More than 10 years after the US war began, in spite of the presence of about 2,000 international aid groups, at least $3.5 billion in humanitarian funds and $58 billion in development assistance, humanitarian conditions in Afghanistan remain abysmal.

This past winter, one of the harshest in recent years, compounded the suffering of those living in refugee camps — an estimated 35,000 people just in the capital of Kabul, and many more around the country. The camps, according to the New York Times, are euphemistically referred to as “informal settlements,” because labeling them as what they really are, camps full of war refugees, is “politically sensitive.”

According to the Times, “The Afghan government insists that the residents should and could return to their original homes; the residents say it is too dangerous for them to do so.” The death rate for children under age five in these camps is 144 out of 1,000, according to Julie Bara of Solidarités International. The Times calls this “stunningly high even for Afghanistan, which already has the world’s third highest infant mortality rate.”

As Mohammad Yousef, director general of Aschiana, an Afghan aid group that provides education and other services in 13 of the camps, told the Times, “There is no clear strategy to help these people. They don’t have access to anything — health, education, food, sanitation, water. They don’t even have an opportunity for survival.”

Such a bleak picture of humanitarian conditions should give pause to anyone who might still believes that the US could be a force for good in Afghanistan.

But it isn’t only the dire conditions in the refugee camps. By any measure, even those of the occupiers, the US war and occupation has been a dismal failure — failing to liberate women, failing to improve conditions for ordinary Afghans, failing to bring about democracy, failing to stop the killing of civilians, failing to permanently oust the Taleban, failing to train a national armed forces.

Of course, that’s because the US occupation was never about liberation and democracy in the first place. It was about securing an imperial foothold in the region — no matter the consequence to the Afghan people. Now, as the US occupation unravels, it is ordinary Afghans who are suffering the consequences as the US looks in vain for a “Plan B” that doesn’t exist.

Although the 2001 war was accompanied by relentless propaganda from both Democrats and Republicans telling us that the US had to go to war in order to “save” Afghan women from repressive fundamentalism, reports today suggest that little has changed.

According to the Guardian, half of all Afghan women in prison — some 400 — are there for “moral” crimes — including running away from abusive homes. Others have been imprisoned for the “crime” of sex outside of marriage — after being raped or forced into prostitution.

A report last fall from Oxfam found that 87 percent of Afghan women reported experiencing physical, psychological or sexual abuse or forced marriages.

The US-backed stooge President Hamid Karzai, whose government is notorious for its corruption and its lack of legitimacy outside Kabul, is desperate to cut whatever deals he can with the Taleban and other forces now, because his isolated and weak government would have a hard time remaining in power once the US presence is wound down.

Nor has the US been able to train a stable Afghan Army — at least not with any confidence that its soldiers will remain loyal to US interests or to Karzai and the central government. The Obama administration is counting on the perception that its troop “surge” brought internal security and stability to large areas of the country, even though that’s clearly not the case.

In fact, the US and its NATO partners in the Afghanistan occupation don’t trust the soldiers that they do recruit and train. In many places outside Kabul, the Taleban and other warlords are in total control of local militias. In Ghor province in the West, for example, more than 150 illegally armed groups are estimated to contend for power in the area — against some 200 NATO soldiers.  The US currently spends some $9 billion a year to fund and train the Afghan army. As Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, said recently, if the US stops funding the Afghan army after its planned withdrawal of combat troops in 2014, “We will have given 100,000 people training and a gun, and then made them unemployed.”

All of this complicates the Obama administration’s timeline for withdrawal. While Karzai remains largely a figurehead, the US continues to rely on his administration to broker a deal with the Taleban in order to set the stage for the September drawdown of troops and, ultimately, the planned withdrawal of all combat troops by 2014.

Following the Bales massacre, the Taleban withdrew from talks — leaving the Karzai government and the US scrambling now to figure out how to get them back to the table.

Within the US, this latest atrocities and tragedies have had a clear impact on people’s attitude toward the war. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll taken after the Bales massacre, in the last four months, American opposition to continuing the war in Afghanistan has climbed from 53 percent to 69 percent of the population. Some 60 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats now agree that the war is going badly.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta immediately dismissed the poll, stating, “We cannot fight wars by polls. If we do that, we’re in deep trouble.”

But the Obama administration is already in “deep trouble” when it comes to the quagmire in Afghanistan. It has no strategy except its hope to cut whatever deal it can with the Taleban, maintain the six US military bases across the country, keep Karzai as a nominal figure in Kabul, and continue the drone war.  The Republicans, of course, don’t have an alternate strategy. Mitt Romney has been critical of Obama’s “withdrawal timetable,” but all his campaign website says is that as president, he would “order a full interagency assessment of our military and assistance presence in Afghanistan.”

As Sonali Kolhatkar of the Afghan Women’s Mission recently explained in an interview with the Real News Network:

What Afghans, ordinary Afghans have been subjected to over the past 10 years has been they get targeted from three different sides. You have the US and NATO occupation on one hand, which is conducting these night raids and killing civilians, the likes of which we just saw. And then you have the Taleban, who are only stronger because of the US presence, because they have a great excuse to remain in Afghanistan. And then you have the US-backed central government in Afghanistan, which is riddled with very corrupt and criminal warlords. After 10 years, it’s long past time for ordinary Afghans to be able to decide their own fate without the interference of the US and NATO. As long as the US military remains, Afghanistan cannot be free.
 
Nicole Colson writes for SocialistWorker.org, in which this article was first published.