November 2001 

For Class War Against the Imperialist War!

Red Cross Building Destroyed by American Bombs, Kabul, 26 October 2001 

American bombs started falling on Afghanistan on October 7. The imperialist rulers of the United States who call their system of rapacious exploitation “democracy” are laying waste to what is already one of the poorest and most devastated countries on earth. Next on their list is Iraq. Meanwhile, capitalist governments around the world are using this war to launch an assault on democratic rights and workers’ gains. Police-state laws authorizing unrestricted state spying on the general population, “preventive detention” of immigrants and other dictatorial measures are being rammed through legislatures as the war drums beat. A regimented “strong state” at home is required to wage permanent war, which is what they intend.

In almost a month of non-stop bombardment some 1,500 Afghans have been killed, the vast majority of them civilians. Most of the population has fled the cities. Residential districts in the capital of Kabul, already in ruins after 20 years of attacks by U.S.-backed Islamic reactionaries, have been reduced to rubble. Hospitals have been hit in Herat and Kandahar, a mosque in Jalalabad. A United Nations agency was bombed in Kabul, and then a Red Cross warehouse filled with food supplies. A week later, the same warehouse (which had a huge red cross painted on the roof) was hit again in broad daylight. No mistake, no “collateral damage”: this was deliberate. While the UN reports 6 million Afghans on the verge of starvation, U.S. planes drop a few thousand yellow packets of meals-ready-to-eat littering strawberry jam across the desert: “Pop tarts in the dust” are the “humanitarian” face of war being waged with hunger and bombs. 

Imperialist murders! Afghan man cries over the body of hgis child killed by U.S. bombs in Kabul, 28 October 2001. (Photo: Sayed Salahuddin/Reuters)

The state terrorists who proclaim themselves the defenders of Western civilization are systematically destroying any modern facilities in the country. Airports, power stations, dams and irrigation works are on the daily target lists. B-52s are carpet-bombing, cluster bombs are dropped on cities, AC-130 gunships fire 25,000 rounds a minute as they hover over “kill boxes,” formerly known as “free fire zones.” It wouldn’t be hard to bomb Afghanistan “back to the Stone Age,” as U.S. Air Force chief Curtis LeMay threatened to do to Vietnam – the isolated Central Asian country is already in ruins. The chiefs of the Pentagon intend to do just that. But their attempts to put a new government in Kabul have failed miserably, and they still can’t find the men on their “wanted, dead or alive” list. Pentagon chiefs think they have banished the “Vietnam syndrome,” yet news commentators are beginning to utter the dreaded Q-word: “quagmire.” 

The warmongers in Washington and London, their NATO allies, Zionist junior partners and neocolonial satraps can be beaten. They won’t be stopped by a few parades calling to “give peace a chance” or outbursts of Islamic fundamentalist frenzy. Neither pacifism nor “holy war”: what’s needed is class war, on the streets and in the factories, against the imperialist war on semi-colonial Asian countries and the working class at home. Peace pleas won’t stop the generals, but millions of proletarians around the world have the social and economic strength to inflict a stinging defeat on the imperialist war machine. To do so requires the forging of a revolutionary leadership that can take the struggle from protest to a fight for power. 

The Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International call to defeat U.S. imperialism, defend Afghanistan and Iraq, and fight for international socialist revolution. 

The Pentagon’s terror bombing of Afghanistan launched the “war on terrorism” that the leaders of U.S. imperialism vow will last “two years or more” (U.S. president George W. Bush) and whose effects are intended to last the “lifetime” of most adults (according to U.S. vice president Dick Cheney). It was initially called a “crusade” by Bush, igniting outrage in the predominantly Muslim countries of the Near East where the history of invasions by Christian crusaders in the Middle Ages is still vivid. First code-named “Infinite Justice” by the Pentagon, it was presented as a reprisal for the terror attack that demolished the World Trade Center in New York City. But this war has nothing to do with justice or fighting “terrorism.”

