Defeat U.S. War on Afghanistan and Iraq!

December 2009
Imperialist Chief Obama: Deeper Into the Quagmire

U.S. troops on patrol in Helmand province,
Afghanistan, February 2009.
(Photo: Reuters)
Break with the Democrats – For Workers Strikes
Against the War!
On December 1, President Barack Obama officially announced a massive
escalation of the U.S. war on Afghanistan. The 30,000 troops to be
dispatched will bring U.S. forces in the country to 100,000, tripling
the number of American military personnel there since Obama took office
last January. Add in 36,000 NATO and other “coalition” troops and more
than 100,000 “contractors” employed by the U.S. Beyond the sheer
numbers, this move marks a decision by Washington to continue the
colonial occupation of Afghanistan indefinitely, and with it the bloody
slaughter of the Afghan people. Obama’s claim that he would “begin the
transfer” of U.S. forces by mid-2011 was just sucker bait for gullible
liberals, and a useless “signal” to the terminally corrupt and
ineffectual Afghan puppet government. Key was his vow a couple of days
earlier that he would “finish the job” in Afghanistan. Since the
feckless Afghan “army” will not be battle-ready any time soon, if ever,
what this means is that the U.S. will be bogged down in an Afghan
quagmire, the dreaded “Q-word” that the bourgeois media didn’t dare
utter.
“Afghanistan Is Now Obama’s War,” proclaimed the media from New York
to London to Mumbai. The U.S. president certainly “owns” the
Afghanistan war, as well as the ongoing war/occupation in Iraq. But
that has been true since Day One of his administration. Immediately
after the new imperialist commander in chief took office, U.S. troops
killed 16 villagers in Afghanistan, U.S. Predator aircraft fired
missiles killing 15 in Pakistan, and U.S. Special Forces executed a
couple in Kirkuk, Iraq in front of their daughter. Afghanistan has been
the Democrats’ war since the moment it was launched, in
September 2001, when the U.S. Senate voted 98-0 and the House of
Representatives voted 420-1 to authorize then-president George W. Bush
“to use all necessary and appropriate force” against anyone he held
responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. And Democrats voted repeatedly to fund the war on Iraq,
even after they won a majority in both houses of Congress in 2006. As
we have repeatedly stressed, the war on Afghanistan and Iraq is a bipartisan
imperialist war.
Obama’s long-awaited speech announcing the escalation and his
“strategy” for the war, held before 4,000 West Point cadets and 40.8
million television viewers, was by every measure a dud. Pundits panned
it, conservatives slammed it, opponents of the war damned it. But it’s
not about a speech, or Obama’s extended “policy review,” which
Republicans portrayed as gutlessness or dithering. It’s about a war
that even after eight year the U.S. “superpower” can’t get a handle on.
Already in February, the new president dispatched an additional 21,000
troops to Afghanistan, later increased to 30,000+, effectively doubling
the size of the U.S. expeditionary force there. Yet it didn’t make a
dent in the pace of attacks by the Taliban and other insurgent forces,
which tripled from February to August. Even more worrisome to
Washington, the areas under effective insurgent control have expanded
from 20 percent to 40 percent of Afghanistan over the past two years.
Last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,
told an audience of Marines at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina
straight-out, “We are not winning, which means we are losing” (London Telegraph,
10 December).
Imperialist commander
in chief Barack Obama announces
escalation of war on Afghanistan at West Point military academy,
December 1. (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP)
So now we have the spectacle of Obama receiving the Nobel “peace”
prize (named after the Swedish arms manufacturer and inventor of
dynamite!) and delivering his ridiculous “war is peace” speech while
escalating the war on Afghanistan, as well as attacks on Pakistan.
Though it was not mentioned at West Point, the U.S. president
reportedly “signed off on a plan by the Central Intelligence Agency to
expand C.I.A. activities in Pakistan” (New York Times, 2
December). This includes extending missile strikes against Al Qaeda and
Taliban “targets” launched from Predator and Reaper drone aircraft,
resuming attacks by special operations forces across the border from
Afghanistan and from secret bases inside Pakistan, and stepping up
clandestine activity by “contractors” such as the infamous Blackwater
mercenaries (see Jeremy Scahill, “The Secret US War in Pakistan,” The
Nation, 21 December). Now U.S. generals want to strike in the
rebellious province of Baluchistan. This covert aggression against a
supposed ally has provoked massive opposition. The London Guardian
(2 December) reported: “Strikes that have killed at least 750 people in
the past two years have provoked public hostility. Any move into
Balochistan is likely to spark a fierce backlash.”
