Trotskyist Bulletin No. 8
AFGHANISTAN & THE LEFT
Document 1.2
Enduring Oppression and Infinite Injustice
Imperialisms Bloody Trail
The following is an edited version of a talk given by Tom Riley
at several campuses in the Toronto area in early November 2001. Reprinted from
1917 No. 24.
We are a few weeks into a war between one of the
poorest, most backward countries on earth and the worlds biggest and most
advanced industrial society (which also happens to have ten times the
population). And the larger power is backed by a coalition that
includes every other imperialist country (including brave, neutral
Canada). The mighty United States Air Force is engaged in systematically
degrading what little remains standing in Afghanistan after 20
years of continuous civil conflict. Simon Jenkins of the London Times (a
traditional mouthpiece of Britains conservative establishment) described
the coalition campaign as follows:
The current high-intensity bombing of Afghanistan
is by no stretch of military imagination simply de-activating air defences or
disrupting bin Ladens networks. It is strategic bombing of whatever
passes for the Afghan State, its cities and people. The Pentagon openly calls
it psychological bombing, the targeting of roads, power stations
and public buildings (even those with red crosses on them). Since from the air
Afghan troops are indistinguishable from civilians, the implication of using
aerial gunships is that no ground operation can be risked if any Afghan is
alive in the region. To those fleeing Afghanistan in their thousands, this is
indeed terror repaying terror. Times, 24 October
So far more than a thousand Afghan civilians have been killed.
Like the destruction of the World Trade Center, this is an exercise in
monstrous criminality.
The U.S. was clearly going to make somebody pay for the attack on
the homelandbut killing ten or a hundred thousand Afghans is
not going to make the world a safer place for Americans or anyone else.
Officially, of course, it is not a war on Afghanistan, but on
terrorism, which the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense define
as:
the unlawful use of force or violence against
persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian
population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social
objectives.
The U.S. has used force or violence to coerce and
intimidate civilians and overthrow other governments more regularly than any
other state: in Guatemala in 1953, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua
throughout the 1980s, and there are lots of other examples. But none of them
qualify as terrorists according to the FBI, because they were
lawful, that is, authorized by the U.S. government.
On 9 October, two days after the bombing began, U.S. Ambassador
John Negroponte announced to the UN Security Council that Washingtons
war on terrorism could be visiting other countries after
Afghanistan. Iraq is widely thought to be next on the list, but Syria, Libya
and various others have also been mooted as potential targets. John Pilger,
writing in Londons liberal Guardian, pointed out that Negroponte
was a particularly grotesque choice as Americas
anti-terrorist messenger to the world because:
As US ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s,
Negroponte oversaw American funding of the regimes death squads, known as
Battalion 316, that wiped out the democratic opposition, while the CIA ran its
contra war of terror against neighbouring Nicaragua.
Guardian, 25 October
Global Capitalism: Infinite Injustice
The capitalist world system headed by the U.S. is based on
massive, unending violence against the vast majority of humanity in the service
of funnelling wealth from the poor to the rich within nations and between
nations. The World Bank reports that half of the worlds population lives
on less than $2 a day. Now, with economic indicators turning down, we are told
to get ready for a period of generalized belt-tightening. For those trying to
eke out an existence on $2 a day or less, things are going to become even more
horrific. The impoverishment of billions of unfortunates at one pole is, of
course, balanced by the enormous accumulation of wealth and power
by a tiny elite at the other.
After the attack on 11 September, the U.S. Department of Defense
published an outline of current U.S. military doctrine, signed by U.S. Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It proclaims that America has enduring
national interests in access to key markets and strategic
resources everywhere on the planet, and asserts a U.S. right to overthrow
non-compliant regimes:
U.S. forces must maintain the capability at the
direction of the President to impose the will of the United States and its
coalition partners on any adversaries including states or non-state entities.
Such a decisive defeat could include changing the regime of an adversary state
or occupation of foreign territory until U.S. strategic objectives are
met. Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 30 September
2001
The current war on terrorism is, above all, an
exercise in imposing the will of the United States.
The Rise of Radical Islamism
To understand the chain of events that led to 11 September, we
have to go back at least a few decades. In the early 1960s radical Islamic
fundamentalists were generally regarded as a lunatic fringe by most of the Arab
worldmuch as creation scientists are seen today in North
America.