To justify their war, the rulers of America are cynically exploiting the deaths of thousands of innocent working people in the despicable indiscriminate terror attack on the WTC. As always, the U.S. picks the easy targets first. To go after the Soviet Union and Cuba, Ronald Reagan invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. Airplanes are rammed into the twin towers in the heart of the U.S. financial capital; 14 of the 19 hijackers are reportedly Saudi Arabians. So naturally...the U.S. bombs Afghanistan, and prepares to attack Iraq. Why? Supposedly because “terrorist mastermind” Osama bin Laden is holed up in some cave there. But the U.S. has not produced one shred of evidence linking the hijackers to the Saudi millionaire. And Washington is not about to do anything to shake the dynasty in the Arabian kingdom that contains 40 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. 

This is the war that U.S. rulers have sought and prepared for ever since the counterrevolution that swept through the Soviet Union and East Europe during 1989-92. Following the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War against Iraq, President George Bush the Elder proclaimed a New World Order (NWO) dominated by the “one remaining superpower,” the United States. (Consciously or not, he was echoing Adolf Hitler, who proclaimed a Neue Ordnung in a Europe under German domination.) State Department advisors proclaimed the “end of history.” But the imperialist triumphalism was short-lived. What followed was a decade of worldwide disorder, with nationalist civil wars raging from Central Africa to Yugoslavia. Now in the reign of Bush the Younger, a puppet president imposed by fiat of the Supreme Court, without a shred of pseudo-democratic legitimation, the same team is back to “finish the job” of nailing down the “NWO.” 

At the very outset, Bush Jr.’s top presidential counselor commented, “This is a defining moment. We have an opportunity to restructure the world.” A few days later, British prime minister Tony Blair declared: “This is a moment to seize…. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us” (New York Times, 3 October). The scope of this war goes far beyond the Near East and Central Asia: it is indeed about reordering and restructuring the world. 

U.S./British bombing of Afghan cities and villages has touched off angry protests around the world. Cape Town, South Africa demo, October 11. (Photo: AP)

Partly it is a “war for oil,” though not in the simplistic way that some leftists claim. Yes, there was jockeying between an Argentine oilman and U.S. oil giants Unocal and Amoco. Yet no sane oil mogul would today contemplate building a pipeline through Afghanistan. Western capitalists seek to gain control over the oil fields of Central Asia now being opened up to imperialist exploitation, just as they pounced on the Baku oilfields at the beginning of the last century. But as in the Persian Gulf War, most of that oil will be exported to Europe, not the U.S. (which gets most of its energy imports from Western Hemisphere producers). The economics are subordinate to imperialist strategy: Washington wants to keep its hand on the oil tap in order to keep its rivals in line. 

Ultimately this is a war for U.S. imperialist domination of the world, which is why some of the United States’ European imperialist allies are increasingly unenthusiastic about it as the bombing drags on. Immediately after September 11 there was impressionistic talk of the beginning of World War III. Following the 1990-91 Gulf War and demise of the USSR, the Catholic Pope of counterrevolution proclaimed the end of the postwar period. Now we are in a prewar period. Just as the Balkan wars of 1908-13 fed into and touched off World War I, just as the Spanish Civil War, Japan’s invasion of China and Italian imperialism’s war on Ethiopia (Abyssinia) prepared World War II, the U.S.-led imperialist wars over the last decade against Iraq, Yugoslavia and now Afghanistan point to a third imperialist world conflagration growing out of the heightened rivalries between the major capitalist powers. 

There is a lot of concern in Washington that the Taliban could get their hands on nuclear weapons. Yet the very real danger is that the United States has a vast arsenal of ABC (atomic, biological and chemical) weapons of mass destruction, and is contemplating using some of its experimental “tactical” arms in the present war. For the Dr. Strangeloves in the Pentagon, Afghanistan is a giant testing ground, an Asian Nevada. As the war goes on, it underlines anew that the alternative facing humanity is socialism or nuclear barabarism. 

