On 30 August, the last plane carrying US personnel departed from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, ending the largest airlift operation in history – 123,000 people evacuated in just 17 days. Marine General Frank McKenzie, the head of US Central Command, announced ‘the completion of our mission in Afghanistan’ after 20 years of occupation. British troops and personnel have been forced to withdraw alongside those of other NATO states, incapable of fielding a military force in Afghanistan independently of the US. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan has ended in a US rout; imperialism has left the country in a state of corruption, dependency and underdevelopment. It is a stark expression of the US’s relative decline as the world’s dominant imperialist power. Afghanistan will now enter the sphere of China’s influence. WILL HARNEY reports.
Humiliating defeat
The capital city of Kabul came under the control of the utterly reactionary Taliban on 15 August. On 26 August, in the thick of the evacuation, a suicide bomb ripped through the airport, claimed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant-Khorasan Province (ISIL-KP). It killed at least 182 people, including Afghan civilians, British dual-nationals, members of the US military and Taliban fighters. Terror was answered with indiscriminate terror: the US drone-bombed a suspected ISIL-KP member three days later, in what they called a ‘righteous act’. It obliterated a family of ten, including seven children, a blatant war crime. The man who was targeted, Zemari Ahmadi, was in fact a long-time employee of a California-based NGO and had applied for asylum in the US, and there is no evidence he was involved with ISIL-KP. He was transporting water canisters for his family and neighbours (New York Times, 29 August).
NATO’s occupation of Afghanistan, since the removal of the first Taliban government of 1996-2001, has involved thousands of such acts of criminal barbarity. The US-led invasion, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, was supposedly to defeat the threat of Al Qaeda, in revenge for the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US which killed 2,996 people. No reliable count of Afghan casualties of the war has been made but on one count 164,436 have been killed, not including many others who died through hunger and disease brought on by war. More than two million Afghan people have been displaced. The US suffered 2,448 military deaths and other NATO countries lost 1,144 soldiers, of which British forces numbered 457. The failure of the occupation expresses a shift in the balance of world power, against the US and Britain.
The lie is told that the occupation of Afghanistan created ‘breathing space’, however brief, for oppressed people to flourish. Adam Tooze, for example, writes in New Statesman on 10 September that NATO intervention created ‘a partially modernised society … the emancipated women, the hundreds of thousands who attended college, the green shoots of a public realm.’ But imperialism has never been capable of developing Afghanistan, nor has it attempted to. In truth, the NATO invasion was a move in imperialism’s ‘Great Game’ to re-gain strategic control of Afghanistan and central Asia and plunder their resources following the decline of the USSR. In that process, the US and Britain created the Taliban.
Revolution in Afghanistan1
After winning independence from the British Empire in the third Anglo-Afghan war (1919), like many other post-colonial countries Afghanistan had waged a struggle to develop economically. The independence war had been inspired by the Bolshevik revolution and Afghanistan established friendly relations with the USSR. Fifty percent of Afghanistan’s foreign aid between 1950-1970 came from the Soviet Union, while 30% came from the US in the same period. Progressive forces (liberal bourgeois intellectuals, urban workers and poor peasants) fought to reform the political system and develop national industry and agriculture, while the conservative clergy (mullahs), large landowners and monarchy fought to preserve their increasingly parasitic position which was traditionally based on patriarchy, tribal loyalty (to the Khans/warlords especially of the Durrani Pashtun tribe), and the exploitation of poor peasants.
By 1970 nearly half of land had been concentrated in the hands of landowners making up just 5% of the population. 36% of the rural population were poor peasants subject to practices such as compulsory labour and rent-in-kind. The practice of paying a bride price to the family of the groom was common, and oppressive marriage practices were crucial to defending property relations and family status. 90% of the population was illiterate (96% of women). There were only 3,371 primary schools, 139 secondary schools and 199 high schools, as well as 1,027 doctors and 71 hospitals. Within Afghanistan’s population (seven million in 1950, 39 million today) underdevelopment had also sown the seeds of deep conflicts between diverse national minorities: Pashtuns (42-48% of the population), Tajiks (27%), Uzbeks (9%) and Hazaras (9%) form the largest demographics.