This began to change with Israels victory in the 1967 Six
Day War, when the Egyptian airforce was completely destroyed and Israel seized
the Sinai peninsula. This shattered the prestige of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the
leading figure in the Arab Revolution, who in 1956 had successfully
nationalized the Suez Canal and resisted the joint British-French-Israeli
invasion. The fundamentalists claimed that Egypt, the cultural and political
leader of the Arab world, had been defeated because it had turned away from
Allah to embrace secular modernism.
The big breakthrough for the Islamists came in 1979 when Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini toppled Shah Reza Pahlavis Peacock Throne and
established an Islamic Republic in Iran. The Shah had come to power
in 1953 in a CIA-engineered coup that overthrew the modernizing, nationalist
regime headed by Mohammed Mosaddeq. To stabilize the Pahlavi
dynasty, the CIA, with the help of Israeli intelligence, created SAVAK,
Irans notorious political police. SAVAK imprisoned, tortured and killed
thousands of opponents of the regime. Iran under the Shah, along with Israel
and Saudi Arabia, was one of the pillars of American imperialism in the Middle
East.
Islamic fundamentalism must, at bottom, be understood as a
reactionary response to imperialist dominationan assertion by a section
of the oppressed of their own cultural identity and a rejection of the values
of their oppressors. One thing that radical Islamists (including Khomeini, bin
Laden and the Taliban) have in common is opposition to social equality. They
insist on the total and absolute subordination of women within the family, and
their virtual exclusion from society. They are hostile to socialism, as well as
Western capitalist ideology.
The structural adjustment programs pushed by the
International Monetary Fund, and embraced by many domestic rulers in the
region, opened the door to foreign capital penetration and cheap imports.
Agriculture, indigenous manufacturing and many traditional occupations were
dislocated by the sudden introduction of the efficiencies of the
world market. The result was the growth of urban shantytowns full of
impoverished former peasants who are today entirely dependent on the Islamic
charities (run out of the local mosques) for healthcare, schooling and any
other social services. These people constitute the mullahs mass base and
can be summoned into the streets at any moment. But the cadres of the Islamist
movement are chiefly recruited from members of the scientifically trained
intelligentsia, who feel that they, not the current gang of corrupt imperialist
lackeys, should be in power.
Imperialism & Reaction in Afghanistan
American intervention in Afghanistan dates back to 1978, when the
CIA first backed Islamic reaction against the pro-Soviet Peoples Democratic
Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The PDPA was a radical nationalist Stalinist
formation, similar to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. In an interview published in
Le Nouvel Observateur (15-21 January 1998), Zbigniew Brezinski, Jimmy
Carters national security adviser, revealed that CIA support to the
mujahedin predated the Soviet intervention:
According to the official version of history, CIA
aid to the mujahedin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet
army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until
now, is completely otherwise: indeed, it was 3 July 1979 that President Carter
signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet
regime in Kabul.
The interviewer asked Brezinski if, in hindsight, he had come to
regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and
advice to future terrorists? He replied:
What is most important to the history of the world?
The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or
the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
The mullahs, the moneylenders and the big landowners opposed the
PDPA because of its decrees slashing debts, lowering the bride price (a major
source of business for the moneylenders) and giving peasants the land they
tilled. The PDPA had also abolished child marriage and initiated schooling for
girls. The leaders of the free world instinctively sided with the
Islamic reactionaries, just as revolutionaries defended the PDPA and their
Soviet allies.
U.S. aid was directed toward the most fanatical of the
mujahedin factions, on the grounds that they would be the most
intransigent opponents of the Soviets. The U.S. also encouraged volunteers for
the jihad to come to Afghanistan to fight the infidel. One of those who
answered the call was a young Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden. The CIA
armed and trained the cadres of bin Ladens organization and built the
terrorist training camps that the U.S. Air Force has been bombing.
When the Kremlin bureaucracy betrayed their Afghan allies and
pulled out Soviet troops in 1989, the U.S. lost interest in the conflict. The
PDPA regime held out for three years before finally being overwhelmed by the
Islamists. But the victorious mujahedin warlords, currently gathered
together in the Northern Alliance, fell out among themselves in a
savage power struggle which exacted a terrible toll on the civilian population.
Civil order in Pakistan was threatened by the continuing unrest
across its border. The Pakistani intelligence agency, which had been the
conduit for CIA support to the mujahedin throughout the 1980s, began to
provide active military support to the Taliban, a fanatical Pashtun
Muslim sect based in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistans North-West
Frontier Province. The Taliban enjoyed spectacular military success, toppling
one warlord after another and in 1996 seized Kabul.
