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Seeing this photo brought a whole range of memories and impressions of times past.
I remember the revolution (or communist takeover in Afghanistan). It overthrew what may be described as a feudal monarchy and brought into power a communist regime that dealt with its opponents brutally - but not nearly as brutally as its Mujaheddin and Taliban successors.
But what they also attempted to do was to bring Afghanistan into the modern age - they brought medicine, education and rights to women. All that is epitomised in the photo below taken at an Afghan university in the 1980's.
The American response to this was to fund and arm the Mujaheddin and to suck the geriatric regime in the Kremlin into a destructive war that eventually did its bit to bankrupt the USSR.
The Americans backed this up with a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 (sound familiar?) and further support to those forces that wanted to take Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages, including their good friend Osama bin Laden.
The Soviet Union, whatever its shortcomings and evils, acted as a counterweight to American imperialism. Wherever they were successful in the developing world they brought an improvement to the social (if not the economic) conditions of the people.
Cuba is the last remaining example of this in the world - both as an example of the achievements as well as the shortcomings.
We can never go back to those days - Peak Oil and catastrophic climate change have seen to that.
I am a firm fan of bearing witness and setting the historic record straight.
2 + 2 = 4, not 5!!
---Seemorerocks
Afghanistan:
Misogynistic Hell Hole Made in the U.S.A.
Amnesty
International Supports More Imperialist War and Occupation
by
Steven Argue
16
July 2012
On
March 6th 2012, the puppet government of President Hamid Karzai
approved a new “code of conduct” for the women of Afghanistan
that officially condones wife beating, legally bars women from
leaving the home without a male guardian, bars women from mingling
with men at markets, in offices, or in school, and states, “men are
fundamental and women are secondary.”
A
common sight in Afghanistan is women begging to for money to feed
their starving children. Commonplace is women sold into prostitution
where they service U.S. troops and military contractors. Likewise,
Afghani women almost everywhere are forced to wear suffocating head
to toe burqas.
The
United States first became involved in Afghanistan in 1978 under
Carter's regime. U.S. intervention was to overthrow the pro-woman and
pro-education PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan)
government. In response to massive U.S. intervention and the begging
of the PDPA government, the Soviet Union intervened in an attempt to
defeat the U.S. backed misogynistic religious fanatics of the
mujahideen. Six billion dollars in U.S. military aid and a million
lives later, the United States managed to achieve a government that
stripped women of all rights, executed all opposition including
communists, executed atheists, executed homosexuals, committed mass
murder against national minorities, destroyed irreplaceable art, and
eliminated science from the life of Afghanistan. Today, the U.S.
intervention in Afghanistan that started in 1978 has continued, and
those who the U.S. backs today, unlike socialist forces, continue to
be anti-women.
The
anti-woman nature of the current U.S. puppet government of Karzai
continues to be documented. This includes a March 28, 2012 report by
Human Rights Watch which reported finding 400 girls and women in
prison for the “moral crimes” of trying to escape forced and
underage marriages, beatings, stabbings, burnings, rapes, forced
prostitution, kidnappings, and murder threats.
One
19 year-old woman, convicted of “running away” after fleeing a
husband and mother-in-law who beat her told Human Rights Watch, “I
will try to become independent and divorce him. I hate the word
‘husband.’ My liver is totally black from my husband… If I knew
about prison and everything [that would happen to me] I would have
just jumped into the river and committed suicide.”
In
contrast, even a source that was hostile to the PDPA government had
to admit the following:
“The
Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. The emancipation of Afghan women
moves quickly. There are greater opportunities for education,
employment, and professional training, especially for women in the
cities…. Women students outnumber men at the Universities…. The
Communists legally guarantee the equal rights of women and men. More
and more women hold positions in business, government, the diplomatic
corps, the police, the army, and in Parliament. Women are teachers,
nurses, entertainers, doctors and lawyers. Education and employment
for women becomes more acceptable through much of Afghan society.”
