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.
Faced with the apparently unexpected rapidity of events, the foreign ministers of the member countries of the UN met urgently in New York on the 12 November to call for the slowing down of military action and the acceleration of political action. Conversely America increased its pressure for the speeding up of the military offensive. Instead of trumpeting their satisfaction at the defeat of one the principle centres of ‘international terrorism’, and faced with a situation of growing anarchy, the imperialist powers in the security council of the UN made a worried appeal to the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces to “keep to their responsibilities concerning human rights” and to exercise power while “respecting people and assuring social peace”. We can only underline the sickening hypocrisy of these criminals giving lessons to the little gangsters and cliques that they supported for their own interests, when the great powers are the principle warmongers and their rivalries are directly responsible for the biggest massacres in history.
What the dramatic situation in Afghanistan shows once more is the free for all among the great powers. No consensus exists between them to eradicate international Islamic terrorism, which in any case is not the real game; nor are they interested in ‘humanitarianism’, which is only a pretext to settle their scores by bleeding populations white.
The pressure of American policy
The attack on the Twin Towers was the dreamt-for pretext for the US to apply a military policy already defined this summer by the secretary of defence Donald Rumsfield, i.e. pursuing its strategic priorities in Asia instead of Europe and the Mediterranean basin. In order to clearly affirm its authority in this part of the world, the United States has decided to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan by itself, with its own methods, only leaving a miniscule role to its best ally Britain, and excluding a country like France, which has been itching to take America’s hand in order to play its own pawns. Since September 11 Bush has constantly repeated that this war is going to be long, and that it’s not only against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The entire world is to become an ‘anti-terrorist’ hunting ground: “We have had a good beginning in Afghanistan, but much remains to be done (�) we will pursue them to the end” he declared a week after the taking of Kabul. Shortly after that he began growling menacingly towards Iraq, which many see as the next target, although a number of other candidates have been floated (Yemen, Somalia, etc).
The United States can boast today that it has won certain advantages. With the rapid victory of the ‘anti-Talibans’, it has for example silenced those European powers, headed by France, who criticised the validity of bombing and thus the whole of American strategy. By the same token it has gained a certain success with its own ‘public opinion’ by defeating the Taliban enemy with a policy of ‘zero deaths’. This has allowed Washington to better justify the dispatch of 3200 marines in addition to 500 special forces already on the spot, as well as a highly sophisticated and destructive military armada.
The imperialist free for all
However, everything is far from being a walkover for the White House. Contrary to the Gulf War where the US imposed its law on Saudi Arabia and brought to heel the western powers hostile to its intervention, the United States has clearly decided to act for itself. Looking at the different demonstrations of US force since the Gulf War, whether the spectacular defeat in Somalia in 1992, the attempt to bring American order to ex-Yugoslavia, or the massive war against Serbia in 1999 in the name of defending Kosovans, the US has been systematically opposed by their old allies of the western bloc. In such a context, in the breakthrough they have made in Afghanistan, the US policy is to ride alone. In order to block the pressure of its ‘allies’, the American government is presently supporting the Northern Alliance, until now supported more by Russia. At the same time Washington has deliberately not armed the more important but less dependable Pashtun factions closer to Pakistan.
Thus when Bush officially told the Northern Alliance on the 10 November not to enter Kabul, defence secretary Rumsfield at the same time told it to do as it wished, but “without committing exactions”. Faced with its rivals America throws oil on the fire of a chaotic situation.
The most eager bourgeoisie of all, the French, already eclipsed by the vote on the first resolution of the UN, has been able to justify its presence in Uzbekistan in the name of humanitarianism. It’s thus no accident that Paris has developed a whole press campaign on the danger of a relapse to the kind of anarchy we saw between 1992 and 1996, given the return to power of the Afghan warlords. Hubert Vedrine, French foreign minister, unblushingly addressed a threat to “those who are going to exercise power in Afghanistan”; henceforth they would be “under the vigilant gaze of the international community”. The French media, like the media in most of the western countries, who yesterday couldn’t find words bad enough to denounce the Taliban, has suddenly discovered their virtues since they at least established a state and a stable social situation. Another example of the vileness of the bourgeois class, whose truths vary according to its immediate interests.
