Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Monday, December 20, 2010
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
U.S. Gov't Reveals Spending $80 Billion on Spying
by Gene Clancy
Published Nov 7, 2010 11:30 PM
On Oct. 28 the U.S. government revealed it spent $80 billion on intelligence for fiscal year 2010. That’s more than the $53 billion the government spent on the Department of Homeland Security or the $30 billion spent by the Justice Department, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Of the $80 billion, $53 billion went to so-called “civilian” agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, and $27 billion went to the Department of Defense, of which $3.5 billion was spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The $80 billion allotment is about the same as the total budget for the Department of Health and Human Services. Unlike the intelligence agencies, HHS must account for every penny spent. Until Oct. 28 the intelligence agencies did not even have to reveal the total amount of funds they spent.
The revelation was outrageous enough to provoke a lame response from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which sets the intelligence budget and oversees policy.
“It is clear that the overall spending on intelligence has blossomed to an unacceptable level in the past decade,” said Feinstein. She admitted that the total intelligence budget has doubled since 2001. (Associated Press, Oct. 28) During this entire time, Feinstein was either the chairperson or the ranking leader of the committee, which is given regular briefings about all spending.
The government has voluntarily revealed the total intelligence budget only twice before, in 1997 and 1998 in response to a lawsuit. Then it was $26.6 billion and $26.7 billion, respectively, showing that the total intelligence budget has tripled in 12 years. No details of how the money was spent have ever been revealed; the government cites “national security” as the reason.
In addition to its usual skullduggery, intelligence agency activities include such crimes as dropping assassination drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan and so-called “rendering” operations where suspects, more often than not ordinary citizens, are kidnapped and secretly flown to foreign locations where they are tortured.
Military budget cover-up
Since the war in Vietnam, U.S. budget planners have devised a number of accounting tricks to hide the true costs of the many wars and interventions they have conducted. During the Bush administration, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were taken out of the budget altogether.
While the Obama administration has put the costs of these wars back into the budget, it persists in other misleading practices. One of the main techniques is to meld Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs into the overall budget to make it appear that social services, not military spending, make up the largest share. Thus in the 2009 federal budget, Medicare and Social Security were shown as constituting 39 percent of the budget, while defense was pegged at 23 percent. (www.gpoaccess.gov)
This covers up the fact that Social Security and Medicare are self-contained, self-supporting programs, overwhelmingly paid for by taxes from working people. Unfortunately, recent administrations have regularly raided these funds to pay for their many wars and interventions.
An honest presentation of the federal budget, which includes the costs of past wars, including debt service and veterans’ benefits, and excludes Social Security and Medicare, would show military spending as constituting 54 percent of the budget and human services as a mere 30 percent. (www.ArmsControlCenter.org)
In 2009, 85 percent of federal tax receipts came from Social Security, Medicare and individual income taxes. A mere 7 percent were from corporate income taxes. The progressive movement must demand an end to the robbery of poor and working people to pay for illegal spying and murderous wars.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Published Nov 7, 2010 11:30 PM
On Oct. 28 the U.S. government revealed it spent $80 billion on intelligence for fiscal year 2010. That’s more than the $53 billion the government spent on the Department of Homeland Security or the $30 billion spent by the Justice Department, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Of the $80 billion, $53 billion went to so-called “civilian” agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, and $27 billion went to the Department of Defense, of which $3.5 billion was spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The $80 billion allotment is about the same as the total budget for the Department of Health and Human Services. Unlike the intelligence agencies, HHS must account for every penny spent. Until Oct. 28 the intelligence agencies did not even have to reveal the total amount of funds they spent.
The revelation was outrageous enough to provoke a lame response from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which sets the intelligence budget and oversees policy.
“It is clear that the overall spending on intelligence has blossomed to an unacceptable level in the past decade,” said Feinstein. She admitted that the total intelligence budget has doubled since 2001. (Associated Press, Oct. 28) During this entire time, Feinstein was either the chairperson or the ranking leader of the committee, which is given regular briefings about all spending.
The government has voluntarily revealed the total intelligence budget only twice before, in 1997 and 1998 in response to a lawsuit. Then it was $26.6 billion and $26.7 billion, respectively, showing that the total intelligence budget has tripled in 12 years. No details of how the money was spent have ever been revealed; the government cites “national security” as the reason.
In addition to its usual skullduggery, intelligence agency activities include such crimes as dropping assassination drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan and so-called “rendering” operations where suspects, more often than not ordinary citizens, are kidnapped and secretly flown to foreign locations where they are tortured.
Military budget cover-up
Since the war in Vietnam, U.S. budget planners have devised a number of accounting tricks to hide the true costs of the many wars and interventions they have conducted. During the Bush administration, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were taken out of the budget altogether.
While the Obama administration has put the costs of these wars back into the budget, it persists in other misleading practices. One of the main techniques is to meld Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs into the overall budget to make it appear that social services, not military spending, make up the largest share. Thus in the 2009 federal budget, Medicare and Social Security were shown as constituting 39 percent of the budget, while defense was pegged at 23 percent. (www.gpoaccess.gov)
This covers up the fact that Social Security and Medicare are self-contained, self-supporting programs, overwhelmingly paid for by taxes from working people. Unfortunately, recent administrations have regularly raided these funds to pay for their many wars and interventions.
An honest presentation of the federal budget, which includes the costs of past wars, including debt service and veterans’ benefits, and excludes Social Security and Medicare, would show military spending as constituting 54 percent of the budget and human services as a mere 30 percent. (www.ArmsControlCenter.org)
In 2009, 85 percent of federal tax receipts came from Social Security, Medicare and individual income taxes. A mere 7 percent were from corporate income taxes. The progressive movement must demand an end to the robbery of poor and working people to pay for illegal spying and murderous wars.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Denounce FBI Repression of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization
From: Freedom Road Socialist Organization
By Fight Back! Editors
We denounce the Federal Bureau of Investigation harassment of anti-war and solidarity activists in several states across the country. The FBI began turning over six houses in Chicago and Minneapolis this morning, Friday, September 24, 2010, at 8:00 am central time. The FBI handed subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury to about a dozen activists in Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan. They also attempted to intimidate activists in California and North Carolina.
"The government hopes to use a grand jury to frame up activists. The goal of these raids is to harass and try to intimidate the movement against U.S. wars and occupations, and those who oppose U.S. support for repressive regimes," said Colombia solidarity activist Tom Burke, one of those handed a subpoena by the FBI. "They are designed to suppress dissent and free speech, to divide the peace movement, and to pave the way for more U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and Latin America."
This suppression of democratic rights is aimed towards those who dedicate much of their time and energy to supporting the struggles of the Palestinian and Colombian peoples against U.S. funded occupation and war. The activists are involved with well-known anti-war groups including many of the leaders of the huge protest against the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN in September 2008. The FBI agents emphasized that the grand jury was going to investigate the activists for possible terrorism charges. This is a U.S. government attempt to silence those who support resistance to oppression in the Middle East and Latin America.
The activists involved have done nothing wrong and are refusing to be pulled into conversations with the FBI about their political views or organizing against war and occupation. The activists are involved with many groups, including: the Palestine Solidarity Group, Students for a Democratic Society, the Twin-Cities Anti-War Committee, the Colombia Action Network, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera (a Colombian Political Prisoner).
Steff Yorek, a long-time antiwar activist and one of the activists whose homes was searched, called the raids “An outrageous fishing expedition.”
We urge all progressive activists to show solidarity with those individuals targeted by the U.S. Government. Activists have the right not to speak with the FBI and are encouraged to politely refuse, just say “No”.
Please contact info@colombiasolidarity.org or info@fightbacknews.org if you would like to provide support to the targeted activists.
Contact: Tom Burke, 773-844-3612; Steff Yorek, 612-865-8234
Take action:
Call the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at 202-353-1555 or write an email to: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov.
Demand:
* Stop the repression against anti-war and international solidarity activists
* Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.
* End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists
By Fight Back! Editors
We denounce the Federal Bureau of Investigation harassment of anti-war and solidarity activists in several states across the country. The FBI began turning over six houses in Chicago and Minneapolis this morning, Friday, September 24, 2010, at 8:00 am central time. The FBI handed subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury to about a dozen activists in Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan. They also attempted to intimidate activists in California and North Carolina.