The liberal Democrat in the White House is no less an imperialist
warmonger than his Republican predecessor. Under Obama, the notorious
torture prison at Bagram air base north of Kabul continues to operate,
the mercenary death squads are expanding, and the Air Force is still
bombing wedding parties. From the moment his commander in Afghanistan,
General Stanley McChrystal, demanded a big increase in U.S. forces, and
then leaked his report to the press, there wasn’t the slightest chance
that Obama would turn down the military. He has to resort to
double-talk to sell this policy to the antiwar base that elected him
(in a Gallup poll the week before his talk, 57 percent of Democrats
favored reducing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and fully
half now think the U.S. was wrong to invade the country in 2001). He
also needs to assuage Democratic Congressmen up for re-election in
2010, many of whom could be defeated simply if antiwar Democrats stay
home. The U.S. population as a whole is increasingly fed up with the
war. A September 2009 Pew Research Center poll showed 43 percent
favored withdrawal from Afghanistan, and 49 percent thought the U.S.
should “mind its own business” internationally, higher even than the 41
percent who took that view in the wake of the defeat in Vietnam.
Stuck with an unpopular, losing war, in his West Point speech, Obama
tried to soft-soap the escalation with talk of a “transfer” of security
to Afghan forces in July 2011. He immediately qualified this, saying
the 2011 date is only a “beginning” and it would depend on “conditions
on the ground.” But this didn’t please Republicans and military
hardliners, so in the next few days, officials emphasized over and over
that there would be no pullout. General McChrystal declared in Kabul
that the timeline “is not an absolute.” NATO secretary general Anders
Fogh Rasmussen stated in Brussels, “Transition doesn’t mean exit.” And
on Sunday TV talk shows, there was a chorus from Obama administration
officials. General James Jones, Obama’s National Security Advisor said,
“We’re going to be in the region for a long time.” War secretary Robert
Gates said that with 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan in mid-2011,
“some handful, or some small number, or whatever the conditions permit,
will begin to withdraw at that time.” And Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton vowed, “We’re not going to be walking away from Afghanistan
again.”
So much for the illusion of the Democratic administration
voluntarily pulling out of Afghanistan. To be sure, Obama said from the
outset that he was not opposed to all U.S. wars, just “dumb wars” that
the U.S. was bound to lose. During the 2008 election campaign he said
he would increase U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and his advisors made it
clear they intended to leave 50,000-plus U.S. forces in Iraq
indefinitely. So anyone who thought Obama was an antiwar candidate fell
for the hype about “hope” and “change” and didn’t read the fine print.
The Democrats just thought that Bush and his dark-side vice-president
Dick Cheney royally screwed things up with their stupidity, and the
Dems could “do better.” At her Senate confirmation hearings as
secretary of state, Clinton said the new administration would use
“smart power” in diplomacy. (Like in Honduras, where the U.S. de facto
supported the coup-makers?) As we wrote earlier this year about the
Obama presidency:

“But there’s dumb ... and dumber. Bush’s invasion and occupation
of Iraq has drained U.S. military and economic strength in a quest for
world domination. Obama’s vow to escalate the war in Afghanistan,
spread over a far larger, mountainous territory, and at the same time
to attack Pakistan, with eight times the population and the only
Islamic country with nuclear weapons to boot, could set off a chain
reaction that would send the entire region up in flames.”
– “Obama
Presidency: U.S. Imperialism Tries a Makeover,” The
Internationalist no. 28, February 2009


When Obama was elected – the first black president in the history of
the United States, a nation founded on chattel slavery – tremendous
hopes were placed in him by wide sectors of the population: African
Americans, youth, workers and millions who were fed up with eight years
of George W. Bush. If many thought they were voting to put an end to
the debilitating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and withdraw U.S. troops,
this illusion was partly fostered by the “antiwar movement” that
deliberately called off national peace marches in order not to
embarrass the Democratic Party candidate. Also, most Democrats
considered Afghanistan the “good war” as opposed to “Bush’s war” in
Iraq, where they wanted to cut U.S. losses and head for the exit. Now
that the U.S. is losing the war in Afghanistan and is mired in by far
the worst economic crisis in three-quarters of a century, Obama
responds ... by digging in and escalating. This has left many of his
supporters feeling angry and betrayed. But their anger will go nowhere
so long as the mass of working people and antiwar activists remain tied
to the Democratic Party.
Internationalist
contingent at December 2 Times Square New York
City protest over U.S. escalation of war on Afghanistan.
(Internationalist photo)
The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International
did not support Democrat Barack Obama against Republican John McCain.
We warned that on most fundamental issues – including the war, the
bailout of Wall Street banks, education “reform” and other questions –
the positions of the two capitalist contenders were barely
distinguishable, if not identical. While much of the left made
“social-patriotic” appeals to “bring the troops home” (and even more
explicitly to “support the troops” by “bringing them home”), ever since
September 2001 we called to defeat the imperialist war on
Afghanistan, and later Iraq, while defending the Afghan and Iraqi
peoples under U.S. attack. Rather than forming “antiwar” coalitions
with bourgeois politicians, we called to break with the Democrats
and for workers strikes against the war. Even at protests
following Obama’s announcement of more troops to Afghanistan,
organizers carefully avoided any signs mentioning the president by
name. Our Internationalist contingent, in contrast, carried signs
including, “Hey Obama, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today? Defeat
Imperialist Slaughter in Afghanistan, Iraq.”
