35,000 NATO Troops Now In Afghanistan

NATO's increasing and largely unpublicized participation in Afghanistan is a key to understanding its overall role in the Oil Encirclement Plan. The First World's objectives in the region are simple: the two greatest remaining known hydrocarbon reserves in the world, those in Iran/Iraq and in and around the Caspian Sea. Effectively, it means war with Russia in its own backyard, and Afghanistan must be taken and held in order to both wall off Iran and control its pipelines to the East, and also as a fortified base to extend north.

As the Russians and Iranians are well aware, and as the British should be acutely aware from their own history, the various tribes who live in Afghanistan have never been very cooperative in grand imperial schemes. They have a way of pinning forces down, wearing them out, and sending them home as heroin addicts or invalids. As the video above shows, there's very heavy fighting going on in southern Afghanistan, where the resistance is now commonly described as "the Taleban," and "al-Qaeda." The fighters, in many cases the same men, were once known in the Western press as "the mujahedeen," or as the "freedom fighters."

These men made the deathbed of the Soviet Republic, and it's very doubtful whether a mere 50,000 NATO and US troops will ever achieve mastery over the same ground, no matter if they're backed by US A-10 Warthogs flying close support missions. (In the video, the A-10s Gatling gun fires so fast it sounds like a hive of bees, and its pilot drops bombs right outside the compound's gate where the Brit troops are trapped.) The security situation has devolved very rapidly, and the only reason we're seeing this video is that the British troops in it wanted their story to be told. More likely NATO troops will fail to quell the guerillas. Half a million men might not be able to do it. This is a simple calculation for Russia, Iran, and China to make; as an indication of their confidence levels, they haven't even supplied Stinger-style missiles to the Taleban yet, preferring to wear down everyone. Too bad Western leaders can't get the same equation through their heads.