From the 1960s, broad masses of people began to agitate for change: boycotts, a strike wave, peasant movements demanding land redistribution, and feminists demanding emancipation of women. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was founded in 1965 to fight for a democratic republic. The party immediately faced censorship and repression but continued to grow in strength. The corrupt handling of aid to famine victims starved half a million people between 1969-1972. The old order was facing a rising revolutionary threat and this broke apart the ruling classes. Mohammed Daoud Khan overthrew the constitutional monarchy in 1973 and installed a one-party state with himself as President, to represent the capitalist class; it attempted to see off the threat of revolution with a combination of reform and repression. From 1977 Daoud began to cut ties with the USSR and planned to align with US imperialism via Saudi Arabia and Iran.
When leading trade unionist and PDPA member Mir Akhbar Khayber was murdered in April 1978, Daoud’s government was blamed. Khayber’s funeral turned into a mass demonstration. Six PDPA leaders who spoke at the demonstration were marked for arrest; before he was imprisoned, Hafizullah Amin issued a signal to PDPA-loyal army troops to begin an insurrection. The army revolt overthrew Daoud’s dictatorship. Thousands of people poured into the streets of Kabul waving the red banner of the proletariat – this was the Saur Revolution.
From 1978-1992, the PDPA began to transform the country. Peasant debts were abolished with public burnings of the debt registers. Land was redistributed to poor peasants and an upper limit of five hectares on land ownership imposed. Women’s equality with men was proclaimed. 400 kindergartens were built, and 1,000 doctors, men and women, were trained each year, equal to the number trained in the entire previous 50 years. Children in rural schools were educated in their own languages. With continued financial assistance from the Soviet Union, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) under the leadership of the oppressed began to develop decisively out of the backwards state that the former ruling classes had held it in. The mullahs and Khans were enraged, as the reforms threatened the social relations on which their privileges and property depended. Civil war erupted.
The revolutionary role of women in Afghanistan
Before the 1978 revolution, reforms had only improved the lives of urban elite women. The Democratic Women’s Organisation of Afghanistan (DOAW) had been founded in the same year as the PDPA to defend and extend women’s rights, eliminate women’s illiteracy, oppose forced veiling and abolish the bride price. In 1970, it organised a protest of 5,000 women in Kabul in response to gendered violence stoked by conservative mullahs. Among those who joined in the shootings and acid attacks was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who would go on to a future career as a mujahideen, lauded as a ‘freedom fighter’ and even received at Downing Street by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1986. The DOAW protest succeeded in forcing investigations and arrests for the attacks. Following the Saur Revolution, DOAW became the country’s principal women’s organisation. It opposed imperialism, provided women’s social services and launched a literacy campaign in both rural and urban areas. Women joined the cadres and militias of the PDPA and trained for armed combat.
‘By 1984, the [DOAW] had organised 30,000 women in 669 politico-social units and had mobilised more than 80,000 rural women in social production. In 1990, the organisation had succeeded in unifying more than 160,000 members, with 1,405 working class women, 7,309 agricultural women, 62,810 housewives, and 33,764 female students’ (Countercurrents.org, 19 August 2021). The PDPA abolished the forced veiling of women. Legal reforms and improvements in state provision of education and childcare allowed women to work and go to university. Dowries were banned and the bride price lowered to £3. The right of women to divorce was introduced.
