THE TALIBAN RETREATS
By Jack A. Smith
Progressive people will rejoice at the withdrawal from the Afghanistan capital of the ultra-right-wing Taliban regime, which has been oppressing the people of that country since it grabbed power following the Washington-engineered defeat of the left-wing government almost a decade ago.
But there can be no rejoicing about the Bush administration’s unjust aggression against Afghanistan’s independence and national sovereignty, which now may spread to other countries under the guise of a “war on terrorism.” Nor can there be satisfaction because the backward Taliban clique may be replaced by another coterie of reactionaries--either the brutal Northern Alliance (which slaughtered many thousands the last time it occupied Kabul) or more probably an uneasy, short-lived right-wing coalition, fabricated by Washington and stamped with the UN’s imprimatur.
The war, of course, may be far from over. The Taliban -- carpet-bombed by an array of sophisticated U.S. weaponry into a tactical retreat to the more hospitable Pashtun-populated portion of southern Afghanistan -- intends to resume the fight. At the moment, there’s no telling how this will end. The Northern Alliance, which for years could not advance one mile against the Taliban until the Pentagon’s bombing campaign, will undoubtedly seek its long-time objective of political power over the entire country, which the Russian government appears to favor. This alliance, however, understands that a grab for total power at this stage would provoke the White House to retaliate, perhaps terminally. The Bush administration, not wanting to offend Pakistan’s essentially pro-Taliban military-political leaders or cause them to be overthrown by anti-American sectors apoplectic because of their government’s capitulation to the U.S., will seek to construct a cosmetically correct successor puppet regime containing balanced ethnic elements including the Pashtuns, who constitute about 40% of the population. (Pakistan also fears becoming crushed in the pincers of a hostile India to the east and an unfriendly Afghanistan on the west.)
There is no power vacuum in Kabul during this moment of political transition. The U.S. is in charge, supported by its loyal retainer, Britain with its colonial experience in the country. One of Washington’s political priorities is to insure that the Afghan political left is excluded from the new government and from any role in society. Defeating the left is the reason the U.S. financed, supplied and manipulated the right-wing “freedom fighters” who brought down the country’s only progressive government in 1992 after a vicious civil war. The eventual successors to the Taliban may ease a few of the more onerous restrictions oppressing women, but will hardly allow the kind of reforms women enjoyed during the progressive years--from the right to social and legal equality, to education through the university level, to employment, to getting rid of the veil if they chose, and to the option of freedom from confinement in the home. Nor will these successor war lords or monarchists resurrect laws protecting the rights of working people.
The U.S. government has no legitimate justification to be fighting in Afghanistan. The terror attacks in New York and Washington were not launched by the Afghan regime. None of the suicide soldiers who participated in the Sept. 11 hijackings was an Afghani. The majority were from Saudi Arabia, a Washington ally from whence also issues much of the funding for Osama bin Laden’s private al Qaeda army. Few of those suspected by the FBI of involvement with small-group terrorism against civilians in the U.S. or in foreign networks are Afghanis.
After Sept. 11, the Bush administration very much wanted this war. It wouldn’t even consider the repeated Taliban offer to turn bin Laden over to a third country if the U.S. provided Kabul with evidence that he was responsible for the airline hijackings. It could have relied on international police work to capture the individuals responsible for plotting the terror attacks, and on a variety of measures consistent with the Bill of Rights for homeland defense, rather than waging war. Instead the White House chose to bomb and invade poor and backward Afghanistan. There were four main reasons for so doing:
1. Since the perpetrators of the attacks were amorphous, the U.S. needed a concrete “enemy” it could crush with relative ease in order to prove it was not, in former President Nixon’s phrase, a “helpless giant.” Afghanistan’s tiny army did not pose a serious obstacle for a superpower intent on saturation bombing its way to victory with the help of a surrogate “contra” army fighting on the ground.
2. Once it wins its “popular” war against Afghanistan, the U.S. may more easily extend its “war on terrorism” to other countries on its long-term hit list, such as Iraq, who have no relationship to the September events.
3. The Afghan war, if successfully concluded, will project the Pentagon’s military power into strategically important Central Asia, close to Iran, Pakistan, India, China and several former republics of the USSR with their enormous oil reserves. This is a rich prize for the Pentagon. An additional benefit will be another triumph for the imperialist notion of “humanitarian intervention” -- a justification for physically removing governments attracting Washington’s displeasure -- that had its trial run with the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
4. A flag-waving “patriotic war” based on violent revenge and superpower chauvinism may result in the passage of key right-wing legislation and the return of the right-wing to the White House and Congress in the next major elections.
It is essential for the progressive and left forces involved in the antiwar movement, though greatly outnumbered at the moment by a broad pro-war cartel embracing right-wing Republicans and liberal Democrats alike, to intensify their just struggle to end the Afghan war and to prevent the Bush administration from transforming its “war on terrorism” into attacks on other countries over the next several years. This movement must also fight against the dangerous erosion of civil liberties, giveaways to big business, and the racial profiling of Arab-Americans, which seem to be as much a part of the “anti-terrorist” campaign as bombs, bathos, bombastic politicians and beribboned generals who perceive the moment opportune for strengthening right-wing, militarist ideology and the extension of empire.
This could be a long campaign, as Bush promised from the beginning. Nobody can predict the outcome. Both objective and subjective circumstances will change along the way, perhaps dramatically. The U.S. could lurch further to the right in the absence of a fight-back movement. Or the public may tire of Bush’s Empire-Strikes-Back adventure relatively soon, once the terror-terror-terror trauma subsides, along with its government/media-contrived cohort, jingoism. The economy may get considerably worse, which could produce a variety of outcomes. Bush’s crazy-quilt international coalition, the skating-on-thin-ice “Partnership of Nations,” could collapse, especially as antiwar protest movements develop in these various countries. As long as the diverse political forces that make up the U.S. peace movement remain organized, activist, consistently vocal and united in a common struggle against Bush’s war regardless of other differences, there is a good chance they will be able to influence positively the unstable course of empire over the next months and years.