Imperialism is not a policy that can be discarded at will but a
system that continuously generates poverty, racism and war. Any
capitalist politician, pro-war or “antiwar,” will perpetuate it,
whatever rhetoric they may spout on the campaign trail. The U.S. will
withdraw from the Mideast only if it is forced out, by losses on the
battlefield and class struggle “at home.” At bottom, the war is not
over Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, Al Qaeda or oil
pipelines – it is a war for world domination. We can only put an end to
the endless U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Colombia,
Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Korea and elsewhere if we smash imperialism
through international socialist revolution.
U.S. Sinking in the Afghan Quagmire
In all the analysis in the media of Obama’s Afghanistan surge there
has been hardly any mention of the terrible toll the U.S. war and
occupation is taking on the Afghan population. The killing of civilians
in air strikes seldom makes it into the press unless it is a really big
massacre, like last May 5, when over 125 villagers were killed in a
bombing raid. In such cases U.S. military spokesmen typically deny
civilian casualties for a few days, then say their reports were “thinly
sourced” (i.e., invented), and eventually own up to a small fraction of
the dead, claiming the rest were “militants” and “extremists,” or were
supposedly killed by the Taliban. The regular slaughter of smaller
numbers, such as the killing of nine civilians (including several
children) in Helmand province on November 5, seldom makes it into the
press, in that case only because the villagers took the bodies to the
provincial capital to show before burying them. According to official
(United Nations) statistics, over 2,000 civilians were killed in
Afghanistan from January to October, well ahead of last year’s toll.
But the U.N. is just an appendage of the U.S./NATO “coalition” military
and the actual numbers are undoubtedly far higher.
Afghans overwhelmingly oppose the war and the occupation, although
no one asked their permission. In keeping with the modern-day
imperialists’ voracious appetite for “metrics,” all sorts of agencies
from the International Red Cross to the U.S. Republican Party are
continually conducting “opinion surveys” in Afghanistan. This is absurd
to begin with in a country where the bulk of the population lives in
isolated rural areas, and in wartime when respondents will say what
they think the people with the guns behind the surveyors want to hear.
But in one of the few polls that even asked about the presence of
foreign troops, an ABC survey in December 2008, barely a third said
opinions toward the “coalition” forces were generally positive in their
area, only 18 percent wanted more U.S./NATO troops, and 77 percent
wanted an end to the air strikes. There have also been numerous
demonstrations against the occupiers, such as in Kabul just this past
December 9, when thousands of students blocked the Kabul-Jalalabad
highway protesting the killing in nearby Laghman province. Did you read
about that in the newspapers or see it on TV? No you didn’t, because
the “free but responsible” imperialist press censors it.
Afghan puppet
president Hamid Karzai and U.S. puppet mistress
Hillary Clinton in Kabul, November 2009. (Photo: U.S. embassy)
What the imperialist media and the U.S. government are
concerned about is that “the central government of President Hamid
Karzai ... is widely seen here as corrupt and incompetent,” in the
words of a London Guardian (2 December) report from
Kabul. Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts questioned
sending more troops “defending a government that is corrupt and
incompetent.” Both Obama and Clinton reportedly lectured Karzai on the
need to fight corruption. But whoever heard of a puppet government that
wasn’t corrupt? The regimes of Ngo Dinh Diem or Nguyen Van Thieu, heads
of the Saigon “government” during the U.S. war on Vietnam, were hardly
corruption-free. Even Nazi collaborator puppet “governments” in East
Europe were rife with corruption. And why not? The politicians in
Afghanistan and Iraq who serve as a quislings for the colonial
occupiers are traitors who would face summary justice at the hands of
any self-respecting nationalist government. So naturally, if they act
as front men, their first question is “what’s in it for me?” Corruption
is the grease that makes it possible for such criminal regimes to
function at all. The Americans will never get an uncorrupt Afghan
puppet.
A competent corrupt regime is another matter. That’s the
kind of dictators the U.S. typically looks for in “Third World”
countries: the Shah of Iran, Pinochet in Chile (who stole millions from
the state treasury, while murdering tens of thousands of leftists), the
air force officer turned hard-line politician Nguyen Cao Ky in South
Vietnam (who ran the opium trade on CIA Air America planes). But
Washington has a problem of even getting that in Afghanistan today. To
have a military dictatorship, you have to have a military to provide
the bureaucratic framework for bonapartist rule. But Afghanistan
doesn’t. The Afghan army dissolved when the former Soviet-backed
government fell in 1992. It was replaced by the warlords of the
Northern Alliance who had been bankrolled by the U.S. A few years later
they, in turn, were toppled by bands of Taliban, a creation of the
Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Unlike
in Iraq – where after initially cashiering Saddam Hussein’s entire
officer corps, the U.S. turned around and rebuilt the Iraqi army – in
Afghanistan they are starting from scratch. It will take some years to
turn the warlords’ private militias into a disciplined national army.
