By Richard Mellor in California
As the US withdraws after a 20-year occupation, it is astonishing, though not surprising, to witness the rapid collapse of the US puppet regime in Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban offensive. The US, through the overwhelming dominance of air power, toppled the Taliban after the attacks of September 11 2001, and this feudal bunch of religious fanatics are back in the driver’s seat.
It is equally astonishing to read the comments of other world leaders, officials whose governments participated in or supported the invasion. The boy from Eton, Britain’s Boris Johnson, and whose government supplies the Saudis with weapons, remarks that, “We don’t want anybody bilaterally recognizing the Taliban”.
Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, blames the Afghan security forces the US spent a trillion or two training, that it is the result of their “inability” to “defend their country”. It’s all their fault. Canada’s Trudeau is “heartbroken” and Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, reminds us that “freedom is always worth it whatever the outcome.” I’m sure poor Morrison has suffered terrible pain through this 20 years occupation, wondering if freedom will prevail if they kill enough people. For US capitalism this is an embarrassing moment that will undoubtedly undermine US global power and influence on the world stage.
Things they never told us in the first place
There’s an awful lot they won’t have to remind us about though, because they never told us in the first place. But I am old enough to remember a few things about Afghanistan and the Taliban. I was still at work when the Taliban came to power in 1996, thanks to US military aid, made possible through US cooperation with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Part of this US cooperation effort was financial support for the religious schools, the Madrassas preaching a violent, fanatical form of Islam. The US provided the textbooks, hoping to increase anti-Soviet feeling by creating a more radicalized, fanatical Islam.
On taking power, Taliban representatives came to the US, to Houston to be exact. They were there to meet with representatives of the UNOCAL corporation that was a major player in the efforts to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean, bypassing Iran.
One of UNOCAL’s consultants was Zalmay Mamozy Khalilzad, an Afghan American who served as US ambassador to the UN under George W Bush, and served as an envoy to Afghanistan under Pompeo and still, under Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken. Khalilzad, said in May 2021 after the plan for US withdrawal was announced that, “I personally believe that the statements that their forces will disintegrate and the Talibs will take over in short order are mistaken,”. Oops!
Pipeline contract beats women’s rights
And one can acquire considerable wealth working for the US government.You rarely have to be right about anything. When it comes to warmongering, as long as your lads don’t die in large numbers.
There was a lot of talk in the media about the cruelty of the Taliban (without stressing that US taxpayer money was behind them), in particular their treatment of women, but an oil pipeline trumps women’s rights, “The US government, which in the past has branded the Taliban’s policies against women and children “despicable”, appears anxious to please the fundamentalists to clinch the lucrative pipeline contract.”, wrote the Daily Telegraph in December 1997. The Taliban representatives were getting the royal treatment in Texas.
It is no secret that the US government has supported and armed some of the most despotic violent regimes on the planet. Overthrowing governments that want to determine to some extent their own national policy and own their own natural resources is par for the course and any force, no matter how reactionary, is worthy of US support when it comes to profit-making and the Taliban was no exception.
US recruited Osama Bin Laden
The official US position was that the CIA had trained and funded Afghanistan’s mujahideen as a response to the Soviet Union’s invasion in December of 1979. It was at this time that the US recruited Osama Bin Laden. Around 40 million Muslims lived in the Soviet Union and destabilizing the Soviet Union was US capitalism’s prime objective.
In an interview in 1998, former US president Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, that CIA money to the mujahadeen began before the Soviet invasion.
“The reality, secretly guarded until now” he said, “is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him that in my opinion, this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”
When the interviewer asked Brzezinski if he regretted arming and giving advice to religious fundamentalists and “future terrorists” Brzezinski replied, “What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold war?” (my added emphasis).*
Politics is more than a ballot every four years
Oh, how they now long for the relatively peaceful co-existence of the Bi-polar Cold War world, when US imperialism and the Stalinist totalitarianism of the Soviet Union existed side by side, willing to make deals here and there and keep things balanced.
Much of this information about the role of US capitalism and its imperial ventures is known, including by many workers. And by this, I mean known in the general sense. But there is a strongly-held belief that we must not discuss politics, a belief propagated by the US ruling class for whom politics is life as it should be.
The truth is that politics is life. It’s not simply about sticking a piece of paper in a ballot box every four years to elect candidates from, in our case, one of the two capitalist parties to determine which section of the US ruling class will govern society and plunder the world’s resources until the next election.
It’s about what we do every day. It’s about critical thinking, questioning, understanding history with a working-class perspective in mind. “Question Authority” is a great statement and very popular here in the US. Unfortunately, that popularity is more often than not limited to a bumper sticker on a car.
Trillions spent in Afghanistan
Politics determines where you live, whether you can have shelter, transportation, education health care and so on. Politics, and in particular, the absence of the working class from it, has led to the present situation in Afghanistan and untold misery, poverty and death for its people.
Imagine what the US worker has had to do without due to political decisions to spend two or three trillion dollars in Afghanistan over 40 years. Imagine what that, or half that figure, would have accomplished if it were spent in helping the people of Afghanistan rather than bombing them.
As one person reminded me yesterday, the US dropped the largest ever non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan. It was heard miles away, “I hope America’s adversaries are watching and now understand there’s a new sheriff in town,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, referring to Trump. That one sentence is a chilling example of the horrors the Native American’s faced in their dealings with the new colonial settler state.
The global competition between the world’s major capitalist powers (China is well along the capitalist road and will be engulfed in huge internal struggles in the period ahead) is threatening to destroy life as we know it. President “worker Joe” Biden has announced a “new period of ‘extreme competition’ with the People’s Republic of China”. (BusinessWeek August 9). But US workers have no reason to enter into any ‘extreme competition’ with Chinese workers. Or any other workers, including in the domestic marketplace.
Global warming crisis on the point of no return
Workers and the middle class cannot benefit from competition, either on the job or between countries as workers. Biden’s competition with China and the competition between any of the ruling classes of different countries is not our business. We are appealed to merely as observes and as part of a team we are not members of.
The global environmental crisis is verging on the point of no return. It is politics, working class politics, the politics of the world’s billions of people who live by our labour power alone if they have the luxury of work and haven’t fallen in to the ranks of the dispossessed and starving, victims of centuries of assault by the so-called free market. This is what can change society and offer our children and grandchildren an alternative to the madness of the market.
As for Afghanistan, the situation may have been different were the working class in the US and other western democracies to have supported the pro-Soviet government of Mohammad Najibullah, I am not that well versed in all the details. This could have been done critically with friendly attempts to influence change there; but a break from the class unity with our own capitalist class is the only way that can occur.
A bunch of guys in sandals beat powerful military power
The US is concentrating its efforts in the competition for global domination with the Chinese Stalinists and for them, Afghanistan has entered the history books. If we want to delve into why Afghanistan is where it is and how a bunch of guys in sandals forced the most powerful economic and military power to exit their country, we have to pull our heads out of the sand, do our own research and come up with our own solutions as to what’s the best road for our class.
This ignominious exit by US imperialism is similar to Vietnam, but in a very limited way. In Vietnam the good guys won. But in Afghanistan there are no “good guys”. Successions of US presidents and regimes saw to that.
*“The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan” Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur 15-21 January 1998, Quoted in War and Globalization by Michel Chossudovsky ISBN 0-97311109-0-2
From the US socialist website Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
