A View From The Left- Afghanistan Occupation: 15 Years of Imperialist Crimes All U.S./NATO Forces Out Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1101	2 December 2016

Afghanistan Occupation: 15 Years of Imperialist Crimes

All U.S./NATO Forces Out Now!

October marked the 15th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. In the launch of what has become the longest war in U.S. history, on 7 October 2001 cruise missiles and bombs rained down on Kabul, Kandahar and other parts of Afghanistan. Weeks of relentless pounding reduced villages to rubble, destroyed hospitals, obliterated Red Cross facilities and wiped out entire families. Here was the world’s mightiest imperialist power, having taken hits on its own territory in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, lashing out to assert its unchallenged supremacy. The vast firepower unleashed on an already devastated Afghanistan, like the “shock and awe” invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, was part of a drive by U.S. imperialism to extend its global military reach and maintain its control over world resources.

When Barack Obama took over as Commander-in-Chief later in the decade, Afghanistan was his preferred theater of imperialist carnage, citing it as the “good war” compared to Bush’s folly in Iraq (conveniently sidestepping the bipartisan support for the devastation of both countries). In 2009, Obama pledged to win the war and diverted tens of thousands of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, almost tripling the number of troops there to nearly 100,000. Despite this “surge,” a highly publicized offensive to wrest control of Kandahar from the Taliban collapsed. Today, even as the U.S. military continues to wreak havoc, the Taliban controls large swaths of the country, including areas outside its traditional Pashtun base, and has made repeated incursions into the northern city of Kunduz. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS) have both claimed shares of the country.

At the time of the invasion, we declared: “It is the obligation of the proletariat internationally, especially workers and minorities in the U.S., to defend Afghanistan in the face of the imperialist attack” (WV No. 766, 12 October 2001). We made clear that having a military side did not constitute the least political support to the reactionary, woman-hating Taliban cutthroats. Similarly, in defending Iraq against the U.S. invasion, we gave no political support to the dictatorial capitalist regime of Saddam Hussein. As we stressed, the chief means of defending the two neocolonial countries was through international working-class struggle, above all by the multiracial U.S. proletariat. The post-September 11 wars abroad were part and parcel of an onslaught by the capitalist rulers against workers, minorities and just about everyone else at home. The “war on terror” that was a pretext for the occupations was used domestically to increase state repression and regiment the population. Today, we call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO troops and bases from Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Near East.

The last 15 years have left a trail of death and destruction in Afghanistan. Airstrikes and official night raids alone have killed tens of thousands of civilians. In 2010, amid the seemingly endless litany of sadistic outrages perpetrated by imperialist forces, a dozen U.S. Army soldiers stationed in Kandahar province were charged with the murder of Afghan civilians for sport. The soldiers cut up the bodies of their victims, keeping fingers and skulls as trophies of war. Bagram air base—a site where hundreds of people were tortured and killed and just one of Washington’s many “black site” detention centers worldwide—became synonymous with U.S. imperialist savagery.

The bloodshed has displaced over one million people within the country and forced over two and a half million to flee it altogether. In 2015, Afghans constituted the second largest group of asylum seekers in Europe after Syrians. In October, by threatening to cut aid to Kabul, the European Union pressured the Afghan government to take back tens of thousands of refugees and is now set to deport them en masse to the very hellhole that the European imperialist powers helped create.

With occupied Afghanistan sinking deeper into a morass of corruption, terror, brutal oppression of women and murderous tribal warfare, the country remains one of the world’s poorest. More than ten million of its 33 million people live in dire poverty, and three-quarters of the population is illiterate. Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world; 60 percent of its children are malnourished and only 27 percent of Afghans have access to safe drinking water.

Obama has refused to lift the imperialist jackboot. In an Orwellian moment a year ago, the U.S. president declared that he does “not support the idea of endless war” while announcing nearly 10,000 troops would remain in Afghanistan, ostensibly as “trainers.” In fact, they have been carrying out special operations raids and supporting drone assassinations. As the New York Times reported regarding U.S. soldiers who fought the Taliban at close quarters in October 2015: “Nine months after President Obama declared an end to the American combat mission in Afghanistan, these Green Berets were at the leading edge of an offensive to retake Kunduz, where Afghan forces had melted away as insurgents attacked, leaving an entire city in the Taliban’s grip for the first time since 2001” (“U.S. Role in Afghanistan Turns to Combat Again,” 8 May). Tens of thousands of military contractors, i.e., mercenaries, also remain in the country.

The criminal bombing of a Kunduz hospital operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) last year underscored the ugly reality of the new phase of the war. This November, U.S. aerial bombardment of a village outside Kunduz killed at least 30 civilians, including women, children and babies. With fewer troops available for night raids, the U.S. has become increasingly dependent on airstrikes, which have more than doubled since last year.

Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan

U.S. imperialist crimes in Afghanistan extend back more than two decades before the occupation, to a time when Washington heralded the Islamic fundamentalists as “freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union and showered them with billions of dollars in aid. The CIA began to fund and train the woman-hating mujahedin reactionaries shortly after the Soviet-allied, left-nationalist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power in 1978. What followed was the biggest covert operation in CIA history, and a decade-long proxy war against Soviet military forces that intervened to bolster the modernizing PDPA regime. The Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS are all first- or second-generation offspring of that U.S.-sponsored “holy war.” As Trotskyists who stood for the unconditional military defense of the bureaucratically degenerated Soviet workers state and championed the cause of women’s emancipation, we proclaimed: Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Recognizing that the material conditions did not exist for meaningful social progress to emerge from within Afghan society, where for instance mullahs outnumbered manufacturing workers over seven-to-one, we also raised the call: Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!

The mullahs had first gone on the warpath when the PDPA embarked on a program of limited reforms, which included canceling peasant debt, carrying out land redistribution, prohibiting forced marriages and lowering the bride price to a nominal sum. The new government made schooling compulsory for girls and launched literacy programs for women, building 600 schools in just over a year. The earliest bloody confrontations were over women’s education, as PDPA cadres and women literacy workers were driven from villages and killed. A New York Times reporter observed at the time: “Land reform attempts undermined their village chiefs. Portraits of Lenin threatened the religious leaders. But it was the Kabul revolutionary Government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed Orthodox Moslem men in the Pashtoon villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking up their guns” (9 February 1980).

Unable to fend off the U.S.-backed mujahedin insurgency, the PDPA repeatedly requested Soviet intervention. Fearing the collapse of the PDPA regime and acting to defend its southern flank, the USSR sent thousands of troops into Afghanistan in December 1979. While the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy did not send the Red Army into Afghanistan to accomplish a social revolution, Soviet military intervention objectively opened up the possibility of bringing the country into the modern world and of freeing Afghan women from degradation. Women were encouraged to shed their head-to-toe burqas and study science, medicine and engineering. By the late 1980s, almost two-thirds of the students at Kabul University were women. Some 5,000 Afghan women took up arms as members of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan militia.

Instead of fighting to finish off the mujahedin, a prospect that was within reach by the mid 1980s, the Kremlin bureaucrats temporized, hoping to appease the U.S. In 1988-89, the Moscow bureaucracy withdrew the Soviet Army. This betrayal left Afghanistan to revert to the benighted and tribal-riven slaughterhouse it is to this day and helped to pave the way to the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state itself. With the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, U.S. imperialism’s strategic target became the Chinese deformed workers state, where capitalist rule was overthrown in 1949. The occupation of Afghanistan and the placement of U.S. military bases in Central Asia and elsewhere in Asia under the rubric of the “war on terror” were part of the effort to militarily encircle China and ultimately to restore capitalist rule.

U.S. Imperialism: Enemy of Women’s Rights

Under the occupation, Afghanistan has been a living hell for women. To sell their predatory war, the U.S. rulers cynically decried the plight of women under the Taliban, pledging that an American-led takeover would bring liberation. Instead, the imperialists brokered a constitution that effectively enshrined Islamic fundamentalist sharia law. In 2012, Washington’s puppet Afghan president Hamid Karzai approved a new “code of conduct,” issued by the Ulema Council of senior Muslim clerics, that bars women from going out without a male guardian or mingling with men in schools, offices and markets. Afghan women still suffocate under the burqa. Forced marriages and “honor killings” of women are rampant.

Afghanistan has the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Due to lack of access to health care, thousands of women die during pregnancy and childbirth. Barely a quarter of Afghan girls go to school. Religious fanatics attack those who do, including by spraying acid in their faces, and kill their teachers. The literacy rate for women is 12 percent, while their average life expectancy is 44, some 24 years below the world average. To escape their unbearable lives, many women turn to suicide. Even by official Afghan accounts, some 2,300 women and girls kill themselves every year—more than six each day.

The regimes installed by the imperialists during the occupation have been based largely on the same reactionary, anti-woman mujahedin tribal warlords who devastated the country after the Soviet withdrawal. They populate both the central and provincial governments and maintain private militias linked to smuggling and criminal networks. These warlords hold the power of life and death over the mass of Afghan people through extortion, arbitrary detention, torture, rape and murder. They kill farmers and grab their land. Empowered by the imperialists and enriched through bribery, contract awards and opium traffic, their patronage networks have become more entrenched.

Gul Agha Shirzai, who ran Kandahar in the early 1990s during the bloody rule of the mujahedin, was picked by Washington to be governor of Kandahar province after the invasion and is now governor of Nangarhar. Asadullah Khalid, another recipient of U.S. largesse, is the former head of Afghanistan’s security agency. According to Human Rights Watch, he has participated in arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial summary executions and rape of women and girls in his private prison. When he traveled to the U.S. for medical care in 2013, Barack Obama paid him a visit.

The horrors produced by U.S. imperialism’s anti-Soviet “holy war” and current occupation of Afghanistan show once again that the capitalist system is a barrier to social progress and a breeding ground for war. The only possibility of a future free of wars, misery and want rests in the victory of international socialist revolution. When the workers of the world rule, deeply oppressed and backward regions like Afghanistan will finally begin to be lifted out of their poverty, isolation and obscurantism, laying the basis for the genuine equality of all peoples. Our purpose is the forging of a multiracial revolutionary workers party, section of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International, that is dedicated to leading the American proletariat in overthrowing the U.S. imperialist beast from within.