AFGANISTHAN

Mediamonitor: American losses mounting as Afghans maintain resistance

After claiming for months that everything in Afghanistan is under their control, the Americans got a rude shock at the end of January; it has forced them to concede that several of their soldiers have been killed. But even this admission came with a fantastic amount of ‘spin’, and several days after the actual event. On January 30 an American military spokesman was quoted as saying that a helicopter carrying troops had crashed at Bagram airbase north of Kabul, killing at least four soldiers.

Afghan fighters opposed to the US presence in Afghanistan claimed that they had killed 14 American and 24 Afghan soldiers. They also said that an Apache helicopter had been shot down during fighting in Adi Ghar, a mountain range south of Qandahar. The truth about the two conflicting versions was confirmed through other Afghan sources, and reveals the degree of censorship exercised by the US government, and the willingness of the US media to go along with it. This has been standard procedure with most news emanating from Afghanistan: only one version (the American one) is given, but this time the Americans’ denials were not plausible.

Opposition to the US’s presence in Afghanistan is increasing, and the use of Stinger missiles is bound to raise the level of resistance. It is already much more widespread and sustained than it was against the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan. The Americans have been extremely cautious in using ground troops; now they have even more to worry about. All this is made even worse by the fact that Hamid Karzai’s government has demonstrably failed to exercise any control even in Kabul, much less anywhere else in the country.