The dominant imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists is pressing Obama to emphasize ground warfare over air strikes in the widening Afghanistan-Pakistan battleground. The shift spells higher death tolls on all sides and even more U.S. troops than Obama’s surge of 21,000. Current U.S. strategy targeting al Qaeda and the Taliban with pilotless “drone” aircraft is unintentionally swelling enemy ranks.

The May 17 New York Times, the rulers’ leading mouthpiece, published an op-ed piece, “Death From Above, Outrage Down Below,” by Andrew Exum and David Kilcullen of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).  It warned, “Over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani

sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians....Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.” Over one million Pakistanis have been forced from their homes into refugee camps because of groundwarfare.

Bankrolled by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Exum and Kilcullen’s CNAS served Obama’s 2008 campaign as a “Pentagon-in-waiting.” CNAS’s president, Michele Flournoy, is now an Undersecretary of Defense.

Obama Flip-Flops on Torture

Photo-Op to Protect New War Leader

Consequently, Obama’s dramatic replacement of General David McKiernan with torture expert Stanley McChrystal as top general in Afghanistan launches a more effective killing campaign that implicitly criticizes Bush’s efforts there. Not since President Truman booted General Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War (1952) has a president removed a warzone commander this way. The big switch — along with the White House christening of a new “Af-Pak” theatre of war— makes Afghanistan-Pakistan “Obama’s War.”

McChrystal’s expertise lies in the quintessential U.S. ground force, “Special Operations.” Early in his career he trained anti-Soviet forces in the CIA operation based in Pakistan that helped oust the Russians from Afghanistan, an effort that produced Osama bin Laden and later al Qaeda.

McChrystal also trained the Afghan warlords in a joint campaign to chase the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, forces he must battle once more, now that they’ve staged a come-back in several Afghan provinces.

He most recently oversaw Delta and Seal Special Operations units. These units train fascist armies and are used to torture and murder “enemy suspects” in prison camps in Iraq and Afghanistan, seldom distinguishing actual insurgents from innocent civilians.

Obama abruptly broke his promise to release pictures of the U.S. military abusing prisoners to avoid embarrassing appointee McChrystal, who gave the orders.  [For an account of the war crimes committed under McChrystal’s command, see Esquire magazine, 5/7/09.] The CNAS’s Exum told MSNBC (5/12/09) that U.S. and Afghan casualties “are likely to go up” once McChrystal takes over.

Obama: Ruling-Class Hero

For the war-bent rulers, Barack Obama is proving the most effective leader since Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s, transformed his popularity during the Great Depression into mobilization for World War II. Obama hopes to accomplish something similar, as the rulers plan for conflicts far bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan, against China and Russia. Aided immensely by the rulers’ main ideology-shapers, the liberal media and universities, Obama enjoys sky-high approval ratings.

Meanwhile, the war machine he presides over slaughters more and more civilians in his escalating Af-Pak war. He has reopened Bush’s Guantanamo Military Tribunals, which deny all rights to anyone they care to label “enemy combatant,” validating “evidence” extracted by torture. And Obama is prolonging the Iraq war he promised to end.

The rulers’ media constantly urges us to vote for the “lesser evil” (usually a Democrat) in their electoral circuses. Since millions are disgusted with both parties, the rulers use liberals to spread the illusion that they will “reform”the system’s more brutal nature and won’t be as “bad”as reactionary Republicans. As a “lesser evil” who carries out the rulers’ war aims, Obama tops all his warmonger predecessors — Johnson in Vietnam; Carter in the 1979 CIA Afghan war cited above; and Clinton in the Yugoslavia air-war massacre and bombings of Iraq.

Since ultimately only communist revolution can forever halt these endless imperialist wars, we must strive in our shops and unions, in strikes and mass protests in our schools and on our campuses, in churches and all mass organizations, to expose Obama’s regime as an unprecedented, all-out assault on the working class.

Within this class struggle we must show how the super-exploitative, racist capitalist system is the source of this constant assault, and that the elimination of the profit system — replaced by a communist society in which the working class reaps all the value it produces — is the only road to workers’ emancipation.

Building the revolutionary PLP is the key to that goal.