The U.S. has no intention of exiting Afghanistan, zero. It might
like to mask its domination with a semi-colonial protectorate like the
Hashemite monarchy Britain installed in power in Iraq in 1920, which
stayed in power until 1958 while the British ran things from their air
force bases. (This is what Washington has in mind for Iraq today.) But
however they try to disguise it, the Obama administration is going to
be occupying Afghanistan for years – five or ten minimum – unless
it is driven out first. That time frame is what British and German
ministers have admitted to when questioned in Parliament and the
Bundestag, and that’s more or less what General David Petraeus,
commander of the Central Command (covering Iraq and Afghanistan), told
the U.S. Congress on December 9. And it will cost, a lot: Petraeus
cited the figure of $10 billion a year to fund an Afghan army; Obama
quoted $30 billion a year as the price tag for his “surge” of 30,000
more troops. The official cost of U.S. operations in Afghanistan this
year will be $100 billion, or a million bucks for each of the 100,000
U.S. troops scheduled to be “in country” by July. And the bill isn’t
getting any smaller any time soon.
Fresh graves of
villagers killed in May 5 U.S. air strike in
Farah province, western Afghanistan, where more than 125 were killed,
including many women and children. (Photo: AP)
For now, the U.S. and 42 other members of the military “coalition”
(formally known as the International Security Assistance Forces [ISAF])
that is occupying Afghanistan are stuck in a war that even they admit
they are losing. In his August 30 Initial Assessment report as ISAF
commander requesting a massive increase in U.S. forces, General
McChrystal said bluntly:

“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in
the near-term (next 12 months) – while Afghan security capacity matures
– risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer
possible.... [T]he overall situation is deteriorating despite
considerable effort by ISAF. The threat has grown steadily but subtly,
and unchecked by commensurate counter-action, its severity now
surpasses the capabilities of the current strategy. We cannot succeed
simply by trying harder....”


“Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer
conflict, greater casualties, higher overall costs, and ultimately, a
critical loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are
likely to result in mission failure....


“The insurgents control or contest a significant portion of the
country, although it is difficult to assess precisely how much due to a
lack of ISAF presence. ... REDACTED”

The McChrystal report states that the prisons have been turned into
Taliban-recruiting centers, and that the Taliban have displaced the
Kabul government in many areas:

“The QST [Taliban operating out of Quetta, Pakistan] has a
governing structure in Afghanistan under the rubric of the Islamic
Emirate of Afghanistan. They appoint shadow governors for most
provinces, review their performance, and replace them periodically.
They establish a body to receive complaints against the own ‘officials’
and to act on them. They install ‘shari’a’ courts to deliver swift and
enforced justice in contested and controlled areas. They levy taxes and
conscript fighters and laborers. They claim to provide security against
a corrupt government, ISAF forces, criminality, and local power
brokers.”

No doubt the “redacted” parts of the report are even more explicit.
A series of maps and charts published by Andrew Cordesman of the Center
for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “The Uncertain Metrics
of the Afghan War” (3 December) include a 2008 U.N. “accessibility map”
showing almost the entire southern 40 percent of Afghanistan as a
“no-go area” of “extreme risk/hostile environment” for aid workers.
Other maps show the southern 60 percent of the country as areas “with
permanent Taliban presence,” and much of the east as “extreme risk” as
well. And now the Taliban control areas in the north around Kunduz.
Obama’s “Strategy”: Looking for the “Good Taliban”
So Obama gave McChrystal what he asked for: the 30,000 troops, with
a few thousand more from the U.S.’ “allies” (in several cases paid for
by the U.S. as part of the Global War on Terror, or GWOT in
Pentagonese), essentially fulfills the general’s request for 40,000. In
any case, it was all that was available: the U.S. Army and Marines
currently have total active duty combat forces of around 500,000, and
by mid-2010, fully half of those will be deployed in and around Iraq
and Afghanistan. The rest are on duty in other “theaters” (Philippines,
Colombia), assigned to the 700+ U.S. military bases in 156 countries
worldwide, retraining, and/or getting ready for their next tour of duty
in the war zone. The fact is that the U.S. is at the limits of its
“force projection” capability without introducing a draft (military
conscription).
No wonder they're
losing. Slide from PowerPoint presentation for U.S.
Joint Chiefs of Staff on counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in
Afghanistan.
The “new” Afghanistan strategy is described as “counterinsurgency”
(COIN) aimed at holding off the Taliban, rather than “counterterrorism”
(CT) focusing on destroying Al Qaeda. While talking of “protecting the
population,” what it seeks to “protect” it from is “a resilient
insurgency and a crisis of confidence in the government.” What the COIN
strategy argues, in General McChrystal’s words, is that “the population
... must be leveraged” ... to protect the government from the people.
The additional U.S. forces are to be deployed almost entirely in a
few provinces in the south (Helmand and Kandahar) and the east (Khost),
while pulling back exposed “forward operating bases” and forming a
“ring of steel” around the capital. The tiny outposts in hostile
territory could only be defended by calling in air strikes, which were
becoming a major liability due to mounting civilian casualties. What
this shows is that the military planners are seeking to buy time, to
halt the insurgents’ advance and prevent Kabul from falling to the
Taliban in the next six to 12 months. So McChrystal wasn’t
exaggerating, and the imperialist occupiers really are in deep trouble.
