When arguments are made over the war in Afghanistan people are often quick to assert that it is a failed state, locked in a medieval mindset; it’s always been a mess and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It was not always so but decades of war have devastated the country and its people.
I am re posting some great pictures of Afghanistan before it suffered invasions and Taliban rule - When the west help create the Taliban we knew not what we did.
Fidel Castro Ruz
Cubadebate
The filmed scenes of the massacre in Libya, starting to be seen, offend for their total absence of humanism and the crass lies that served as an excuse for invading and taking over the natural resources of that country.
With more than 25,000 combat missions, NATO air forces backed up the monstrous crime.
They stated that the Libyan government had funds abroad exceeding 200 billion dollars. At this time, nobody knows where the money is nor what has been done with it.
A fraudulent electoral process ensured the overthrowing of the presidency of the most powerful country on the side of George W. Bush, an alcoholic without medical treatment nor the most basic ethical principles, who ordered West Point graduates to be ready to attack without warning 60 or more dark corners of the world.
Such a deranged person, with the use of a small black briefcase, could decide on the use of thousands of nuclear weapons; with a minimal percentage of these, he could put an end to human life on the planet.
It is sad to remember that on the opposite side of the Yankee super-power, another deranged person, with three bottles of vodka in his stomach, declared the disintegration of the USSR and the dismantling of more than 400 nuclear bases in whose range were all the military bases threatening that country.
Those events did not constitute any surprise. Throughout many years of struggle, experience garnered, contact with events, ideas and historical processes did not come as a surprise.
Today the Russian leaders are trying to rebuild this powerful State which had been created with so much effort and sacrifice.
When Pope John Paul II visited our country in 1998, more than once before his arrival I talked about several subjects with one or another of his envoys.
I especially remember the occasion when we sat down to dinner in a small room in the Palace of the Revolution with Joaquín Navarro Valls, Papal spokesman, sitting in front of me. To the right was a pleasant and intelligent priest who had come with the spokesman and assisted Pope John Paul II at the Masses.
Curious about the details, I asked Navarro Valls whether he thought that the immense sky with its millions of stars had been made to please the inhabitants of the earth whenever we deigned to look upwards on any given night. “Absolutely” ―he replied. “It is the only inhabited planet in the universe.”
I then turned to the priest and said: what do you think of that, Father? He replied: “In my opinion, there is a 99.9 percent possibility of intelligent life existing on some other planet.” The answer did not violate any religious principle. Mentally I multiplied the figure, who knows how many times. It was the kind of answer that I deemed to be correct and serious.
Afterwards, that noble priest was always friendly with our country. Sharing a friendship does not mean you have to share beliefs.
Today, on Thursday, as it happens with increasing frequency, a European entity with well-known solvency in the subject, textually states:
“There could be billions of planets not much larger than the Earth orbiting around weak stars in our galaxy, according to an international team of astronomers.
“This estimated number of ‘super-Earths’ -planets with up to ten times Earth’s mass – is based on detections already made and then extrapolated to include the population of the so-called ‘dwarf stars’ in the Milky Way.”
“‘Our new observations with HARPS show that around 40% of the red dwarf stars have a ‘super-Earth’ orbiting around it in its habitable zone, where there may be water in a liquid state on the surface of the planet’, stated Xavier Bonfils, team leader at the Sciences of the Universe Observatory in Grenoble, France.
‘“Due to the fact that the red dwarfs are so common – there are around 160 billion of them in the Milky Way – this brings us to the surprising results that there are tens of millions of those planets in our galaxy alone’.”
“Their studies suggest that there are ‘super-Earths’ in habitable zones in 41% of the cases, with a range of 28 to 95%.
“‘40% of the red dwarf stars have a ‘super-Earth’ orbiting them in their habitable zone, where water in its liquid state may exist’.”
“That leads to the obvious question about whether any of those planets may not only be habitable but may also have life.”
“But these stars are prone to stellar eruptions, that can wash over the neighbouring planets with X-rays or ultra-violet radiation, making it less likely that life may exist there.
“‘We have an idea about how to find traces of life on those planets’, stated Stephane Udry, researcher at the Observatory of Geneva.”
“‘If we are able to see traces of elements related to life such as oxygen in that light, then we can obtain indications about whether there is life on that planet’.”
Simply reading these news items shows the possibility and the necessity we have of enriching our knowledge which today is fragmented and scattered.
Perhaps it takes us to more critical positions on the superficiality with which we deal with cultural and material problems. I have not the slightest doubt that our world is changing much more quickly than we are capable of imagining.
Farirai Chubvu
New Era
“The development of a genuine anti-war movement directed at the root of war — the profit system — has been systematically blocked by the left liberals, Greens and, above all, the various pseudo-left organizations.”
NINE years ago last week, on March 20, 2003, the US and its allies, including Britain and Australia, launched the illegal invasion of Iraq.
All of the pretexts used to justify the war were lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction and no links between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
The protracted American-led occupation resulted in an autocratic, pro-US regime, the deaths of a million Iraqis, and an enormous social and economic regression.
Today, nine years after US troops toppled Saddam Hussein and just a few months after the last US soldier left the devastated country, Iraq has become something close to a failed state.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki presides over a system rife with corruption and brutality, in which political leaders use security forces and militias to repress enemies and intimidate the general population.
The law exists as a weapon to be wielded against rivals and to hide the misdeeds of allies. The dream of an Iraq governed by elected leaders answerable to the people is rapidly fading away.
The Iraqi state cannot provide basic services, including regular electricity in summer, clean water, and decent health care; meanwhile, unemployment among young men hovers close to 30 percent, making them easy recruits for criminal gangs and militant factions.
Although the level of violence is down from the worst days of the civil war in 2006 and 2007, the current pace of bombings and shootings is more than enough to leave most Iraqis on edge and deeply uncertain about their futures.