"The government hopes to use a grand jury to frame up activists. The goal of these raids is to harass and try to intimidate the movement against U.S. wars and occupations, and those who oppose U.S. support for repressive regimes," said Colombia solidarity activist Tom Burke, one of those handed a subpoena by the FBI. "They are designed to suppress dissent and free speech, to divide the peace movement, and to pave the way for more U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and Latin America."
This suppression of democratic rights is aimed towards those who dedicate much of their time and energy to supporting the struggles of the Palestinian and Colombian peoples against U.S. funded occupation and war. The activists are involved with well-known anti-war groups including many of the leaders of the huge protest against the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN in September 2008. The FBI agents emphasized that the grand jury was going to investigate the activists for possible terrorism charges. This is a U.S. government attempt to silence those who support resistance to oppression in the Middle East and Latin America.
The activists involved have done nothing wrong and are refusing to be pulled into conversations with the FBI about their political views or organizing against war and occupation. The activists are involved with many groups, including: the Palestine Solidarity Group, Students for a Democratic Society, the Twin-Cities Anti-War Committee, the Colombia Action Network, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera (a Colombian Political Prisoner).
Steff Yorek, a long-time antiwar activist and one of the activists whose homes was searched, called the raids “An outrageous fishing expedition.”
We urge all progressive activists to show solidarity with those individuals targeted by the U.S. Government. Activists have the right not to speak with the FBI and are encouraged to politely refuse, just say “No”.
Please contact info@colombiasolidarity.org or info@fightbacknews.org if you would like to provide support to the targeted activists.
Contact: Tom Burke, 773-844-3612; Steff Yorek, 612-865-8234
Take action:
Call the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at 202-353-1555 or write an email to: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov.
Demand:
* Stop the repression against anti-war and international solidarity activists
* Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.
* End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
U.S. manipulates women’s condition to build war support
By Joyce Chediac
Published Aug 13, 2010 10:11 AM
It is shocking and disturbing. Time magazine’s cover has a picture of a young Afghan woman whose nose has been cut off. The headline reads, “What happens if we leave Afghanistan.” (Aug. 9)
Time’s story claims the Taliban ordered 18-year-old Aisha’s nose and ears cut off because she left her husband and fled abusive in-laws. She is now living in a Kabul women’s shelter run by an American nongovernmental organization, and will come to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery
Surely, this cruel and abusive treatment of women must not be permitted anywhere. Time’s implication, however, that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is the only barrier preventing further horrendous treatment of Afghan women is a lie. The article is manipulating the feelings of well-meaning people, while exploiting Aisha’s plight, in order to further Washington’s genocidal war, which has hurt Afghan women the most.
Time’s goal? Answering WikiLeaks
The recent WikiLeaks publications showed “How coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. ... How a secret ‘black’ unit of special forces [death squads] hunts down Taliban leaders for ‘kill or capture’ without trial. ... How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada,” and how there has been a steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on NATO troops. (The Guardian, July 25)
A separate editorial in the Aug. 9 issue of Time entitled “What’s hard to look at” admits that its cover picture and story are meant to counter the WikiLeaks publication. The magazine pitches its cover story as “emotional truth” and “something you cannot find in those 91,000 documents” of the leaked information.
Priyamvada Gopal, professor of English at Cambridge University who specializes in women and postcolonial theory, more accurately described the strategy behind what Time is doing. The WikiLeaks documents, she writes, “reveal CIA advice to use the plight of Afghan women as ‘pressure points,’ an emotive way to rally flagging public support for the war.” (The Guardian, Aug. 3)
Time has dropped all semblance of objective reporting. The magazine has taken the CIA’s “advice” and exploited Aisha’s plight to build war support. Truthfully, the more than 30 years of war in Afghanistan that Washington fueled and abetted has locked many rural Afghan women into the worst of both worlds: a medieval social structure and the destruction and dislocation of imperialist war.
Afghan women’s advocate Suraya Pakzad recently described the desperate situation for women in her country and its cause. “Three decades of war, displacement, warlordism, gun trafficking and narcotics trafficking,” she said, “come together and create a really hard situation for women. When there’s no security and continuation of war, there’s no guarantee for women’s rights.” (Politics Daily, March 10)
CIA’s war erased women’s gains
The U.S. press gets nostalgic about the freedom women in Kabul enjoyed before the Taliban. They fail to mention that the only government that brought significant gains to Afghan women took power in 1978 and sought to build socialism in Afghanistan.
Working under difficult conditions in one of the poorest countries in the world, the women and men in this government achieved the following: Feudal laws restricting women were abolished, and women became professors, attorneys, judges and government ministers. Seventy percent of the teachers, 50 percent of the government workers and 40 percent of the doctors were women. This government also sought ways to reach out to rural Afghanistan to develop it socially and economically.
Washington opposed this government from day one and courted the same rural feudal elements who found women’s new authority unacceptable. For its own ends, the U.S. exploited these feudalists’ misogyny as much as their anti-communism. The rural rulers who saw women as property would have been swept into the dustbin of history had U.S. imperialism not given them a new life and more than $3 billion in weapons.
The warlords overthrew that progressive government in 1992, after 13 years of vicious war financed by the U.S. and organized by the CIA. Soviet intervention to aid the progressive government was also thwarted. Even the New York Times admits, “The mujahedeen leaders who forced out the Soviets in the late 1980s were as conservative as the Taliban in many places, keeping women at home in order to preserve family honor instead of educating them or integrating them into the government.” (July 30)
U.S. empowered anti-women groups
The U.S. government was not promoting Afghan women’s rights when it installed the Northern Alliance, which ruled Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996. This clique was seen as “a symbol of massacre, systematic rape and pillage.”(The Independent, Nov. 14, 2001).
The Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1996, but the U.S. raised no objections for five years. When the Bush administration invaded the country in 2001 and defeated the Taliban, it installed in its place the misogynist Northern Alliance. The current Kabul government still contains many members of this group, which are as reactionary on women’s rights as the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government has played it both ways. Beginning in 1979, Washington used the gains made by women under the progressive Afghan government to provoke reactionary forces into action against that government. Today, for U.S. domestic consumption, Washington claims it is “rescuing” Afghan women from the very same reactionary forces it armed and empowered.
An imperialist occupying army can never improve women’s conditions in a country it occupies. The best thing for the women of Afghanistan is for the U.S. to leave completely and unconditionally and cease all covert and overt interference in this tortured nation. Only then will Afghan women and men have the chance to build a safe and stable environment where they can make their needs known and have them met.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Published Aug 13, 2010 10:11 AM
It is shocking and disturbing. Time magazine’s cover has a picture of a young Afghan woman whose nose has been cut off. The headline reads, “What happens if we leave Afghanistan.” (Aug. 9)
Time’s story claims the Taliban ordered 18-year-old Aisha’s nose and ears cut off because she left her husband and fled abusive in-laws. She is now living in a Kabul women’s shelter run by an American nongovernmental organization, and will come to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery
Surely, this cruel and abusive treatment of women must not be permitted anywhere. Time’s implication, however, that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is the only barrier preventing further horrendous treatment of Afghan women is a lie. The article is manipulating the feelings of well-meaning people, while exploiting Aisha’s plight, in order to further Washington’s genocidal war, which has hurt Afghan women the most.
Time’s goal? Answering WikiLeaks
The recent WikiLeaks publications showed “How coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. ... How a secret ‘black’ unit of special forces [death squads] hunts down Taliban leaders for ‘kill or capture’ without trial. ... How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada,” and how there has been a steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on NATO troops. (The Guardian, July 25)
A separate editorial in the Aug. 9 issue of Time entitled “What’s hard to look at” admits that its cover picture and story are meant to counter the WikiLeaks publication. The magazine pitches its cover story as “emotional truth” and “something you cannot find in those 91,000 documents” of the leaked information.
Priyamvada Gopal, professor of English at Cambridge University who specializes in women and postcolonial theory, more accurately described the strategy behind what Time is doing. The WikiLeaks documents, she writes, “reveal CIA advice to use the plight of Afghan women as ‘pressure points,’ an emotive way to rally flagging public support for the war.” (The Guardian, Aug. 3)
Time has dropped all semblance of objective reporting. The magazine has taken the CIA’s “advice” and exploited Aisha’s plight to build war support. Truthfully, the more than 30 years of war in Afghanistan that Washington fueled and abetted has locked many rural Afghan women into the worst of both worlds: a medieval social structure and the destruction and dislocation of imperialist war.