This, however, raises the question – that has been hotly debated for
the last week – of how the U.S. could even begin a “transfer” of
security to Afghan forces in a mere 18 months.
No one in Washington thinks the Afghan puppet army will be able to
handle the Taliban by then. They will grab their spoils and run. So are
the Obama administration and the Pentagon chiefs raving idiots and
lily-livered weaklings as Republican right-wingers contend? Not at all.
The administration argues that “the Taliban is a deeply rooted
political movement in Afghanistan” that cannot be eliminated
militarily, according to a top official quoted by the Washington
Post (10 October). The actual U.S. strategy is not to defeat the
Taliban but to weaken it enough so that elements of the Islamists can
be brought into a political deal. The McChrystal report is explicit:

“Insurgencies of this nature typically conclude through military
operations and political efforts driving some degree of host-nation
reconciliation with elements of the insurgency. In the Afghan conflict,
reconciliation may involve GIRoA1-led,
high-level political settlements.... ISAF must be in position to
support appropriate Afghan reconciliation policies.”

This isn’t about “reintegrating” low-level Taliban fighters.
Washington is angling for a “high level political settlement” with the
“good Taliban.”
Some months ago the New York Times (8 March) reported,
“President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was
not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a
reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out
to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias
in Iraq.” Since then the search has been on for the “moderate Taliban.”
Could this be the Haqqani network, whose founder, Jalaluddin Haqqani,
has been well-known to the Americans (and the Pakistani ISI) since he
was a mujahedin commander in the anti-Soviet war? Alas, the
Haqqanis are in tight with Al Qaeda. Could the elusive “good Taliban”
be Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, “the sociopathic former Afghan Prime Minister
who pulverized Kabul during the post-Soviet fall-out amongst mujahedin
thieves in the early 1990s” (Tom Burghardt, “America’s Search for the
‘Good Taliban’,” Global Research, 15 March)? Hekmatyar,
another top recipient of CIA aid in the ’80s, was notorious for
throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women students at Kabul
University. But Hekmatyar is a leading drug kingpin, and has been for
decades, which could prove an embarrassment for Washington.
Corruption in Afghan puppet
government? Shocking! But main
agent of corruption in Kabul regime, Ahmed Wali Karzai (at right), the
president's brother, turns out to be on the CIA payroll.
(Photo: Banaras Khan/AFP)
The U.S. figures the Taliban are not a regular military formation
such as the former Baathist military who started the insurgency in
Iraq. Also, Obama argued at West Point, it is not a mass-based
insurgency such as the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. So maybe
the Kabul regime can be propped up for a time with massive force.
However, what form a “reconciliation” might take is unclear: a revolt
of deputies of Mullah Omar, a break-away of groups more interested in
local control than Taliban/Al Qaeda-style Islamism? The Washington
Post reports, “Some inside the White House have cited Hezbollah,
the armed Lebanese political movement, as an example of what the
Taliban could become.” The White House insiders consider “although
Hezbollah is a source of regional instability, it is not a threat to
the United States.” The condition would be that they break from Al
Qaeda, and possibly hand over Omar bin Laden, if he’s still around, and
Ayman Al-Zawahiri, one-time chief of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, bin
Laden’s chief deputy and the real leader of Al Qaeda. But whatever the
scenario, whether Washington can stabilize its “corrupt and
incompetent” puppet government sufficiently and pull off such a deal is
dubious.
A major U.S. liability in Afghanistan is Hamid Karzai, the man it
picked as a figurehead president, and the tattered regime he heads.
Karzai was installed to give a Pashtun face to a “government” of the
Tajik warlords of the Northern Alliance, who control the army and
police, such as they are. Taliban influence has grown because the
Pashto-speaking clans and tribes of southern Afghanistan regard the
Kabul authorities as an alien force. The massive fraud in the August
2009 Afghan elections was because in the South, Karzai’s supposed base,
security was so tenuous and popular hostility to the government so
great that there was no vote at all in much of the region. So they
simply stuffed the ballot boxes. Pashtun rulers dominated Afghanistan
from 1747 until the overthrow of the last king in 1973. But whether
they yearn for a “Pashtunistan” including the 40 million Pashto
speakers of southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, or for an