Counterrevolution backed by imperialism
Imperialism was being forced into retreat on the global stage. US forces were defeated in Vietnam in 1975. The pro-imperialist regime of the Shah of Iran was toppled in February 1979. The US-backed Somoza regime in Nicaragua was overthrown in July 1979. Britain and the US, seeing that the PDPA’s popular revolution was at war with the remaining elements of Afghanistan’s old ruling classes, threw their weight behind the reaction, with arms, training and funding channelled through Pakistan. It was an opportunity to claw back the Middle East and draw the Soviet Union into a costly military conflict on its southern edge. Mujahideen recruited from rural Afghanistan and refugee camps in Pakistan waged war on the Afghan revolution, led by the conservative mullahs and Khans. This was expressed ideologically through fundamentalist Islam, as a ‘holy war’ against communism; they demolished schools, clinics and hospitals, the symbols of revolution. By December 1979, when the Soviet Union sent troops to fight on the side of the DRA, the PDPA leadership had already requested urgent Soviet military assistance 14 times. 80,000 troops from the USSR were deployed to Afghanistan.2
On 3 July 1979, US President Carter had secretly authorised ‘Operation Cyclone’, a $500m programme to overthrow the PDPA state. In August 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported that ‘the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.’ The mujahideen were supplied with over $10bn in arms. Britain joined in the bloodshed: ‘Margaret Thatcher visited Pakistan in October 1981 where she told Afghan mujahideen at a refugee camp near the border: “The hearts of the free world are with you.” She pledged £2 million in humanitarian aid’ (Declassified UK, 8 September 2021). The CIA, MI6 and the SAS trained more than 100,000 mujahideen fighters in Pakistan, including Osama bin Laden and Jalaluddin Haqqani, father of the current deputy leader of the Taliban. Just like the US war against the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the conflict was financed by the narcotics trade – prior to 1979, Afghanistan and Pakistan barely exported any heroin to the West, but by 1981, Pakistani army trucks shipping CIA weapons were returning from Afghanistan loaded with heroin.3 The 1979-92 civil war claimed as many as two million lives and displaced 3.5 million according to the World Bank.
Empire of graveyards
Soviet and Afghan forces had suffered an estimated 42,000 casualties and the USSR had expended around 27 billion roubles ($75bn) in military spending and aid. By 1989, with the USSR facing collapse, Soviet troops withdrew. In 1992 the PDPA was overthrown, and Afghanistan was dismembered as warlords fought over the scraps and ethnic conflicts between Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras and Pashtuns re-emerged with a vengeance. Atrocious crimes against humanity were committed on many sides. The Taliban (‘students’) emerged from this fray. They promised to reunite Afghanistan through a strict application of what they deemed Sharia law, disarming the population, and opening roads to trade; fundamentally, their goal was to re-establish Pashtun and clerical dominance of Afghanistan. They seized control of Kabul in 1996 and murdered former PDPA president Mohammed Najibullah.
The US, eager to tap vast oil and gas reserves, valued at $3 trillion, under the former Soviet central Asian republics, tested the waters in the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: ‘[The Taliban] were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a US oil company consortium … In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the US and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W Bush’s Vice-President’ (John Pilger, Counterpunch, 25 August 2021). However, the Taliban state, still lacking UN recognition, faced a deeply contradictory situation created by imperialism: chronic dependence on foreign aid and NGOs that required stability; and the need to brutally repress its political opponents, especially women and non-Pashtun ethnic groups. NGOs and journalists were eventually expelled, while investors pulled capital out of the country as terror reigned.
‘War on Terror’
Operation Cyclone devastated Afghanistan and failed to produce a biddable client state. The NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 removed the Taliban which had become an obstacle to recolonisation. Britain joined the so-called ‘War on Terror’, starting with the Labour government of 1997-2010, committing the second largest military force to Afghanistan and Iraq after the US. The Afghan client state that the NATO countries then installed was loyal but riddled with corruption, staffed by the same hated war criminals, the Northern Alliance warlords, that dismembered the country in the 1990s. It gave the green light to further imperialist war crimes (see ‘Bagram airbase: torture central’ below), the flourishing of the drugs trade (by 2006, Afghanistan was producing about 92% of the world’s opium output, and key figures in the government enriched themselves on this trade) and the plunder of Afghanistan’s wealth by imperialism.