After taking power, the Taliban moved quickly to outlaw beard
trimming, as well as music and dancing at weddings. They closed down all
schools for girls and banned televisions, tape recorders, homing pigeons, and
even kites. Under the Taliban, thieves are punished by amputation; adulterers
are stoned to death; and political, religious and national minorities are
brutally oppressed.
The discovery of major oil and natural gas deposits in Central
Asia, immediately north of Afghanistan, in the early 1990s considerably
increased Afghanistans geo-political significance, as the U.S. Energy
Information Administration noted in a December 2000 report:
Afghanistans significance from an energy
standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route
for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian Sea.
Initially, Washington welcomed the Taliban as a force for
stability in Afghanistan. The State Department was pleased when the Taliban
selected a consortium headed by UNOCAL, a major American oil corporation, to
build a $2 billion natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to
Pakistan. There were plans for awarding a similar contract for the construction
of an oil pipeline. This would have given the U.S. access to Central Asian gas
and oil fields bypassing both Iran and Russiaits two chief rivals in the
region. The deal fell through in 1998 after Al Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies
in Africa prompting Bill Clinton to retaliate by launching 20 cruise missiles
at Afghanistan.
One objective of the American war on terrorism, in
addition to eradicating a hostile regime, is to increase U.S. leverage in
Central Asia. The establishment of U.S. military bases in Uzbekistan and
Tajikistan, both previously considered firmly within the Kremlins sphere
of influence, is a major step in that direction. The Russians have been assured
that these installations are only temporarybut Putin no doubt
recalls the solemn promises made to Gorbachev at the time the Berlin Wall came
down that if the Soviets agreed to a united Germany remaining in NATO, no other
former Warsaw Pact country would ever be allowed to join. Today Poland, the
Czech Republic and Hungary are all NATO members, and most of the rest of the
former Pact countries are on the waiting list.
Spin Laden
A source of considerable irritation for the coalition
partners thus far has been the ease with which bin Laden has been winning the
Spin War for the hearts and minds of Muslims in the region. The
explanation for this is pretty simple: bin Ladens program is in tune with
what most people in the area want. He has pledged to call off Al Qaedas
jihad against the U.S. if three conditions are met. First, U.S. forces
must leave Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca and Medina, Islams two most holy
sites. The second condition is that the sanctions against Iraq, that have
killed over a million people, be ended. Thirdly, bin Laden demands an Israeli
withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem and the creation of a
Palestinian state on these territories.
Most Americans wouldnt find these demands objectionable,
which is why they have been virtually blacked out. Bin Ladens ultimate
program is of course to impose fundamentalist Islamic regimes throughout the
Middle East, but as a first step his chief concern is to expel the
infidels from the region.
U.S. attempts to extinguish terrorism have certainly
elevated the status of Al Qaeda among disaffected Muslims. If tens of thousands
of Afghan refugees end up starving or freezing to death this winter, that
support seems likely to increase further. The rulers of both Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia (both officially supporters of the U.S. campaign) are concerned that a
prolonged conflict may destabilize their regimes. But Washington appears
determined to try to break Taliban resistance from the air, regardless of the
toll on Afghan civilians, before risking American ground troops.
Taking the War to the Pashtuns
At this point it is difficult to predict the outcome of the
conflict. The Taliban are deeply unpopular with many Afghans, but there is some
evidence that the coalition terror bombing has solidified their support, just
as the attack on the World Trade Center pushed up Bush Jr.s ratings. The
Taliban leadership appears to think their troops are well enough dug in to
survive the worst that the U.S. Air Force can throw at them. The 26 October
issue of Britains Tory Telegraph reported that the elite U.S.
Delta Force was taken aback by fierce Taliban resistance when they staged a
brief raid on an abandoned compound in the Kandahar region on 20 October.
The Taliban strategy apparently involves drawing out the conflict
long enough and grinding up enough American soldiers to force the U.S. to
withdraw. This is the lesson they have drawn from Reagans hasty retreat
from Lebanon after the 1983 demolition of the U.S. Marine barracks, and
Clintons withdrawal from Somalia a decade later when 18 U.S. soldiers
were killed in a firefight with the forces of a local warlord. However, in the
wake of the World Trade Center attack, popular support in the U.S. for the
assault on Afghanistan is much deeper than it was for intervention in either
Lebanon or Somalia.
If the U.S. is serious about taking out the Taliban and creating a
stable client regime in Afghanistan (rather than just providing aerial support
for its Northern Alliance proxies or capturing Kabul) it will have to take the
fight to the Talibans base area around Kandahar among the Pashtun
population which straddles the border between Afghanistan and Pakistans
North West Frontier Province. That could pose a whole new set of
problemsas General Pervez Musharrafs government seems likely to be
an early casualty of such an assault. Instability in Islamabad conjures up a
lot of nightmare scenarios given Pakistans nuclear arsenal.