The Taliban regime that has controlled most of Afghanistan since 1996 has made the country a chamber of horrors, particularly for women. But so did the feuding warlords who preceded it, the leaders of the Islamic jihad (holy war) who were financed, trained and armed by the United States to wage a proxy war in the 1980s against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-allied reform government in Kabul. Revolutionaries hailed the Red Army intervention in Afghanistan, one of the few progressive acts by the Stalinists, and one that went sharply against their strategy of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. The Soviets did not lose that war on the battlefield, but instead the Kremlin bureaucracy abandoned the effort in vain hopes of reaching a deal with Washington. The ignominious Soviet withdrawal in 1989 set the stage for the collapse of the multinational degenerated workers state. The devastation this produced is incalculable. From Moscow and Kiev to former Soviet Central Asia, working people have been reduced to paupers.

Afghanistan is an impoverished backwater, with feudal and even pre-feudal conditions in much of the country. Many regions high in the Hindu Kush and Pamir Mountains are largely sealed off from the outside. Yet because of its location in the center of the Asian continent, from the time of Genghis Khan in the 13th century it has been a crossroads and staging area for military campaigns aimed at Central and South Asia. The 19th century “Great Game” between Britain and tsarist Russia was one of several key battlefields for control of Asia. In the late 20th century, U.S. imperialists saw Afghanistan as a route for attacking the Soviet Union’s “soft underbelly” in historically Muslim Central Asia. CIA chief William Casey organized expeditions of mujahedin (holy warriors) to penetrate Tajikistan, hoping to set in motion Islamic forces of counterrevolution. 

Because of its extreme economic backwardness, the social forces within Afghanistan are too weak for a workers revolution to be carried out from within. That is a key reason why Soviet intervention to stave off the victory of Islamic reaction was necessary in the 1980s and why Trotskyists strongly supported it. But Afghanistan cannot be viewed in isolation from the surrounding region. The U.S. bombing campaign has set off considerable unrest among the millions of inhabitants of Pakistan’s cities, though mostly led by Islamic fundamentalist forces, and there have been demonstrations against the war in many cities in India, led by the reformist CPI-M, in an attempt to pressure the government led by the rightist Hindu BJP. In Bangladesh, Egypt and elsewhere in the Near East as well as among Muslims in northern Nigeria there have been large protests against the U.S. attack on Afghanistan. The Saudi monarchy is worried about unrest. The war could touch off social upheavals throughout the region.

The key is what kind of social upheaval. Various leftists in the West have uncritically reported Pakistani demonstrations led by Islamic fundamentalist forces as “workers protests.” Some even talk of an “anti-imperialist front” and “common action” with such reactionaries. Yet those religious zealots are virulent opponents of anything that has a hint of communism, socialism or even trade-unionism. Pakistani labor organizers are attacked on a daily basis by the fundamentalists. Egyptian leftist students who sought to protest against the U.S. bombing have also been set upon by fundamentalists. While communists defend Afghanistan against the imperialist war, we call for revolutionary defensism, fighting to overthrow the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban and their reactionary rivals in the “Northern Alliance.” And far from forming any kind of bloc with fundamentalist groups, socialists in the Near East face a civil war with Islamic religious reaction. In Israel/Palestine, communists fight for joint Arab-Hebrew workers revolution, an anathema to the Islamic right wing. In fact, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies systematically fostered the growth of such forces in order to crush the “communist threat.”

As defenders of Leon Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution, the League for the Fourth International emphasizes that in the imperialist epoch of decaying capitalism, no bourgeois force can carry out any serious democratic tasks, much less the social liberation of oppressed sectors. The fight for the liberation of women and national minorities and all oppressed groups requires above all a fight for the revolutionary class independence of the working class from all bourgeois forces, Islamic fundamentalist and nationalist alike. Revolutionary workers parties must be built to lead international socialist revolution throughout the region, and extending to the proletariat of the imperialist centers. 

Yet the war is not going well for the U.S. They can’t seem to track down bin Laden or Taliban leader Sheikh Omar. They can’t form an opposition government in Afghanistan. On the home front, they have arrested 1,100 people in the United States, overwhelmingly immigrants of Near Eastern origin, but have yet to charge a single person with connection to the World Trade Center attack. And the FBI admits it hasn’t a clue as to who is behind the poisoned letters containing anthrax powder sent to various government and media figures. But the Republican Bush administration has managed to pass the “U.S.A. Patriot Act” (with a 98-1 vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate) which goes a long way toward expanding police-state powers to regiment the population for war. 

This draconian piece of legislation builds on the 1996 Effective Death Penalty and Antiterrorism and immigration “reform” acts pushed through by the Clinton administration. It effectively abolishes the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution against arbitrary search and seizure, by allowing police agencies to secretly search anyone’s home, business or organizational offices. Police can tap phones, e-mail and Internet use with secret authorization from special courts. The supposed ban on domestic spying by the CIA is dropped. Immigrants (legal or “illegal”) can be held without charges for periods of “six months” which can be indefinitely renewed. This is already happening: because of such secrecy provisions, there is almost no public information about what has happened to the hundreds of people arrested in the post-September 11 dragnet. We say free them now!

To push through the package of repressive measures, the government and media have whipped up a hysteria about anthrax, trying to link this to the September 11 attacks. Several letters with the deadly agent were mailed to a few leading politicians and media figures. As a result, several of their office staff and postal workers have contracted anthrax and two have died. The anthrax scare whipped up over this is vastly out of proportion with the actual number of casualties. Moreover, there is no evidence so far of a link to Near Eastern terrorists, while in fact domestic U.S. fascists and some anti-abortion zealots have long been touting anthrax. Planned Parenthood reported that its clinics have received more than 100 envelopes containing white powder since the World Trade Center attack. And it is curious that the main recipients of the threatening letters were journalist Dan Rather and the liberal Democratic head of the Senate.

The beefing up of police powers is not limited to the United States. Similar laws are being enacted in Canada, Britain, Germany, India and elsewhere. This is part of a general push toward a “strong state” as the bourgeoisie prepares for war. This also fosters the growth of ultra-rightist organizations. Already in Italy and Austria, the fascist parties of Giacomo Fini and Jörg Haider are junior partners in right-wing governments. In New York City, the budding bonapartist mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried (unsuccessfully) to get his term lengthened. However, these ominous developments do not signify a general “creeping fascisation,” as some leftists have argued. Italy’s right-wing media mogul and prime minister Silvio Berlusconi caused an uproar by proclaiming the “superiority of our civilization…in contrast with Islamic countries.” But Berlusconi was sharply criticized by other European Union leaders for getting in the way of their attempts to portray the war on Afghanistan as non-racist. 

In fact, the push for police-state measures has come equally from liberal Democrats like Clinton and social democrats like Blair in Britain and Gerhard Schröder in Germany. During wartime, the imperialist “democrats” can be quite as authoritarian as any dictator. The U.S. “internment” (concentration camps) for Japanese Americans is the historical norm, along with sedition and treason laws used against leftists. In NYC, the right-wing New York Post tried to whip up a red-hunt at City University by going after antiwar professors; a CUNY trustee labeled them “seditious.” More McCarthyite witchhunting is to be expected. In the anti-Soviet Cold War the bourgeois liberals went along with it and were often some of the biggest witchhunters, particularly in purging leftists from the unions. This underscores the fact that the fight against them cannot be waged simply on a “democratic” basis. As always, it comes down to a class question.

In the 1930s, Leon Trotsky referred often to the drive toward bonapartism and a strong state as the spectre of war loomed. In his “Program of Action for France” (June 1934), he wrote:

“The bourgeoisie is starting to carry out its plan of the transformation of state power, to eliminate once and for all the resistance of the workers…. The bourgeois plan of the ‘authoritative state,’ directed against the exploited, must be ruthlessly attacked by the toiling masses….
“The task is to establish in this country the rule of the working people.”

The fight against the Afghanistan war and the drive to a new imperialist world war must be waged together with the fight against attacks on democratic rights, minorities and the working class in the imperialist countries. Our small international organization, the League for the Fourth International, seeks to cohere the cadres to build the nuclei of revolutionary workers parties around the globe. From the Near East, South and Central Asia to Europe and the United States, such parties can only be built through relentless struggle against all sections of the bourgeoisie and the reformist and centrist forces who capitulate to them. This fight to reforge an authentically Trotskyist Fourth International is key to a genuine fight against imperialist war and repression.  n

5 November  2001