ultra-fundamentalist Islamic emirate, the common denominator is hatred
of the U.S. occupation, and what “holds the disparate Taliban factions
together is opposition to Tajik dominance in Kabul,” as liberal
imperialist Asia “expert” Selig Harrison wrote (New York Times,
17 August).
For Permanent Revolution Throughout Central and South Asia
Beyond the uncertain prospect of an alliance with sections of the
Taliban, the other big sticking point of Obama’s “strategy” is what he
barely mentioned at West Point: nuclear-armed Pakistan. More than 80
U.S. missile strikes inside Pakistani territory in the past two years,
Pentagon plans for more “special operations” inside Pakistan, the
prospect that more American troops will push the Afghan Taliban deeper
into Pakistan, and Washington’s heavy-handed pressure on the tottering
Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari and army chief General Ashfaq
Parvez Kayani have sparked overwhelming sentiment against the Obama
administration in Pakistan. Clearly, Islamist reactionaries and
right-wing militarists could capitalize on this sentiment. But
Pakistan, unlike Afghanistan, has a sizable working class, and at least
elements of a leftist labor movement. Internationalist communists would
seek to seize this moment to wage genuine anti-imperialist, proletarian
revolutionary struggle – against the U.S., its client Zardari, the
Islamist generals who have been the real power in Pakistan since its
foundation, and the semi-feudalist landlords who still dominate the
political parties – and thereby compete with the Taliban’s appeal to
the “wretched of the earth.”
While the weight of oppression on the toilers of Afghanistan is
enormous, it must be recognized that the social forces inside
Afghanistan that could be a base for revolution are weak. This is one
of the most impoverished countries in the world, and its economy has
been further devastated by decades of war, to the point that there is
hardly any industry at all. Nevertheless, Trotsky’s perspective of
permanent revolution holds true here as well: in this era of
imperialism, of decaying capitalism, even the democratic gains of the
bourgeois revolutions (democracy, agrarian revolution and national
liberation) can only be realized through the taking of power by the
working class, led by its communist party, which proceeds to carry out
socialist tasks. In Afghanistan today, any revolutionary push is likely
to come from without, but that is far from impossible. With neighboring
Pakistan and Iran in turmoil, the potential for socialist revolution in
the region is real, and could join with protests inside Afghanistan
against the occupation evolving into a struggle against imperialist
domination.
The League for the Fourth International calls for the defeat of the
imperialist war on, and colonial occupation of, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Following the example of Lenin and Trotsky, we stand on the side of the
semi-colonial peoples against imperialism, and with those resisting the
occupiers – who are by no means limited to Taliban, Al Qaeda or other
Islamists. Many, particularly in the capital, look back favorably to
the pro-Soviet government when unveiled women could walk the streets
and were the majority of students in Kabul University. While hailing
any real blows landed against the occupiers and their Afghan and Iraqi
puppets, working-class militants oppose sectarian attacks on Sunni,
Shiite, Christian, Buddhist and various minority communities. And we
give no political support to the various bourgeois opposition
forces, which are often as reactionary as the Baghdad and Kabul
“governments.” Communists fight for education for all, for full
equality for women, including freedom from the veil and other
restrictions, and defend the rights of nationalities, including the
right to self-determination (independence), such as for the Baluchis.
Proletarian internationalists are anti-imperialists, not Afghan or
Pakistani nationalists.
Revolutionary communists oppose the political manifestations of all
forms of religious fundamentalism, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim,
Hindu, Buddhist, etc. In fighting for workers revolution that unites
all the toilers, we are for a secular state and against an Islamic
republic in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq or anywhere else, just as
we oppose a Jewish state in Palestine or a Christian state in Europe in
the U.S. We seek to break the stranglehold of religious forces on
education, medicine and public life in different countries. As avowed
atheists, Marxists seek to overcome through social development and
scientific enlightenment the prejudices and obscurantism that
characterize all religions. And where religious fanaticism becomes a
reactionary military force, we seek to mobilize the working class to
fight it, while at the same time opposing the bourgeois militarists who
sometimes oppose (and sometimes ally with) the fundamentalists, as for
example in Algeria.
During the 1980s when
Soviet-backed secular government was in
power, majority of students at Kabul University were women. Maoist and
social-democratic reformists hailed Islamic mujahedin (holy warriors)
on CIA payroll who killed teachers, threw acid on faces of unveiled
women. Trotskyists hailed Red Army intervention, calling for gains of
October 1917 Revolution to be extended to Afghan peoples.
Authentic Trotskyists opposed the Islamists when they were used as
pawns by Washington against the Soviet-backed reform government in
Kabul from 1979 on. At the time, most of the left joined the U.S.
government, first under Democrat Jimmy Carter and then under Republican
Ronald Reagan, in hailing the mujahedin (Islamic holy
warriors) who are now the backbone of the U.S. puppet “government” in
Kabul. We hailed the Red Army intervention and stood for defense of the
Soviet Union in the Cold War fought by proxy in Afghanistan, calling
for the extension of the gains of the October 1917 revolution to the
Afghan peoples.2
When the Kremlin ignominiously withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, we
offered to form an international brigade to fight against the
U.S.-financed, armed and trained Islamic mercenaries. Thus we opposed
the Islamists in the past when they were allied with the U.S., and we
will oppose them tomorrow as Washington again seeks “reconciliation”
with a section of the Taliban. And when Muslim forces rise up against
imperialist domination, we continue to oppose Islamism politically
while supporting any real struggles against the invasion and
colonial occupation.
