Afghans suffer surge

The largest U.S. offensive of the long Afghan war was launched in February in Taliban-held Marjah, in southern Afghanistan. While fighting there has now wound down, most residents are unable to return for fear of bombs planted by the Taliban during the battle. This indignity follows the brutal grinding experienced at the hands of the U.S. military.

One U.S. air strike alone killed 27 Afghan civilians, including several children. Another 12 people, half of them children, were killed Feb. 14 when U.S. rockets struck a family home. In the latest Afghan "surge," U.S. commanders have apologized six times in ten days for civilian deaths. It is the way the U.S. has conducted its brutal war all along. One Afghan woman in Helmand province expressed a common feeling: "The Americans use methods to lower deaths on their side but in the process are raising Afghan deaths."

An Afghan man in Kabul said: "I want to ask General McChrystal if he had lost his family in such an incident, and if someone called to apologize, what would his reaction be? An apology doesn't bring anyone back to life."

As in Pakistan, the use of unmanned drones and "precision" weapons results in a high level of civilian deaths and injuries. In addition, the U.S. has been expanding the number of camps at which Afghan civilians are arrested and held without charges. The U.S. and its NATO allies claim that they will deliver a respectable government behind these policies. The desires of the Afghan people are meanwhile being ignored, their voices unheard.

Afghans are being offered little alternative. The endgame for the Taliban would be a return to power. But the people of Afghanistan have not forgotten the horrors of life under Taliban rule. Even in the center of their support, among Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan, only one in four would support their return and very few would do so in the rest of the country. In recent months they have also seemingly lost some of the support they had received from Pakistan's secret services. Their only real claim is in not being the corrupt Karzai government.

For now the U.S. supports the continuation of the same corrupt Karzai government. Its one and only recommendation is that it is not the Taliban. But of course it is also anti-woman, anti-human rights, and so anti-democratic that it now rules after having produced an election as blatantly fraudulent as that of its neighboring government in Iran. The Obama administration is running into the same problem as the cruder Bush administration did—the inability of imperialism to wage a revolutionary war. The problem isn't the Afghan quagmire, it is the quagmire of U.S. bourgeois society.

As Terry Moon expressed it, "In all the scenarios spun out of the heads of U.S. leaders, none of them consider either the desire or the ability of Afghan people to govern their own lives and nation. Yet that is the only solution" ("Afghan lives, freedom sucked into U.S. quagmire," News & Letters, October-November 2009).

It is why the only realistic position for international solidarity with the Afghan people is support for those forces which demand revolutionary changes like women's equality to men. This calls equally for a revolutionary perspective here in the U.S. It is why News and Letters Committees from the beginning, long before Sept. 11, 2001, expressed our support for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Those like Malalai Joya, who risked her life to educate young women under the Taliban's rule, and today equally opposes the Taliban, Karzai, and the U.S. war, deserve international support.

The U.S. has already announced that a new round of fighting, a larger offensive, will be unleashed later this year against Kandahar, a city the Taliban have long used as a stronghold. The necessity to support those forces within Afghanistan that represent a real hope for change only grows greater.

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