January 2002  

U.S./NATO Out of Afghanistan and Central Asia! 

• Next Up: Philippines, Iraq, Somalia…? 
• Revolutionary Defeatism on All Sides in an India-Pakistan War!
• For International Socialist Revolution!

Class-conscious workers throughout the world must fight to defeat the imperialists and defend Afghanistan, Iraq and any other country targeted by the U.S./NATO war. 

As U.S. forces direct “mopping-up” operations in the countryside,  and a British-led NATO “peacekeeping” force patrols Kabul, it’s clear that Western occupation forces won’t be exiting Afghanistan any time soon. An “interim government” headed by U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai and filled with minions of the former king Zahir Shah (deposed in 1973) was formed at talks in the former West German capital of Bonn. While this warlord/monarchist lash-up got reluctant backing from various elements of the fractious “Northern Alliance,” it has little support among the Pashtun majority in the South. One gang of Islamic fundamentalists has replaced another, and Afghan women are still imprisoned in the head-to-toe burqa. Meanwhile, there is no sign of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, or George Bush’s nemesis Osama bin Laden, despite “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters and a multi-million-dollar bounty.

This hasn’t stopped the imperialists from forging ahead with their “global war on terrorism.” The U.S. keeps on bombing Iraq (three times in the last week) as it has done regularly since the Persian Gulf war a decade ago. Washington hardliners threaten to topple Saddam Hussein, even though the CIA thinks its bought-and-paid for Iraqi “opposition” isn’t up to the job. Deputy U.S. war secretary Paul Wolfowitz pointed to Somalia as a “lawless country” that fit the bill for a second “anti-terrorist” strike. Yemen was another likely target. The Pentagon wants to lift restrictions on aid to the Indonesian army imposed by Bill Clinton and unleash the murder machine of former dictator Suharto. But tops on their list is the Philippines, where a joint command has been formed between the U.S. and the local army. Some 650 American troops (Army Green Berets and Navy Seals) are slated to be “in-country” soon, more “advisors” than the United States had in Vietnam in the early 1960s. 

But while U.S. special ops teams pay Afghan mercenaries to comb the caves looking for Taliban and “Al Qaeda” fighters gone to ground, full-scale war could break out between India and Pakistan, both of which are nuclear powers. The Indian government has closed the 1,800-mile border, hundreds of thousands of troops have taken up battle positions on both sides, scores of soldiers and civilians die in daily skirmishing in Punjab and Kashmir, and rockets capable of delivering nuclear warheads have been readied. The current governments in Islamabad and Delhi are client regimes of the United States; both of them back the imperialist war in the name of fighting “terrorism,” and each is jockeying for influence with Washington. Yet General Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee are connected to Islamic fundamentalist and fascistic Hindu communalist forces respectively, which are eager to trigger a conflagration. U.S. president Bush’s war on Afghanistan could ultimately send all of Central and South Asia up in flames.

U.S./NATO occupation forces could take losses from skirmishes with remnants of the Taliban in the forbidding Afghan mountains, or suffer another fiasco as in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993. The crucial force is the working class – from South Asia to Latin America to the imperialist centers in Japan, Europe and North America – to bring down the bloodthirsty capitalist rulers who are waging a terrorist war in the name of “anti-terrorism.” Their war is also directed against working and oppressed people at home, as police-state measures are enacted in countries from India and Australia to France, Germany, Canada and the United States. In the U.S. we demand the release of the more than 1,200 mainly Near Eastern detainees being held incommunicado by the government. Initially targeting immigrants, Washington’s longer-term aim is to rip up fundamental democratic rights and set the stage for an assault on unions, the left and anyone else identified as the “enemy within.” This onslaught cannot be fought by petitions and appeals to the bourgeoisie for more “humane” policies. We say: Not pacifism or nationalism, but class war against the imperialist war!

The imperialist governments and media say this is a war against terrorism. In fact, it is a terrorist war. According to a careful counting by University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold, at least 3,742 civilians were killed by U.S. aerial bombing in Afghanistan from October 7 to December 10 (“A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting”). Since then, more than 270 deaths have sent the civilian toll over 4,000.  In addition, there were the hundreds of Taliban prisoners slaughtered by U.S. bombing of the fort at Mazar-i-Sharif in late November, and hundreds more who suffocated while being transported in sealed containers. Even some liberal commentators have pointed out that these numbers considerably exceed the 3,000 people killed in the indiscriminate September 11 attack against the World Trade Center in New York. And while the military talks of supposedly unintended “collateral damage,” a Pentagon official said of an attack on a farming village, “the people there are dead because we wanted them dead” (“Who Will Count the Dead? U.S. Media Fail to Report Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan,” MediaFile, December 2001).  

