Statement on the

U.S. WAR ON AFGHANISTAN

21 October 2001

High tech murder, as real as the World Trade Center attack and much more deadly, is underway in Afghanistan as U.S. bombs continue to fall in the third week of President Bush's obscene war on terrorism. However, CNN carries no interviews with the victims' families or with the working class heroes on the ground. Instead the airways are filled with U.S. officials issuing orders: Osama bin

Laden must be destroyed, domestic opposition is unpatriotic, unconditional surrender or else.

Welcome to the New World Order!

With the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. imperialism became the unchallenged power in world politics and our planet became a much more dangerous place to live. Now another capitalist war for markets, nfluence and natural resources is being unleashed in one of the poorest places on earth.

George Bush wants a change of government in Afghanistan, not because he hates terrorism, but because those who put him in office seek to secure a gateway to the oil rich regions of the former Soviet Union. He is not the first U.S. President to attempt this feat. In 1985, Ronald Reagan wanted exactly the same thing. Only he praised Osama bin Laden and the forces that became the Taliban as "freedom fighters." He directed the CIA to promote the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in

Central Asia to destabilise the Soviet Union. Between 1978 and 1982 the U.S. government funneled at least six billion U.S. dollars in training and arms into the region to promote rightwing fundamentalism. Others, including Saudi Arabia, provided similar levels of financial support.

The women and girls of Afghanistan paid a terrible price for Reagan's anti-communism and the greed of U.S. oil giants. Once in power, the Taliban outlawed female education, prohibited women from mployment, and denied them basic human and civil rights. Now Bush callously heaps even greater misery on the region, by bombing their country and sending U.S. troops to kill their sons, many of

them draftees in the Taliban's army.

RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM--

U.S. interest in Afghanistan has always been driven by two factors: oil and anti-communism. When a

pro-Soviet regime came to power in Afghanistan through a popular uprising, the U.S. immediately

tried to destabilize it and allied itself with right-wingers in the Taliban--men violently opposed to the new

government's plan to educate all women and girls and to outlaw child marriages.

Today the Taliban exists both because the U.S. directly helped create it and because capitalism gives rise to the economic and political conditions which fuel religious fundamentalism all over the world. U.S. policy in the Middle East involves murdering leftists and stamping out their organizations, strangling democratic rights and deliberately under-developing a region rich in natural resources in order to maintain political hegemony and control of oil reserves.

This Machiavellian U.S. policy leaves the vast majority of people destitute and without the means to influence their governments. Thus imperialism prepares the soil in which religious fundamentalism flourishes as a contradictory expression of anti-imperialist sentiment.

The Taliban, bin Laden, Hamas and all the other religious zealots offer an outlet for anger and protest against the "decadent" ways of the Western world. At the same time, they promise a return to "traditional" values, like the imprisonment of women in the home and a legal system based on religion.

Because of their essentially conservative and anticommunist character, imperialism found these

reactionaries vastly preferable to leftist and democratic causes before September 11, 2001.

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT TALKS OF FREEDOM

BUT EVERYWHERE SPREADS MISERY

Mass murder is nothing new for the rulers of the U.S. They dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima that killed over 100,000 people. They installed Pinochet in Chile in 1974 and orchestrated Suharto's massacre of more than a million Communists and suspected Communists in Indonesia in 1965. They trained the murderous military henchman of Central and South America and now they are

pouring $1.6 billion in military aid to the blood-soaked Colombian army to fight a leftist insurgency.

Like Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, Iraq's Saddam Hussein was a creature of U.S. imperialism. When he had served his purpose, the U.S. demonised him but kept him in power to maintain the pro-imperialist status quo in the Middle East. In Iraq, half a million children died as a result of U.S sanctions while Saddam Hussein tightened his grip on power.

Now Condoleeza Rice, national-security advisor to President Bush, is arrogantly advocating "nation building" as the means to replace the Taliban government in Afghanistan. She proposes stitching together a compliant puppet regime consisting of an 86-year-old Afghan king and the Northern Alliance, a woman-hating fundamentalist-led army. Rice, the duplicitous imperial messenger, talks out of two sides of her mouth. While deploring the Taliban's treatment of women, she prepares a future that will actually be worse for them and in which they have no say once again.

THE WAR ON AFGHANISTAN STRENGTHENS THE ENEMIES

Governments in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and Australia have pledged to back Bush militarily to the bitter end. These loyal imperialist partners are willing to spend millions on war production, while ruthlessly implementing the domestic neoliberal agenda of privatisation and cuts to spending on health, education and welfare.

Bush's Western allies are also using the war drive as an excuse to implement long sought legislation to hobble dissent and undermine civil liberties in order to curb growing protests against neoliberalism worldwide. In Australia, the Government has announced sweeping new anti-terrorism laws which give widespread powers to the sinister Australian Security Intelligence Organization.

And in Canada and the United Kingdom, new laws are being swiftly pushed through curtailing the rights of immigrants as well as freedom of expression, assembly and association.

For the people of Palestine, the terrorist attacks in the U.S and the launch of war on Afghanistan have led to a massive increase in Israeli aggression. Palestinian towns and villages have been subjected to the tightest closure in history. At the same time, there is also an escalation of military attacks.

In Pakistan the war is polarising society resulting in increased support for the Taliban and their domestic allies while the military regime of General Pervaiz Musharaf has been strengthened against those who sought democratic reforms. Nonetheless, Labour Party Pakistan has denounced the war and is organizing a peace movement opposed to the general's rule.

Bush's "war on terrorism" is really a war on dissent, on anti-capitalist protest, and on the anti-corporate

FOR A GLOBAL, ANTI-CAPITALIST ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

Opposition to this unholy war for oil and hegemony is burgeoning. Recently in London, more than 3,000 people attended an antiwar meeting called by Socialist Alliance and 20,000 marched in the streets shortly after the assault began.

In Australia, anti-capitalist protests planned against the Commonwealth Heads of Government gathering and the associated Commonwealth Business Forum meeting quickly turned into militant antiwar demonstrations.

In Taiwan, students, labor activists and environmentalists held several large protests within 24 hours of the U.S. bombing campaign. And in an especially brave demonstration, 10,000 peace activists marched in New York City within days of the World Trade Center attack calling for an end to U.S. aggression--a real inspiration to opponents of U.S. foreign policy everywhere!

Despite these demonstrations, much more remains to be done. The world desperately needs a global antiwar movement which not only marches for peace in the Middle East, but calls for an end to capitalism, the system that terrorizes the working class of this planet with one insane war after another. The time is growing short to build such a movement as the imperialist masters fashion their new police states to stomp out all dissent. It is imperative that the Left join forces in every country to this end today.

* No to war, racism and the oppression of women!
* U.S. out of the Middle East!
* No to the U.S.-led coalition and its deadly war on the people of Afghanistan!
* Victory to the Palestinian Intifada!
* Defend Arabs, Muslims and immigrants in every country!
* No to police state powers! Defend civil liberties! For workers' rights to organize, strike and protest!
* Build an anti-capitalist movement against corporate globalisation!
* Money for jobs, health, education and welfare, not for warfare!

ISSUED BY
Freedom Socialist Party
International Executive Committee
Solidarity Salon, 580 Sydney Road, Brunswick, Vic 3056, Australia

Postal: PO Box 266, West Brunswick, Vic 3055, Australia

€ Phone/fax 61-3-9388-0062

€ E-mail: fsprwaus@ozemail.com.au