Not an Antiwar “Popular Front” But Class Struggle to Defeat the War
on Working People Worldwide
It is striking that in the United States, a majority of the
population is turning against the war even though there hasn’t been a
major national antiwar march in more than two years – ever since the
start of the last presidential election campaign. A recent CNN poll
reports that not even one in five (19 percent) think that Obama
deserved a peace prize, and 43 percent think he will never deserve it.
So now that his own supporters are feeling jobbed, we are beginning to
hear a few peeps from the quiescent “peace movement.” Thirty-four
organizations have gotten together to plan a march in Washington ...
next March 20. We have insisted that this “movement” is nothing but
bourgeois pressure politics, “lobbying in the streets,” a
class-collaborationist “popular front” beholden to the Democrats. Here
we have another proof: the fact that the protest will not be until
months after Obama’s “surge” makes it perfectly obvious that this is a
ritual gesture. All those liberals who vowed to “hold Obama’s feet to
the fire” while calling for his election, and the reformists who
celebrated his victory, figure they have to do something in order not
to appear totally hypocritical. In American shorthand it’s called CYA.
Cars bring bodies of
villagers killed by U.S. airstrike in Helmand
province to place in front of governor's house, November 5.
(Photo: Abdul Khaleq/AP)
Meanwhile, they are still cozying up to the commander of U.S.
imperialism. In Afghanistan, angry villagers chant “death to Obama” as
they place the bodies of women and children killed by U.S. commandos in
front of the provincial governor’s house. In the U.S., the leaders of
every major “antiwar” group sent a November 30 letter to Obama pleading
with him: “Polls indicate that a majority of those who labored with so
much hope to elect you as president now fear that you will make a wrong
decision – a tragic decision that will destroy their dreams for
America.” This pro-Obama letter was signed by Brian Becker (ANSWER
Coalition [Party of Socialism and Liberation]), Medea Benjamin (Code
Pink [Green Party, Progressive Democrats of America]), Leslie Cagan
(United for Peace and Justice [Committees of Correspondence]), Sara
Flounders (International Action Center [Workers World Party]), Jeff
Mackler (National Assembly to End Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and
Occupations [Socialist Action]) and others. Obama is an
imperialist war criminal drenched with the blood of Afghan babies
and these fakers are talking about his “tragic” decision that will
destroy “dreams for America”! What social-patriotic crap!
The various leftist groups behind the competing antiwar “coalitions”
reacted to Obama’s escalation of the war on Afghanistan with their
ever-so-slightly different formulas, all aimed at cajoling the
dissident Democrats they’re always chasing after. The International
Socialist Organization (ISO), focused on “Answering Obama's Afghanistan
deceptions” (Socialist Worker web site, 8 December) with
quotes from “liberal establishment” figures like Garry Wills, Rachel
Maddow and The Progressive. The Party for Socialism and
Liberation (PSL) added a pinch of soft-core “anti-imperialism” to spice
up its appeal to bourgeois defeatism: “Afghanistan and the logic of
empire: Concealing defeat in a war that cannot be won” (PSLweb.org, 6
December). Workers World Party (WWP) made its usual pocketbook pitch:
“the increased costs of the war will come directly from funds that
could be used to provide jobs and services for unemployed workers at
home.” But it objects to the media calling it “Obama’s war” when “the
Pentagon is in charge,” and highlights a chant, “Obama, Obama, yes we
can, U.S. out of Afghanistan!” (Workers World, 17
December). Author William Blum skewered this talk of a “peace
candidate” become war president in an article on “Yeswecanistan” (Counterpunch,
10 December).
For its part, Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), is
currently on a “left” kick after losing the liberal Democrats it
courted with its “World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime” front
group. An article on “Obama’s War Speech” in the RCP’s Revolution
(13 December) goes back to the earlier (1980-89) U.S. war on
Afghanistan, quoting Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s national
security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski about how Washington secretly
funded Islamist groups in order to “induce a Soviet military
intervention.” True. What the article leaves out is that back then, the
RCP praised the “resolute struggle of the Afghani people for their
freedom” against the Soviet Union (which it branded “a fascist state”)
and said nothing about the imperialist aid flowing to the mujahedin
(“Superpowers Square Off Over Afghanistan,” Revolutionary Worker,
11 January 1980). Along with the Mao-Stalinists of the RCP, the
social-democratic ISO also sided with the CIA’s Islamic “holy
warriors,” declaring at the time of the Soviet withdrawal: “The
Mojahedin victory will encourage the opponents of Russian rule
everywhere in the USSR and Eastern Europe” (Socialist Worker,
4 February 1989).
In contrast, at a December 2 demonstration in New York City the day
after Obama’s West Point speech, a highly visible Internationalist
contingent put forward a Trotskyist perspective of class struggle
against imperialist war. Our signs included: “Drive U.S. Out of
Afghanistan and Iraq! Hands Off Pakistan!” “Defend Iran Against
U.S.-Israeli Nuke Threats!” “Israel Out of Gaza and the West Bank –
Defend the Palestinian People!” “Break with the Democrats – For Workers
Strikes Against the War!” “Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!”
and “For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!” In response to
the IAC/WWP demonstration organizers’ call for butter instead of guns,
we said: “Jobs Not War? Imperialism Is Not a Budget Item – Smash It
Through Workers Revolution!” We emphasized “Obama’s U.S.A.: Prison
Nation. Mumia Abu-Jamal, Lynne Stewart, Leonard Peltier, and Thousands
More. Free All Class War Prisoners!” And: “Down with the Democrats and
Republicans – Imperialist War Parties, For a Revolutionary Workers
Party.”