The French army, presently isolated, rejected by the American pack leader, is thus impotent, back to square one, at the Uzbekistan border, whose head of state, supported by the United States, is dragging things out while waiting to draw profit from his part of the Afghan cake.
The consensus between the great powers is so uncertain that Great Britain itself, despite being in the first rank since the first day of the conflict, has decided “not to put its forces in place without the agreement of the United States and a clear understanding of what our troops will do in the framework of the military coalition”, and has stood down thousands of troops who were expected to be deployed. In fact, the British bourgeoisie, despite Blair’s declarations of allegiance, has been excluded by Bush from all the decisions taken about Afghanistan for the past two months (see the accompanying article in this issue).
The disappointment of France and Great Britain indicates the policy of the United States in this conflict: to elicit the ‘solidarity’ of its old cold war allies toward its own strategic vision, but to deprive them of any benefit that they might expect from this solidarity. Obviously the European powers who announced their support for operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ weren’t doing it to win Bush’s smile but because it was the only means of being there when the spoils were shared out. The little part of the cake that Blair or Chirac were hoping for was to deploy their troops on the spot. This would prevent the American godfather from enjoying the monopoly of military presence in this part of the world, which in turn would leave its hands entirely free to pursue its own exclusive interests. But Bush has apparently decided not to even grant them these crumbs. The only solidarity that the American gangster appreciates from his second strings is obedience.
Capitalism’s only perspective is chaos
The Bonn conference which began on 26 November between Europe and the different Afghan factions has the avowed aim of establishing a “multi-ethnic regime representing the diversity of the country”. In reality it is only an episode in the free for all now reigning in Afghanistan. But this conference is above all part of the wider free for all amongst the great powers who pretend to have a political solution for Afghanistan.
It is also significant that this conference is being held in Germany and not in Great Britain or in France who have been until now the most active in the military operation (even if modestly). By giving Germany the diplomatic prestige of organising this conference, the biggest power is trying to play its allies off against each other.
Not only is the Afghan powder-keg becoming one of the new zones of confrontation between the great powers, a major stake of the imperialist balance of forces in the period to come; it is also extending capitalist chaos further to the east. Afghanistan has always represented a key region between the Middle and Far East, and between three large countries, Russia, China and India, a region which has always been a stake between the eastern and western blocs during the cold war. Today the conflicts within Afghanistan are much more likely to spread to the neighbouring region. Thus the countries to the north, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, are trying to play off Russia and the United States. Pakistan’s rival factions, already wound up in the preceding period of American intervention, are going to tear into each other more than ever, while the loss of Islamabad’s Taliban ally will make it all the more vulnerable at the geo-strategic level. Meanwhile India is being caught between the pressure of the US and China, which has generously supplied its atomic capability to India’s arch-rival, Pakistan. The imperialist pretensions of India are thus pushing it to oppose the military presence of the US in a region where it wants to be one of the preponderant powers.
The future announced by the circling of all these vultures is sombre indeed. Once again they are going to sow death and chaos in the name of peace, humanity, and civilisation �in reality for the needs of a dying social system.
KW, 24 /11/01.
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.
The Northern Alliance is the same clique which plunged the country into chaos after the defeat of the USSR. Its rule of rape and pillage resulted in many welcoming the Taliban as a better alternative. And already it has shown its real nature very clearly: pogroms against ‘foreign’ Taliban, the massacre of 500 prisoners after the so-called revolt at Marzer e-Sharif (aided and abetted by US air attacks), the execution of 150 prisoners at Takteh Pol, near Kandahar for ‘refusing to surrender’.
And yet we are being sold the line that the Taliban (supported by the US when it first came to power) was, along with bin Laden’s al-Qaida group, the real cause of the suffering of the Afghanistan population, the real cause of the present war - and that now at last the country can look forward to peace and reconstruction.
Lies! In Afghanistan, as in the Middle East, in Kosovo, in all the other so-called ‘humanitarian wars’, the civil population has simply been held hostage by the imperialist rivalries between different bourgeois states and gangs. The barbarism of war isn’t caused by a particular faction of world capital, but by world capital as a whole.
