Socialist Action /December 2001
US Victory in Afghanistan... What Does
it Mean?
By GERRY FOLEY
The collapse of the Taliban regime, now completed with the fall of Kandahar
on Dec. 7, came as a surprise to the Western governments and media, despite
the preceding claims by U.S. officials of the effectiveness of their military
campaign. The New York Times felt compelled to run a special article in
its Dec. 2 issue to explain the sudden turn of events.
The final fizzling of the Taliban's "holy war," seemed certain
on Dec. 5, when they agreed to surrender their last stronghold, Kandahar,
after having vowed to defend it to the death.
Before the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, the major city in Northern Afghanistan,
to Northern Alliance troops on Nov. 9, the U.S. military campaign had seemed
to be producing few results other than a political backlash in the Muslim
world and rage among the Afghan people. The major capitalist world media
concurred that the U.S. was sinking into a quagmire.
Then, suddenly, the stalled effort of the imperialists turned into a
stunning victory, in which the U.S. seemed on the verge of achieving its
declared and undeclared objectives in the "war on terrorism" that
it had launched after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on targets in the United
States.
The undeclared but fundamental aims of the U.S. operation were to deal
a blow to the opposition to imperialist policies in the dominated world
and in the capitalist heartlands.
In the big-business press in the United States and Europe, speculation
has been shifting from the situation in Afghanistan to the likely next targets
for U.S. attacks-Somalia, Sudan, and Iraq, or even Palestine. The London
Guardian on Dec. 9 reported that the United States had already begun surveillance
flights over Somalia, looking for forces associated with al-Qaida.
What led to the victory?
That is the index of the victory of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
This victory for the moment has altered the international political situation.
Therefore, this triumph for imperialism and the perspectives it has created
need to be looked at. In the first place, what explains it?
The most important factor is clearly the nature of the forces that the
U.S. attacked-the Taliban and al-Qaida. Both were based on an elite that
was highly motivated and self-sacrificial but without a program for solving
the problems of the masses of the Muslim world oppressed by imperialism,
and still less of the rest of the neocolonial world. Both leaderships operated
on the idea that determination could succeed without a political strategy.
Islamist currents managed to tap anti-imperialist feelings among the
masses in Muslim countries following the defeats or capitulations of Stalinist
or nationalist leaderships. Their stock-in-trade was that they would stand
firm for principle, not capitulate or bend to imperialism, and that they
could win because they were prepared to fight to the death.
The Islamists also claimed that on the basis of their religious ideals
they could unite the entire Muslim world against imperialism, and constitute
a more powerful force than a movement confined to one or a few countries.
The Islamists won some successes. Bin Laden became a hero of the discontented
in the Muslim world, from which he recruited a devoted band of fighters.
Hamas, the main Islamist organization in Palestine, grew to the point of
challenging or even out-distancing the traditional Palestinian leadership.
Both the Arab and Western bourgeois papers were saying before Mazar-i-Sharif
that bin Laden had won the political contest for the sympathy of the Arab
masses.
The collapse of the Taliban, however, showed the limitations of the Islamist
perspectives. Afghanistan was supposed to be the model Islamic state, the
only true Islamic state, as bin Laden called it, and as the Islamist volunteers
from many countries apparently believed. But for the masses it was hardly
an attractive model.
The only information from the areas from which the Taliban fled or were
driven out is that the population felt relieved or even liberated. That
may not be the whole story, but there is certainly no evidence that the
Taliban left a resistance movement behind among the population.
Whereas bin Laden and his followers believed that their Islamist principles
could unite the entire Islamic world and recreate the Caliphate of the Islamic
golden age-which ruled a vast territory stretching from northern India to
the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean-in Afghanistan they failed even to unite
the various peoples and tribes of one relatively small country where religion
has played an unusually powerful role.
Support for the Taliban was essentially confined to the Pushtun people,
about 40 percent of the population of Afghanistan. The other major nationalities,
representing at least another 40 percent of the population and dominant
in the northern half of the country, followed other leaderships, mainly
united (however loosely) in the Northern Alliance.
Among the Pushtun themselves, tribal loyalties seem now to have prevailed
over any loyalty to the Taliban. Thus, it proved impossible to unite the
faithful against the infidel, but rather one self-proclaimed Muslim faction,
backed by imperialism, prevailed over the other that claimed to be waging
a "holy war" against the "Judeo-Christian" enemy.
A common religion did not give the peoples of the region sufficiently
strong common interests to provide a basis for unity against imperialism.
That was something that only the collective economic and political interests
of the oppressed and exploited working people of the region could do.