They have lost all hope that the bloodshed will go away and simply live with their dread.
Acrimony in the political realm and the violence in the cities create a destabilising feedback loop, whereby the bloodshed sows mistrust in the halls of power and politicians are inclined to settle scores with their proxies in the streets.
Both Maliki and his rivals are responsible for the slide toward chaos, prisoners of their own history under Saddam.
Iraq today is divided between once-persecuted Shiite religious parties, such as Maliki’s Dawa Party, which is still hungry for revenge and secular and Sunni parties that long for a less bloody version of Saddam’s Baath Party, with its nationalist ideology and intolerance of religious and ethnic politics.
Meanwhile, the Kurds manoeuvre gingerly around the divisions in Baghdad.
Their priority is to preserve their near autonomy in northern Iraq and ward off the resurrection of a powerful central government that could one day besiege their cities and bombard their villages, as Baghdad did throughout the twentieth century.
Nine years later, the world is on the brink of even greater disasters as the Obama administration, pursuing the same imperialist ambitions, recklessly intensifies its threats and preparations for war against Iran.
The absence of a mass anti-war movement today raises critical questions about the failure of the 2003 protests and how to renew the struggle against militarism and war.
The development of a genuine anti-war movement directed at the root of war — the profit system — has been systematically blocked by the left liberals, Greens and, above all, the various pseudo-left organisations.
All of these individuals and organisations are deeply hostile to the working class and its independent mobilisation.
Their social base is a narrow layer of the affluent middle class that has shifted sharply to the right under the impact of the worsening capitalist crisis.
This layer increasingly identifies its interests with those of its own imperialist power.
The middle-class leftists who opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s have step by step become advocates for imperialist war.
The process was already evident during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, when a considerable section of former anti-war protest leaders directly supported Nato’s intervention and its phoney humanitarian claim to be protecting first the Bosnian Muslims and later the Kosovars.
What was behind the attack on Serbia was Washington’s determination to exploit the opportunities opened up by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Not a few of those who backed the Balkan interventions employed similar humanitarian pretexts to support the US invasion of Iraq in the name of removing the “dictator Hussein.”
More insidious, however, was the political role of the liberals and leftists who dominated the mass anti-war protests of 2003 and promoted the illusion that the invasion could be stopped by appealing to the United Nations or to France and Germany.
The latter had opposed the war in the UN to protect their imperialist interests in the Middle East and quickly fell into line once the US occupation became an established fact.
These renegades used their influence over the protest movement to channel the anti-war sentiment of broad layers of the population behind the Democrats and the election campaigns of John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.
The election of Obama was the prelude to shutting down the anti-war movement altogether.
Behind the eruption of US militarism over the past two decades lies the attempt by successive administrations to exploit the military predominance of US imperialism to offset its historic decline, at the expense of its European and Asian rivals.
Those processes have only been accelerated under the Obama administration by the deepening global economic crisis.
The current drive to war against Iran and Syria threatens to embroil not only the entire Middle East, but to drag in other countries including China and Russia.
A new international movement against war and militarism must be based on the understanding that the fundamental cause of imperialist conflict is not the subjective characteristics of political leaders or mistaken policies.
Behind the criminality and recklessness of leaders in the US, Europe and elsewhere are the fundamental contradictions of capitalism—between world economy and the outmoded nation state system, and between socialised production and the private ownership of the means of production.
A viable movement against war requires national consciousness and a revolutionary force for pro-people policies.
So much for Uncle Sam’s ‘democratisation’ project.
HOMS, (SANA) — President Bashar al-Assad paid an inspection field visit Tuesday to Baba Amr Quarter in Homs Governorate.
President al-Assad met the inhabitants of the Quarter, earlier agonized by heavily-armed terrorist groups which terrorized the inhabitants, asserting that the State would never hesitate to carry out its duty and responsibilities in protecting its citizens.
“The State has given those who deviated from the path of right the best of possible opportunities to backtrack and return to the Homeland, and to put down their arms; they ,however, rejected seizing these opportunities and further increased their terrorism. So, there was a must as to work for restoring security, safety, and for imposing the rule of law,” underscored President al-Assad to hundreds of the citizens who gathered around him and complained from the heinous acts perpetrated by the armed terrorist groups.
President al-Assad, during his field visit and inspection of the destruction inflicted upon the Quarter by the armed terrorist groups, called for the rallying of efforts redoubling work as to quickly reconstruct destroyed buildings and rehabilitate the infrastructure, especially schools, electricity grids, and medical establishments.
President al-Assad, during his meeting with some army and police force members, lauded the sacrifices and efforts exerted by Syrian Army and Police members in defense of the Homeland and its stability and security.
The inhabitants of the quarter, who chanted slogans of loyalty, and amity to president al-Assad, asserted that the terrorist acts by the armed terrorist groups have but increased the inhabitants’ commitment to their Homeland, and care about its security and stability, highly appreciating the Syrian Arab Army, which restored safety and security to their Quarter and City.
An interview by Rachael Boothroyd with feminist activist Meglimar Melero from the Insumisas Collective and the Feminist Spider network discussing the feminist movement in Venezuela today.
Can you tell us something about your collective, Insumisas and the Feminist Spider?
MM: The Feminist Spider is a communal space for discussion in which numerous collectives and social movements participate. We at Insumisas are participating as a collective within that space in different ways. The Spider is still not what you could describe as a feminist movement with militants just yet.
For instance, we at Insumisas carry out numerous events in Carabobo state, we participate in Mission Sucre with our student-comrades, with comrades from the communities, comrades who are organized in the communal councils. Basically what we are trying to do is carry out a type of political education with respect to feminism and socialism through the women’s organization processes in the communal councils, that’s to say, using whatever methods possible to promote and build gender equality and justice committees.
Venezuela celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8. Can you comment on the significance of the day and why it is important in Venezuela?