At present there is a severe worldwide capitalist economic crisis on
top of a drawn-out losing imperialist war. This conjunction cries out
for intervention by revolutionaries. The liberals, and the reformists
who love them, see the connection as a choice of priorities
for the government: “butter or guns” in the classic phrase of German
social democracy. This reflects deep illusions in the class nature of
the state. What the government will spend money on is not up for
democratic decision but depends on the needs of capital. If Washington
spent less on the Afghanistan war, any extra would go to propping up
banks rather than improving schools. The priorities argument also
reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of capitalism:
even if they did spend more on jobs instead of war, it would not
restart the stalled economy. This crisis is not one of
“underconsumption” that can be solved by simply pumping more money into
the economy, but of overproduction of capital. Capitalists
refuse to invest because they can’t get an “adequate” return on their
investments (the falling rate of profit). So instead they
sink their money into one speculative bubble after another, until it
comes crashing down. When it does, the government – their
government – bails them out.
The real connection between the war and the economic crisis is the
need for sharp class struggle against both, since both are expressions
of the bankrupt capitalist-imperialist system. To put a stop to the
endless cycle of wars and the boom-bust economy, nothing less than a
socialist revolution to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie is
required. This is particularly visible when you have 20 million jobless
in the United States and the U.S. is in the ninth year of a war without
end that even the Pentagon admits it is losing. The answer is not one
more peace crawl to beg Congress or the White House for a few more
crumbs, but mobilizing the working class against capitalism. That is
why the Internationalist Group calls for workers strikes against the
war – as well as for transport workers to “hot cargo” (refuse to
handle) war materiel, and for militant labor action such as plant
occupations and a fight for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay to
combat unemployment. When on May Day 2008 the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union shut down every port on the U.S. West Coast to stop
the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and to defend immigrants, that was a
small taste of the kind of class struggle we need.
The struggle against imperialist war and capitalist economic crisis
must also oppose the escalating repression which the ruling class
requires in order to keep down its wage slaves “at home.” As an IG sign
at the December 2 Times Square protest declared: “Imperialist War
Abroad = Racist Police State ‘At Home’ – Defeat U.S. Imperialism!” The
Obama administration has not closed down the Guantánamo
torture-prison,
and is it continuing warrantless wiretaps and other attacks on civil
liberties authorized by the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act (and earlier repressive
legislation by the Democratic Clinton administration). Now it is
gearing up for a new crescendo of “terrorism” scaremongering ... just
as the U.S. steps up terror bombing of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama
justified the Afghan war by linking it to the 9/11 bombing of the World
Trade Center and Pentagon, even though not a single Afghan was among
the bombers, and the attack was reputedly planned in Hamburg, Germany
not Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Hysteria around the upcoming trial of the
alleged “9/11 mastermind,” to be held in downtown New York City, will
doubtless be used to justify a new crackdown here.
Obama clearly did the electoral math in calculating the fallout from
his Afghan escalation. He wrote off big chunks of the Democrats,
figuring the Republicans would have to support him. He also is counting
on liberal Democrats to support his health care “reform,” which is
really a giant giveaway to the insurance companies, because they will
have “nowhere else to go.” Of course, this strategy of trying to
“govern from the center” by straddling the party divide (the Clintons
called it “triangulation”) runs the risk of collapse if anyone decides
not to go along. We will see when the war budget comes up for a vote.
But at bottom, there is no way out so long as the working class and
oppressed black, Latino and Asian are tied to the Democratic Party, the
bourgeoisie’s party of choice in times of war and economic crisis when
the ruling class must call for “sacrifice” from those it exploits and
oppresses. In order to put an end to the slaughter on the battlefield
and the jobs massacre here, we need to begin organizing a workers party
to lead the class struggle for socialist revolution. That, as American
Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon wrote, is “the only road to a stable
and enduring peace for the people of the world.”


Another IG sign read: “Free Lynne Stewart, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Leonard Peltier! No Justice in the Capitalist Courts!”
(Internationalist photo)
As a sign of the CUNY Internationalist Clubs at the December 2 NYC
protest read: “Capitalism Sux: Wall Street Bailed Out, Workers Thrown
Out, Afghanistan Bombed Out. For International Socialist Revolution!” ■

1 Government
of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, i.e., the Kabul regime.
2 See “U.S.
Sponsors the Enslavers of Afghan Women,” The Internationalist No.
12, Fall 2001.
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