Afghan women’s advocate Suraya Pakzad recently described the desperate situation for women in her country and its cause. “Three decades of war, displacement, warlordism, gun trafficking and narcotics trafficking,” she said, “come together and create a really hard situation for women. When there’s no security and continuation of war, there’s no guarantee for women’s rights.” (Politics Daily, March 10)
CIA’s war erased women’s gains
The U.S. press gets nostalgic about the freedom women in Kabul enjoyed before the Taliban. They fail to mention that the only government that brought significant gains to Afghan women took power in 1978 and sought to build socialism in Afghanistan.
Working under difficult conditions in one of the poorest countries in the world, the women and men in this government achieved the following: Feudal laws restricting women were abolished, and women became professors, attorneys, judges and government ministers. Seventy percent of the teachers, 50 percent of the government workers and 40 percent of the doctors were women. This government also sought ways to reach out to rural Afghanistan to develop it socially and economically.
Washington opposed this government from day one and courted the same rural feudal elements who found women’s new authority unacceptable. For its own ends, the U.S. exploited these feudalists’ misogyny as much as their anti-communism. The rural rulers who saw women as property would have been swept into the dustbin of history had U.S. imperialism not given them a new life and more than $3 billion in weapons.
The warlords overthrew that progressive government in 1992, after 13 years of vicious war financed by the U.S. and organized by the CIA. Soviet intervention to aid the progressive government was also thwarted. Even the New York Times admits, “The mujahedeen leaders who forced out the Soviets in the late 1980s were as conservative as the Taliban in many places, keeping women at home in order to preserve family honor instead of educating them or integrating them into the government.” (July 30)
U.S. empowered anti-women groups
The U.S. government was not promoting Afghan women’s rights when it installed the Northern Alliance, which ruled Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996. This clique was seen as “a symbol of massacre, systematic rape and pillage.”(The Independent, Nov. 14, 2001).
The Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1996, but the U.S. raised no objections for five years. When the Bush administration invaded the country in 2001 and defeated the Taliban, it installed in its place the misogynist Northern Alliance. The current Kabul government still contains many members of this group, which are as reactionary on women’s rights as the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government has played it both ways. Beginning in 1979, Washington used the gains made by women under the progressive Afghan government to provoke reactionary forces into action against that government. Today, for U.S. domestic consumption, Washington claims it is “rescuing” Afghan women from the very same reactionary forces it armed and empowered.
An imperialist occupying army can never improve women’s conditions in a country it occupies. The best thing for the women of Afghanistan is for the U.S. to leave completely and unconditionally and cease all covert and overt interference in this tortured nation. Only then will Afghan women and men have the chance to build a safe and stable environment where they can make their needs known and have them met.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Imperialist has moment of truth in Afghanistan
By John Catalinotto
Published Jun 2, 2010 5:16 PM
An imperialist politician was forced to resign May 31, not for a scandal, not even for getting caught lying to the public. This time German President Horst Köhler, a Christian Democrat (CDU), was forced to resign for giving everyone a moment of truth about Germany’s role in the war in Afghanistan.
Speaking on Deutschlandradio on May 22 while visiting troops in Afghanistan, Köhler let it slip out: “But my estimation is that, on the whole, we are on the way to understanding, even broadly in society, that a country of our size, with this orientation toward foreign trade and therefore also dependence on foreign trade, has to be aware that when in doubt in case of an emergency, military deployment is also necessary to protect our interests.” (The Local, May 27)
Köhler must have forgotten he wasn’t speaking just to his CDU cronies. His lapse into truth stirred up a storm among the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens back in Germany. They had been justifying German intervention in Afghanistan as necessary to defend Germany from “Islamic terrorism” as well as for the rights of Afghan girls and women to go to school.
Since the German participation in the attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, these parties have led Germany into wars carried out for alleged human rights. Köhler’s remarks exposed their hypocrisy. So their leaders exploded in a spasm of criticism of the German president for speaking the truth in public.
Opposition SPD Speaker in Parliament Thomas Oppermann told newsmagazine Der Spiegel that Köhler was “damaging the acceptance of the Bundeswehr’s foreign missions.” Oppermann accused Köhler of “making the case of the Left party,” the one party in Parliament that has consistently opposed the Afghan mission. The Bundeswehr is the German armed forces.
Köhler’s remarks exposed the real reason Germany is shipping its young people to the mountains of Central Asia, 3,000 miles away. To fight for such a reason violates Germany’s constitution. His words also opened a window on the whole mechanism of 21st century imperialism.
The big industrialized countries in Western Europe, North America and Japan, which are also the world’s financial centers, exploit workers at home and all over the world. They superexploit workers and seize resources in oppressed countries — mostly former colonies of 19th and 20th century imperialism.
Economically, the rules for this trade and investment are set by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and other institutions controlled by the same big powers.
Militarily, the Pentagon provides the main police force to keep the oppressed from rising up and taking back what has been and is being stolen from them, and to seize more land and open up more areas to invest.
While U.S. imperialists aim to always maintain global military supremacy they demand that West Europe and Japan pay part of the price in money and troops. Otherwise Germany, France, Britain, Japan, etc., lose their place at the table where Washington sits at the head.
The last few administrations’ “Defense Strategy” papers openly declared the goal of U.S. supremacy. The latest one just released on May 27 by the Democratic administration repeated that goal. In keeping with U.S. hypocrisy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that “U.S. values” were important. Replace “values” with “profits” and it rings truer.
“Stopping the Taliban,” “stopping terror,” and “women’s rights” are all public relations smoke to hide the real reason that Germany, some other European powers and the U.S. government send their young people to kill and die in Afghanistan. The real reasons are to gain markets for investment to exploit more workers, control resources, expand trade, enforce submission in the region and keep the profits rolling in to the banks.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) on the British Elections
From the The Proletarian, bi-monthly journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
After the election: dangers and opportunities ahead
Fightback looms as election circus ends with a crack of the ring master’s whip.
The British general election, held on 6 May 2010, proved inconclusive, with no party winning an absolute majority of seats in the 650-strong House of Commons. The strength of the parties in the newly-elected parliament is as follows:
Conservatives 306 (98 more than in the previous parliament);
Labour 258 (91 fewer than previously);
Liberal Democrats 57 (5 fewer than in the former parliament);
Others 28 (1 fewer than before).
Although Labour decidedly lost the election, the Conservatives failed to win it. As for the much trumpeted and hoped-for LibDem revival, it failed singularly to materialise. As though by some collective intuition, the British electorate decided to display its disapproval of all the major bourgeois parties – Conservative, Labour and LibDem.
The Conservatives emerged from the election as the English party, with no support in Scotland (where they won just one seat) and very little in London and northern England.
Economic crisis
As it took place in the midst of the worst economic crisis for decades, it is not surprising that the single most important issue in the election was the economy. In the three months to February of this year, unemployment in the UK rose by 43,000 to 2.5 million, the highest for 16 years.
This latest increase has taken the official unemployment rate to 8 percent of the work force. Actual unemployment is much higher, as is indicated by the fact that the number of people classed as economically inactive – including students, people looking after a sick relative or those who have simply given up looking for work – rose by 110,000 to 8.16 million, the highest since records began in 1971 (see Financial Times, 22 April 2010).
Britain is confronted with an annual budget deficit of about £170bn following the bail-out of Britain’s bankrupt banks, which cost the Treasury hundreds of billions of pounds (£850bn so far, to be precise) and pushed public indebtedness to heights unprecedented in peacetime. Standing at 11 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), this deficit needs to be tackled as a matter of urgency. As a result, bourgeois economics requires that departmental budgets should be cut by at least 11.9 percent over the next parliament.
On the present forecasts of the Treasury, the British economy will once more reach 2008 levels of economic activity in 2012. In other words, four years of anticipated economic growth will have disappeared. Assuming that these forecasts are accurate (and it is very likely that they are overoptimistic), it will be 2031 when the economy becomes as big as it would have been had the 1998-2007 trend continued.
This cumulative loss of output amounts to 160 percent of the 2007 GDP. Consequent upon the crisis, it turns out that Britain, like many other countries, is poorer than it imagined it was. The fight over who is to bear the losses promises to be brutal.
