Why we oppose the war in Afghanistan
Untitled Document
World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
WSWS : News
& Analysis : The
US War Drive
Why we oppose the war in Afghanistan
Statement of the WSWS Editorial Board
9 October 2001
Back
to screen version
| Send this
link by email | Email the
author
The World Socialist Web Site condemns the American military
assault on Afghanistan. We reject the dishonest claims of the
Bush administration that this is a war for justice and the security
of the American people against terrorism.
The hijack-bombings of September 11 were politically criminal
attacks on innocent civilians. Whoever perpetrated this crime
must be condemned as enemies of the American and international
working class. The fact that no one has claimed responsibility
only underscores the profoundly reactionary character of these
attacks.
But while the events of September 11 have served as the catalyst
for the assault on Afghanistan, the cause is far deeper. The nature
of this or any war, its progressive or reactionary character,
is determined not by the immediate events that preceded it, but
rather by the class structures, economic foundations and international
roles of the states that are involved. From this decisive standpoint,
the present action by the United States is an imperialist war.
The US government initiated the war in pursuit of far-reaching
international interests of the American ruling elite. What is
the main purpose of the war? The collapse of the Soviet Union
a decade ago created a political vacuum in Central Asia, which
is home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum
and natural gas in the world.
The Caspian Sea region, to which Afghanistan provides strategic
access, harbors approximately 270 billion barrels of oil, some
20 percent of the worlds proven reserves. It also contains
665 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, approximately one-eighth
of the planets gas reserves.
These critical resources are located in the worlds most
politically unstable region. By attacking Afghanistan, setting
up a client regime and moving vast military forces into the region,
the US aims to establish a new political framework within which
it will exert hegemonic control.
These are the real considerations that motivate the present
war. The official version, that the entire American military has
been mobilized because of one individual, Osama bin Laden, is
ludicrous. Bin Ladens brand of ultra-nationalist and religious
obscurantist politics is utterly reactionary, a fact that is underscored
by his glorification of the destruction of the World Trade Center
and murder of nearly 6,000 civilians. But the US governments
depiction of bin Laden as an evil demiurge serves a cynical purposeto
conceal the actual aims and significance of the present war.
The demonization of bin Laden is of a piece with the modus
operandi of every war waged by the US over the past two decades,
in each of whichwhether against the Panamanian drug
lord Manuel Noriega, the Somalian war lord Mohamed
Farrah Aidid, or the modern-day Hitlers Saddam Hussein
and Slobodan Milosevicthe American government and the media
have sought to manipulate public opinion by portraying the targeted
leader as the personification of evil.
In an October 8 op-ed column in the New York Times,
Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, pointed
to the real aims that motivate the US war drive. Describing a
conference of Arab and Muslim organizations held a week ago in
Beirut, Gerges wrote:
Most participants claimed that the United States aims
at far more than destroying Osama bin Ladens Al Qaeda organization
and toppling the Taliban regime. These representatives of the
Muslim world were almost unanimously suspicious of Americas
intentions, believing that the United States has an overarching
strategy which includes control of the oil and gas resources in
Central Asia, encroachment on Chinese and Russian spheres of influence,
destruction of the Iraqi regime, and consolidation of Americas
grip on the oil-producing Persian Gulf regimes.
Many Muslims suspected the Bush administration of hoping
to exploit this tragedy to settle old scores and assert American
hegemony in the world.
These suspicions are entirely legitimate. Were the US to oust
the Taliban, capture or kill bin Laden and wipe out what Washington
calls his terrorist training camps, the realization of these aims
would not be followed by the withdrawal of American forces. Rather,
the outcome would be the permanent placement of US military forces
to establish the US as the exclusive arbiter of the regions
natural resources. In these strategic aims lie the seeds of future
and even more bloody conflicts.
This warning is substantiated by a review of recent history.
Americas wars of the past two decades have invariably arisen
from the consequences of previous US policies. There is a chain
of continuity, in which yesterdays US ally has become todays
enemy.
The list includes the one-time CIA asset Noriega, the former
Persian Gulf ally Saddam Hussein, and yesterdays American
protégé Milosevic. Bin Laden and the Taliban are
the latest in the chain of US assets transformed into targets
for destruction.
In the case of Iraq, the US supported Saddam Hussein in the
1980s as an ally against the Khomeini regime in Iran. But when
the Iraqi regime threatened US oil interests in the Persian Gulf,
Saddam Hussein was transformed into a demon and war was launched
against Baghdad. The main purpose of the Gulf War was to establish
a permanent US military presence in the Persian Gulf, a presence
that remains in place more than a decade later.
Even more tragic is the outcome of US sponsorship of bin Laden
and the Taliban. They are products of the US policy, begun in
the late 1970s and continued throughout the 1980s, of inciting
Islamic fundamentalism to weaken the Soviet Union and undermine
its influence in Central Asia. Bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists
were recruited by the CIA to wage war against the USSR and destabilize
Central Asia.
In the chaos and mass destruction that followed, the Taliban
was helped along and brought to power with the blessings of the
American government. Those who make US policy believed the Taliban
would be useful in stabilizing Afghanistan after nearly two decades
of civil war.
