While the disaster in Iraq deepens, U.S. and NATO forces also confront a growing crisis in Afghanistan, with violence at its highest point since 2001. Five years after the initial U.S. and NATO invasion, the occupying forces face a resurgence of the Taliban and massive hostility from ordinary Afghans, angered by events like the NATO airstrike on a village in southern Afghanistan on October 24 that killed over 60 civilians.

As in Iraq, the occupation has been a nightmare for the Afghan people. According to the Senlis Council, a foreign-policy think tank, “a humanitarian crisis of starvation and poverty has gripped the south of the country.” Over half of Afghans live below the poverty line (IPS, 9/5/06).

While the Bush administration boasts of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, the U.S. strategy has been to encourage the Karzai regime to placate the rich, the warlords, and organized crime in the hope that this will provide stability to the puppet government. A corrupt and hated authoritarian elite rules the country.

Corruption is rife among judges, government officials, police chiefs, and governors. According to one journalist, “to pay taxes in Kabul, one must first bribe the tax collector!” (The Nation, 10/30/06). While ordinary Afghans are starving, cabinet ministers in the U.S.-backed Karzai government have built ostentatious villas in Kabul on expensive real estate they granted to themselves after the U.S. invasion (NY Times, 8/23/06).

The head of the charity Afghans for Tomorrow, Mohammed Siddique, summed up the anger among Afghans: “Why doesn’t the government help the poor? Why do the government people and the commanders build big mansions, and poor people still live in bad conditions? Why, when all this money is coming into Afghanistan from foreign countries, are people’s lives so miserable? People say the Taliban are bad, but people also say these people in government are bad.” (AP, 10/17/06)

The U.S. has spent $82.5 billion on military operations in Afghanistan (compared with just $7.3 billion on “development”). This money has been used to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban, which has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths.

The Resurgence of the Taliban
In this context, the Taliban are re-emerging as a powerful force. According to the Senlis Council report, “the Taliban have [already] regained control over the southern half of Afghanistan and their frontline is advancing daily.” (IPS, 9/5/06) The situation is so bad that the NATO commander in Afghanistan said that if things do not improve in the next six months, three-fourths of the population would support the Taliban over the occupying forces (The Nation, 10/30/06).

It is a stunning indictment of the brutality of U.S. and Western imperialism when the reactionary Taliban looks like the lesser evil compared to the occupying forces. This should give pause to all those who argue for “humanitarian” intervention by U.S. or Western military forces.

Socialist Alternative opposed the war on Afghanistan from the beginning. We explained that the U.S. invasion was never about liberating the people of Afghanistan. The Bush administration’s real aim was to restore the prestige of U.S. imperialism following the 9/11 attacks and to strengthen U.S. domination over the Middle East.

The plan was to install puppet regimes friendly to the U.S. throughout the region, which would help safeguard U.S. oil interests and insure strategic control of the region. That is why we opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and call for the immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces.

Rather than combating terrorism, the brutal war in Afghanistan, like the war in Iraq, has only furthered the conditions that create support for terrorism and increase support for reactionary political Islamic groups and forces like Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Democrats and Afghanistan
Despite this deepening disaster, the Democratic Party and even many in the antiwar movement continue to claim the war in Afghanistan is a “just war.” Leading Democrats like John Kerry have criticized the war in Iraq on the grounds that it has distracted U.S. forces from the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan. Kerry has called for 5,000 more U.S. troops to be sent to Afghanistan (Wall Street Journal, 9/25/06).

Sending more troops to Afghanistan, however, would only be used to further carry out the brutal occupation and prop up the corrupt government. The continuation and ramping up of the war will only further drive ordinary Afghans and others around the world into supporting right-wing political Islamic forces and terrorist ideas.

The experience of Afghanistan is important to keep in mind, given many Democratic politicians’ criticism of the war in Iraq because it was not carried out with the support of the UN. Yet this is exactly what exists in Afghanistan. Under a mandate from the UN, NATO leads a force of 40,000 troops from 34 countries. This has done nothing to bring justice to the people of Afghanistan. Instead, the force operates in the interest of U.S. and Western imperialism, under the fig leaf of the UN.

While demanding an end to the occupation of Iraq, it is crucial that the antiwar movement also demand an immediate end to the U.S. and NATO occupation of Afghanistan.

In addition, workers and poor people in Afghanistan need to organize a mass movement and political alternative to the Taliban and the current corrupt ruling elite. Ultimately, without social justice, impossible under the capitalist system and the domination of U.S. imperialism, there is no way of eliminating terrorism and war. That is why we struggle for a socialist world, in the U.S. and Afghanistan, at the same time as building movements against U.S. military occupations.

For more analysis of the “war on terror” and why we opposed the invasion of Afghanistan, read our statement issued immediately after the 9/11 attacks, End the Cycle of Terrorism, at www.SocialistAlternative.org/literature/911