Women in the “new” Afghanistan. A soldier of the “Northern Alliance” beats women lined up in head-to-toe veils (burqas) as they wait for UN food supplies. (Photo: Marco di Lauro/AP)

The imperialist governments and media say this is a war to free women from oppression. The wife of the U.S. president, Laura Bush, went on radio in mid-November using the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban as an argument for the war; she was followed by Cherie Blair, wife of the British prime minister. Yet almost simultaneously when some 200 women courageously gathered in the center of Kabul uncovered by the imprisoning veil, they were prevented from marching by the new U.S.-backed regime on the grounds of “security” (AFP, 20 November). In fact, only a small minority of women in the capital have dared to uncover their faces as the brutal oppression of women continues under the new Islamic fundamentalist rulers. News stories talk of universities being opened to women, when in fact only a few score will be admitted. And no one even talks of the right to free abortion on demand, of free childcare, of equal pay for equal work. It will take international socialist revolution to free Afghan women!

That will require the mobilization of the working class throughout Central and South Asia, led by internationalist communist parties, to overthrow the capitalist (and in the case of Afghanistan semi-feudal) rulers, achieving fundamental democratic rights and undertaking socialist tasks through workers and peasants governments, and extending the socialist revolution to the imperialist centers. This Trotskyist program of permanent revolution is sharply counterposed to the Stalinist purveyors of the myth of “socialism in one country.” In the 1980s, Trotskyists hailed the Soviet intervention against CIA-backed Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, which cut against the Stalinists’ pipedream of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. We likewise denounced the ignominious Soviet withdrawal in 1989, which set the stage for the demise of the USSR and the East European deformed workers states in 1989-91.

Today, as the capitalist governments of India and Pakistan threaten to engulf the region in nationalist war, Trotskyists stand for revolutionary defeatism on both sides. We call on Indian and Pakistani workers and soldiers to “turn the guns the other way,” against the reactionary Hindu communalist BJP government of India and the Muslim-militarist government of Pakistan. Working-class power through strike actions and other means should be mobilized against the military movements, which threaten to plunge the subcontinent into a fourth Indo-Pakistani war since the bloodbath of partition. Trotskyists call for the right of self-determination for Kashmir, annexed to India against the wishes of its predominantly Muslim population in 1948, as well as for all the oppressed peoples and nationalities of India and Pakistan. At the same time proletarian revolutionists fight uncompromisingly against the Islamic fundamentalists and Hindu chauvinists, as well as against the nationalist-populist capitalist parties. We fight for workers republics joining Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Nepal, Lanka and Tamil Eelam, etc., in a socialist federation of South Asia. 

The takeover of Kabul and Kandahar and the occupation of Afghanistan by NATO forces is not the end of the war but merely the opening shots, for U.S. imperialism has proclaimed a global war. On the eve of the bombing of Afghanistan, Vice President Cheney remarked that the “anti-terrorist” war declared by the White House “may never end. At least, not in our lifetimes.” The Republican White House rejects the former Democratic administration’s mantra of “nation-building,” which Clinton used to justify U.S. aggression from Somalia to Yugoslavia. The Bush gang more openly pushes “empire-building,” not only against “rogue states” (like Iraq or the North Korean deformed workers state), but also against its European imperialist rivals. London is content to once again station its troops in the Afghan capital, as it did a century and a half ago as it waged the “great game” with tsarist Russia for control of this pivotal region. Washington wants more: it is in the process of setting up military bases in Tadzhikstan and Kyrgyzstan, to encircle now-capitalist Russia and keep its hand on the spigot of Central Asian oil (while letting its NATO “allies” get bogged down in “peacekeeping”).  

Would-be cowboy George W. Bush would see himself sitting high in the saddle. With the “war on terrorism,” the Bush White House thought it had found just the ticket to overcome domestic unease about the illegitimacy of this president, “elected” by a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court, to cow the Democrats, regiment the population and get European and Russian leaders to toe the line. A cheap and easy “win” in Afghanistan would leave them sitting pretty. But American capitalism is not as all-powerful and stable as its cynical rulers make out. Houston oil-and-gas giant Enron, until mid-October the seventh-biggest company in the U.S. and by far the biggest corporate backer of Bush, has dramatically crumbled to dust, its stocks worth less than 1% of their former value. One of the top five accounting firms, Andersen, is on the verge of collapse. Meanwhile, Argentina, the star pupil of the International Monetary Fund, which effectively “dollarized” its economy a decade ago and followed every IMF directive to the letter, has been ruined. Swept by mass protests of the starving unemployed and the pot-banging middle class whose bank deposits have been confiscated, the country had five presidents in less than two weeks. 

For Yankee imperialism, bent on world domination, the implosion of Enron and explosion of Argentina threaten to eclipse the Afghan war. But as Lenin repeatedly emphasized, capitalism will not collapse on its own. The objective conditions for world socialist revolution are more than ripe. What is key is the “subjective factor,” forging a revolutionary party in an authentically Trotskyist Fourth International to sweep away the capitalist system which can only produce more misery, more war, racial oppression and economic crisis, from Afghanistan and South Asia to the imperialist heartland. n