Moreover, the appeal of Islamism was largely based on a mystique of unbreakable
determination leading to victory. Once the Taliban forces suffered a major
defeat, the mystique was shattered. Their support began to crumble. The
cascading cave-in was not limited to Afghanistan. It is notable that in
Pakistan, following Mazar-i-Sharif, mass demonstrations in support of the
Taliban have ceased, even though an estimated 8000 Pakistani Islamists have
died fighting for the former rulers of Afghanistan.
The Taliban leadership's claim that they were evacuating the cities in
order to fight in the mountains seemed clearly no more than a figleaf of
self-justification to cover the extent of their collapse. They abandoned
Kabul without a fight but allowed their main forces to be encircled in Kandahar.
If the Taliban thought they had the popular support necessary to sustain
a prolonged guerrilla war, it is not likely that they would have declared
that they were prepared to sacrifice the hard core of their fighters in
a futile struggle in an isolated city.
The reason for this decision seemed to be a last hope that they could
rescue themselves from the ignominy of their collapse and rout by a symbolic
fight to the death. Now even that hope has proved illusory. It is extremely
unlikely that after such a crushing political defeat, they will be able
to mount any serious guerrilla activity.
Behind U.S. victory in Mazar-i-Sharif
The battle of Mazar-i-Sharif was thus decisive politically as well as
militarily. Its outcome was almost certainly the result of political factors
as well as military ones.
From the military standpoint, after the U.S. victory in the Gulf War,
a conflict with which their al-Qaida allies were intimately familiar, the
Taliban leadership could not have been unaware of what it was up against.
But according to The New York Times, they made the fundamental tactical
error of concentrating their forces and thus making them into sitting ducks
for the deadly air power of the United States.
From a political standpoint, the Taliban could not make a stand in the
Mazar-i-Sharif because the population was hostile to them. They risked a
massacre if they withdrew into the city.
Then, once they abandoned this key northern city, it was clear that the
whole northern part of the country was going to fall into the hands of the
Northern Alliance, which is based on the populations of the region. The
Afghan majority of the Taliban's forces began to crumble, leaving the foreign
fighters isolated.
The battle of Mazar-i-Sharif also marked a shift in the U.S. strategy.
Previously, the U.S. bombing had avoided committing its air power to supporting
the Northern Alliance forces on the ground. The bombing had been dispersed
throughout the country with the rationale of destroying the Taliban's infrastructure,
despite occasional admissions even by U.S. spokespersons that the Taliban
had virtually no infrastructure.
Washington's Pakistani allies even began to describe the U.S. bombing
as "random."
The real objective of the United States seems to have been political
rather than military, to put pressure on the Pushtun tribal chiefs to break
from the Taliban. It was only when that failed (the main effect seemed to
be to rally the population behind the Taliban) that the bombers went to
the aid of the Northern Alliance.
And it was only when the Northern Alliance began to score decisive victories
that the desired defections among the Pushtun leaders began in earnest.
Washington got its victory, but at the price of hitching its war wagon
to local forces of dubious coherence, dubious discipline, dubious representiveness
and-worst of all for the United States-dubious reliability for their imperialist
allies.
The Northern Alliance initially emphatically rejected the proposals for
stationing a "peacekeeping force" on their newly won territory.
They did, under who knows what pressure, later give in on this point, but
it is obviously a ticklish one for them.
If their Northern Alliance allies and their new friends in the Pushtun
southeast have some unpleasant surprises in store for the U.S., it would
hardly be the first time that Afghan factions have burned their foreign
backers.
It was initially the U.S. that armed and financed the Islamists in Afghanistan.
Then Pakistan backed the Taliban, enabling it to defeat its rivals. Now
essentially the U.S. has done the Pakistanis one better by providing a sort
of artillery support for the Northern Alliance and the Pushtun tribes beyond
anything Pakistan could offer.
Moreover, any conflict in Afghanistan threatens to spread internationally.
The mountainous country is the focus of a complex of potentially competing
interests-Chinese, Pakistani, Russian, as well as Iranian. It seems unlikely
that the U.S. will be able to hold all these balls in the air for very long.
The interim government set up by the accord among the anti-Taliban factions
in Bonn at the beginning of December is clearly a basket of crabs, denounced
by various Pushtun chiefs and now by the most notorious turncoat in the
shifting sands of Afghan politics, General Dostum, the warlord of Mazar-i-Sharif.
And there is always the possibility that any dissident faction in Afghanistan
will find a patron or patrons among the foreign powers contending for influence
there.
In the long run, the fact that the United States was forced to turn on
its long-standing Islamist allies represents a reduction of its options
in the region. Islamism, moreover, is a giant ruin that continues to pose
many stumbling blocks. Although the Pakistani military rulers have been
forced to turn on the extreme wing of Islamism, religious ideology continues
to be the basis of the Pakistani state.