MM: I think it’s necessary to re-conceptualize International Women’s Day from the important perspective of being a working class woman. We need to win the day back from capitalism, which has tried to commercialize it. It’s now a day about buying flowers and saying, “Oh, look how great women are”. I think that we have to rescue its educational meaning, its message of struggle and rebellion, its concept of participation and organization, basically its revolutionary character, no?
On March 8 we celebrated the day (in Venezuela) and the atmosphere of enthusiasm was tangible, really militant. It seemed to me, being in the epicenter of the march with all the other women, from Mission Madres del Barrio and other working women from all over the country, you could really feel the spirit of the politically organized woman, the woman who is participating in the community, the woman who really believes in this revolutionary process.
In short, I think the day is really important on a global level for working class women, and it’s important to give the day its original character back, which is that of class struggle. Because historically, this day started to be commemorated because of working class women’s struggles, from their labor demands.
Can you comment a little bit about the politics of the Bolivarian government with respect to women? Have you noticed a change in terms of this government’s policies and those of previous governments?
MM: It is thanks to the revolutionary process that women’s participation is even taken into account, obviously we are grateful to the revolutionary process, because as women, we have greater participation and greater opportunities, not just in terms of our role but also in practice, because we have all those instances of popular power and participation.
The revolution has generated the spaces for us women to organize, and to respond to, debate and reflect over our reality within capitalist society, in which we are still living, no? I think that the communal councils have gender equality, as well as other spaces such as the governmental federal committees, the party, and in the recognition that social movements can generate policy. All of these are tools for participation in which women are recognized and which try to drive forward the participation of women.
What would you say to the feminists in other countries who criticize Venezuelan feminism for being too class orientated, as opposed to focusing on issues specific to women?
MM: I think it’s really about carrying out a historic revision of feminism. What has happened to feminism as a global movement?
I think that women from other places in the world, especially the West, should reflect at length about what has happened to the Marxist-feminist proposal, socialist-feminism; what has happened to those proposals in their respective countries? Because let’s say that we have had some currents which have broken away and have stayed within the arena of simply making liberal demands. They don’t organize towards the transformation or the surmounting of exploitation or the patriarchy, viewed as the complimentary functional system to capitalism.
Feminism has suffered from, just like the global left, ideological deviations that can’t be hidden. I think, what we are trying to do in Venezuela is to recover all of that material and those feminist proposals, Marxist-feminism with class consciousness. Because without feminism, socialism can’t exist, and without socialism, true feminism cannot exist.
Venezuela is famed for its beauty competitions. As a feminist collective do you have a position with respect to this?
MM: The culture of the media has had a really profound effect on society, and obviously there is a culture, not just in Venezuela but in other countries in Latin America and Europe, which seeks to market women’s bodies. It converts women into an object that is bought and sold, it dehumanizes women completely, it turns them into merchandise.
I think, in this sense, the struggle should be about opening more spaces in the media which reflect how diverse we are as women, in every sense, and that we become more aware. That’s a successful political strategy because (in Venezuela) there is alternative media, which little by little is starting to promote the fact that another type of woman exists, a woman who builds things, creates things and has things to contribute. Not the stereotypical woman that is sold by capitalism.
The Feminist Spider has been organizing workshops from a gender perspective for the new Labor Law which is due to be passed by the government in May of this year. What are the principal proposals that have been developed through these workshops?
MM: We as socialist feminists, with respect to the discussions surrounding the new labor law, are worried and concerned over the issue of women and the work environment. We are conscious that we as women have particular conditions in our work environment, whether we are on a salaried wage or working as part of the informal economy, which is made up of a lot of women.
Those are the kind of issues that we have been discussing at the workshops. We have tried to orientate the discussion towards how to regulate our working environments and what we can do for the huge mass of women inside the informal economy, such as women selling products in a catalogue, street-sellers, hairdressers, etc. This is all indirect work.
Our main preoccupation is how to regulate and guarantee labor rights for the female working population. Because our work also goes above and beyond the working day, our work also includes the intellectual and productive work that women carry out at home. We have a lot of challenges, above all because a lot of responsibilities fall onto the shoulders of women, a lot of social responsibilities.
It’s important to point out that these responsibilities aren’t just women’s responsibilities, but they are in fact social responsibilities; looking after children, the sick, the old, education. These are responsibilities that historically have fallen upon each one of us as women. We have to create, evaluate and socialize the concept of these tasks as social responsibilities, so that these areas become collective spaces of work and education. That is basically the focal point of our proposals towards the new labor law.
MINSK, 22 March (BelTA) – The EU travel ban list has been adopted on the tip of the fifth column in Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko said in an interview to Alexander Gurnov, head and host of the program Spotlight (Prozhektor) of the TV company Russia Today, on 20 March.
The head of state commented on the information regarding one of Belarusian opposition figures, former chairman of the Belarusian parliament Stanislav Shushkevich barred from leaving the country: “The European Union has adopted a so-called blacklist which includes your obedient servant as well. This list has been approved on the tip of our fifth column led by one of its leaders Stanislav Shushkevich.”
When asked about retaliatory measures, Alexander Lukashenko said: “We have compiled our blacklist in response. We have not introduced it in full yet. But we will certainly do it. These people provide the West with names and companies and suggest imposing economic sanctions.”
The President noted that he has always treated his predecessors with respect. With this, the Belarusian leader pointed out the policy pursued by Stanislav Shushkevich in his time. “As for his policy, one action is enough to describe this person when he together with Kravchuk (Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk – BelTA’s note) insisted on the dissolution of the Soviet Union,” Alexander Lukashenko said.
Editor’s Note: Stanislav Shushkevich was a contemporary of Boris Yeltsin and was a leading advocate of counterrevolution in Belarus. Today, he is one of the loudest voices calling for ‘regime change’ against President Lukashenko, who has been a vocal critic of NATO and was the sole European country to stand with Libya last year.
