The war in Afghanistan could not be more disastrous, both for the long-suffering people of that country, but also for the chief aggressor: the United States. And 2007 was the bloodiest year of the war - so far.

As with every war in the history of capitalism, its proponents cloak their real aims with high-minded and noble-sounding phrases. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - just like the slaughter of World War I, the Vietnam War and countless other conflicts - were sold as battles for freedom, liberty, democracy, good vs. evil and so on. The Bush administration is hardly original in its rhetoric.

The professed concern for the lives of the occupied peoples is patently false. It is estimated that these occupations have caused over one million casualties, as well as establishing a permanent legacy of death and deformity by the use of weaponry enhanced with depleted uranium.

The American elite care little about human suffering. They are committed to the free market, neo-liberal economy policies that have seen a massive global increase in extreme poverty. They were quick to apply this economic dogma to their newly conquered Middle Eastern possessions. Companies like Halliburton made mega-profits for failing to provide services and infrastructure.

Today, the war in Iraq is totally discredited. The US overstretched itself trying to link Saddam and bin Laden, and even more so, in inventing stories about WMDs. The lies were necessary because the genuine reasons for the war were so perverse and cynical. Chiefly, the war was about the US ruling class trying to extend its power in the world. In this case they were seeking to rewrite the geo-political map in the oil-rich, and strategically important, Middle East.

Afghanistan and Iraq are essentially different theatres of the same American war. The US occupies both countries for the same reasons. Indeed the entire "war on terror" flows from the logic of imperialism.

Imperialist military conflict is the inevitable extension of the economic competition upon which capitalism is based. Major companies rely on the states in which they are based to use their muscle to secure access to raw materials like oil, and to arrange favourable terms of trade with other nations.

Imperialism is primarily about competition between the most powerful states in the world. And military strength is the ultimate arbiter of power between these states. This becomes clear when one considers how the victors of World War II were able to divide up the globe as they pleased at the conclusion of the war. The US and its ally Britain on the one hand, and the USSR on the other hand, simply carved up key sections of the world into "spheres of influence".

Since the collapse of the USSR, the United States has been the world's sole superpower. But as its economic position vis-à-vis other major capitalist nations has declined, the US has become increasingly reliant on its unsurpassed military might to shore up its dominance.

Whereas the US economy accounted for a majority of world production in the immediate post-World War II years, its share of global GDP has been trending downward for decades. And the figure has slipped from 30 per cent to 25 per cent in the last five years.

The Afghan and Iraq wars were conceived by the US ruling class primarily as a reaction to the prospect of US global hegemony being challenged, either by an integrated Europe, a resurgent Russia, or most pressingly, by ascendant China. When Bush declared after 9/11 that "you are either with us or with the terrorists", he was effectively telling the rulers of all other nations that they must accept the right of the US to govern the world. Very few of these rulers felt able to challenge this statement at the time.

But instead of ushering in a renaissance of US hegemony, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have had actually seen a diminishing of US power. The reason is that the people of these countries have resisted in a most determined fashion.

It has been possible to say with complete certainty for at least the last three years that the chance of the US salvaging some sort of victory in Iraq is zero. As for Afghanistan, the occupation is now in its eighth year, with the insurgency continuing to gain strength. The US-puppet government has no legitimacy in the country, and no control over most of it.

As the left-wing commentator Tariq Ali put it recently: "To sum up the situation in Afghanistan, it's a total mess. The US can never win that war, and the main reason they can never win is that Afghans don't like being occupied. Afghans kicked out the British in the 19th century, the Russians in the 20th century, and now they're fighting again against the US and its NATO allies". Indeed, it is the right of the Afghan people, and the people of Iraq, to resist the subjugation of their country.

Rather than admit defeat, the Bush administration has continued to obliterate thousands of US lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives. And the Democrats who control US Congress have done literally nothing to obstruct this process.

In fact, many key Democrats like Barack Obama have participated in preparing the ground politically for a possible future attack on Iran. Frighteningly, there are precedents from the last 40 years of the US lashing out when faced with inevitable defeat in a war. Even though the US had clearly lost in Vietnam by 1968, they not only persisted until 1975, but actually extended the conflict into Cambodia.

We can therefore say with complete justification that the US military machine is the greatest threat to the peoples of the Middle East and central Asia. And the words of Martin Luther King during the Vietnam era, that the US government is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world", have never been more true than today.

For this reason, socialists oppose the entire phoney "war on terror". And we oppose any Australian support for America's war.

Australia's involvement in the disaster in Afghanistan is no mere token undertaking. The roughly 1000 troops deployed there play an active operational role. That is, they carry out killings, and themselves come under fire. Three troops have been killed in combat in recent months.

Furthermore, the Australian Defence Force has had to abandon its previous attempts at a cover-up, and publicly release a report into the suicide last February of a soldier who had served in Afghanistan. The Melbourne Age noted on January 10 that the young man "was struggling to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder incurred after shooting a man dead in Afghanistan and telling others of how he had seen a child raped".

The troops stationed in Afghanistan have not and will not be able to achieve anything, other than to do some of the dirty work of the US ruling class. They are assisting in one part of a global war that has involved routine torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, the gulag of Guantánamo Bay, 25,000 US troop suicides, a million dead Iraqis, and the diversion of trillions of dollars into military spending that ought to have been spent on alleviating poverty and fixing the climate crisis.