U.S./Canada/NATO Out of Afghanistan!

Torture and the “War on Terror”

Hideous accounts of torture have surfaced from some of the prisoners detained by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. On being handed over to the Afghan authorities, they have been beaten with cables, frozen, choked, subjected to electric shocks and killed. The most severe torture occurs at the National Directorate of Security headquarters in Kandahar, where Canada has led NATO forces and deploys most of its 2,500 troops. After a series of shifting lies and denials, the Harper government finally released a 2006 Foreign Affairs report on Afghanistan, only to censor out admissions that “extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial are all too common.”

The latest revelations are neither a surprise nor an aberration. Prisoner abuse in Afghanistan is as intrinsic to the global imperialist “war on terror” as the torture by U.S. troops in Iraq and the demonizing and repression of Muslims in the U.S., Canada and other Western countries. The slaughter of Afghan civilians by the U.S.-led occupation forces is so commonplace that even Washington’s puppet president Hamid Karzai is complaining. In May alone, air strikes and other attacks killed dozens of villagers including women and children. U.S., Canadian, all NATO troops out of Afghanistan now! Down with the neocolonial occupation of Iraq!

It is inconceivable that the Harper government did not know what was happening to the prisoners. Canada’s 2005 detainee transfer agreement with Afghanistan is no different than Washington’s “extraordinary rendition” program, which similarly passes detainees on to be tortured. It is no different than the deportation of Maher Arar to a year of imprisonment and torture in Syria. Moreover, the Canadian military is deeply embedded within the Afghan regime, with a “Strategic Advisory Team,” mainly composed of Canadian military personnel, operating inside government ministries.

The hue and cry over detainee abuse by the opposition parties in parliament is sheer hypocrisy. It was the former Liberal government that sent Canadian troops to Afghanistan and approved the detainee transfer agreement. The Liberals and Bloc Québécois support keeping the army there to at least 2009, despite widespread popular opposition. The NDP also backed the Afghan occupation until quite recently, and voted for every one of the Liberals’ massive hikes in the military budget.

Calling to “support our troops,” Jack Layton says Canada should be fighting the “right battles,” as in “the Korean War and in dozens of UN-sanctioned peacekeeping missions” (ndp.ca, 12 March). From the murderous war on North Korea in the early 1950s to the Canadian troops who tortured and murdered black youth in Somalia in the early 1990s, Canadian “peacekeeping” under UN auspices is nothing but the brutal enforcement of the imperialist order.

The NDP’s fealty to capitalist Canada is shared by the fake-socialists in the Iraq/Afghanistan “antiwar movement.” The website of the Canadian Peace Alliance, backed by the International Socialists among others, advertises t-shirts “in UN blue” adorned with Canadian flags and the slogan, “Peace is Patriotic—Support our Troops: bring them home.” The Mobilization Against War and Occupation has called to protest the deaths of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. The slogan raised by both these outfits, “Bring the troops home now,” is meant to engender a false sense of common interest with the imperialist military.

From the start, we Marxists took a side with the poor, semicolonial countries of Afghanistan and Iraq against imperialist attack, while giving no political support to their reactionary regimes. Similarly today, military blows against the imperialist occupiers coincide with the interests of the working class, as a defeated or weakened imperialism would make room for anti-capitalist struggle at home. But we do not cheerlead for the politically retrograde “resistance” forces in Afghanistan and Iraq—we fight for international working-class struggle against the barbaric imperialist order.

Militarism and war are inevitable outgrowths of a worldwide system under which a handful of rich capitalist countries compete for control of the world’s resources, markets and spheres of influence through brutal exploitation, pillage and war. Real opposition to imperialist war is impossible without opposition to the system that breeds it. The army, like the police and other institutions of the capitalist state, is a weapon of the enemy class which can under no circumstances be wielded on behalf of the oppressed. We say “not a person, not a penny for the Canadian military!” The rulers’ repressive state apparatus must be smashed through proletarian revolution.

We Said: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!”

The disastrous plight of the masses of Afghanistan today, and particularly that of Afghan women, is a direct consequence of the Soviet Union’s military withdrawal from that country in 1989 and the subsequent triumph of fundamentalist religious cutthroats backed by U.S. imperialism. When the Soviet Red Army entered Afghanistan at the request of a modernizing nationalist regime a decade earlier, we declared “Hail Red Army! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to Afghan peoples!”

Sending the army into Afghanistan to clean out a reactionary insurgency against the government’s progressive reforms—like providing education to girls and reducing the bride price to a nominal sum—opened a road to social liberation for the Afghan people. It underlined our Trotskyist understanding that the Soviet Union was a workers state, product of the October 1917 proletarian socialist revolution, despite its subsequent degeneration under a nationalist, Stalinist bureaucracy. We called for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, and for a proletarian political revolution to oust these treacherous Stalinist bureaucrats.

Throughout the 1980s, many of the same reformist left groups who today raise the social-patriotic call to “support our troops” stood with U.S. imperialism and its Canadian junior partner in their “holy war” against the Soviet Union and the rights of Afghan women. Among the more notorious of the CIA’s Islamic fanatics was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose specialty was throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women. Today one of Hekmatyar’s long-time lieutenants, Abdul Jabar Sabet, a Canadian citizen and former resident of Montreal, sits in the Afghan cabinet as Karzai’s attorney-general.

Patriotic Hoopla and Imperialist Barbarism

In an attempt to shore up support for the Afghan occupation, the Tory government orchestrated a major commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the World War I battle of Vimy Ridge. Harper and Canadian army chief of staff Rick Hillier presided over the televised April 9 ceremonies at the Vimy Ridge memorial in France along with war veterans and leaders of the WWI Allied powers. The NDP’s Layton took the opportunity to issue another “support our troops” salute, saying, “Vimy was a critical victory for the Allies in the First World War and an important moment for our nation.”

In fact, the First World War was a bloody contest among imperialist states competing to redivide the world, which sent soldiers to die by the hundreds of thousands. As Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky put it in The ABC of Communism (1920), “between 1 August 1914, and 1 January 1918, the capitalists had brought to market twelve hundred million pounds of putrid human flesh.” In such wars between blood-drenched imperialist powers, Marxists do not take a side but say, in the words of German revolutionary leader Karl Liebknecht, “The main enemy is at home!”—our own ruling class. In neocolonial wars of occupation and pillage such as Afghanistan and Iraq today, we do take a side—in defense of oppressed nations and peoples against imperialism.

Vimy Ridge was part of the Battle of Arras, which saw over 220,000 soldiers killed and wounded on both sides. The enormous casualties led prime minister Robert Borden to introduce conscription, which in turn produced mass protests in Quebec. WWI was already unpopular there, where it was widely seen as a “war for the English.” By Easter 1918, the protests escalated into anti-conscription riots in Quebec City. The government invoked the War Measures Act and sent in the army, killing at least four civilians.

To this day, popular opposition to Canadian militarism remains high among the Québécois, many of whom rightly view the Canadian army as a tool of oppression both abroad—as in Afghanistan today—and at home. The latter was shown in the October 1970 military occupation of Montreal, again under the War Measures Act, which aimed at suppressing the national and social discontent then sweeping Quebec. As forthright opponents of English Canadian chauvinism, Marxists advocate independence for Quebec.

The effects of World War I on the international working class were aptly described by the revolutionary leader Rosa Luxemburg: “dividends are rising—proletarians falling; and with each one there sinks a fighter of the future, a soldier of the revolution, a savior of humanity from the yoke of capitalism, into the grave” (Junius Pamphlet, 1916). But in Tsarist Russia, the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky was able to rally the war-weary worker and peasant masses, leading them to power in October 1917 in the world’s first proletarian socialist revolution. It is in this tradition that we seek to forge revolutionary workers parties to lead the way to new October Revolutions worldwide. The imperialist order that is unleashing barbarism on the peoples of the world from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond must be swept away through proletarian revolution, the only road to the liberation of humanity.