The output losses have had a severe impact on the UK’s finances. Although the recession in Britain has not been worse than in the other imperialist countries, it has had a disproportionately large effect on revenues here, since Britain’s financial sector furnished an exceptionally big basis for consumer expenditure, corporate profits and property transactions in recent years.
Before the banking crisis, at least a quarter of corporate taxation came from the financial sector alone. Following the recession, receipts for corporate taxes fell by a quarter in the 12 months to October 2008 and the following 12 months to October 2009. During the same time, VAT receipts fell by 17 percent.
Writing in the Financial Times, Mr Martin Wolf, from whose article the information in the preceding two paragraphs is drawn, made the observation that “the UK has not only had a financial crisis, with the usual severe impact on output [Mr Wolf, as becomes a respectable bourgeois economic thinker, puts it the wrong way round, but we shall let it pass] and public finances, but that the UK has also been a ‘monocrop’ economy with finance itself acting as the ‘crop’”. (‘How to share the losses: the dismal choice facing Britain’, 16 December 2009)
In other words, the dominance of, and excessive reliance on, finance capital has reached such monstrous proportions that, in place of being a source of prosperity, it has become a conduit for spreading poverty and misery among the masses.
Lack of candour
Since each of the three big parties were only too aware of the dire situation surrounding the state of the British economy and public finances, they offered the electorate only competing visions of misery.
As this was not a message calculated to enthuse voters, the election campaign was characterised by a near-total absence of honesty and candour on the part of the leaders of these parties on the question of restoring public finances. Their parties’ election material was no more enlightening. None of them was prepared to take the electorate into confidence about the choices facing it if they found themselves in office on 7 May.
Both the Conservatives and Labour promised vague “efficiency savings” to make impending cuts palatable. Labour promised savings of £11bn a year from 2011, though without disclosing before the election the departmental budgets from which these savings would come. The Conservatives for their part promised to cut an extra £6bn immediately. They insisted that these cuts would have no effect on service delivery and its quality, but failed to identify the targets of these magical cuts.
The Conservatives attempted to present themselves as a Thatcherite party of “tough choices” and deficit-cutting while at the same time purporting to be a “compassionate Conservative” party intent on protecting public services and increasing spending on overseas ‘aid’.
While expressing horror at Conservative plans to cut spending in 2010-11 by £6bn, and emphasising its manifesto pledge to “support the economy to ensure recovery is established”, the Labour government had already taken away upwards of £20bn of support for the economy in 2010-11 by reverting the VAT rate back from 15 to 17.5 percent, and by cutting capital expenditure.
Similar plans
Notwithstanding the strenuous efforts made by the two leading bourgeois parties to conceal their real intentions, it was clear even before the election – at least to the initiated – that their prescriptions for fixing the public finances were very similar.
Each proposed sizeable tax increases – Labour £19bn a year, the Conservatives £14bn. Both harboured similar budgetary objectives, with Labour desiring to halve the deficit within four years and the Conservatives doing the same over a slightly shorter period. Both wanted major deficit reduction to result from spending cuts not tax rises, with Labour’s ratio being £1 of tax rises for £2 of spending cuts, and that of the Conservatives being £1 of tax rises for £4 of cuts.
In view of the similarity between the parties on cutting the government deficit, it is not surprising that the biggest financial sharks with investments in Britain’s government debt were quite relaxed and by and large indifferent to the outcome of the election. Credit rating agencies, too, decided to wait for the new government to come up with its fiscal consolidation proposals before pronouncing on the UK’s AAA-rated status.
The other burning issue, namely, the Anglo-American imperialist wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, which have claimed the lives of well over a million people, and wounded and displaced many times more, were, as if by a conspiracy of malign silence, hardly even mentioned, let alone thoroughly debated, by the principal parties and their leaders.
Each of the parties hypocritically promised to usher in a ‘fairer’ society on being elected, while knowing full well that their main job would in fact be to safeguard the interests of British monopoly capitalism at the expense of millions of working people.
As an alternative to Gordon Brown’s war-mongering, anti-working class government, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, could promise no more than what he called the “big society” in which problems of Britain’s “broken society” were to be addressed by voluntary groups and community organisations, rather than by state action – a recipe for leaving the victims of capitalism to the care of the churches, voluntary bodies and a myriad well-meaning community organisers. Welcome to the new Victorian age of dire poverty, providing a fertile ground for the well off to practise their charity on.
The LibDems, as usual, waffled vaguely about a ‘fairer’ Britain, although among their concrete proposals for making this happen were plans to force immigrants to carry cards permitting them to live and work only in certain areas!
Coalition government
Characterised by diplomatic silence, deception and fraud, lacking in even a modicum of honesty, with the three parties offering a vision of general misery, the election was a lack-lustre affair resulting in a hung parliament.
Finding himself bereft of an absolute majority, David Cameron, who during the election had rudely remarked that the biggest joke he knew was Nick Clegg, made “a big, open and comprehensive offer” to the same joke to join in a coalition – of course all in the “national interest”, to which Clegg responded, doubtless in the “national interest”, with great alacrity.
Following several days of horse-trading, a coalition government was finally formed between the Conservatives and LibDems on Tuesday 11 May, with David Cameron as prime minister and Nick Clegg, the LibDem leader, as deputy prime minister. Apart from Clegg, the new cabinet includes four other LibDems.
In order to seal the coalition deal, the two partners had to agree to small modifications of their electoral pledges on issues ranging from Europe, immigration and defence to electoral reform. The Conservatives had to give ground on the issue of electoral reform and agree to the holding of a referendum on the alternative voting system (AV); without agreement on this issue the formation of the coalition would have been out of the question, thrusting the Liberals into the arms of the Labour party, who had made a far better offer, that of proportional representation, to the LibDems.
Sinn Fein victory
One ray of light to emerge from the otherwise bleak electoral scene are the victories scored by Sinn Fein in northern Ireland, where this progressive nationalist party won five seats, emerging as the largest party there, with a 25.5 percent share of the vote – the greatest number of votes of any party in the north of Ireland.
The party’s five MPs were re-elected with an increased mandate, including the stunning victory of Michelle Gildernew in Fermanagh and South Tyrone against a ‘unity’ unionist candidate by just four votes on the third count.
In West Belfast, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams secured 71 percent of the vote, winning the seat by a majority of 17,000 – one of the largest of the newly elected MPs to Westminster. Welcoming a small number of votes he had received from “heartland loyalists or unionist areas” of the constituency, he thanked “those who see that their class interest rests with Sinn Fein and not with the conservative parties of unionism”. In Mid Ulster, Martin McGuiness secured 52 percent of the vote and won by a majority of nearly 16,000 – again one of the largest.
Speaking in the aftermath of her re-election, Michelle Gildernew, said that “the forces of unionism had collected together against us and we had a mountain to climb this time”, adding, however, that “catholic, protestant and dissenter” had voted for her. She said that she was “especially proud and grateful” that “protestant people ... came out and voted for me”, and thanked everyone who had supported her campaign.
As to the other parties in the north of Ireland, the DUP, with 25 percent, was just behind Sinn Fein, the SDLP secured 16.5 percent, while the UUP/Tory candidates received 15.2 percent of the vote but failed to win any seats at all. The Alliance Party won their first seat, and Sylvia Hermon, having walked out of the UUP following the latter’s decision to join forces with the British Conservatives, won a comfortable victory.
Hot on the heels of Sinn Fein’s electoral victory, Gerry Adams, has written to other party leaders in the north of Ireland to meet, discuss and come up with an agreed strategy to oppose any cuts proposed by the British government. Adams expressed his belief that it was “imperative that all parties in the Executive act with a unity of purpose to safeguard public services, to defend frontline services in health and education”, adding that any cuts, which the Tories and Labour had both proposed, were “unacceptable”, for they would have a detrimental effect on public services and jobs. He went on to call on all the parties to “unite on a positive agenda” to “protect those most disadvantaged in our communities”.
Gerry Adams’ concern for the most disadvantaged, and his fighting talk to resist the cuts in the offing, ought to strike a chord among wider sections of the British working class, too, and furnish a basis for close collaboration between the two in the coming days to blunt and defeat the capitalist offensive, whose sole purpose is to pass the monstrous burdens of the deepest ever crisis of imperialism on to the backs of the working class, whether Irish or British.
