WeeklyWorker

22.11.2001

Where now for the anti-war movement?

It is only a matter of time before the last of the Taliban strongholds fall. US air power has given an overwhelming advantage to the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces, and Kunduz and Kandahar will surely soon be in their hands too. But, as the US military offensive in Afghanistan is more and more supplanted by diplomacy, arm-twisting and power-brokering, the anti-war movement must change. It will be totally inadequate to go on saying, ?Stop the bombing?.

The turnout on the November 18 demonstration organised by the Stop the War Coalition was excellent. More than 50,000 marched through London - well up on the October 13 CND event, but it was clear that the sudden, unexpected collapse of Taliban authority had reduced numbers - many people stayed away, believing the war was all but over.

Certainly the bombing will be scaled down in its intensity, as US generals target the shrinking enclaves held by Taliban and al Qa?eda fighters. But it is possible that US and British ground forces will be drawn into a long and bloody guerrilla war, as they continue to search out and attempt to eliminate Osama bin Laden.

So the Socialist Workers Party is at least in part correct when it says: ?Imperialism cannot bring peace? (November 18 demonstration leaflet). By the same measure top-down attempts - led by Britain and the EU - to cobble together a central provisional government that encompasses all Afghan nationalities are beset with difficulties. Apart from the fact that the US seems intent on only pursuing bin Laden and staying clear of ?nation building?, any central administration will be based on the armed power of the rival blood-soaked warlords - with the sole proviso that the Taliban hardliners are excluded. The all-party conference will no doubt include the ex-monarch Zahir Shah and a token women?s presence but without substantial injections of capital Afghanistan will remain mired in banditry and ethnic fragmentation.

But Tony Blair and Clare Short at least have a programme for Afghanistan. They not only want to rid it of the Taliban and bin Laden, but to impose on it their own version of stability. To gain backing for this they use the language of democracy. Surely there can be nothing more nauseating than the spectacle of Cherie Blair and Laura Bush launching an anti-Taliban campaign for the rights of Afghan women. Such hypocrisy. Official society never had the slightest compunction about backing any of the anti-women mujahedin in the 1980s - the burqa was not a Taliban invention. Then all the various shades of fundamentalists were regarded as staunch allies against the Soviet Union and the progressive People?s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government. Nor do the imperialists - neither the US nor the UK - mount campaigns for the rights of Saudi women, who live under a regime only marginally less oppressive than the Taliban.

However, as far as the SWP is concerned, imperialism can have a free run when it poses as the champion of democracy. The SWP has not, and does not, put forward a democratic programme for Afghanistan - or any kind of internal programme in fact. All we get is a Bowdlerised anti-imperialism. Indeed, in its shamefaced, unspoken ?defencism? - ?my enemy?s enemy is my friend? - it has constituted itself as an apologist for the reactionary Taliban regime. Even now, when it is clear that the Taliban enjoyed almost no support among the population, the SWP pretends they were preferable to their rivals: ?The north of the country is under the control of the Northern Alliance. They are a bigger bunch of killers than the Taliban? (November 18 leaflet).

In my opinion it is totally futile to argue that the National Front is worse than the BNP, or vice versa. The point is, we need to put forward our own, working class, alternative - something the SWP signally fails to do. Its leaflet puts forward a list of immediate tasks:

?We need to fight to:

As can be seen, this anti-imperialism hardly concerns itself with Afghanistan and is almost entirely negative - it is more than clear what the SWP is against, but what is it for (apart from ?one Palestine? - a simplistic solution which ignores the small matter of the Israeli nation)? Reading SWP propaganda, you get the impression that all of Afghanistan?s problems would go away, if only it was left alone: ?America wants to impose control, but Russia, Pakistan and Iran will all want to promote their warlords? (ibid).