A new constitution in 2004 removed obstacles to profitable imperialist exploitation: it banned nationalisation of industries and established a 20% corporate tax rate, the lowest in the region. The US Geological Survey and British Geological Survey began sizing up Afghanistan’s resources. Fifty-four fully state-owned enterprises were marked for privatisation by the end of 2009. Neoliberal reforms would ensure that Afghanistan’s wealth could not be used to develop the country but would benefit multinational corporations and a comprador ruling class, while Afghanistan remained in a state of dependency. An NGO industrial complex flourished and by the end of the war the country was more dependent than ever: ‘modern life in Afghanistan depends on a steady inflow of imports and foreign aid. The measure of that dependence is a trade deficit of 25% of GDP. Tens of thousands of Afghans worked directly for the Western presence as translators, fixers and other staff…Before Ashraf Ghani’s regime fell, the World Food Programme estimated that 14 million out of Afghanistan’s population of 39 million faced food insecurity and half its children under five were malnourished’ (Tooze).
Bagram airbase: torture central
The notorious airbase north of Kabul that became the hub of US military operations housed a secret interrogation centre, part of the now notorious US system of ‘black sites’, secretive torture camps that included Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the Guantanamo concentration camp in US-occupied Cuba, and a whole sinister network that stretched across Europe, Asia and north Africa. These hellholes operated beyond the reach of international law. In 2002 the US Bush administration declared that the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war did not pertain to ‘terrorists’ and dismissed international treaties banning torture as ‘quaint and obsolete’.
So torture at these ‘black sites’ was the norm. At Bagram, ‘stress positions’ and sleep deprivation were used as standard; water-boarding, electric shocks, sexual threats, humiliation and violence, gagging, cigarette burns, exposure to extremes of temperature and other sadistic practices were commonly used to ‘soften prisoners up’, or just because the guards were bored. One prisoner was made to pick bottle caps out of a mixture of excrement and water, another to roll on the floor kissing the boots of his tormentors. Several prisoners are known to have been murdered, their legs shredded to a pulp by repeated beatings while shackled to the ceiling.
These human rights abuses were carried out with the active collusion of Britain’s then Labour government. Dozens of British citizens or residents have testified to being tortured by foreign intelligence agencies with the knowledge, complicity and in some cases, presence of British intelligence officers. In 2005 Prime Minister Tony Blair declared ‘the rules of the game have changed’. A secret new official policy was drawn up which, in contravention of all international and domestic prohibitions, told members of the security services that if detainees ‘are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene’ to prevent torture. This policy was signed off by Labour war criminals Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Cat Wiener
The empire slinks back
The war and occupation cost the US $2.3 trillion, and Britain more than £40 billion. According to Brown University’s Cost of War project, the cost of the interest alone on the Afghan war debt will reach $6.5 trillion by 2050. With the Taliban’s galloping takeover of the country following the US’s flight, the project to build an effective post-Taliban client state is confirmed as an utter failure. The US, anticipating this failure, has been negotiating its surrender for years. The Obama administration announced a ‘pivot to East Asia’ in 2011, moving forces away from the Middle East to confront China in the Pacific region; President Obama announced in 2011 that the US would withdraw combat troops by 2014, leaving a smaller force of 8,400 to train the Afghan army, though this was not achieved until 2016. The Trump administration, through talks in Doha, Qatar in 2019, had agreed with the Taliban to withdraw all US personnel by May 2021, an agreement recognised by the UN Security Council; Biden’s government merely moved the deadline back to September.
