The worsening situation in Afghanistan and the new imperialist initiatives
25 February 2008. A World to Win News Service. In the last six months there have been numerous reports by top Western governmental committees, study groups and self-described humanitarian organizations portraying the situation in Afghanistan in dark and gloomy terms. The U.S. Atlantic Council, for instance, in February, warned that the country is in danger of becoming a failed or failing state. There are real signs of disappointment among the occupying powers, a sense of failure and even dread, but the disillusionment is far greater among Afghanistan’s masses of people.
Now more than six years after the Taleban were ousted and replaced by the Western-installed government of Hamid Karzai, there is no end in sight to the cruelties committed by the imperialists in Afghanistan under the name of the war against terrorism or fighting drug trafficking or even human rights and democracy and reconstruction.
The new puppet regime has so thoroughly sought to identify itself with Islamic Sharia law and the reasoning behind it that in January its judges condemned 23-year-old student journalist Pervez Kambaksh to death for downloading an article from the Internet on women and Islam that the intelligence services claimed were insulting to religion. The parliament consists of present and ex-warlords and other widely hated reactionaries. A report from the NGO Womankind stated that the situation for women has deteriorated under American occupation, to the point that the majority of marriages now involve girls under 16, often sold by their parents. The people have seen few positive changes in their lives, while they must now endure more insecurity and more insults, abuses and worse from the foreign occupiers. These are perfect conditions for backward fundamentalist forces such as the Taleban to grow in strength and advance in their war. All the above-mentioned reports agree that in contrast to the period after the Taleban were driven from power in 2001 and the following few years, they are now growing in numbers and in their capability to expand the ambit of their operations.
A report by Amnesty International in May 2007 indicated that the country’s people are under severe pressure in many aspects of their lives. The report refers to the brutality and atrocities committed by all the main armed forces involved so far, including the US (and Nato) occupiers, the Karzai regime, the local commanders supposedly working for it, the Taleban and the drug traffickers. The report put the number of people killed at 4,000 over the preceding year. It said that the security forces of the regime and US troops recklessly violate the human rights of the civilian population in general and strip the 650 suspects now held at the U.S.-run Bagram air base of their basic human rights.
Two months later, in July, the Britain’s Defence Parliamentary committee released a report admitting that the Nato mission in Afghanistan is facing a big challenge. It names as the main hurdles the resurgence of the Taleban, the increased number of civilian losses, rampant corruption in the police force and the slow process of reconstruction.
A report by the U.S.-based Pickering-Jones research group released 30 January 2008 concludes, “The six-year achievement is under the serious threat due to increasing violence, the weaknesses of international solutions, the increase of international and regional challenges and the increase of the disappointment and disillusion among sections of people of Afghanistan.”
Matt Waldman, a policy advisor for the British charity Oxfam, says that the reason that Taleban is getting stronger and can mobilize people more easily is because the people of Afghanistan see no improvement in their situation and have become disappointed and disillusioned. (BBC, 31 January)
No doubt these reports and others published in the last seven months are part of the campaign by the US and UK imperialists to put pressure on the other Nato members to send more troops to Afghanistan. But at the same time these reports are confessions about some realities of life in Afghanistan.
While the U.S., the UK and Canada are desperately trying to put pressure on other Nato member countries, especially Germany and France, to supply more troops and especially to send them to the war zone areas, they are also trying other initiatives to control the situation and save themselves from the political and military disaster that could be on the way.
Some non-military initiatives by the occupiers
The occupiers have been trying to launch their initiatives on two levels. One is an attempt to organize cooperation between the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments in the guise of a “regional peace conference”. The other is a policy of actively encouraging the Taleban to negotiate with the Karzai government.
What are the new elements in the attempt to foster Afghanistan-Pakistan cooperation? The Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan writes in its organ Shola Jawid (18 December 2007),
“The ‘regional peace conference’ is an ongoing initiative to pursue two goals: one is to improve relations between the Pakistani government and the Karzai regime, and the other is to strengthen once more the Pashtun tribal leaders on both sides of the Diuorwand line (the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the Pashtun area) and in accord with that line to pit Pashtunism (Pashtun chauvinism against the other nationalities of Afghanistan and the region) against pan-Islamism and fundamentalism.”
The imperialists have had much experience in buying tribal leaders and big feudals in many parts of the world. The British did it throughout the Middle East and South Asia after World War I. Today the U.S. and UK occupiers are doing the same thing in Iraq with their efforts to form anti-Shia and anti-Sunni fundamentalist “Awakening Councils” among the same tribal leaders on whom Saddam Hussein relied for his regime, while de-emphasizing the Shia fundamentalist forces that were originally main pillars of their regime, along with the Kurdish nationalist parties, who also have lost some of their importance to the occupiers. It’s bitterly ironic to hear American and UK officials talk about this policy borrowed from Saddam and the British colonialists before him as though it were some brand new invention.
As far as Afghanistan is concerned, the British had extensive dealings with Pashtun Khans (feudal lords) during the Afghan wars in the nineteenth century and long after. The Soviet Union also tried this policy, seeking, at a certain point late in their occupation when it was going badly for them, to form a national reconciliation council with some tribal and feudal leaders. It is believed that Afghanistan’s current occupiers have taken all these experiences as raw material for new initiatives that are meant to replace the domination of Islamic fundamentalist parties with the influence and domination of the Khans and other local traditional forces. These seem to be the aims behind some of the financial support for dubious “construction projects” and the money and arms being given out to tribal military groups on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier.