Other parties
In Scotland, the SNP nationalists won five seats, while in Wales, Plaid Cymru won three. In England, while the anti-European UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) and the BNP (the openly racist British National Party) won no seats, on average they came fourth and fifth after the three major bourgeois parties.
Caroline Lucas won Brighton Pavilion for the Green Party – whose programme in this election was anti-war (opposing Britain’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan) as well as reflecting concern over environmental issues.
However, despite the anti-war sentiments of the electorate, Caroline Lucas’s victory was an isolated phenomenon. Following months of scare-tactics campaigning by so-called ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘left’ Labour groups such as Hope Not Hate about the dangers awaiting Britain if the Tories or the BNP should get elected, many voters who would otherwise have voted Green or socialist – or not voted at all – were persuaded to back Labour as the ‘least-worst’ option.
As to the left candidates, their combined strength came to 107, of which a mere seven gained upwards of 1,000 votes each.
The best performance came from George Galloway’s party, Respect, three of whose candidates secured a sizeable vote, with Salma Yaqoob (Birmingham Hall Green) securing 12,240 votes, and coming a strong second behind the Labour winner, Abu Miah (Bethnal Green and Bow) 8,532, and George himself (Poplar and Limehouse) 8,160, while the fourth, Arshad Ali (Bradford West) received 1,245.
Of the other three candidates who secured more than 1,000 votes, two were from TUSC (Trade Union and Socialist Coalition) – Dave Nellist (Coventry North-East) who received 1,592 and Jenny Sutton (Tottenham) 1,057 – and one, Eamonn McCann, for People before Profit (an SWP front capitalising on dissident republican sentiments in Foyle, in the north of Ireland) received 2,936.
It is clear as daylight that what passes for the left in Britain has a long way to go. Further, its weakness is to a considerable extent to be explained by illusions, entertained by nearly all those who call themselves communist and socialist, in the imperialist Labour party. Until the communists change this stance, they will no more see victory than will they see their ears.
A time of opportunity
The easy part – the formation of the new coalition government – is over. Now comes the hard business of restoring public finances, securing the interests of finance capital, and attacking the living standards of the working class through tax rises and deep cuts in public expenditure.
The impending budget tightening, estimated to be between 5 and 7 percent of the GDP (£70bn - £100bn), that is, between £3,000 and £4,000 per household, will be the deepest for decades. Drastic cuts can only mean a freeze on public workers’ pay, brutal cuts in the provision and quality of public services, cuts in welfare benefits, rising unemployment, and increasing poverty and squalor.
The ability of Britain, as indeed of all the other imperialist countries, to get a grip on its borrowing hinges largely on the much talked-of economic recovery. But the very act of getting the deficit down quickly cannot fail to put in jeopardy the hoped-for growth and, in turn, make the process of deficit reduction even harder.
Notwithstanding the stoical reputation of the British working class for calmly putting up with the miseries inflicted on it by the ruling class, the nightly images of riots and petrol bombs in Athens and the rout in the financial markets are chilling reminders that workers’ patience has limits; that they will not react to deep cuts and attacks on their standard of life with impassivity and resignation. These are times of danger, as well as opportunity – danger for the ruling class, opportunity for the working class.
Let the working class rise to the challenge and declare loud and clear that it will not pay for the crisis of capitalism. Faced with the choice of either placing itself at the mercy of capitalism and accepting its lot while its level of existence sinks ever lower, or of adopting the weapon of Marxism Leninism and raising the banner of revolt against capitalism, the working class, in the final analysis, is bound to opt for the latter alternative.
British General Strike of 1926, led by Revolutionists.
Monday, May 31, 2010
German President Admits War Is For Profits, Resigns
German President Quits Over Remarks on Military
By JUDY DEMPSEY
BERLIN — President Horst Köhler of Germany resigned on Monday amid a barrage of criticism for remarks he made a week ago during a surprise visit to Afghanistan.
It is the first time that a German president has ever resigned.
Mr. Köhler’s resignation from the largely ceremonial post is a blow for Chancellor Angela Merkel, a close friend and an important conservative political ally.
Mrs. Merkel had lobbied hard for Mr. Kohler to become president, first in 2004 and again in May, 2009.
His resignation comes just a week after another leading conservative politician, Roland Koch resigned as premier of the state of Hesse, saying he had had enough of politics.
Mr. Köhler, a former director of the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, shocked Germans earlier this month when he said that the country’s soldiers serving in Afghanistan or other peacekeeping missions were deployed to protect German economic interests.
Usually, German leaders justify their soldiers’ presence in the American-led coalition by saying they are needed to thwart would-be terrorists who might use Afghanistan as a base for attacks in Europe.
But, in his contentious remarks, Mr. Köhler said: “A country of our size, with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests, for example, when it comes to trade routes, for example, when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes.”
In a short statement on Monday, Mr. Köhler said he regretted his remarks, saying he could not remain in office in the face of intense criticism and loss of confidence. He was accompanied by his wife, Eva Luise.He praised the German troops serving abroad, adding he deeply regretted his remarks and how they were misunderstood.
“The criticism damaged the respect for my office,” he said. “I announce my resignation, immediately. I hope you understand my decision. It was an honor to serve Germany.”
After the resignation Mrs. Merkel canceled a planned visit with the German national soccer squad, in training in northern Italy for the forthcoming World Cup in South Africa, according to Germany’s DPA news agency.
Under German law, a successor must be chosen within 30 days by the so-called Federal Assembly of legislators and representatives chosen by Germany’s 16 states.
When Mr. Köhler was elected to his second five-year term in May, 2009, the assembly consisted of 612 members of the lower house of Parliament and an equal number of state representatives. He secured victory by a single vote, capturing re-election by 613 votes. Despite the ceremonial nature of the office, the election of a president is seen by politicians as a barometer of party solidarity.
Victor Homola contributed reporting.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
U.S.-Nato Occupiers Withdraw from Korengal
By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Apr 25, 2010 7:38 PM
In one remote region of Afghanistan, the Korengal Valley, the Pentagon has decided to close down its embattled outpost, seeing that its efforts are useless and that the people of this region will not submit to occupation.
Forty-two U.S. troops died there, most between 2006 and 2009, and hundreds more were injured. Many more Afghan troops were killed in fighting, probably because Afghans hired to enforce Western domination are routinely not provided with as much protection and body armor as their Western paymasters and counterparts.
More and more Afghans have joined the resistance and are fighting with the hope that the U.S. occupiers will be driven not just from this forested valley by the banks of the Pech River, but from their entire homeland.
Some historical background can help explain this resistance. After the 1979 revolution led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the mountains and valleys of the Afghan countryside became economically prosperous. Philip Bonosky, a reporter from the U.S. who resided in Afghanistan during that time, describes this in his book, “Afghanistan: Washington’s Secret War.”
At that time, the PDPA government worked to provide employment for the residents of the rural areas as part of its efforts to assist the people of the country, the majority of whom were peasants, along with a few low-paid industrial workers.
With Soviet material aid, the PDPA government provided employment for youth throughout the countryside, mobilized to teach them to read, and offered medical care and other necessities unknown to many Afghans during the preceding years of Western domination of the country’s government and economy.
Bonosky notes how much of Afghanistan’s great forests had been decimated through years of unregulated harvesting by foreign capitalists. However, young people organized under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Democratic Youth League attempted to reforest the countryside and heal the ecological damage the capitalists had inflicted in order to build a sustainable environment for the Afghan people.
The revolutionary regime carried out a massive Soviet-funded jobs program, which helped improve life for millions of Afghans who dwelled in the mountainous regions and had previously barely survived.
When U.S.-sponsored mercenaries defeated the PDPA government after a lengthy war, the victors sold off vast natural resources of Afghanistan to those who had collaborated with the West. Many of those who profited from the removal of the popular regime were not themselves even born in Afghanistan. Many had been hired with CIA funds to wage war against the democratic government and its Soviet defenders.