Pyongyang, March 21 (KCNA) — The Korean nation has ardently wished to see the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula at an early date as it has been exposed to a more direct nuclear threat for such a long period than any other nation in the world.
However, this ardent desire and wish are facing a new grave challenge due to the Lee Myung Bak group of traitors’ policy of confrontation with the DPRK and moves to provoke a nuclear war.
The south Korean puppet authorities are getting evermore undisguised in their moves to turn “the nuclear security summit” to be held in Seoul into a confab on a nuclear racket against the DPRK.
Coming to the surface is their attempt to put the “nuclear issue in the north” on the agenda of the summit in the wake of such reckless remarks that “the summit is of particularly weighty significance for south Korea being exposed to a nuclear threat” and “it is the first process for building a world free from nukes.”
Lee Myung Bak on March 19 let loose sheer sophism that “the summit may play a big role in expanding the international community’s support for the denuclearization of the north,” disclosing his ulterior motive.
Kim Song Hwan, puppet minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Rim Song Nam, puppet chief delegate to the six-party talks, and others who are responsible for discussing the issue of the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula are floating wild rumors that “there may be speeches on the north’s nuclear issue,” “written statements may be presented” and “there may be a message urging the north to scrap nuclear substance” at the summit.
Also heard from the conservative media are outbursts echoing the puppet authorities’ claims that “the nuclear issue of the north is likely to be addressed in depth” and “the parties concerned to the six-party talks will address the nuclear issue of the north in an intensive manner.”
Worse still, even an idea of working out a draft “Seoul communique” on the premise of “nuclear threat from the north” is high on the agenda.
This clearly testifies to the fact that the Lee Myung Bak group of traitors is set to use the forthcoming international forum as a lever for confrontation with the DPRK by availing itself of its position as a host.
The Seoul “nuclear security summit” is a continuation and extension of the group’s frantic anti-DPRK nuclear racket. The DPRK has already clarified its principle stand over this issue and made it clear that international norms are strictly observed in storing and managing nuclear substance.
What should be stated emphatically is that the issue of the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is that of denuclearizing the whole peninsula. Accordingly, “the north’s nuclear issue” has never existed, in fact, and there is no justification to bring it up for discussion at the summit.
The Lee group’s persistent efforts to place “the north’s nuclear issue” on the agenda of the Seoul “summit” are nothing but a revelation of its sinister attempt to justify its moves for a nuclear war against the DPRK and a curtain-raiser to the worldwide politically-motivated farce to divert elsewhere public criticism of it and escape a miserable defeat in the forthcoming “election.”
It is a ridiculous attempt and an absolutely unpardonable criminal act for Lee Myung Bak, traitor for all ages, to bring someone’s “nuclear issue” up for discussion. The Lee group is foolish enough to use the “summit” as a card for justifying its military threat and moves for a nuclear war against the DPRK.
Crying out for “coping with the north’s possible terrorism by biological weapons and its attack to disturb GPS”, the group had already staged such war drills as “combined protection drills of civilians, officials, military and police forces” and “combined drill to combat terrorism”.
Kim Kwan Jin, puppet minister of Defense, even issued an order “to shower a ten-fold retaliatory fire” in case the north provokes. He cried out for “retaliating against the north till its full surrender in the spirit of taking revenge upon it for the sunken ‘Cheonan’ warship and the Yonphyong Island shelling case.”
Jong Sung Jo, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also issued an order to “take prompt strong retaliatory strikes.” He said the north should be forced to “deeply regret for its action”.
The Lee group is keen to use the “summit” as a curtain-raiser to its nuclear war against the DPRK.
The DPRK cannot but take a serious note of this fact.
No one can vouch that Lee would not use the “summit” for achieving his sinister aim as he left no means untried to bedevil the inter-Korean relations in the past.
This is proved by the group which behaved so meanly in the wake of the DPRK’s announcement that it would launch satellite Kwangmyongsong-3.
The group is making last-ditch efforts to deny even the DPRK’s right to use space for peaceful purposes and infringe upon its sovereignty. This behavior suffices to guess how reckless it will go with this “summit” as an occasion.
The situation on the peninsula has reached an uncontrollably serious phase due to the group’s thrice-cursed act of hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the DPRK.
No one can predict how the situation will deteriorate in the future.
In case “the north’s nuclear issue” is placed on the agenda at the Seoul “summit” and such provocation as “issuing a statement” against the DPRK is perpetrated, this will be recorded in history as an intolerable insult to the wishes of the peerlessly great men of Mt. Paektu who left the denuclearization of the peninsula as their behests and as another thrice-cursed hideous crime.
It is a mockery of the public at home and abroad and shame on the world community to open the “summit” to discuss nuclear security in south Korea, the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal.
To take part in Lee’s indiscreet burlesque is as reckless an act as driving the situation on the peninsula to the worst phase and adding fuel to the flames.
Any provocation will amount to a declaration of a war against the DPRK and result in throwing a stumbling block in the way of discussing the denuclearization of the peninsula.
U.S./NATO Troops Out Now!
We Said: Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!
On March 6, two days before International Women’s Day, Washington’s Afghan puppet president Hamid Karzai announced that he had approved a new “code of conduct” issued by the Ulema Council of senior Muslim clerics. This edict legally confines women to their homes, barring them from going out without a male guardian or mingling with men in schools, offices or markets. It also officially condones wife-beating. “Men are fundamental and women are secondary,” said the statement, which Karzai saluted as “the sharia law of all Muslims and all Afghans.”
Throughout the past ten years of U.S. occupation, Afghanistan has been a living hell for women. To sell their predatory war in retribution for the September 11 attacks, the U.S. and its NATO allies pointed to the crimes against women under the then-ruling Taliban, pledging that an American-led takeover would bring liberation. After U.S. forces seized control of the country in 2002, George W. Bush proclaimed that “today, women are free.” In reality, the U.S. rulers merely handed power to another wing of the anti-woman fundamentalist forces that they had backed against the Soviet Union and the leftist regime of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) from the late 1970s to the early ’90s.