Socialist Worker goes further: ?Rival local powers - Iran, Pakistan, India and Russia - support different factions. Talk of the UN organising a government is about giving each of these states a slice of power, or possibly a slice of a partitioned Afghanistan (original emphasis, November 17). And to stress the point, Socialist Worker features a cartoon of Bush holding a giant knife over the Afghanistan ?dish?. He is saying to Blair, ?Shall I carve??, as representatives of Iran, Russia and Pakistan slobber in anticipation.

Bush is not partitioning Afghanistan. The US wants to get bin Laden. In the process it tilted the balance of power - through bombing and arms supplies -  massively against the Taliban. It is the Northern Alliance and other petty warlords who have de facto partitioned the country. It is Blair and the EU which is at the forefront of those pushing for a centralist Afghan state. The present tension between Britain and the US is not over dividing the country up but over political intervention and non-intervention. Once they get bin Laden the rightwing of Bush?s Republican Party will be quite content to let Afghanistan rot. Again we see the nullity of the SWP?s dogma that America?s main war aim is to ensure the laying of an oil pipeline across the country. You might have thought that such a project would be greatly facilitated if the oil barons were able to deal with a single central state or at least a client statelet.

Sections of the left developed a similar conspiracy theory regarding alleged plans to break up Yugoslavia. The possibility that there is an internal dynamic underpinning the divisions in Bosnia, Kosova - and Afghanistan - is totally discounted.

Of course imperialism sponsored the mujahedin. Of course neighbouring states have interests. But that is not the end of the story. Afghanistan is a multi-national ?state? whose peoples remain fiercely insular. Apart from in the cities - especially Kabul - classes and the state have never developed, even embryonically. Males are routinely armed and loyal to local headmen and warlords who, besides seeking external allies, have a proven ability to unite against both central authority - Kabul - and outside powers.

When a mediated form of class struggle did break out, it was through the leadership of the People?s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Strikes, mass demonstrations, the revolutionary ?coup? of April 1978 were all headed by the PDPA - an ?official? communist organisation with a mainly western-educated leadership which had deep roots in the working class and urban poor and managed to secure support amongst a wide layer of junior officers and army units. Its reforms - land redistribution, women?s equality, minority national rights - enraged the traditional elite, not least in the countryside - the landlords, mullahs and village elders. But the PDPA was aligned to the Soviet Union.

Because of its inconsistent third camp position the SWP backed the mujahedin against the PDPA, ignoring the massive funding they received from the USA. The mujahedin counterrevolution was equated with a national liberation struggle - against the imperialist state capitalism of the USSR. Now that one wing of the counterrevolution, the Taliban, has fallen out with the US, the SWP supports them - quietly, covertly and by implication - because they are against the remaining imperialist superpower.

Since the Taliban are against US and British imperialism, and since imperialism still backs the Northern Alliance, the latter can now be written off. Once they were liberation fighters; now they are puppets. Socialist Worker is full of the atrocities committed by the Northern Alliance  - yet is silent over the crimes of the Taliban. In fact the only negative reference to the Taliban in last week?s Socialist Worker comes in a reprint of a report from the Scottish Socialist Party?s Alan McCombes on his return from a visit to Pakistan:

?Despite the repression they suffer from the Taliban, Hilla [an activist comrade McCombes met in Pakistan] says all women oppose the US bombings: ?? if they invade the country on the ground, most people will fight with the Taliban against America and Britain.?? That, of course, is what the SWP believes ought to happen: an anti-imperialist bloc, if necessary under the leadership of the Taliban. That hampers or rules out any attempt to unite the Afghan masses on the basis of class.

We communists take a rather different view. We are for the democratic struggle of the Afghan workers and peasants to free themselves from the oppression of both the Taliban and the rival warlords, and in opposition to the imperialist onslaught. Such a position is principled and consistent - it does not change like the wind, along with the fortunes of the Northern Alliance, Taliban, the imperialists or anyone else.

If the anti-war movement is not to end up in cul de sac - fading from the scene as the bombing winds down - it must take up the politics of consistent democracy. Imperialism wants to impose a settlement in its own interests. We must champion the rights of the Afghan masses.

Peter Manson