Class war in the countryside
Once the PDPA government was driven out in the 1980s, the Korengal Valley, like many other areas, was run by a class of Western-backed “timber lords,” capitalists in the lumber industry who often employ their own private armies. These lords rule without question in a totally “free market” where no government intervention exists and money is the only law. It was only in 2006 that government forces of any kind re-entered the region. (New York Times, Feb. 24, 2008)
The people of the Korengal Valley have shown they will not submit to Washington’s wishes. Many villagers live in houses embedded into the sides of mountains. They have loudly refused to recognize the pro-U.S. puppet regime in Kabul or to accept Western “aid” meant to buy their compliance. (New York Times, April 14)
Even after Oct. 20, 2007, when 2,000 pounds of bombs were dropped on the village of Yaka China in the valley, turning five innocent civilians into “collateral damage,” the will of the people to resist did not dry up. (uruknet.info)
Despite nine years of occupation, thousands of deaths, bombings and other brutality designed to force the Afghan population to submit, it seems that the U.S. has been unable to “stabilize” even this single wooded valley.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Published Apr 25, 2010 7:38 PM
In one remote region of Afghanistan, the Korengal Valley, the Pentagon has decided to close down its embattled outpost, seeing that its efforts are useless and that the people of this region will not submit to occupation.
Forty-two U.S. troops died there, most between 2006 and 2009, and hundreds more were injured. Many more Afghan troops were killed in fighting, probably because Afghans hired to enforce Western domination are routinely not provided with as much protection and body armor as their Western paymasters and counterparts.
More and more Afghans have joined the resistance and are fighting with the hope that the U.S. occupiers will be driven not just from this forested valley by the banks of the Pech River, but from their entire homeland.
Some historical background can help explain this resistance. After the 1979 revolution led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the mountains and valleys of the Afghan countryside became economically prosperous. Philip Bonosky, a reporter from the U.S. who resided in Afghanistan during that time, describes this in his book, “Afghanistan: Washington’s Secret War.”
At that time, the PDPA government worked to provide employment for the residents of the rural areas as part of its efforts to assist the people of the country, the majority of whom were peasants, along with a few low-paid industrial workers.
With Soviet material aid, the PDPA government provided employment for youth throughout the countryside, mobilized to teach them to read, and offered medical care and other necessities unknown to many Afghans during the preceding years of Western domination of the country’s government and economy.
Bonosky notes how much of Afghanistan’s great forests had been decimated through years of unregulated harvesting by foreign capitalists. However, young people organized under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Democratic Youth League attempted to reforest the countryside and heal the ecological damage the capitalists had inflicted in order to build a sustainable environment for the Afghan people.
The revolutionary regime carried out a massive Soviet-funded jobs program, which helped improve life for millions of Afghans who dwelled in the mountainous regions and had previously barely survived.
When U.S.-sponsored mercenaries defeated the PDPA government after a lengthy war, the victors sold off vast natural resources of Afghanistan to those who had collaborated with the West. Many of those who profited from the removal of the popular regime were not themselves even born in Afghanistan. Many had been hired with CIA funds to wage war against the democratic government and its Soviet defenders.
Class war in the countryside
Once the PDPA government was driven out in the 1980s, the Korengal Valley, like many other areas, was run by a class of Western-backed “timber lords,” capitalists in the lumber industry who often employ their own private armies. These lords rule without question in a totally “free market” where no government intervention exists and money is the only law. It was only in 2006 that government forces of any kind re-entered the region. (New York Times, Feb. 24, 2008)
The people of the Korengal Valley have shown they will not submit to Washington’s wishes. Many villagers live in houses embedded into the sides of mountains. They have loudly refused to recognize the pro-U.S. puppet regime in Kabul or to accept Western “aid” meant to buy their compliance. (New York Times, April 14)
Even after Oct. 20, 2007, when 2,000 pounds of bombs were dropped on the village of Yaka China in the valley, turning five innocent civilians into “collateral damage,” the will of the people to resist did not dry up. (uruknet.info)
Despite nine years of occupation, thousands of deaths, bombings and other brutality designed to force the Afghan population to submit, it seems that the U.S. has been unable to “stabilize” even this single wooded valley.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Pentagon Spends Bilions to Terrorize Civilians
By Deirdre Griswold
Published Feb 17, 2010 5:12 PM
Feb. 16 — It is now four days since U.S. Marines stormed into the town of Marjah in Afghanistan, backed up by helicopter gunships, fighter jets and drones. Some 9,000 U.S. troops are taking part in Operation Moshtarak, which means “together” in the Dari dialect — a bright idea from some psyops genius meant to beguile the local population.
These U.S. troops, part of the Obama administration’s “surge” of 30,000 additional forces sent to Afghanistan, are supplemented by 4,000 British soldiers and a few thousand Afghans. So altogether you have some 15,000 troops, equipped with the most modern weapons, pitted against what the Pentagon estimated to be about 400 Taliban fighters with only handheld guns and mortars and dug-in improvised explosive devices to slow the advancing forces.
The types who thrilled to Hitler’s tank battalions rolling across the farmlands of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would undoubtedly find this display of raw imperialist military power in Afghanistan equally stimulating. For ordinary working people around the world who are not turned on by the latest death machines, it is appalling.
In what has become a monotonous Pentagon mantra, the media repeat that everything is being done to prevent civilian casualties. In this well-publicized-in-advance campaign, the U.S. generals told the people to stay home and not risk being hurt. So why did their fighter jets bomb a building in Marjah with people inside, killing 12, half of them children?
The NATO commanders in charge also admit to another eight civilian deaths so far in the offensive in Helmand province, but shrug it off as an acceptable cost of war.
How Afghans view the ‘surge’
What kind of war is it where one side has all the tactical advantages? Where only the determination of the population to resist the invaders keeps the outsiders from completely taking over the country?
No matter what cozy labels U.S. and British military planners attach to their hideous offensives in order to “win the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people, it isn’t working.
A well-informed article in the British newspaper Guardian on Feb. 16, called “How Afghans see Operation Moshtarak,” says international coverage of this military push “is in sharp contrast to the way it is regarded on the ground in Afghanistan.”
The writer, Nushin Arbabzadah, is an Afghan woman who grew up in Kabul. She reports that the opposition newspapers, which regard the government of Hamid Karzai as illegitimate after an election riddled with fraud, have “belittled the operation, casting doubt over the strategic importance of Marjah and Nade Ali, and highlighting the issue of civilian casualties there.”
Her article also summarizes the main points in an interview with Mullah Abdul Rezaq Akhund, identified as the Taliban commander in Marjah. It was conducted in Pashto and posted on the Cheragh Daily website.
Mullah Akhund put forward four reasons why the NATO forces considered Helmand province of geostrategic importance and therefore had chosen it for their well-publicized offensive. Reporter Arbabzadah characterizes these as “conspiracy theories,” but adds that “Mullah Akhund’s views reflect those of a majority in Afghanistan.”
According to the Guardian reporter, “The Taliban commander alleged that the U.S. and the U.K. intend to set up surveillance centers along the border to collect Iranian military and intelligence data. Akhund further alleged that since Helmand is also close to Gwadar, a Pakistani port which is of economic significance to China, controlling Helmand allows Washington to curb the influence of its main economic rival in the region.
“He then went on to allege that the U.S. and the U.K. were also interested in taking control of the drug production laboratories located in Helmand in a bid to profit from the international heroin business. The fourth reason, as alleged by Akhund, is Helmand’s uranium resources. In the Taliban commander’s own words: ‘According to eyewitnesses, British forces are bringing a large amount of equipment to the area and have started extracting uranium there and British transport planes land and take off from this area several times every day.’”
What this shows is that, while the imperialist militaries may enjoy enormous technological advantages, the resistance in Afghanistan is neither insular nor ignorant of what is going on in the world. While U.S. politicians have used semi-religious terms, like “evil-doers,” to provide some rationale for the war, this Taliban commander is pointing out material reasons why the imperialists are trying to control the region.
Workers in the U.S. and Britain — and Afghanistan too — are being forced to cough up the money for this war. Unlike the resistance fighters, who seem invisible because they dress and look like the people, the troops “surging” around Marjah look like they are landing on the moon, so swaddled are they in protective armor and encumbered with all the things that soldiers from an alien country need to survive — from water and food to night vision equipment, not to speak of weapons and ammunition.
And it all costs — big time. At a time when bridges are falling down in the U.S., the Pentagon is buying portable ones strong enough to hold armored vehicles as they cross the canals that crisscross Helmand province. It’s another piece of equipment the grunts have to carry with them as they “surge.”
How many school buses can be bought for the price of a light armored vehicle? The Army has signed a contract for 2,131 LAVs, adding up to $4 billion. That’s almost $2 million apiece, or the equivalent of nearly 30 school buses every time one of these wheeled tanks gets blown up in Afghanistan.