The defeat of the Taliban will bring no prospect of peace either in the short or the long term. On the contrary, ethnic conflicts are going to sharpen, further destabilising both Afghanistan and the region around it. The real perspective is one of growing chaos, whatever the ‘solutions’ cooked up by the UN or by the various imperialist powers, local or global. All of them, including the USA’s most ‘loyal’ ally, Britain, are trying to get a foothold in the country under the guise of ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘humanitarian aid’, and so prevent the US from achieving total and undisputed control of this key strategic region at the crossroads of Asia and the Middle East. The end of the present phase of the conflict will only whet the appetites of the competing imperialist sharks and thus prepare the ground for further competition and conflict.
War in the name of peace
War in the name of peace - it’s nothing new. The ruling class has been singing the same refrain since the beginning of the 20th century. The first world war was the ‘war to end war’. Balance sheet: 20 million dead. The second world war was fought in the name of democracy against fascism, civilisation against barbarism. Balance sheet: 60 million dead. Today, in the name of another noble cause, the ‘fight against terrorism’, capitalist civilisation has carried out new massacres that in turn will provoke even bigger massacres in the future, not only in Afghanistan, but throughout the entire region. Already the US is looking for the next target on its ‘anti-terrorist’ hit list, the current favourite being Iraq.
Peace is impossible in decadent capitalism. War has become the way of life of this doomed and dying system. Since the first world war, capitalism has demonstrated over and over again that it has exhausted all possibilities for peaceful expansion. At that point it entered into a permanent crisis of overproduction, and so into a state of permanent self-cannibalisation, acted out through the endless military rivalries of the various nation states, large or small. The more capitalism sinks into its economic contradictions, the more it rots on its feet, the more wars will multiply, revealing the utter bankruptcy of a system which has nothing further to offer humanity.
The only way to put an end to this hellish spiral is to put an end to capitalism before it destroys the planet. And this can only happen if the working class develops its struggles against the effects of the economic crisis, against poverty and unemployment, against the intensification of exploitation; if it comes to understand the intimate connection between war and the crisis of capitalism; if it reaffirms its own historic perspective, its political programme: the replacement of capitalism with a society without classes, frontiers and nations, a society based on the satisfaction of human needs and not on exploitation, competition, and the hunt for profit. Only in such a society can there be real and lasting peace on Earth. WR 1/12/01
From the very first moments, American bourgeois propaganda has likened the 11 September attack on the World Trade Center to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941. This comparison is laden with considerable psychological, historical and political impact, since it was Pearl Harbor that marked American imperialism’s direct entry into the Second World War. Like all bourgeois ideological myths, whatever the elements of truth that offer superficial credibility, this propaganda barrage is laced with half-truths, lies, and self-serving distortion. But this is no surprise. The politics of the bourgeoisie as a class are based on lies, deception, manipulation, and maneuver. This is particularly true when it comes to the difficult task of mobilizing society for all out war in modern times. There is considerable evidence that the bourgeoisie was not taken by surprise by the attacks in either case, that the bourgeoisie cynically welcomed the massive death toll in both cases for the purposes of political expediency in regard to implementation of its imperialist war aims, and other long range political objectives.
The machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie
All too often, when the ICC denounces the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, our critics accuse of us of lapsing into a conspiratorial view of history. However their incomprehension in this regard is not just a misunderstanding of our analysis, but � even worse � falls prey to the ideological claptrap of bourgeois apologists in the media and academia whose job it is to denigrate as irrational conspiracy theorists those who try to ascertain the patterns and processes within bourgeois political, economic and social life. However, it is not even controversial to assert that lies, terror, coercion, double-dealing, corruption, plots and political assassination have been the stock in trade of exploitative ruling classes throughout history, whether in the ancient world, feudalism or modern capitalism. Lying and manipulation, a mechanism employed by all preceding exploiting classes, have become central characteristics of the political mode of functioning of the modern bourgeoisie, which, utilizing the tremendous tools of social control available to it under the conditions of state capitalism, has taken machiavellianism to a qualitatively higher stage.
