Leslie Feinberg
An inordinate amount of imperialist media attention on Afghanistan has focused on the wording of a new constitution approved by the Loya Jirga, or grand assembly. Like a huckster at a carnival shell game, the more the big-money media can get the crowd to concentrate on the shells, the less likely they are to realise the entire game is rigged.
US President George Bush, who in this election year no longer talks about the "endless" character of his war for empire in Central Asia and the Middle East, hailed the signing of the new constitution on January 4 as the dawn of democracy in Afghanistan.
Is this genuine self-rule? Is the newly named Islamic Republic of Afghanistan really independent?
Some 11,700 US troops occupy Afghanistan. The country's government, army, police and judiciary were crushed or dismantled during the Goliath versus David war against one of the poorest countries on the planet.
After tight political control of the process, the new constitution upholds the presidential system that Washington pushed for, defeating the demand for a parliamentary system. Elections for president — a formality in order to give Hamid Karzai, who was appointed by the US, the mantle of being elected — are slated to take place in six months.
Washington and its would-be allies are eager to slip a glove of "sovereignty" over the iron fist of military occupation in Afghanistan. Forces hostile to US control now dominate much of the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan. Interior minister Ahmed Jalali officially concedes that the Taliban — the religious group that the Pentagon invasion ousted — controls at least 12 districts.
Donald Rumsfeld visited Kabul in early December to shore up the shaky Karzai. The US defence secretary also reportedly met in Mazar-e-Sharif with two Afghan generals, Abdul Rashid Dostrum and Mohammad Atta, who come from the Uzbek and Tajik peoples in the north, the area most improved by Soviet development aid before the war.
As a show of strength during Rumsfeld's visit, the Pentagon launched Operation Avalanche. However, a few hours after he left Kabul on December 5, resistance forces fired a rocket at the heavily guarded US embassy in the capital.
During the three weeks in which delegates to the Loya Jirga fought verbal battles over the wording of the constitution inside a huge white tent in Kabul, the US had to militarily protect them. Warnings not to collaborate with the occupation kept some delegates away.
Washington's handpicked titular leader, Karzai, is virtually a prisoner in the capital, under the night-and-day protection of US corporate mercenary bodyguards. In order to congratulate delegates at the grand assembly meeting, Karzai had to be flown there by helicopter, even though it was only a mile away from his office. It was too dangerous for him to drive through the streets of Kabul.
Major decisions of the council were reportedly really made by Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born US ambassador to Kabul.
Dragged back a century
As the ink dried on the newly signed constitution, Karzai announced, "It's the first time in the history of Afghanistan that we take a step for the real power of the people". Nothing could be further from the truth. It was his patron, the US government, that drowned the only truly progressive government in Afghan history in blood when it funded and organised a vicious war against it.
In 1978, a progressive revolution in the impoverished, semi-feudal country had tried to carry out a social transformation in the direction of socialism. The new government instituted land reform and women's rights, built schools for girls and boys and set up literacy programs. It printed textbooks in many languages, and sought to unite Dari, Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic, Baluchi and other nationalities in Afghanistan.
Had there been no outside intervention, the defeated feudalists would have been relegated to the dustbin of history. But in the Cold War era of imperialism, US monopoly capitalism was hell-bent on destroying this revolution on the Soviet Union's borders.
Beginning early in 1979, the CIA began covertly financing and arming landlord mercenary bands, according to admissions by national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA director Robert Gates.
After the Afghan government appealed to the Soviet Union for troops in December, Washington began admitting it was funding an armed opposition, but claimed it did so to help Afghanistan fight a "Soviet invasion".
During the 1980s, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and other reactionary forces received some of the US$8 billion Washington shelled out on this dirty war.
The revolutionary government was defeated in 1992. After four years of factional fighting among rival fundamentalist forces, the Taliban came to power in 1996. They expected continued aid from the US, but the Soviet Union had been overthrown by then and Washington wasn't that interested in Afghanistan any more.
By September 11, 2001, it was the Taliban who were on the Pentagon's hit list.
Michael Meacher, a senior Labour Party MP who had been a member of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet, wrote in a September 6, 2003, article in the British Guardian: "Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs'."
Today most of the schools and apartment complexes built during the revolutionary period with help from the Soviet Union lie in ruins. Bombing raids continue to turn the rural countryside into a virtual moonscape. Hunger, disease and poverty are rampant. And no matter how the new constitution is worded for Western consumption, it's not going to change the reality for the Afghan population, national minorities or women.
The most reactionary and repressive forces in the country — the feudal landlords and their militias — have been elevated by imperialist intervention and more than a quarter century of war.
Poppy cultivation, which helped bankroll the counter-revolutionary war, is burgeoning again. Armed rivalries between regional factions and nationalities are becoming increasingly explosive.
The country is run by a US ambassador, Khalilzad, who was a liaison between the US energy company Unocal and the Taliban government and had worked under National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice when she served as a director of Chevron oil.
And the current US-appointed "president", Karzai, worked with the CIA to overthrow the Afghan revolution. He, too, became a consultant for Unocal, which planned to build a multi- billion-dollar, 1600km natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.
Now, however, more than two years after the 9/11 attacks provided Washington with an excuse to unleash its devastating aerial bombardment of Afghanistan, it's proving difficult for Pentagon Special Forces to protect a road from Kabul to Kandahar, much less a pipeline traversing the country.
Afghanistan was seen as the shortest route from the oil and gas fields of Central Asia to the sea, with the most favourable terrain. But monopoly capital, inexorably compelled to create profits, never puts all its eggs in one basket.
'Pipelineistan'
On the shores of the Caspian Sea and under its waters lie the world's biggest untapped oil and gas reserves, ranging in estimated worth up to $4 trillion. The only catch is that the region is landlocked. From the capitalist viewpoint, these resources are worthless until they can be transported and sold as commodities.
Under the cover of the "war on terror", the Pentagon has quietly established military bases in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgizstan.
The area of this US military boot heel on Central Asia is commonly referred to as "Pipelineistan". For years, Enron, Unocal, BP Amoco, ExxonMobil, Pennzoil, Atlantic Richfield, Chevron, Texaco and other oil monopolies have been like piranhas in a billion-dollar feeding frenzy to siphon off and sell the region's rich oil and gas reserves.
ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and BP have already reportedly invested more than $30 billion in production facilities in the region. And construction of a $3.8-billion pipeline from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan has already begun.
US corporations are also embarking on a trans-Balkan pipeline from the Black Sea across Bulgaria to the Adriatic coast.
Through a massive infusion of money and political manipulation, Washington and Wall Street have created client governments in the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Georgia.
Central Asia's vast and precious reserves of hydrocarbons were once the collective property of the peoples of the Soviet Union. Since overturning the Soviet Union — the achievement of a momentous revolution of workers and peasants that lasted over 70 years — imperialism has shattered the former socialist camp in Asia and Europe into vassal states, their populations ethnically divided and economically devastated.
But Pax Pentagona can find no stability. Its military machine and dreams of empire are bogged down by indefatigable resistance in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, as well as Colombia, the Philippines and elsewhere.
Since the start of this "endless war", thousands of GIs have returned home injured or in body bags. The Pentagon's available troop strength is stretched thin and so is the endurance of its foot soldiers, growing increasingly fed up with orders from the brass to be an occupying army for US corporations.
[Abridged from Workers World, weekly paper of the US Workers World Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 21, 2004.
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