Congress added $160 billion to the fiscal year 2010 Pentagon budget for Overseas Contingency Operations — about half of it for the war in Afghanistan. The drain of imperialist wars on the economy is bleeding all social programs in the U.S. — which is especially painful in this period of high unemployment and low wages, when tens of millions of workers and their families need every bit of help they can get.
Several opportunities are coming up for the anti-war, pro-people movement in the U.S. to carry out its own “surge”: the March 4 demonstrations of students and youth against cutbacks and tuition hikes; the March 20 anti-war protests; and the April 10 March for Jobs in Washington. Be there! Stop the wars and occupations!
E-mail: dgriswold@workers.org
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Published Feb 17, 2010 5:12 PM
Feb. 16 — It is now four days since U.S. Marines stormed into the town of Marjah in Afghanistan, backed up by helicopter gunships, fighter jets and drones. Some 9,000 U.S. troops are taking part in Operation Moshtarak, which means “together” in the Dari dialect — a bright idea from some psyops genius meant to beguile the local population.
These U.S. troops, part of the Obama administration’s “surge” of 30,000 additional forces sent to Afghanistan, are supplemented by 4,000 British soldiers and a few thousand Afghans. So altogether you have some 15,000 troops, equipped with the most modern weapons, pitted against what the Pentagon estimated to be about 400 Taliban fighters with only handheld guns and mortars and dug-in improvised explosive devices to slow the advancing forces.
The types who thrilled to Hitler’s tank battalions rolling across the farmlands of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would undoubtedly find this display of raw imperialist military power in Afghanistan equally stimulating. For ordinary working people around the world who are not turned on by the latest death machines, it is appalling.
In what has become a monotonous Pentagon mantra, the media repeat that everything is being done to prevent civilian casualties. In this well-publicized-in-advance campaign, the U.S. generals told the people to stay home and not risk being hurt. So why did their fighter jets bomb a building in Marjah with people inside, killing 12, half of them children?
The NATO commanders in charge also admit to another eight civilian deaths so far in the offensive in Helmand province, but shrug it off as an acceptable cost of war.
How Afghans view the ‘surge’
What kind of war is it where one side has all the tactical advantages? Where only the determination of the population to resist the invaders keeps the outsiders from completely taking over the country?
No matter what cozy labels U.S. and British military planners attach to their hideous offensives in order to “win the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people, it isn’t working.
A well-informed article in the British newspaper Guardian on Feb. 16, called “How Afghans see Operation Moshtarak,” says international coverage of this military push “is in sharp contrast to the way it is regarded on the ground in Afghanistan.”
The writer, Nushin Arbabzadah, is an Afghan woman who grew up in Kabul. She reports that the opposition newspapers, which regard the government of Hamid Karzai as illegitimate after an election riddled with fraud, have “belittled the operation, casting doubt over the strategic importance of Marjah and Nade Ali, and highlighting the issue of civilian casualties there.”
Her article also summarizes the main points in an interview with Mullah Abdul Rezaq Akhund, identified as the Taliban commander in Marjah. It was conducted in Pashto and posted on the Cheragh Daily website.
Mullah Akhund put forward four reasons why the NATO forces considered Helmand province of geostrategic importance and therefore had chosen it for their well-publicized offensive. Reporter Arbabzadah characterizes these as “conspiracy theories,” but adds that “Mullah Akhund’s views reflect those of a majority in Afghanistan.”
According to the Guardian reporter, “The Taliban commander alleged that the U.S. and the U.K. intend to set up surveillance centers along the border to collect Iranian military and intelligence data. Akhund further alleged that since Helmand is also close to Gwadar, a Pakistani port which is of economic significance to China, controlling Helmand allows Washington to curb the influence of its main economic rival in the region.
“He then went on to allege that the U.S. and the U.K. were also interested in taking control of the drug production laboratories located in Helmand in a bid to profit from the international heroin business. The fourth reason, as alleged by Akhund, is Helmand’s uranium resources. In the Taliban commander’s own words: ‘According to eyewitnesses, British forces are bringing a large amount of equipment to the area and have started extracting uranium there and British transport planes land and take off from this area several times every day.’”
What this shows is that, while the imperialist militaries may enjoy enormous technological advantages, the resistance in Afghanistan is neither insular nor ignorant of what is going on in the world. While U.S. politicians have used semi-religious terms, like “evil-doers,” to provide some rationale for the war, this Taliban commander is pointing out material reasons why the imperialists are trying to control the region.
Workers in the U.S. and Britain — and Afghanistan too — are being forced to cough up the money for this war. Unlike the resistance fighters, who seem invisible because they dress and look like the people, the troops “surging” around Marjah look like they are landing on the moon, so swaddled are they in protective armor and encumbered with all the things that soldiers from an alien country need to survive — from water and food to night vision equipment, not to speak of weapons and ammunition.
And it all costs — big time. At a time when bridges are falling down in the U.S., the Pentagon is buying portable ones strong enough to hold armored vehicles as they cross the canals that crisscross Helmand province. It’s another piece of equipment the grunts have to carry with them as they “surge.”
How many school buses can be bought for the price of a light armored vehicle? The Army has signed a contract for 2,131 LAVs, adding up to $4 billion. That’s almost $2 million apiece, or the equivalent of nearly 30 school buses every time one of these wheeled tanks gets blown up in Afghanistan.
Congress added $160 billion to the fiscal year 2010 Pentagon budget for Overseas Contingency Operations — about half of it for the war in Afghanistan. The drain of imperialist wars on the economy is bleeding all social programs in the U.S. — which is especially painful in this period of high unemployment and low wages, when tens of millions of workers and their families need every bit of help they can get.
Several opportunities are coming up for the anti-war, pro-people movement in the U.S. to carry out its own “surge”: the March 4 demonstrations of students and youth against cutbacks and tuition hikes; the March 20 anti-war protests; and the April 10 March for Jobs in Washington. Be there! Stop the wars and occupations!
E-mail: dgriswold@workers.org
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Deirdre Griswold: "Behind U.S. Military Expansion, from Afghanistan to Yemen
AN EXCELLENT, IMPORTANT, MUST SEE SPEECH!!!!!!!!!!
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Video: George Galloway Speaks in Cleveland
This Clip Shows The Introduction
This shows clips from his speech, including responses to the accusation of Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism, as well as the crimes of Zionism.
In This Clip He Speaks of Building the International Aid Brigades to Gaza.
In this clip he answers a question from a Fascist who maintains that Isreal's existance was secured because "the Jews control America." Galloway rips this fascist lie, perpetuated by the Ron Paul/John Birch Society Fascists, to shreds, and exposes it as a tool against the people.
This shows clips from his speech, including responses to the accusation of Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism, as well as the crimes of Zionism.
In This Clip He Speaks of Building the International Aid Brigades to Gaza.
In this clip he answers a question from a Fascist who maintains that Isreal's existance was secured because "the Jews control America." Galloway rips this fascist lie, perpetuated by the Ron Paul/John Birch Society Fascists, to shreds, and exposes it as a tool against the people.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Report Exposes Secret CIA Prisons
By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Jun 18, 2007 12:04 AM
A Swiss politician named Dick Marty has issued a Council of Europe expose showing, based on his interviews with U.S. and European intelligence sources, that there were several CIA secret prisons in Poland and Romania from 2003 until 2005. In these prisons, detainees, mainly from the Middle East, were shackled and forced to remain naked for months at a time without any charges being brought against them. The guards wore masks to hide their faces. “Interrogation techniques,” a euphemism for torture methods, were used.
The CIA called the report “exaggerated,” but never denied that such prisons existed or countered any of the report’s claims.
The report shows that there were 10 secret flights to Poland by U.S. military planes. Six of them were from Afghanistan.
It appears that some of those who saw their country bombed and invaded by the United States, and picked up a gun to resist, found themselves apprehended, put onto a plane, and shipped like a piece of cargo to prisons in Eastern Europe, where they faced torture and interrogation.
This report just adds to the growing body of knowledge about U.S. policy toward prisoners accused of being “terrorists” since Sept. 11, 2001. It is worldwide knowledge that the U.S. military brutally tortured people at Abu Ghraib, with the torture approved high up the chain of command. An unknown number of people are currently held without charges by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay, where they are subjected to brutality and abuse.