The War at Home
The U.S. rulers are using the war against terrorism to
attack the hard-won democratic rights (and living standards) of American
workers. More than a thousand people, mostly Arab immigrants, have been locked
up indefinitely. The authorities are refusing to release their names or state
what (if anything) they are charged with. There has also been talk of
legalizing torture to speed up confessions, as they do in Israel. Here in
Canada, Jean Chrétiens government, which has backed the U.S.
campaign against Afghanistan at every step, is pushing
anti-terrorist legislation that amounts to a blank check for the
government to harass and incarcerate anyone they dont like.
The Bush Administration is using the current wave of xenophobic
fervor to shower U.S. corporations with billions of dollars in
retroactive tax rebates. It has also promised tens of billions in
bailouts for the airlines and insurance companies. This is all going to be paid
for by looting the social security lock box that was supposed to
ensure that American workers dont have to spend their retirements living
in cardboard boxes and eating cat food.
When U.S. workers realize that this war is being waged
on two frontsagainst Afghanistan and against themwe could
see an eruption of class struggle in the American homeland. It is
worth noting that there is much less patriotic hysteria in the black
population, which historically tends to be the most politically advanced
section of the proletariat.
The job of Marxists in every country of the imperialist
coalition is to struggle to win working people to see that they
have an interest in defending Afghanistan against their own
rulers. A single workers political strike against the war could have
enormous political impact internationallyparticularly in the Middle
Eastand help lay the basis for joint class struggle in the future.
The Taliban are the mortal enemies of the oppressed and must be
overthrownbut this task, like the removal of the rest of the reactionary
regimes in the region, falls to the oppressed and exploited, not to the
imperialists. The worst outcome of this conflict, from the point of view
of working people here and in the Middle East, would be for the U.S.-led
coalition to score the sort of lop-sided victory it did over Iraq a
decade ago. A cheap imperialist victory would set the stage for larger-scale
and bloodier campaigns in the future.
Most of the ostensibly socialist left has responded to the
imperialist attack on Afghanistan with pacifist, liberal bleating. When Tariq
Ali was in Toronto six weeks ago, we asked him if he, as a former
International Marxist, defended Afghanistan against imperialism. He
answered with a flat No! The self-proclaimed Marxists of the
International Socialists refuse to defend Afghanistan, and are instead pushing
simple-minded pacifist calls to Stop the War. But the imperialists
themselves want to end the war as soon as possible, as the 31
October issue of the New York Times reported:
In the United States, some seem increasingly
frustrated by the slow pace of the military campaign, and conservative
politicians have begun to talk about escalating it by using ground forces on a
larger scale. In Britain and other European countries, however, public opinion
seems headed in the other direction. The European public appears more concerned
about civilian casualties than ending the war swiftly.
emphasis added
The U.S. rulers want to end the war swiftly by
escalating the killing! We would like to see a swift end to the war as
wellbut only through the immediate withdrawal of the
coalition aggressors. Demands to stop the war are fine
for pacifistsbut revolutionaries have a side when imperialist predators
attack neo-colonial countries.
Expropriate the Expropriators!
If a protracted imperialist campaign in Afghanistan goes badly,
and casualties mount, it will strengthen the capacity of oppressed peoples and
workers around the world to resist capitalist attacks. It would also be likely
to weaken several of the regimes that have historically been closely identified
with the U.S., including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
After two decades in power, Irans Islamic Republic appears
rather brittle. Every major sporting event or other public occasion threatens
to turn into a political demonstration against the rule of the mullahs. This is
an important symptom of a developing pre-revolutionary situation. A successful
uprising against the Shiite theocrats based on Irans powerful working
class, led by a hard communist organization armed with a consistently
revolutionary program, could touch off a wave of socialist struggle in the
region, just as Khomeinis victory in 1979 gave impetus to the Islamists.
Ultimately, the cycle of escalating brutality that characterizes
imperialist rule will only be ended by eradicating the international system
that forces the majority of humanity to live in poverty. This planet can only
be cleansed of violence and irrationality through a revolutionary struggle to
expropriate the expropriators and create a socialist planned economy on a world
scale, in which production is geared to meeting human need, rather than
maximizing private profit. Today this may seem a distant goal, but we of the
International Bolshevik Tendency believe that not only is it possible, but that
there is no other way out for humanity. |