The problem for the imperialists is that they have spent the last three decades doing the opposite, or in other words, trying to strengthen the Islamic fundamentalist parties in Afghanistan and the region and in particular among the Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. This has had the affect of integrating both tribal and Khan authorities into Islamic fundamentalism. It is not going to be easy to reverse course and attempt to separate them out and restore the authority of the Khans and tribal leaders in opposition to the fundamentalist parties. Such a process is bound to be complicated and full of contradictions.
As for the attempts to build Afghanistan-Pakistan cooperation, this, too is problematic. Shola wrote, “In any case the first round of the ‘regional peace conference’ has eased the tension between the Musharraf and Karzai regimes. Though a short term result is not expected from these efforts they are trying to hold a second round of the conference.” But things have not gone so well for either regime since then. The fundamentalists in Pakistan’s North-West have their own notions of a united front and the tactics of defeating enemies one by one. Baittulah Mehsud, the leader of the fundamentalist coalition recently renamed Tehrik-e-Taleban has apparently won a cease-fire with the Musharraf government so that the cross-border, Pashtun-based Taleban movement can concentrate on overthrowing the U.S-led occupation and its puppet government in Afghanistan. Musharraf has had to accept such deals in the past. This gives the Musharraf and Karzai governments sharply conflicting interests in regard to the Taleban, even though both governments are, at the end of the day, U.S.-dependent. Moves that would lessen some of the pressure on Musharraf could be fatal to Karzai and vice-versa. There are other long-standing elements of conflict between the two countries as well, including Pakistan’s own traditional designs on dominating Afghanistan. The recent decision of the Karzai government to triple the size of its army over the next few years is widely viewed as a threat against Pakistan, not the Taleban.
The second imperialist initiative is to seek to resolve the Taleban problem through negotiations with them. There have been many attempts in the last couple of years or so to cut a deal with the Taleban that did not get anywhere. But this time it seems it is different, and more high-ranking officials are involved. Even the tone is different. For example, it seems that Karzai personally involved himself and this time he referred to Mullah Omar and Gulbuddinn Hekmatyar not as terrorists but as “Saheb” Mullah Omar and “Engineer” Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. (Saheb is a traditional title to indicate respect. In the region, as in much of the world, the title Engineer is used to indicate respect for an educated person, especially an engineer. During the war against the Soviet occupation, Pakistan funnelled the bulk of U.S. aid to Hekmatyar, who was considered a reliable ally against the USSR by American diplomats because of his extreme religious fanaticism. He is best known for the policy of throwing acid on the faces of women and girls deemed to be improperly covered.) Karzai even made it clear that he is ready to go to Omar and Hekmatyar personally. Prominent former Taleban officials who held high-ranking jobs when the Taleban where in power and are now collaborating with the U.S. and the Karzai regime, such as Mullah Motavakel, Mullah Mujahid and Mullah Zaiif, respectively the Foreign Minister, Taleban representative to the United Nation and United States and Taleban ambassador to Pakistan, have been highly active around these initiatives. There was some hypocritical scandal lately when it was revealed that British diplomats had been meeting directly with Taleban representatives in pursuit of this aim.
At the beginning it seemed that this project was advancing well. Some officials publicly confirmed that initial negotiations were taking place. Even the governance of some areas was turned over to people close to the Taleban and the Islamic Party of Hekmatyar as a good-will gesture on the part of the government. But suddenly the page turned and the hostility between the coalition forces and their puppet regime and the Taleban and Hekmatyar’s Islamic Party recommenced. Nato and coalition forces put out wanted posters for Taleban and Islamic Party leaders, offering up to $200,000 for information that would lead to their arrest. For their part, these forces stepped up their military action and suicide bombings in Kabul. This can be taken as an indication that so far these negotiation efforts have failed.
Why? If Karzai personally embraced these negotiations, it is hard to imagine that he acted without the agreement of the occupiers. There are various possible reasons for the failure but one is clear and it could be the most important reason. While it is certain that the U.S.-led imperialists do not oppose the attempt to find a compromise between the Karzai regime and the Islamic fundamentalist opposition and in fact are the main force behind it, they do have one huge precondition: their presence in Afghanistan is not to be questioned. From the other side, while the Taleban also see no problem in negotiating and collaborating with the Karzai regime, they know well that at this time their only credibility comes from their armed opposition to the foreign forces in Afghanistan. If they give up their only advantage at this stage, they could become a spent force. Their past crimes and their cruelty are well known and felt by the masses and are a source of nothing but complete discredit. If they were to collaborate with the puppet regime under these conditions, they risk vanishing. So this seems to be a dead end, at least in the present situation.
Shola also writes, “Therefore it doesn’t seem that a compromise between the Karzai regime and the Islamic forces resisting it and even the start of formal negotiation between them can be achievable soon, but the attempts to achieve them by the puppet regime have already started and will continue as an political manoeuvre. Secret and unofficial negotiations will continue between the two reactionary sides and bargaining on certain political issues will continue to go on between them.”
The imperialists declared their occupation a success only two months after their invasion. But this victory proved to be shallow. The various tricks and initiatives in their desperate attempt to assert control over the country are not working. Every time they seem to solve one part of the problem another arises. On top of that the endless contradictions among the reactionary forces have been a big obstacle for them. But from the other side, the reactionary Islamic fundamentalists are taking advantage of the situation and the discontent of masses to portray themselves as the anti-occupiers. This situation will give both reactionary sides room to manoeuvre. As Shola 18 reminds us, “The resistance of reactionary forces could not have a better prospect than that of the anti-Soviet resistance”. In other words, because the leadership of the war of resistance against the Soviet occupation was in the hands of fundamentalists, even though that war was won the results were disastrous for the people. We all know the consequences. That’s why the question of who will lead the resistance to the U.S.-led occupation could not be more crucial. But in any case the imperialists have put their feet in a place they cannot get out of without paying dearly.
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