Edelweiss
16th October 2001, 16:04
Why we oppose the war in Afghanistan
Statement of the WSWS Editorial Board
9 October 2001
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
world’s proven reserves. It also contains 665 trillion cubic feet of natural
gas, approximately one-eighth of the planet’s gas reserves.
These critical resources are located in the world’s 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 Laden’s
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 government’s depiction of bin Laden as an evil
demiurge serves a cynical purpose—to 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
which—whether against the Panamanian “drug lord” Manuel Noriega,
the Somalian “war lord” Mohamed Farrah Aidid, or the modern-day
“Hitlers” Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic—the 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 Laden’s Al Qaeda organization and toppling the
Taliban regime. These representatives of the Muslim world were almost
unanimously suspicious of America’s 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
America’s 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 region’s 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. America’s
wars of the past 20 years have invariably arisen from the consequences
of previous US policies. There is a chain of continuity, in which
yesterday’s US ally has become today’s enemy.
The list includes the one-time CIA asset Noriega, the former Persian Gulf
ally Saddam Hussein, and yesterday’s 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 Washington’s 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 yesterday’s terrorist is today’s
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 imperialism’s
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 cat’s 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 Pentagon’s 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
Taliban’s fighters to put down their arms and defect.”
Given the nature of the region, with its vast stores of critical resources, it
is 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 which 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.
World Socialist Web Site (http://www.wsws.org)
Statement of the WSWS Editorial Board
9 October 2001
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
world’s proven reserves. It also contains 665 trillion cubic feet of natural
gas, approximately one-eighth of the planet’s gas reserves.
These critical resources are located in the world’s 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 Laden’s
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 government’s depiction of bin Laden as an evil
demiurge serves a cynical purpose—to 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
which—whether against the Panamanian “drug lord” Manuel Noriega,
the Somalian “war lord” Mohamed Farrah Aidid, or the modern-day
“Hitlers” Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic—the 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 Laden’s Al Qaeda organization and toppling the
Taliban regime. These representatives of the Muslim world were almost
unanimously suspicious of America’s 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
America’s 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 region’s 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. America’s
wars of the past 20 years have invariably arisen from the consequences
of previous US policies. There is a chain of continuity, in which
yesterday’s US ally has become today’s enemy.
The list includes the one-time CIA asset Noriega, the former Persian Gulf
ally Saddam Hussein, and yesterday’s 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 Washington’s 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 yesterday’s terrorist is today’s
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 imperialism’s
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 cat’s 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 Pentagon’s 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
Taliban’s fighters to put down their arms and defect.”
Given the nature of the region, with its vast stores of critical resources, it
is 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 which 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.
World Socialist Web Site (http://www.wsws.org)