This latest report from Marty just reinforces the fact that the capitalist class, in its naked pursuit of profit and control of the Middle East, will stop at no amount of brutality, torture, violation of human rights, and repression. The only law in the eyes of the Republican Party, which carries it out, and the Democratic Party, which silently approves it, is that oil profits from the Middle East must continue to feed the parasite class of Wall Street, with no limit.
Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Published Jun 18, 2007 12:04 AM
A Swiss politician named Dick Marty has issued a Council of Europe expose showing, based on his interviews with U.S. and European intelligence sources, that there were several CIA secret prisons in Poland and Romania from 2003 until 2005. In these prisons, detainees, mainly from the Middle East, were shackled and forced to remain naked for months at a time without any charges being brought against them. The guards wore masks to hide their faces. “Interrogation techniques,” a euphemism for torture methods, were used.
The CIA called the report “exaggerated,” but never denied that such prisons existed or countered any of the report’s claims.
The report shows that there were 10 secret flights to Poland by U.S. military planes. Six of them were from Afghanistan.
It appears that some of those who saw their country bombed and invaded by the United States, and picked up a gun to resist, found themselves apprehended, put onto a plane, and shipped like a piece of cargo to prisons in Eastern Europe, where they faced torture and interrogation.
This report just adds to the growing body of knowledge about U.S. policy toward prisoners accused of being “terrorists” since Sept. 11, 2001. It is worldwide knowledge that the U.S. military brutally tortured people at Abu Ghraib, with the torture approved high up the chain of command. An unknown number of people are currently held without charges by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay, where they are subjected to brutality and abuse.
This latest report from Marty just reinforces the fact that the capitalist class, in its naked pursuit of profit and control of the Middle East, will stop at no amount of brutality, torture, violation of human rights, and repression. The only law in the eyes of the Republican Party, which carries it out, and the Democratic Party, which silently approves it, is that oil profits from the Middle East must continue to feed the parasite class of Wall Street, with no limit.
Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
AFGHANISTAN: Anger at U.S. rises with civilian casualties
AFGHANISTAN
Anger at U.S. rises with civilian casualties
By Caleb T. Maupin
Published May 21, 2007 10:13 PM
“Foreign troops are killing Afghans every day,” said Haji Ibrahim, a resident of a village in the Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. On May 8 he endured the terror of an air strike by U.S. planes against his village.
The U.S. government first claimed that only “terrorists” and “al-Qaeda fighters” were killed in the bombings. A Pentagon media release claimed “three terrorist compounds were destroyed.”
Residents of the area reported that three local homes had been hit and contained scores of dead bodies. “There were no Taliban in our area,” said another local resident, who, like Ibrahim, spoke to the Middle Eastern newspaper Alarab.
The governor in charge of the region—part of the U.S.-sponsored regime—has placed the blame on the Afghan resistance fighters he called “the Taliban.” He is reported to have said that because the resistance fighters hid and didn’t remain out in the open to be bombed by U.S. forces, therefore they—not the U.S. invaders—were responsible for the deaths.
On May 10 Reuters quoted witnesses who estimated that a total of 40 people were killed in this massacre, though the number could be much larger.
A Pakistani web news source stated, “There is growing alarm over a wave of U.S. bombing raids in which 110 civilians have died in the past two weeks. Twenty-one people were killed last week after U.S. Special Forces called in air strikes on the town of Sangin in Helmand province.” (onlinenews.com)
The same day that its planes were attacking the village in Helmand province, the U.S. military was forced to apologize to the families of 19 people killed and 50 wounded in March by Marine Special Forces who fired on civilians in eastern Afghanistan.
It announced it would pay compensation for the dead—$2,000 per body.
“We don’t want their money and apologies. If somebody loses one of his family members, an apology won’t bring him back,” said Haji Lawania, who was injured in the shooting and whose father and nephew were killed. (AP, May 9)
The Pentagon also says it is looking into reports from Afghan officials that 51 civilians died in air strikes and fighting in the western province of Herat last month.
Legislators call for withdrawal
Demonstrations against the Bush administration and the U.S.-installed regime of Hamid Karzai are growing inside Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan. This mass anger pushed legislators in Afghanistan’s upper house to pass a resolution on May 9 calling for an immediate cease-fire, negotiations with the Taliban, and the setting of a date for the withdrawal of foreign troops.
Since the 2001 U.S. invasion, said one Afghan civilian, the country has not been rebuilt to the point of even having paved roads. “My province has only dirt roads and it takes me nine to 10 hours to get from Kabul, when if we had proper roads it would be three.”
The U.S. funded and trained a mercenary “contra” army to overthrow the 1978 democratic revolution in Afghanistan, led by the People’s Democratic Party. That revolution built roads, opened up literacy for women, and aligned with the socialist bloc.
Today, under U.S. and British military occupation, Afghan civilians are being killed daily and countless others are held in prisons where human rights are violated and torture is carried out.
Resistance to the occupying force of 50,000—mostly U.S. and British troops—has grown. In the month of January this year, according to the China Post, there were three times as many attacks on them as the same time last year.
With resistance flowing strong in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bolivarian socialism gaining strength in Venezuela, Zimbabwe standing up to the colonialists and imperialists, and increasing anguish and anger on the “home front” in the United States, it is clear that imperialism is in crisis.
Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Anger at U.S. rises with civilian casualties
By Caleb T. Maupin
Published May 21, 2007 10:13 PM
“Foreign troops are killing Afghans every day,” said Haji Ibrahim, a resident of a village in the Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. On May 8 he endured the terror of an air strike by U.S. planes against his village.
The U.S. government first claimed that only “terrorists” and “al-Qaeda fighters” were killed in the bombings. A Pentagon media release claimed “three terrorist compounds were destroyed.”
Residents of the area reported that three local homes had been hit and contained scores of dead bodies. “There were no Taliban in our area,” said another local resident, who, like Ibrahim, spoke to the Middle Eastern newspaper Alarab.
The governor in charge of the region—part of the U.S.-sponsored regime—has placed the blame on the Afghan resistance fighters he called “the Taliban.” He is reported to have said that because the resistance fighters hid and didn’t remain out in the open to be bombed by U.S. forces, therefore they—not the U.S. invaders—were responsible for the deaths.
On May 10 Reuters quoted witnesses who estimated that a total of 40 people were killed in this massacre, though the number could be much larger.
A Pakistani web news source stated, “There is growing alarm over a wave of U.S. bombing raids in which 110 civilians have died in the past two weeks. Twenty-one people were killed last week after U.S. Special Forces called in air strikes on the town of Sangin in Helmand province.” (onlinenews.com)
The same day that its planes were attacking the village in Helmand province, the U.S. military was forced to apologize to the families of 19 people killed and 50 wounded in March by Marine Special Forces who fired on civilians in eastern Afghanistan.
It announced it would pay compensation for the dead—$2,000 per body.
“We don’t want their money and apologies. If somebody loses one of his family members, an apology won’t bring him back,” said Haji Lawania, who was injured in the shooting and whose father and nephew were killed. (AP, May 9)
The Pentagon also says it is looking into reports from Afghan officials that 51 civilians died in air strikes and fighting in the western province of Herat last month.
Legislators call for withdrawal
Demonstrations against the Bush administration and the U.S.-installed regime of Hamid Karzai are growing inside Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan. This mass anger pushed legislators in Afghanistan’s upper house to pass a resolution on May 9 calling for an immediate cease-fire, negotiations with the Taliban, and the setting of a date for the withdrawal of foreign troops.
Since the 2001 U.S. invasion, said one Afghan civilian, the country has not been rebuilt to the point of even having paved roads. “My province has only dirt roads and it takes me nine to 10 hours to get from Kabul, when if we had proper roads it would be three.”
The U.S. funded and trained a mercenary “contra” army to overthrow the 1978 democratic revolution in Afghanistan, led by the People’s Democratic Party. That revolution built roads, opened up literacy for women, and aligned with the socialist bloc.
Today, under U.S. and British military occupation, Afghan civilians are being killed daily and countless others are held in prisons where human rights are violated and torture is carried out.
Resistance to the occupying force of 50,000—mostly U.S. and British troops—has grown. In the month of January this year, according to the China Post, there were three times as many attacks on them as the same time last year.
With resistance flowing strong in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bolivarian socialism gaining strength in Venezuela, Zimbabwe standing up to the colonialists and imperialists, and increasing anguish and anger on the “home front” in the United States, it is clear that imperialism is in crisis.
Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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