American policy-makers saw in this ultra-reactionary sect an
instrument for furthering US aims in the Caspian basin and Persian
Gulf, and placing increasing pressure on China and Russia. If,
as the Bush administration claims, the hijack-bombing of the World
Trade Center was the work of bin Laden and his Taliban protectors,
then, in the most profound and direct sense, the political responsibility
for this terrible loss of life rests with the American ruling
elite itself.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalist movements, infused with
anti-American passions, can be traced not only to US support for
the Mujahedin in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also to American
assaults on the Arab world. At the same time that the CIA was
arming the fundamentalists in Afghanistan, it was supporting the
Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This was followed in 1983 by the
US bombing of Beirut, in which the battleship New Jersey
lobbed 2,000-pound shells into civilian neighborhoods. This criminal
action led directly to retribution in the form of the bombing
of the US barracks in Beirut, which took the lives of 242 American
soldiers.
The entire phenomenon associated with the figure of Osama bin
Laden has its roots, moreover, in Washingtons alliance with
Saudi Arabia. The US has for decades propped up this feudalist
autocracy, which has promoted its own brand of Islamic fundamentalism
as a means of maintaining its grip on power.
All of these twists and turns, with their disastrous repercussions,
arise from the nature of US foreign policy, which is not determined
on the basis of democratic principles or formulated in open discussion
and public debate. Rather, it is drawn up in pursuit of economic
interests that are concealed from the American people.
When the US government speaks of a war against terrorism, it
is thoroughly hypocritical, not only because yesterdays
terrorist is todays ally, and vice versa, but because American
policy has produced a social catastrophe that provides the breeding
ground for recruits to terrorist organizations. Nowhere are the
results of American imperialisms predatory role more evident
than in the indescribable poverty and backwardness that afflict
the people of Afghanistan.
What are the future prospects arising from the latest eruption
of American militarism? Even if the US achieves its immediate
objectives, there is no reason to believe that the social and
political tinderbox in Central Asia will be any less explosive.
US talk of nation-building in Afghanistan is predicated
on its alliance with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, with
whom the Pentagon is coordinating its military strikes. Just as
Washington used the Albanian terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army
as its proxy in Kosovo, so now it utilizes the gang of war lords
centered in the northeast of Afghanistan as its cats paw
in Central Asia.
Since the Northern Alliance will now be portrayed as the champion
of freedom and humanitarianism, it is instructive to note recent
articles in the New York Times and elsewhere reporting
that the vast bulk of the Afghan opium trade comes from the meager
territory controlled by the Alliance. The military satraps of
the Northern Alliance are, moreover, notorious for killing thousands
of civilians by indiscriminately firing rockets into Kabul in
the early 1990s.
The sordid and illusory basis upon which the US proposes to
rebuild Afghanistan, once it is finished pummeling
the country, was suggested in a New York Times article
on the onset of the war. The Pentagons hope,
wrote the Times, is that the combination of the psychological
shock of the air strike, bribes to anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan
covertly supported by Washington and sheer opportunism will lead
many of the Talibans fighters to put down their arms and
defect.
Given the nature of the region, with its vast stores of critical
resources, it is, moreover, self-evident that none of the powers
in Central Asia will long accept a settlement in which the US
is the sole arbiter. Russia, Iran, China, Pakistan and India all
have their own interests, and they will seek to pursue them. Furthermore,
the US presence will inevitably conflict with the interests of
the emerging bourgeois regimes, in the lesser states in the region,
that have been carved out of the former Soviet Union.
At each stage in the eruption of American militarism, the scale
of the resulting disasters becomes greater and greater. Now the
US has embarked on an adventure in a region that has long been
the focus of intrigue between the Great Powers, a part of the
world, moreover, that is bristling with nuclear weapons and riven
by social, political, ethnic and religious tensions that are compounded
by abject poverty.
The New York Times, in a rare moment of lucidity, described
the dangers implicit in the US war drive in an October 2 article
headlined In Pakistan, a Shaky Ally. The author wrote:
By drafting this fragile and fractious nation into a central
role in the war on terrorism, America runs the danger
of setting off a cataclysm in a place where civil violence is
a likely bet and nuclear weapons exist.
Neither in the proclamations of the US government, nor in the
reportage of the media, is there any serious examination of the
real economic and geo-strategic aims motivating the military assault.
Nor is there any indication that the US political establishment
has seriously considered the far-reaching and potentially catastrophic
consequences of the course upon which it has embarked.
Despite a relentless media campaign to whip up chauvinism and
militarism, the mood of the American people is not one of gung-ho
support for the war. At most, it is a passive acceptance that
war is the only means to fight terrorism, a mood that owes a great
deal to the efforts of a thoroughly dishonest media that serves
as an arm of the state. Beneath the reluctant endorsement of military
action is a profound sense of unease and skepticism. Tens of millions
sense that nothing good can come of this latest eruption of American
militarism.
The United States stands at a turning point. The government
admits it has embarked on a war of indefinite scale and duration.
What is taking place is the militarization of American society
under conditions of a deepening social crisis.
The war will profoundly affect the conditions of the American
and international working class. Imperialism threatens mankind
at the beginning of the twenty-first century with a repetition
on a more horrific scale of the tragedies of the twentieth. More
than ever, imperialism and its depredations raise the necessity
for the international unity of the working class and the struggle
for socialism.
This article is available as a PDF-formatted
leaflet
Untitled Document
Copyright
1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved