Afghanistan

The fact that such an august publication as the Economist is posing such questions about the Afghan war is clear evidence that the official excuses for this military adventure are wearing very thin.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 there has been no let up in the effects of the conflict on the local population, caught between invading western armies, feuding warlords and the Taliban. While the media fawn on ‘our hero’ Prince Harry, leading US generals admit that the mission is on the verge of failure, claiming that Karzai’s Kabul government only controls 30% of the country.

The working class in Britain is daily faced with its sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and friends in the armed forces being sucked ever deeper in to what appears to be a growing series of wars. The chaos in Iraq is rejoined by the revival of conflict and casualties in Afghanistan, although the full extent of the victims of war is deliberately hidden by the state, which does not report the number of injured.

The deployment of 3300 British troops, mainly from the 16th Air Assault Brigade, in the southern Helmand province of Afghanistan has been given the usual government and media spin. They will supposedly bring the resurgent Taliban under control, enforce law and order, and reduce opium production... This is the same government that told us everything was going to be fine in Iraq after the fall of Saddam.

The anti-terrorist crusade that the American ruling class has been carrying out for the past 6 months has been a considerable success.

The USA has installed its military headquarters at the heart of a new strategic region, Central Asia, not only by directly occupying the former military bases of the former USSR republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan, but also, more recently, by sending US military advisers to Georgia. This country, still run by Gorbachev’s former minister Shevardnaze, is thus totally outside of Russia’s control at the precise moment when Russia had envisaged intervening in Georgia, which has been accused of acting as a base for ‘Chechen terrorists’. We are also beginning to see America’s attempts to take control of Yemen, which occupies a key position between the African and Asian continents via the Gulf of Aden which links the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

The Taliban regime has been toppled. The followers of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden have been driven from power in most of Afghanistan. We were told that the battle between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban would be long and hard, in particular for Kabul. But the Taliban have retreated without a real confrontation, crushed under American bombing, and are now under threat in their last stronghold in the region of Kandahar.

Every day there’s another voice added to the chorus of criticisms of the bombing of Afghanistan. Not only is there CND, the Stop The War coalition, various MPs and left-wingers, but also major newspapers. “THIS WAR IS A FRAUD” read the front page of the Mirror (29/10/1). The Guardian has queried the objectives of military action, asked what the bombing has achieved so far, and if food deliveries can be increased, maybe with a pause in the bombing. There is opposition to the use of cluster bombs, calls for a greater role for the UN and concern for ‘innocent victims’ and ‘non-military targets’ such as hospitals, old peoples’ homes, Red Cross warehouses and UN facilities.

With the ‘liberation’ of Kabul, Kunduz and other Afghan cities, the ruling class is trying to paint the war in new colours. We are now being told that, thanks to American bombs, we can celebrate the fall of the Taliban regime and the arrival of Northern Alliance troops in these cities. The systematic bombing of Afghanistan is supposed to be a small price compared to the benefits obtained: women can throw off the burka (although very few have actually done so) and men can cut their beards and go to the pictures. This is the compensation the population is offered for the hundreds, perhaps thousands of ‘collateral’ deaths, the destruction of homes and of the already collapsing infrastructure, the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands who still face a winter of misery and starvation not to mention the political oppression that will undoubtedly be imposed upon them by the new gang that has taken over.

In the name of ‘fighting terrorism’, a deluge of bombs is raining on the impoverished population of Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of men, women and children are fleeing the horror, but what awaits them at the end of their flight is more horror: a beast-like existence in refugee camps, a slow death from hunger, cold and disease as winter sets in.

The ruthless slaughter of thousands of civilians in New York and Washington, the majority of them workers, in the very heart of the USA, of capitalism's number one economic and military machine, was not only an abominable war crime. It also marks a giant step in the decomposition of the existing social order.

Resolution on the international situationHome

The international situation in the year 2000 confirms the tendency, already analysed by the ICC at the beginning of the last decade, for a gap to open up between a growing open crisis of the decadent capitalist economy, and an abrupt acceleration of imperialist antagonisms on the one hand and a retreat in class struggle and class consciousness on the other.

Amid the roar of imperialist savagery in Afghanistan, tiny groups of internationalists have proclaimed their rejection of all the contending imperialisms, denounced any illusion in pacifying capitalism or support for any agencies with this objective, and called for the development of class struggle that alone can overthrow the world wide capitalist system, the mainspring of imperialist war.