President Obama will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Dec. 10, yet he is announcing Tuesday that he is sending tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, escalating the war.

Eight years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the occupation continues to drag on with no end in sight. U.S. casualties are on the rise, with recent months being the deadliest since the war began.

The recent Afghan elections were supposed to legitimize the U.S.-backed government and its “democratic” institutions but instead exposed widespread corruption.  Mass voter fraud, threats of violence and low voter turnout undermined what little credibility remained for the Karzai government.

These developments have dramatically undermined support for the war.  A majority of Americans—57 percent—now oppose the war, according to a 2009 AP-GfK Poll.

Still, Vice President Joe Biden claims that the war in Afghanistan “is worth the effort we are making and the sacrifice,”  as quoted on BBC News.

After eight years, $228 billion has been sunk into Afghanistan, thousands of U.S. soldiers and innocent Afghans have been killed or permanently disabled, and for what?

Malalai Joya is an outspoken 30-year-old women’s rights activist who was ousted from her position in the Afghan parliament by right-wing religious fundamentalists and warlords.

She describes in The Independent Afghanistan after eight years of occupation: “Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords… While a showcase parliament has been created for the benefit of the U.S. in Kabul, the real power is with these fundamentalists who rule everywhere outside Kabul.

” For women, “the situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban.”

The war has exacerbated Afghanistan’s endemic poverty. Two-thirds of Afghans still struggle to survive on less than $2 per day according to Food and Agriculture .org, and 77 percent lack access to clean water. Female literacy—at 14 percent—has barely improved from what it was under the reactionary rule of the Taliban, according to UNESCO.

Yet, according to Biden, the war must go on because Afghanistan is “a place that, if it doesn’t get straightened out, will continue to wreak havoc on Europe and the U.S.” However, the brutal U.S. occupation, along with the grinding poverty and oppression faced by the peoples of Central Asia and the Middle East, is only sowing the seeds for future terrorist attacks.

“Straightening out” Afghanistan will be a long, costly and ultimately futile campaign. General Sir David Richards, head of British forces in Afghanistan, believes it will take another 40 years of occupation before there will be stability, according to the Telegraph.

With a discredited U.S. puppet regime, ruling through warlords and drug-traffickers guilty of all sorts of war crimes, “stability” means nothing more than a government strong enough to suppress dissent and defend the interests of U.S. imperialism in the region.

All of this clearly shows the need to rebuild the antiwar movement. A powerful, antiwar movement in the U.S. and around the world is of decisive importance in stopping the carnage in Afghanistan and preventing thousands upon thousands more troops from killing and being killed in this unjust, unwinnable war.

Please join Socialist Alternative and six co-sponsoring organizations for a rally against the troop surge at 11:45 a.m. on Dec. 1 in Red Square and a march to U.S. House Representative Rick Larsen’s office in downtown Bellingham.

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