In Afghanistan today, women are forced to wear the suffocating head-to-toe burqa almost everywhere. The sight of women begging for money to feed their starving families is commonplace on the streets of Kabul, the capital city. To survive or pay off debts, families sell their daughters in marriage or to the many brothels servicing U.S. troops and contractors. More than half of all girls are forced into marriage before the age of 16.
There is a saying in Afghanistan that a woman belongs either to her husband’s house or to her grave. Half of the inmates at the Badam Bagh women’s prison in Kabul have been imprisoned for years for refusing to marry or for fleeing abusive husbands. Returned runaways are often shot or stabbed by family members in “honor killings.” Other women are jailed for being victims of rape or assault. For a woman in Afghanistan, any sex outside marriage is considered a crime—including when she is raped. The rapist, meanwhile, almost always goes unpunished.
Barely a quarter of Afghan girls go to school. Religious fanatics attack those who do, including by spraying acid in their faces, as happened at a school in Kandahar in 2008. The following year, the education ministry reported that nearly 500 schools, mostly schools for girls, had been destroyed, damaged or forced to close. Between March and October 2010, at least 126 students and teachers were killed. The literacy rate for women is 12 percent, while their average life expectancy is 44, some 24 years below the world average. To escape their unbearable lives, many women turn to suicide. Even according to official Afghan statistics, some 2,300 women and girls kill themselves every year—more than six each day. The most common method is self-immolation with cooking oil.
The atrocities endured by Afghan women are not in the main the actions of rogue elements breaking the law. In 2004, the U.S. overseers brokered a constitution that enshrined Islamic sharia law. Despite the token presence of women in the constituent assembly and a claim that women have “equal rights,” the constitution states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” In 2006, Karzai’s cabinet reestablished the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was notorious under the Taliban for its brutal imposition of sharia, including stoning to death women who defied its edicts.
Calling Afghanistan “the good war,” in 2009 the Obama administration reinforced the U.S. occupation with another 30,000 troops. The imperialist troops, full of racist contempt, continue to massacre untold numbers of civilians. American soldiers have murdered Afghans for sport, cut off their fingers as trophies and urinated on their dead bodies. Marine snipers have posed for photos with a flag bearing the Nazi SS insignia. Soldiers regularly stage night raids in which they go after suspected opponents of the Afghan regime at private homes and shoot dead whoever opens the door. The explosion of anger that followed the revelation that the U.S. military had burned copies of the Koran last month shows the depth of resentment that has built up among the Afghan peoples.
In the latest atrocity, a U.S. Army staff sergeant went door-to-door in a village in southern Afghanistan overnight on March 11, gunning down at least 16 civilians, including nine children. This outrage provoked an immediate condemnation from the Karzai government and vows for vengeance from the Taliban, further complicating the U.S. rulers’ efforts to extricate themselves from the Afghanistan quagmire.
After repeated instances of Afghan forces turning their guns on American soldiers, the Obama administration announced last month that it was moving up the timetable for ending U.S. troops’ “combat role” to some time next year and withdrawing them in 2014. The U.S. is looking to open negotiations with the Taliban, which continues to control large parts of the country, in order to somehow cobble together a “political solution” that would create a modicum of stability after U.S. troops are withdrawn. Karzai’s approval of the clerics’ woman-hating “code of conduct” is widely seen to be an overture to the Taliban on the part of his regime.
As Marxists, our starting point in opposing the U.S. occupation is proletarian class opposition to America’s capitalist rulers and their imperialist predations. In the lead-up to the 2001 invasion, we called for the military defense of Afghanistan against the U.S. and allied forces without giving any support to the Taliban reactionaries. In the face of the ongoing occupation, we emphasize that every blow struck against the blood-soaked U.S. ruling class is a blow against the chief enemy of working people and the oppressed around the world. All U.S./NATO troops out of Afghanistan now!
Afghanistan: Front Line of the Anti-Soviet War Drive
In their drive for world domination, the U.S. imperialists have never had any compunction about siding with the most retrograde social forces. It is impossible to comprehend the current plight of Afghan women without examining Washington’s role in backing the forces of Islamic reaction against the Soviet Union and its PDPA allies starting in 1978.
Many of the modernizing left nationalists who led the PDPA were educated and trained in the Soviet Union, which they rightly saw as a source of social progress. The Soviet Union was a workers state that embodied key social gains of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, centrally a planned economy and collectivized property, despite its subsequent degeneration under a nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy. Progressive-minded activists in Afghanistan in the 1970s looked at the example of Soviet Central Asia, just across the border, which was a modern society where women went unveiled, were educated and participated in public life and where everyone had access to free education and health care.
On coming to power in April 1978, the PDPA began to implement serious reforms favoring women and poor peasants, such as redistributing the land, lowering the bride price, educating women and freeing them from the burqa. In the context of this cruelly backward country, which had far more mullahs than industrial workers, such reforms had an explosive impact. They fueled a revolt by reactionary traditionalists who sought to maintain the old society, including its all-encompassing degradation of women. When the Muslim insurgency threatened the PDPA’s hold on power, the government made repeated requests for Soviet assistance, until the Soviets finally dispatched tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan in December 1979.
This was the only war in modern history fought centrally over women’s rights. From the start, the U.S. imperialists, determined to strike a blow against the Soviet Union, took the side of benighted reaction. Democratic president Jimmy Carter and his successor, Republican Ronald Reagan, backed the mujahedin holy warriors to the hilt in the biggest covert CIA operation in history. Billions of dollars in aid went to an array of Islamist groups based in Peshawar, Pakistan, and to that country’s ISI intelligence service. The CIA used the ISI and the Egyptian and Saudi intelligence services to create, train, finance and arm a network of 70,000 Islamists (including Osama bin Laden) from more than 50 countries to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, giving a huge boost to Muslim fundamentalist movements the world over.