This is not to say all events in contemporary society are necessarily predetermined by the secret scheming of a small circle of capitalist leaders. But even with an incomplete consciousness, the bourgeoisie is more than capable of formulating strategy and tactics, and using the totalitarian control mechanisms of state capitalism to implement them. To turn a blind eye to this aspect of the ruling class offensive to control society is irresponsible and plays into the hands of our class enemies.
Machiavellianism of the American ruling class at Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor offers an excellent example of bourgeois machiavellianism at work. We have the benefit of more than half of century of historical research, and a number of military and opposition party-controlled investigations to draw on. According to President Roosevelt, 7 December 1941 was “a day that will live in infamy,” an example of Japanese treachery. It was used as a means to mobilize public opinion for war in 1941, and is still portrayed in the same way in the capitalist media, schoolbooks and popular culture. Nevertheless, considerable historical evidence demonstrates that the Japanese attack was consciously provoked by American policy. The attack did not come as a surprise, and the Roosevelt administration made a conscious decision to permit the attack both to occur and to sustain significant losses of life and naval hardware, as a pretext to secure America’s entry into the Second World War. A number of books and considerable material on the Internet have been published on this history. Here we will only review the highlights just to illustrate the operational aspects of bourgeois machiavellianism.
In 1941, the Roosevelt administration was anxious to enter the war against Germany. However, despite the fact that the American working class was firmly trapped in the grip of a trade union apparatus (in which the Stalinist party played a significant role) that had been imposed under state authority to control the class struggle in all key industries; and despite the fact that the working class was imbued with the ideology of anti-fascism, the American bourgeoisie still faced strong opposition to war within the population, not only within the working class, but even within the bourgeoisie itself. Public opinion polls showed 60% opposed to entering the war before Pearl Harbor, and the America First campaign and other isolationist groups had considerable support within the bourgeoisie. The decision to impose an oil embargo against Japan and the transfer of the Pacific fleet from the West Coast of the US to a more exposed position in Hawaii served to provide motive and opportunity for Japan to fire the first shots against the US, and thereby provide the pretext for direct American intervention in the imperialist war. As presidential advisor Harold Ickes put it in a June 1941 memo, “There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way.” In November 1941, Secretary of War Stimson wrote about the plan to “maneuver them (Japan) into the position of firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves.”
The report of the Army Pearl Harbor Board (October 20, 1944) described this conscious decision to sacrifice lives and equipment at Pearl Harbor, concluding that during “the fateful period between November 27 and December 6, 1941 numerous pieces of information came to our State, War and Navy Departments in all of their top ranks indicating precisely the intentions of the Japanese including the probable exact hour and date of the attack.” This information included:
� US intelligence sources learned on November 24th that “Japanese offensive military operations” had been set.
� On November 26, “specific evidence of the Japanese intentions to wage offensive war against Great Britain and the United States” were obtained by US intelligence.
� “A concentration of units of the Japanese fleet at an unknown port ready for offensive action” was also reported on November 26.
� On December 1, “definite information came from three independent sources that Japan was going to attack Great Britain and the United States, but would maintain peace with Russia.”
� On December 3, “the culmination of this complete revelation of the Japanese intentions as to war and the attack came� with information that Japanese were destroying their codes and code machines. This was construed�as meaning immediate war.”
This intelligence information was given to the highest-ranking officials in the War and State Departments, and shared with the White House, where Roosevelt personally received twice-daily briefings on intercepted Japanese messages. Despite the desperate urgings of intelligence officers to send a “war warning” to military commanders in Hawaii to prepare for imminent attack, the civilian and military brass decided against doing so, and instead sent what the board termed “an innocuous” message.
This evidence of prior knowledge of the Japanese attack was confirmed in numerous sources, including journalists and memoirs of participants. For example, a United Press dispatch published in the New York Times on December 8, included the following under the subhead ‘Attack Was Expected’:
“It now is possible to reveal that the United States forces here had known for a week that the attack was coming and they were not caught unprepared.”
