On February 18, U.S. air strikes killed 13 civilians in Afghanistan’s Herat province, and Obama’s Afghan surge is just starting, with the first 17,000 troops on their way. The country’s non-combatant death toll, already up 40% from last year, is bound to skyrocket as Obama adds the 30,000 extra troops he promised, and then some.

Candidate Obama had told a war-weary U.S. public that shifting some forces from Iraq to Afghanistan would stabilize the latter country and finally help defeat al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban warlords there. Now that he’s in office, it’s the needs of the most powerful U.S. capitalists, rather than public opinion, that steer Obama’s deployment of the war machine. To counter Russia’s strengthening sphere of influence, rulers are demanding a far greater Afghan build-up. And since Iraq is crucial to U.S. rulers’ profit-pumping oil racket, U.S. troops must remain there permanently, awaiting an all-out Mid-East war.

U.S. Bankers and Oil Barons Demand More GIs and More GI and Afghan Deaths

On February 12, Stephen Biddle, senior fellow at the influential Council on Foreign Relations think-tank [see box], testified before Congress on U.S. rulers’ escalating requirements in the war zones. Biddle told House members that combating Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan called for a massive, drawn out, Vietnam-style campaign with “around 300,000 counterinsurgents.”

He warned that the corrupt Karzai regime wasn’t up to the job. Thus, hundreds of thousands of GIs would be in it for the long haul. “[T]here is reason to doubt that the Afghan government will ever be able to afford the necessary number of troops. If any significant fraction of this total must be American then the resources needed will be very large. And the commitment could be very long: successful counterinsurgency campaigns commonly last ten to fifteen years or more.”

And that’s the “best” of scenarios. Unintended consequences, as in Iraq, could dwarf the Vietnam debacle in a never-ending war.

Biddle coldly calculated “acceptable” body counts. Among GIs, “fatality rates of perhaps 50-100 per month could persist for many months, if not years.” As for Afghans, Biddle assured the lawmakers that U.S. butchery of the innocent has yet to reach a tipping point where the U.S. appears as the main enemy. “In objective terms, violence in Afghanistan, though increasing, is still very low by the standards of most such conflicts,” Biddle says. “The death count for 2008 was under six per hundred thousand.”

He recalled that British imperialists killed at twice that rate during their “successful” 1950s crackdown in Malaya.

Possible All-Out Mid-East Oil War Keeps U.S. In Iraq Indefinitely

Biddle, a mouthpiece for Exxon, Chase, and Citibank has greater worries over Iraq. Further destabilization there “could eventually produce irresistible pressures for Syrian, Jordanian, Saudi, Turkish, or Iranian state entry into the war....The result could be a region-wide version of the Iran-Iraq War sometime in the next decade, but with some of the combatants (especially Iran) having probable access to weapons of mass destruction by that time.”

An event the U.S. can’t control might “plunge one of the world’s most important energy-producing regions into chaos.” So, says Biddle, at least 60,000 U.S. troops must remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future, no matter what candidate Obama promised.

Biddle, his billionaire bosses, Obama and the rest of the rulers’ politicians all well know the lessons of the last century’s wars: Military conquest entailing massive loss of human life is capitalism’s only sure-fire cure for depressed profits. But history teaches workers something else: Our class, organized in revolutionary communist parties can defeat the profiteering killers. During World War I and shortly after World War II, workers triumphed for a time in Russia and China, although grave political errors led to the restoration of capitalism and imperialism in both. Our goal is to build a party that will someday wipe out the war-makers for good.