more on Central Asia in recent months. President Obama has made it clear that the Afghanistan theatre should be our top overseas military priority.”

The war in Afghanistan, he added, would be “long and difficult.” The short-term time frame he placed on the conflict was “five years”— at least until 2014. Gates stressed that the government has no intention of withdrawing from Iraq. Warning that resistance could erupt again against US forces in Iraq, he said “there may be hard days ahead for our troops.” Gates emphasized that “we should still expect to be involved in Iraq ….. for many years to come.”

He told the Senate committee that deployment of the first batch of 30,000 additional US troops in Afghanistan has already taken place.

Gates openly confirmed that the escalation of war to subjugate Afghanistan would involve attacking Pakistan. The Afghan resistance enjoys support amongst the Pashtun population of Pakistan’s Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) as well as amongst other sections of people of Pakistan. US knows that it cannot subjugate Afghanistan without crushing and destroying this support base. In other words, the arena of US attacks is going to greatly increase. It was “impossible,” Gates declared, “to disaggregate Afghanistan and Pakistan, given the porous border between them.”

One of the main goals of the US imperialists in launching invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was to create a base for asserting US influence over the energy rich Central Asian Republics which were earlier part of the Soviet Union, as well as putting pressure on Iran. “War against terrorism” was a smoke screen to carry this out. US occupied Afghanistan along with its NATO allies, after putting pressure on Pakistan to provide bases for launching the occupation war. In 2003, US imperialists launched the war of occupation of Iraq under another pretext, with the aim of getting that country’s energy resources under its control, as well as putting further pressure on Iran. Through these wars, US has also tried to get the upper hand in terms of its European imperialist allies, as well as Russia and China. These wars have been launched with the goal of establishing a unipolar world under its control. 

However in past few years, Russia and China have managed to expand their influence over the energy rich Central Asian Republics. During the Presidential campaign in US it was clear that factions in US ruling circles wanted US to get the control of this region, and Obama was acting as their mouthpiece. Intense diplomacy is taking place to establish access rights and military bases in Central Asian states such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. At the present time, bulk of supplies to US – NATO forces in Afghanistan come through the FATA in Pakistan. US has just recently in January worked out a deal with the Russian government by which the latter has agreed to allow its territory and air space to be used to transport US and NATO supplies into Afghanistan.

The Obama regime has called for stepped up military contribution from NATO allies for the expanding war. Many of them, like Germany, France, Italy and Turkey, have rejected requests for dramatic increase in their involvement in the Afghan war in the past. They will now have to decide how to respond to Obama. Inter-imperialist contradictions between US and some of its NATO allies are bound to sharpen.

The first acts of the Obama regime clearly show that the hopes of millions of American workers who voted for Obama with the illusion that there would be a decisive shift from the aggressive imperialist war mongering course of Bush regime, are going to be belied. US imperialism is a bloodthirsty power, and it is single-mindedly pursuing a savage course to achieve its aims. The escalating war in Afghanistan and Pakistan poses a grave danger to all the peoples of South Asia and Central Asia, including the Indian people.

The situation demands that communists and all those interested in lasting peace in this region must resolutely unite and expel the US imperialists from this region. We must refuse to fall into the propaganda trap of the US imperialists, who are deliberately painting the resistance forces, those fighting for freedom and sovereignty, as “terrorists”. We must resolutely support the struggle of the anti- imperialist and patriotic forces of Afghanistan and Pakistan who are heroically battling the US forces.