History has shown that it is not so easy to keep the religious zealots
under control. It will be even more difficult to find replacements for them.
The Pakistani government has now begun to try to trim the network of
religious schools that provided the basis for the Taliban by integrating
them into the state educational system and introducing secular subjects
that supposedly will prepare the pupils for jobs in a modern economy. But
in the neocolonial economy it is not likely that there will be jobs even
for scientifically trained youths.
That is the case in most Third World countries, where it has not been
possible to divert a large part of the youth into otherworldly education.
And the disillusion will be correspondingly greater for young people who
think their education is a preparation for life in this world rather than
in another.
Although the Pakistani Islamists have suffered a severe defeat, the turning
of the top military commanders, such as President Pervez Musharraf, against
the Islamic ideology previously fostered by successive military regimes
must have left deep wounds in the army and intelligence services.
Among other things, the Afghan war exposed the Pakistani government's
support for Islamist guerrillas operating in Kashmir, who in turn were intertwined
with al Qaida. The Indian government and media are arguing that if the U.S.
is serious about a war on terrorism, it should come down hard on Pakistan.
The Indian press and local people have reported that the Pakistani government
evacuated selected people, probably military operatives, from the beleaguered
city of Konduz in northern Afghanistan before it fell to the Northern Alliance.
U.S. officials have supported Pakistan's denials.
But there is convincing evidence that the stories are true and that therefore
the United States has chosen to wink at the contradictions of the Pakistani
regime. But winking at them will not remove them.
Pakistan has even had to detain and interrogate some of the top figures
in its nuclear program because of their contacts with and apparent sympathies
for the Islamists in Afghanistan.
Northern Alliance wants "Islamic state"
In Afghanistan itself, an editorial in the Dec. 3 issue of the Northern
Alliance on-line journal, Peyam-e-Mujahed (published in Dari, the Afghan
form of Persian), thundered, "an Islamic state, not a secular one."
The statement went on to say that there is no contradiction between Islam
and democracy, that Islam is "democratic."
But a religion-based state and democracy are like oil and water. The
concept of the rule of divine law above the will of the people is fundamentally
undemocratic, no matter which religion interprets it. This attempt to maintain
an Islamic state means that the new authorities are going to continue to
try to use religious ideology to suppress any struggles by the Afghan masses
for a better life.
Undoubtedly, because of the international scandal created by the reactionary
fundamentalism of the Taliban, the new imperialist-sponsored state authorities
in Afghanistan have made certain concessions to international democratic
opinion. These include allowing women to work outside the home and including
two women in the interim government set up by the Bonn accord that is supposed
to govern the "transition to democracy."
But the Northern Alliance government in Kabul refused to allow women
to march in support of their rights at the end of November, arguing that
the security situation was too dangerous. (At the same time, the Nov. 22
issue of Peyam-e-Mujahed stressed that peace and tranquility now reigned
in the Afghan capital.)
The diversion of mass anti-imperialist sentiment into Islamist channels
in the Muslim world has led to a series of disasters for the liberation
struggle, of which the current debacle in Afghanistan is only the latest.
But despite the defeats the masses have suffered, there has been a certain
accumulation of lessons that can strengthen their struggle in the future.
In the first place, when it is the masses who are determined, they can
win victories, like the Iranian revolution of 1979. The protests in arms
against imperialism have crystallized a deepening hatred among the oppressed
masses for the imperialists and their local agents.
They also showed that a layer of young people are prepared to sacrifice
everything and suffer any deprivation to fight against the humiliation and
oppression of their people.
U.S. government representatives are now hinting, and the pundits of the
bourgeois press are saying openly, that the U.S. rulers can afford to ignore
the feelings of the masses in the Muslim world.
But a hatred so widespread and so intense as that revealed by the sympathy
for bin Laden must eventually find more effective expressions. Moreover,
the sufferings of the masses in the Muslim world have nothing to do with
the ancient wars of religion. They are shared by all the peoples of the
neocolonial world regardless of their religion.
The fundamental fact remains that the great majority of the world's population
is condemned to exploitation and brutalization by imperialist domination
and they will never give up hope of escaping this curse.
And the more idealistic and open-minded elements in the imperialist countries,
in particular the youth, will continue to recognize that a system based
on the impoverishment of the great majority of the world's population has,
and should have, no future.
Finally, despite the fearsome display of destructive power by the United
States, the struggle in Afghanistan was still decided by political and not
military factors. If the United States had not been able to exploit the
political weaknesses of the Taliban, its murderous bombing would have only
inflamed the feelings of the people of the region against it.
Although the technological advances of the U.S. military represent a
growing threat to the peoples of the world, they are not a solution to the
challenges the U.S. rulers face in a world of seething discontent.
Socialist Action /December 2001 |