We wrote at the time of the Soviet intervention: “For revolutionary socialists there is nothing tricky, nothing ambiguous about the war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Army and its left-nationalist allies are fighting an anti-communist, anti-democratic mélange of landlords, money lenders, tribal chiefs and mullahs committed to mass illiteracy…. The gut-level response of every radical leftist should be fullest solidarity with the Soviet Red Army” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 29, Summer 1980). The threat of a CIA-backed Islamic takeover on the USSR’s southern flank posed directly the need for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the extended Soviet presence opened the possibility of social liberation for the Afghan masses, particularly women. We proclaimed: Hail Red Army! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!
In contrast, the bulk of the left internationally, with few exceptions, eagerly joined the imperialist chorus against the Soviet Union and whitewashed the mujahedin. The International Socialist Organization and its then ally in Britain, Tony Cliff’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP), stood foursquare with the imperialists. The 12 January 1980 issue of the SWP’s Socialist Worker blared, “Troops Out of Afghanistan!” In 1981, the then fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat of Ernest Mandel called for “stopping Soviet occupation in Afghanistan.” In howling with the imperialist wolves against the Soviet intervention, these groups made common cause with the worst enemies of the rights of women and all the oppressed.
Huge Gains for Afghan Women Under Soviet Presence
Freeing Afghan women from purdah (seclusion) and giving land to the peasants required ending the domination of the mullahs and tribal khans and overturning the country’s entire social structure. But the popular base of support for such moves within Afghanistan was very narrow. The country utterly lacked a proletariat with any social weight. Its tiny manufacturing workforce of some 35,000 was dwarfed by the quarter million Islamic clerics. Those elements in the cities aspiring to progress were surrounded by a sea of nomadic herdsmen and landless peasants beholden to the khans and the landlords. Thus, the presence of the Red Army, together with substantial Soviet aid, was essential to social progress.
Afghan women made unprecedented gains under the Soviet umbrella. While the 1964 constitution had declared women equal to men, equality largely remained on paper except for a few women in the upper strata of urban society. A thin layer of women had taken off the burqa and obtained education and employment outside the home, but even in Kabul, the main urban center, half of all women still wore the full veil in the late 1970s. Throughout the country, 98 percent of women were totally illiterate. In the 1980s, in contrast, there were vast opportunities for women to escape at least the strictest restraints of purdah. Many thousands became university students, workers, professionals and leftist activists.
Suraya Parlika, a founder of the PDPA-affiliated Democratic Women’s Organization, recounted some of these accomplishments in the 2007 documentary Afghan Women: A History of Struggle: “Women worked very hard to get their rights. They formed childcare centers in their workplaces to make it easier for women to work. Maternity leave was extended to three months from six weeks and they were still getting their salary.” The Afghan government also began mass literacy campaigns and provided free medical care.
By the late 1980s, women made up 40 percent of the country’s doctors (women doctors were in high demand, especially in rural areas, where women were still strictly secluded and barred from consulting male doctors). Sixty percent of the instructors at Kabul University and 65 percent of the student body were women. Family courts, in some cases presided over by female judges, had replaced the mullahs’ sharia courts. The number of working women increased 50-fold. By 1987, there were an estimated 245,000 women working in fields ranging from construction, printing and food processing to radio and TV journalism and especially teaching, where they made up 70 percent of the workforce.
In a 1994 PhD thesis, Educated Afghan Women in Search of Their Identities, the Afghan-born academic Sharifa Sharif reported on her 1987 interviews with 30 women workers in Kabul, undertaken as part of a survey for the United Nations Development Program. The sharp increase in women’s participation in economic life was partly due to the war, which had taken away many men and brought women from the countryside into Kabul. But it was also the result of greater legal rights, supportive government policies and economic development, including the construction of new homes, factories, schools and hospitals.
The transformation of these women from backward traditionalist areas into skilled workers gives a glimpse of what might have been achieved if Afghanistan had been able to continue its Soviet-assisted development. While initially encountering fierce resistance from their families, women workers were exposed to technology, education and literacy. They took pride in acquiring job skills and becoming ustad (expert masters) in their fields. Some were sent for training to the Soviet Union. At a construction site, Sharif interviewed a 23-year-old widow and mother of two children, who was one of three female crane operators, a job never before done by a woman in Afghanistan.
Many women took up arms against the mujahedin threat. Four of seven military commanders appointed in 1986 were women. By 1989, the regime reported having armed some 15,000 women. The same year, all female members of the PDPA received military training and arms. The arming of unveiled women with Kalashnikovs symbolized the social transformation then under way in Afghanistan. As early as 1984, Indian journalist Patricia Sethi reported encountering 15-year-old girls carrying rifles who were members of a civilian brigade in a village near Kabul: “They spoke fervently and passionately about their revolution and what it meant for young women in Afghanistan: it meant ‘an education, freedom from the veil, freedom from feudalists who want to keep us down,’ said Khalida. ‘We do not want to become the fourth wife of a 60-year-old man, existing solely for his whim and pleasure’” (India Today, 31 July 1984).
Many women in Afghanistan took up arms to defend the gains of their revolution.
Soviet Withdrawal Betrayed Afghan Women
The Soviet military presence posed the possibility not only of defeating the U.S.-backed Islamists but also of incorporating Afghanistan into the Soviet system. In the 1920s, Soviet Central Asia looked remarkably like Afghanistan in the 1970s—a miserably backward and desolate place where women were bought and sold. Every step toward emancipation taken by the Soviet regime was met with fierce resistance from the khans, mullahs and their armed gangs of basmachi (the mujahedin of the time), including the wholesale murder of Communist agitators and women who rejected the veil.
The imposition of Soviet power under the umbrella of the Red Army created the conditions for dismantling centuries-old tribal/clerical domination and developing the region’s vast natural resources. Once the Soviet Army got the upper hand against the basmachi in 1922, Bolshevik women activists were sent in to work among the horribly oppressed women, who stood to benefit most from the extension of the gains of the October Revolution. Under Lenin’s guidance, they set out to gradually undermine the power and authority of the khans’ and mullahs’ institutions through legal and administrative measures, demonstrating that the Communists were the foremost fighters for the oppressed.
Beginning with the Stalinist political counterrevolution in 1923-24, the USSR underwent a qualitative bureaucratic degeneration in which the working class was deprived of political power. Even after this, however, the necessities of industrialization and economic planning continued to produce particularly huge benefits for Central Asia. As the USSR was transformed from a largely peasant country into an industrial power starting in the late 1920s and early ’30s, Soviet women were increasingly mobilized to work in industry. In Central Asia, women entered the industrial workforce in large numbers during World War II, when many Soviet factories were relocated to the region away from the front lines of the war.
Had the Soviet leadership been determined to see the war in Afghanistan through to victory, the country could have undergone similarly immense social progress through the construction of a modern infrastructure, the creation of a significant urban proletariat and the institution of economic planning. But the Stalinist bureaucrats in the Kremlin did not pursue this course. Instead, the regime of Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew the Red Army in 1988-89.
This was not because it faced military defeat; to the end, the Soviet Army had the upper hand militarily. The Soviet withdrawal was a political decision by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow carried out with the fatuous aim of appeasing U.S. imperialism. It was a betrayal of the Afghan masses, especially women, that helped pave the way for capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union itself in 1991-92.
The Stalinist bureaucracy was a contradictory caste whose nationalist outlook subordinated the interests of the world proletariat to the defense of its own privileged position as a parasitic layer resting on the collectivized economy. The 1979 Red Army intervention was a decent and progressive act, even if it was carried out by the corrupt and conservative regime of Leonid Brezhnev, that cut against the grain of the Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country.” However, we warned from the outset that the bureaucracy might cut a deal at the expense of the Afghan peoples as part of its quest for “peaceful coexistence” with Washington. We fought for a proletarian political revolution to oust the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy and return the Soviet Union to the Bolshevik internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky.
After the Soviet withdrawal, the Afghan government fought on valiantly for three years. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—wrote to the PDPA government in 1989 offering to organize an international brigade to help fight the forces of Islamic reaction. When that offer was turned down, the PDC, at the request of the Afghan government, launched an international fund drive to aid civilian victims of the mujahedin siege of the city of Jalalabad, raising over $44,000. The Afghan forces were able to repel this attack.
When the mujahedin finally took Kabul in 1992, re-enslaving Afghan women, the various tribally-based militias carried out a vengeful war of mass murder, torture and rape of rival ethnic populations, which left at least 50,000 people dead in Kabul alone. This led to four years of horror under the rule of various warring fundamentalist factions which brought the city to the point of famine and total devastation.
A recent New York Times article (“In Afghanistan, a Soviet Past Lies in Ruins,” 11 February) captured some of the destruction wrought by these U.S.-backed cutthroats. The article notes that in the Soviet House of Science and Culture during the 1980s, “Soviets and Afghans gathered for lectures, films and the propagation of modernizing ideas that for a while refashioned Kabul, including a time when women could work outside the home in Western clothing.” It continued:
“But during the civil war of 1992-96, the House of Science and Culture was occupied by one faction and wrecked as another lobbed shells down from a nearby hill. Today, the auditoriums are littered with rubble; cold air comes in through rocket holes; and once-bold Soviet murals of men and women, Afghans and Russians, are hidden in the squalid darkness near cartoon images depicting a Taliban fighter instructing children to become suicide bombers.”
Eventually the Taliban, recruiting from the historically dominant Pashtun ethnic population, emerged as the strongest of the mujahedin factions. Backed by Pakistan and supported by the U.S., it came to power in 1996. A year later, an American diplomat declared: “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that” (quoted in Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia [2000]). Only when the U.S. rulers realized that there would be no Aramco (or any other oil company) and no pipelines did they start talking about the Taliban’s barbaric treatment of women.
Many of the CIA-financed fundamentalists who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s turned against their former paymasters over the following decade. This was the case with the September 11, 2001 attacks carried out by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, which led in turn to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. After ousting the Taliban, the Bush administration installed a regime based largely on the same mujahedin warlords who devastated the country from 1992-96.
The Impact of Counterrevolution in the USSR
The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union has fed the bonfires of social reaction on a global scale. In many countries, women’s rights and social progress in general have been thrown back by generations. For working people in the ex-Soviet Union and the former deformed workers states of East and Central Europe, the return of capitalism has been a calamity measured in unemployment, homelessness, collapsing life expectancy and intercommunal violence.
In ex-Soviet Central Asia, while the effects of more than seven decades of socialized economic development did not permit a quick and easy victory for the Islamic fundamentalists, millions of women have found themselves again trapped under veils and classified as second-class citizens. Fewer and fewer girls attend secondary schools. In much of the region, women can no longer initiate a divorce. The resurgence of nationalism has led to interethnic strife, as in Tajikistan in 1992-97 and more recently in Kyrgyzstan. The region remains a powder keg, where ethnic clashes continue to rage.
The horrors produced by U.S. imperialism’s “holy war” against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, as well as its present occupation of the country, underline how the capitalist system is a barrier to social progress and a breeding ground for reaction. As in Afghanistan, U.S. occupation forces devastated Iraq during their occupation of that country, fueling sectarian massacres and throwing back the rights of women and other oppressed.
Through its “war on terror,” U.S. imperialism aims to impose its will on oppressed peoples around the world. The despotic bourgeoisies of the neocolonies subjugate and plunder their “own” people for their own profit and that of the imperialists to whom they are beholden. There is plenty of hatred among the masses for these parasites and their overlords, however the aspirations of the downtrodden have increasingly been channeled into religious reaction. Islamist forces continue to grow in influence throughout North Africa and the Near East, from Egypt to Gaza to Turkey and beyond.