– Deborah
Ellis, Women of the Afghan War (Praeger, 2000)
When
the PDPA took power in 1978 they announced a 20-point program that
called for women’s rights, the expropriation of the biggest
landowners, the ending of the debts of Afghanistan’s 11 million
peasants, equality between Afghanistan’s many peoples, universal
education for both sexes in their native languages, aid to small
businesses, and the extension of the state owned sector. Women’s
gains included legal equality, guaranteed education, a cap on the
bride price, and the outlawing of polygamy. This included a literacy
drive largely aimed at educating young girls. Ninety-nine percent of
Afghan women were illiterate at the outset of the PDPA led revolution
and within a decade 1.5 million people passed literacy exams.
By
the late 1980s 40% of the doctors in Afghanistan were women, 65% of
the students at Kabul University were women, and secular family
courts, sometimes presided over by women, had replaced the Islamic
sharia courts of the mullahs.
The
CIA funded misogynists of mujahideen shot the teachers and literacy
workers who taught little girls how to read and write, denouncing
them as communists. These mujahideen “freedom fighters” of
“Charlie Wilson’s War” were also known for throwing acid into
the faces of women liberated veil. None of this, however, made it
into the Hollywood propaganda film Charlie Wilson’s War; instead
proven lies were repeated in that film. One of those lies was the
accusation that the Soviet Union had planted bombs placed inside of
toys that blew-up when children picked them up. This accusation was
first aired in a CBS News segment in 1987 that actually showed a bomb
made to look like a toy. According to the segment, that bomb was
planted by Soviet soldiers. The Post, however, later revealed that a
BBC producer admitted to making the bomb-toy used by the CBS
cameraman for the story.
While
neither the Stalinist government of the USSR nor the left progressive
PDPA government of Afghanistan represented a truly communist system
with workers democracy, as Trotskyists advocate, Trotskyists took the
side of the PDPA against U.S. imperialism and their six billion
dollar mujahideen.
The
true killers of children were the Mujahideen. These U.S. backed
misogynistic killers hated the more advanced proletarian center of
Kabul with its liberated women the most. In the Russian Civil War
(1918-1922) a similar thing happened with the U.S. backed
anti-Semitic White Army committing mass murder in the cities of
Ukraine, seeing these cities as heavily populated by Jews and
communists. The White Army murdered 100,000 Jews in the Ukraine
alone. Likewise, the mujahideen promised to burn Kabul to the ground,
and they did, as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA) describe in an April 2012 statement:
“The
ignorant and criminal army of factions mercilessly killed 70,000
people in Kabul in just a few years of their dogfights; completely
destroyed and looted the city; imprisoned women at home with their
medieval-aged mindset; didn’t refrain from raping girls and even
children; and eliminated and pillaged our cultural and national
assets. General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, Director General of the ISI and
father of the Jehadi criminals of Afghanistan had said, “Kabul must
burn!”. Although he himself burned before his treacherous wish
could be fulfilled, but his chained lackeys made sure the dream of
their godfather was realized in a manner more horrible than he could
imagine. Gulbuddin, the cannibal, fired more than a thousand rockets
in Kabul in a single day; Sayyaf, Rabbani and Massoud declared their
loyalty to their Pakistani and Arab fathers by killing and massacring
our Hazara compatriots in Afshar of Kabul, and refreshed the memory
of their ruthless ancestor Abdur Rahman Khan in a more horrifying
manner; Dostum and his voracious militia continued their barbarous
acts of looting and raping women and girls; Iran’s stooges Mazari,
Khalili, Mohaqiq, Anwari and others hammered nails into the skulls of
innocent people, demonstrated “dance of the dead” (a ritualistic
killing where a person’s throat was slightly slit and hot oil was
poured on the cut, the wriggling of the body was called the ‘dance’)
and displayed other shameful practices of Akhundi-styled crimes.”
This
is what the American funded liberation of Afghanistan looked like.