In a 1944 interview, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, revealed that “December 7 was far from the shock it proved to be to the country in general. We had expected something of the sort for a long time.” On June 20 1944, British Cabinet Minister Sir Oliver Lyttelton told the American Chamber of Commerce, “Japan was provoked into attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that America was forced into the war. Everyone knows where American sympathies were. It is incorrect to say that America was ever truly neutral even before America came into the war on a fighting basis.” Winston Churchill confirmed the duplicity of the American government rulers in the Pearl Harbor attack in this passage from his Grand Alliance:
“The President and his trusted friends had long realized the grave risks of United States neutrality in the war against Hitler and what he stood for, and had writhed under the restraints of a Congress whose House of Representatives had a few months before passed by only a single vote the necessary renewal of compulsory military service, without which their Army would have been almost disbanded in the midst of the world convulsion. Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and, as a link between them all, Harry Hopkins, had but one mind... A Japanese attack upon the United States was a vast simplification of their problems and their duty. How can we wonder that they regarded the actual form of the attack, or even its scale, as incomparably less important than the fact that the whole American nation would be united for its own safety in a righteous cause as never before?”
Roosevelt may not have anticipated the extent of the damage and casualties that the Japanese would inflict at Pearl Harbor, but he was clearly prepared to sacrifice American ships and lives, in order to arouse the population to rage, and to war.
In the second part of this article we will examine evidence for similar machiavellian intrigues around the Twin Towers horror.
JG, 1/12/01.
In WR 249 we reported the return of the ‘No War But The Class War’ group in response to the ‘war on terrorism’ and the first attacks on Afghanistan. As the basis of the group is opposition to war on a class basis, the ICC thinks that its re-appearance is positive and our militants have participated in the majority of NWBTCW’s London meetings. As in its previous manifestations NWBTCW contains all sorts of people. Some call themselves anarchists, some anti-capitalists, some communists and some who would resent any label being put on their views. This means there are a number of different approaches to the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement, to activism, and to political discussion. One thing that is shared by all NWBTCW participants is a rejection of the leftist campaign of the Stop The War coalition. In response Workers Power have attacked NWBTCW - at a meeting, in their November paper and in on-line discussion.
In the NWBTCW leaflet distributed at the 18 November Stop The War demonstration there is opposition to the leftist ideology of ‘anti-imperialism’ as it means giving support to capitalist regimes such as that of the Taliban, and leads into an anti-Americanism which writes off an important part of the working class. As the leaflet says: “That the left performs such a counter-revolutionary role does not surprise us - they are after all the left wing of capital”.
“This is sheer nonsense” says Workers Power. Their position is one of defending Afghanistan “without giving any political support to the Taliban”. This is what Trotskyists call ‘military support’, where workers and poor peasants are told they should die in the service of capitalism, without supporting the capitalists. The idea of ‘military support’ not being ‘political support’ is a completely false distinction in the face of the militarised class rule of the bourgeoisie. No faction of the ruling class is going to be upset that WP have withheld their ‘political’ support, just as long as workers are prepared to lose their lives in defence of their exploiters and oppressors. ‘Military support’ means military discipline against workers who struggle to defend their own interests. Workers Power preaches the unity of the classes for “a just struggle” in Afghanistan, against the class war on capitalism.
And the same applies in Britain. NWBTCW denounces the Stop the War coalition as a “cross-class alliance with religious leaders, MPs and other enemies of the working class”. WP thinks this is “startling” as they consider that it’s not necessary to be against capitalism to “defeat the government’s war effort”. But why do capitalism’s governments go to war? It’s in defence of their class interests. And it’s only by the working class becoming a conscious organised force to destroy the capitalist system that the imperialist war drive will finally be extinguished.
Workers Power condemns “the ridiculous alternative ... that the struggle against the war and the struggle against capitalism are one”. They attribute this view to ‘anarchism’, but in reality it is the view of marxism. In the First World War revolutionaries fought for the working class to turn the imperialist war into a civil war against the bourgeoisie - in contrast to the social democrats and anarchists who recruited for the war effort. In the Second World War revolutionaries defended the same perspective - in contrast to the Stalinists, Trotskyists, anarchists and anti-fascists who participated in the war drive of the Allied imperialisms. Today, revolutionaries are enthusiastic when people come together to discuss working class opposition to war and it’s only right that the Trotskyists of Workers Power should attack these efforts.
Car, 30/11/01.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/afghanistan
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/afghanistan
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/56/middle-east-and-caucasus
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/trotskyism
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle