www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, December 2001Lead article
War, terror, and humanism collide in Afghanistan
by Gerard EmmettThe world saw some extreme contrasts in Afghanistan following the
unexpectedly quick collapse of the Taliban regime across most of the country.
First, there was the outpouring of joy by many of the people in areas where the
Taliban had disappeared. This was not a celebration of the destructive U.S.
bombing or the retrogressive politics of the Northern Alliance, but of the
opening to once more express the simple fact of being human. As one young Afghan
said, "We weren't allowed to play football. We weren't allowed to go to
sports clubs. We weren't allowed to feel like other human beings." Thus the formerly banned activities now flaunted listening or dancing to
music, watching movies or television, kite flying, men shaving their beards or
even, for women, showing one's face in public cut through the lies perpetrated
by the inhuman regime and its allies, Al Qaeda, as well as by the Bush
administration. Bush had planned on a more protracted military campaign during which the
political transition could be more closely managed. The new situation is very
fluid and presents many challenges and new openings for the revolutionary
movement. For the first time in years, hundreds of women dared to call a march in Kabul
on Nov. 24 to demand their rights. In one woman's words, "I came here to
demand an education for my daughter. I was a teacher, I am a literate, educated
woman, but my daughter has barely been to school." They were forced to
postpone it however by the military police of the Northern Alliance who now have
de facto power there. The attention drawn to the condition of Afghan women by the worldwide women's
movement as well as indigenous groups like RAWA has helped to create a space in
which such a demonstration can be contemplated. The Northern Alliance can cite
"security" reasons to postpone it, but in fact their own record on
women's rights is scarcely better than the Taliban. This is one reason why many
women are cautious right now about throwing off the burqa. NIHILIST BLOODBATH In contrast to the masses' humanism, the recent actions of Al Qaeda present
the starkest vision of utter nihilism that can be imagined short of nuclear war.
In beseiged Kunduz, the hardcore followers of Osama bin Laden apparently didn't
hesitate to murder many of their Afghan Muslim brothers-in-arms who were less
thirsty for martyrdom than themselves. With the fall of Kunduz and defection of
the Afghan Taliban fighters there, the Al Qaeda members taken prisoner resorted
to a suicidal uprising in their prison at Mazar-i-Sharif in which hundreds more
may have been slaughtered by the Northern Alliance forces and U.S. bombs. With the Taliban's last refuge at Kandahar now being surrounded and hundreds
of U.S. troops occupying the nearby area searching for Osama bin Laden, the
military outcome of this phase of the war seems to be pretty well settled. Despite the isolation, collapse and discrediting of the Taliban and Al Qaeda,
the Bush administration will carry on with its logic of permanent war. It is
true that Bush and bin Laden, in their efforts to polarize the world between
themselves and leave no openings for freedom, have been mirror images that
strengthened each other's position. It is equally true that their weaknesses
mirror each other. For bin Laden, the masses were to be polarized behind his terrorist
atrocities; he genuinely believes that the whole "Islamic nation"
would cast aside all mercy and humanity in the name of his impoverished vision
of a "holy" society. This vision is rooted in a hatred of the masses
themselves, which makes them expendable as cannon fodder, as starving and
silenced, as 360 degrees of collateral damage. It reflects what Marx once called
"the infinite degradation in which humanity exists for itself." The disposability of the Third World masses has always been gospel for the
U.S. ruling class as well. Those who supported a fundamentalist Christian mass
murderer like Gen. Efrain Rios Montt in Guatemala have no right to judge bin
Laden as being uniquely a monster. And only last year the administration was
still providing aid to the Taliban despite the ascendancy of bin Laden and Al
Qaeda. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is one who has formulated the aims of
Bush's war. He was a student and disciple of Albert Wohlstetter, who believed in
the "rational" study of nuclear war, as well as of Allan Bloom, the
elitist author of THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND. The "logic" of
nuclear war and the presence of this kind of thinking in the bourgeois world
feeds the apocalyptic fantasies of bin Laden and many other death cult leaders.
Wolfowitz said on Sept. 14: "It's going to require, as the president has
said, removing the support for those terrorist networks, removing the harbors
that they find sanctuary in, and preventing these kinds of things from happening
in the future, and especially preventing them from acquiring the kinds of
weapons that could be available in the future." As early as the 1970s Wolfowitz advocated the overthrow of the regime in
Iraq, and now is advocating an attack on Saddam Hussein's regime as the next
step in Bush's permanent war. A more pragmatic wing of the ruling class,
represented by Secretary of State Colin Powell, may settle for more peripheral
strikes against bin Laden-linked groups in the Philippines or elsewhere. IMPERIALISM'S HUMAN DILEMMA The U.S. was taken by surprise by the collapse of the Taliban. The plan had
been for a much more tightly managed political transition in Afghanistan, with a
protracted military campaign that presumed an enemy with a more solid grip on
power. But with the Taliban's fall it becomes clear what a lie that was. In fact
the relation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda to the Afghan people was much more like
that of any colonial or neocolonial regime; in some ways it was a regime like
that supported by the Russians, and similar to what the U.S. has installed in
many countries. One former Afghan member of the Taliban secret police described it this way:
"Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed and if we found people doing
any of these things we would beat them with staves soaked in water, like a knife
cutting through meat, until the room ran with their blood or their spines
snapped. Then we would leave them with no food or water in rooms filled with
insects until they died." Other Afghans have described the distance between themselves and the foreign
members of Al Qaeda, who they viewed as a wealthy elite and interacted with only
as cooks or servants. The measure of the regime's inhumanity was it's treatment of women, and the
conditions of women's lives will also measure the new situation. When Northern
Alliance forces who have their own history of rape and massacre entered Kabul
against the wishes of the U.S., they put the Bush administration in the awkward
position, for them, of having to pose as defenders of women's rights or stand
exposed as hypocrites. This is one source of tension which will increase in the coming period.
The revolutionary self-determination of women was also seen in the recent
seizure of food by masses of women who have spent years having to take handouts
from armed factions, as if this was a normal condition of life, and now saw the
opening to fight back and provide for their families with dignity. This kind of
mass action demonstrates the depth of the challenge to all the oppressive
conditions of life that will emerge with the return of women to public activity.
Their demands which begin with calls for political democracy will surely take on
an even deeper revolutionary content. This moment can prove to be an opening for revolutionaries if we can
transcend the kind of narrow either/or that has been offered by Bush and bin
Laden. The outpouring of solidarity with Afghan women seen in the recent tour of
the U.S. by RAWA representatives was a beginning. This will have to continue and
become much more profound. Unlike 1979, when the Iranian women's struggle was sacrificed to Khomeini's
counter-revolutionary anti-imperialism, serious revolutionaries in the West need
to take this opportunity to build new ties with those Third World
revolutionaries who are face to face with the fundamentalist threat. This is a
dialogue that is long overdue. There are currently some positive initiatives in
this direction, like the announcement of an Afghan Workers Solidarity Campaign
to aid those who have suffered from "The suppression by the religious
fundamentalists of all the democratic and human rights in Afghanistan...Many of
them are spending their lives undergound even in exile." It was no accident that RAWA was not invited to participate in the talks on
Afghanistan's future in Germany. It was pressure from the international women's
movement that got them there. The Bush administration would perhaps prefer to
focus on the strategic concerns raised by the ethnic makeup of the Northern
Alliance and the patronage of its various factions by Russia, Iran, and so
forth, as well as Pakistan's historic support for the Taliban as a Pashtun
force. But for revolutionaries it will be the human struggle that challenges the
entire logic of this old Afghan equation. That challenge calls for the strongest
support to the freedom struggles of women, workers, and other forces of
revolution within Afghanistan as they develop. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