Out of these religious fanatics the U.S. with the help of the
Pakistani ISI also helped create the Taliban government as RAWA also
explains:
“There
is no doubt that the US and west carefully chose their fundamentalist
mercenaries. They armed to teeth the most traitorous elements like
Gulbuddin, Rabbani, Sayyaf and Younis Khalis, who are real enemies of
the tribal, religious and linguistic unity of our country, and
introduced them as “leaders” to our people. After four years of
disaster, they again equipped the Taliban against its Jehadi brothers
with the help of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other reactionary
fundamentalists of the region and imposed them upon our people for
many years, so that they could further torture our people, who were
already fed-up of the in-fights of the factions, by the execution of
medieval-aged laws. By enforcing their inquisitorial policies, the
Taliban led our people to more ignorance and misfortune, and by
killing of the people of Shamali, massacre of our compatriots in
Yakawlang of Bamyan, massacre in Mazar and countless other crimes,
followed the methods of discordant butchery and treacheries of their
Jehadi predecessors in a more brutal fashion.”
By
the time of the September 11th attacks the United States had already
been at war with the people of Afghanistan for over two decades with
the blood of over a million Afghanis and the enslavement of the
Afghani women on its hands. The B-52s, troops, and unmanned drone
killers of NATO and US imperialism, however, did not bring
liberation, but instead the U.S. imperialists continued the rule of
many of the same anti-woman fanatics it had supported in the past.
Today the nightmare of U.S. imperialist war in Afghanistan continues
into its fourth decade with U.S. troops keeping the corrupt,
anti-democratic, and anti-woman Karzai government in power through
military actions that have left many civilians dead.
Obama,
declaring Afghanistan the “good war” committed 30,000 more troops
to Afghanistan in 2009 to prop –up Karzai’s corrupt anti-woman
regime. These troops have been responsible for many massacres from
the sky and on the ground. Atrocities have included U.S. soldiers who
have murdered Afghani civilians for sport and collected their body
parts as trophies, and regular night raids of homes of people
suspected of opposing the regime of Karzai where whoever answers the
door is shot dead.
One
thing is quite certain, over four decades of imperialist intervention
in Afghanistan has done nothing but harm the people. As former
Parliamentarian Malalai Joya stated, “We have many problems in
Afghanistan — fundamentalism, warlords, the Taliban. But we will
have a better chance to solve them if we have our self-determination,
our freedom, our independence. NATO's bombs will never deliver
democracy and justice to Afghanistan or any other country”.
Yet,
Amnesty International has taken up the cause of supporting Obama’s
continued war in Afghanistan. Under the slogan “NATO: Keep the
Progress Going" Amnesty International sponsored a public meeting
urging continued U.S. war in Afghanistan. Keynote speaker was
Madeline Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton. This is the
same Madeline Albright who said it was worth it for the U.S. to
murder 500,000 Iraqi children. During Clinton’s regime economic
sanctions against Iraq caused massive death including hundreds of
thousands of children. On May of 1996, 60 Minutes aired an interview
with Madeline Albright, who at the time was Clinton’s UN
Ambassador. Correspondent Leslie Stahl asked Albright, "We have
heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more
children than died in Hiroshima. And — and you know, is the price
worth it?"
Madeline
Albright replied "I think this is a very hard choice, but the
price — we think the price is worth it."
Do
not be deceived by the liberal backers of U.S. imperialism like
Barack Obama, Madeline Albright, and Amnesty International. The U.S.
war in Afghanistan is not the “good war”. Likewise, U.S.
imperialist goals are never humanitarian. Instead, U.S. imperialism
is a blood dripping beast that controls the world’s resources,
labor, and wealth through mass murder, terror, and many forms of
economic manipulation. Only the overthrow of U.S. imperialism through
socialist revolution will end the United State’s constant warfare
against the people of the world. It is towards this revolutionary
goal that the Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Party (RTSP) is
committed. Join us.
Check
out the Statement of Purpose of the RT-SP:
This
is an article of Liberation News, subscribe free
(not
associated with the paper by the same name of the Stalinist PSL who
stole our name)
Also
from this same author, see:
Why
The Russian Revolution is Still Important
Why
We Should Oppose the Imperialist War on Libya