Forced to follow the US’s unilateral policy of retreat, Britain’s inability to protect its imperialist interests independently in Afghanistan is clear for all to see. The reaction from the British ruling class and its hangers-on has been a mixture of fury and denial. The then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab went on holiday in Greece on 6 August as the Taliban took over Afghanistan. Raab couldn’t even be reached on the phone by the Afghan foreign minister regarding the evacuation of interpreters employed by the British military. He professed that he believed Kabul was secure until next year, or perhaps he was simply resigned to the impotence of the British state. The Defence Minister Ben Wallace lashed out at Raab on 2 September, claiming his own department knew as early as July that Kabul would imminently fall to the Taliban. Wallace had privately accused the Foreign Office of evacuating its diplomats ‘on the first plane out’, leaving the MoD to deal with the chaos of evacuating soldiers, interpreters and other British auxiliaries.
British media and politicians were desperate to keep troops in the country, or at least salvage public support for the intervention. They dialled up Islamophobia and rediscovered a faux concern for Afghan women’s rights. Tory MP Tom Tugendhat said the UK had ‘abandoned the Afghan people’, while Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy condemned the removal of troops as a ‘catastrophic miscalculation’. Tobias Ellwood, Chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, risibly argued Britain should ‘attempt to lead a coalition’ to fill the void left by the US.
Advantage, China
The US’s failure to take control of Afghanistan following its destruction of the 1978-92 PDPA state has exposed the limits of its power. In response, the EU has debated the establishment of a 5,000-strong emergency army, something championed by France and Germany for years. The head of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, said on 15 September that Europe needed to find the political will to develop an independent military force.
With the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan is closer to being brought into China’s vast Belt and Road infrastructure (BRI) project. This would integrate much of the Eurasian landmass into a single trade network with China at its heart. China has funded BRI with more than $1 trillion since its launch in 2013. Chinese investment has already laid down infrastructure around Afghanistan’s northern, eastern and western borders, and planned thousands of miles of pipelines extending into the heart of Eurasia (Counterpunch 15 September 2021). In March 2021, China reached a $400bn deal with Iran to lay rail, oil and gas pipelines from Turkey to Pakistan. In July, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with a Taliban delegation and hailed Afghanistan’s new rulers as ‘an important political and military force’.
Impossible condition
The attraction of Chinese investment will be considerable. The Taliban government faces the same contradictions as it did in 1996-2001, only amplified. With $7bn of Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves embargoed in the US Federal Reserve, the country faces an acute financial crisis as well as famine. It seeks international recognition and investment, and it must therefore ensure the safety of aid agency staff, regional stability and make a show of respecting human rights. Yet it must repress its political opponents. Maintaining the unity of its army of mostly young, disenfranchised male fighters means delivering the puritan utopia they have fought for and taking revenge on their enemies. If the Taliban state compromises too far, it will face a growing threat of defections to ISIL-KP (Financial Times, 20 September 2021).
On 19 September dozens of women protested as the Women’s Ministry was shuttered by the Taliban and replaced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. As before the 1978 Saur revolution, it is only the Afghan masses and their most revolutionary sections, especially women, that have the power to develop Afghanistan out of a state of dependency. Interviewed by the Afghan Women’s Mission on 20 August 2021, a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan made clear that to support the struggle of women in Afghanistan means fighting imperialism:
‘We think the inhuman US military empire is not only the enemy of the Afghan people but the biggest threat to world peace and stability. Now that the system is on the verge of decline, it is the duty of all peace-loving, progressive, leftist and justice-loving individuals and groups to intensify their fight against the brutal war-mongers … Replacing the rotten system with a just and humane one will not only liberate millions of poor and oppressed American people but will have a lasting effect on every corner of the world.’
FRFI 284 September/October 2021
1. See ‘A revolution betrayed’ FRFI 166 April/May 2002 on our website. Much of the information drawn from this section is drawn from Emine Engin, The Revolution in Afghanistan (1982), Iscinin Sesi Publications.
2. Soviet News, 22 April 1980 cited in Engin op cit p46.
3. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of North America (2007), University of California Press, p124.