The only way forward is the struggle for an internationalist revolutionary leadership dedicated to the fight for workers revolutions in both the neocolonies and the heartlands of world imperialism. While this may seem a distant prospect in this very reactionary political period, the bitter truth is that no other road can put an end to ethnic and national oppression, the oppression of women and the exploitation of working people.
The domestic complement of the murderous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is an escalating war on the U.S. working class, black people and immigrants. While a handful of wealthy capitalists accrue massive profits, the rest of the population is faced with increasing assaults on its living standards or utter poverty. Moreover, anti-woman religious fundamentalism is also rampant on the home front, as bourgeois politics is saturated with God and the right to abortion and even contraception is under siege.
The purpose of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), of which the Spartacist League is the U.S. section, is to forge revolutionary Marxist parties modeled after Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party that led the October Revolution. Only the working class has the social power and objective interest to sweep away the deeply irrational and inhumane capitalist system through socialist revolution, replacing it with a planned economy in which production is based on the human needs of all, rather than profits for the few.
Particularly in the neocolonial world, where women’s oppression is so acute, women workers will be in the front ranks of such parties. The overthrow of the imperialist-dominated world order will lay a material basis to free women from age-old family servitude and reorganize society in the interest of all. The social functions of the family—housework, child rearing, preparation of food, etc.—will be replaced by collectivized institutions. When the bloody rule of capital is swept away by the workers of the world, the veil, the bride price, purdah, “honor killings” and the social degradation of women in all its forms will become but bitter memories of a barbaric past.
ALEPPO, (SANA)-The National Initiative for the Syrian Kurds on Tuesday held its annual festival at Sky Rose Hall in Aleppo celebrating al-Nowruz ( Spring ) occasion, with participation of popular, civil and official activities in Aleppo.
“The Syrian Kurds, as other national constituents, have foiled all wagers, showed high national awareness and sense to become a real defender of the Homeland,” Chairman of the Initiative Omar Ossi said, referring to the hostile powers’ bids to exploit the Kurdish file within their hostile agendas.
He pointed out to the role of the US-backed Zionism and their tools represented by Al Saud, Al Thani, Turkey and its war against the Kurds in safe regions, preventing them from celebrating the Nowruz Day.
He added that the Kurds will engage, along with their partners in the Homeland, in the national political life to build the features of modern Syria that will consolidate the basic principles of the Syrian people’s rights.
The festival included a lot of shows, songs, folkloric dances that reflected the Syrian people’s civilization and history.
Chicago rejects NATO summit protest march plans
The city of Chicago has rejected a request by anti-war protesters to march through downtown Chicago on May 20, the first day of the NATO summit.
The protesters already had a permit to march along the same route — from Daley Center Plaza to McCormick Place — one day earlier. That was the date the now-moved G-8 summit was to have begun.
But when President Barack Obama moved the G-8 conference earlier this month to Camp David, Md., the protesters put in an application for a city permit that asked to move their march back a day, to Sunday, May 20, to coincide with the opening of the NATO summit.
The Chicago Department of Transportation now says the planned protest would “substantially and unnecessarily interfere with traffic” if it were held on that Sunday.
In a letter denying the application for a march that was sent to protest organizer Andy Thayer, assistant transportation commissioner Mike Simon wrote that there wouldn’t be “sufficient number of on-duty police officers, or other city employees authorized to regulate traffic,” on that Sunday.
Motorcades shuttling 5,000 summit attendees — including 50 heads of state — would create “significant traffic impediments which would be exacerbated by the proposed 2.64-mile parade route,” Simon wrote, warning that there wasn’t enough manpower to police the summit and the protest while adequately covering the rest of the city.
The city has given protesters until Thursday to accept a suggested alternate march route — from the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park down Columbus and Congress before eventually arriving at the site of the summit.
Thayer said the alternate route — which avoids longer stretches of Michigan Avenue and State Street — would be “far less visible and convenient for public transport.” He said Monday that city officials were trying to take advantage of the G-8’s move away from Chicago to stifle protest.
He said that the city’s claim that it doesn’t have the resources to handle a Sunday parade is “ridiculous” given that it already accepted an identical request for Saturday, May 19.
“If anything, there’s less traffic on a Sunday,” he said. “I literally cut and pasted the application and just changed the date.”
At a meeting with city officials Monday morning, Thayer was told that a Los Angeles activist already has a permit to protest at the Daley Center Plaza on the Sunday.
If protesters don’t accept the alternate route, or quickly find a way to work with the Los Angeles activist in a way that is acceptable to the city, they will only be permitted to march the day before the summit begins.
“There isn’t much point in marching on an empty building,” Thayer said. “We have a First Amendment right to be within sight and sound of the world leaders when they meet.”
Organizers hope that tens of thousands of protesters will march. They previously hailed the president’s decision to move the G-8 summit as evidence that the political establishment is scared of large-scale protests in an election year.
Obama said at the time that he preferred to hold the G-8 at Camp David because it would be a more relaxed setting for world leaders to meet.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who has had a battle of words over protest restrictions with activists since the original plans to host the G-8 and the NATO summits were announced last year — has repeatedly insisted that protesters’ First Amendment rights will be respected.
Law Department spokesman Roderick Drew reiterated that message Monday, saying Emanuel’s administration wants protestors to “express their First Amendment rights but we also have an obligation to keep them safe as they do so, and to keep the city safe at the same time.”
Drew said officials are hopeful that a negotiated agreement can be reached but added that the “NATO summit is significantly larger than the G-8 summit with over 50 heads of state and other high level dignitaries in attendance, therefore the traffic issues also grow in comparison to those of the G-8 summit attendees.”
Contributing: Fran Spielman.
