More on Obama’s War in Afghanistan

(Young Spartacus pages)

The following letter from the New York Spartacus Youth Club appeared in the Hunter College Envoy (25 November-8 December 2009) in response to an article in which staff writer Sean McMahon, who had mistakenly believed himself to be a Marxist when he picked up a copy of Workers Vanguard on campus, expressed his dismay that we oppose both the occupation of Afghanistan and imperialist top cop Barack Obama. As McMahon wrote, “I got the impression that to the Vanguard, there was not only no honeymoon period between them and President Obama, but there may not have even been a courtship.” Good! We’re glad we were able to set him straight on some basic Marxism.

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It’s not every day that one can find such forthright admiration for the U.S. imperialist occupation of Afghanistan from a self-described “lefty” as expressed in Sean McMahon’s article “Obama’s War? No, America’s Responsibility” (October 14-27 [2009]). McMahon was responding to the Spartacist League’s article in Workers Vanguard, “Down With Obama’s War in Afghanistan” [WV No. 942, 11 September 2009] which calls for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq. McMahon argues that the United States has the “determination” to “see to it that Afghanistan becomes, if not a thriving democracy, at least a stable country not ruled by religious fanatics….” In fact, we understand that the only “determination” the U.S. has in the strategic region of Central Asia is to advance its imperialist interests. The corrupt regime that the U.S. supports today is based on a coalition of former mujahedin militias, and the 2004 constitution effectively enshrines Islamic fundamentalist sharia law.

McMahon bemoans that “the United States left Afghanistan to its own devices after training the mujahideen to fight the Red Army in the 1980’s….” What actually happened? The Soviet Union in 1979 sent 100,000 troops in order to stem a U.S.-trained mujahedin insurgency against the left-nationalist, pro-Soviet government. We proudly declared, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of October Revolution to Afghan peoples!” This expressed our recognition that, despite its degeneration under a Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union remained a workers state, where capitalism had been overthrown. The Soviet Union embodied the historic gains of the October 1917 Russian workers revolution, not least for women. The intervention of the USSR on behalf of the modernizing secular government brought immense social progress. The amount of women in the workforce increased 50-fold, with half of all university students being women. The Afghan government also began mass literacy campaigns and provided medical care. But the Soviet forces pulled out from Afghanistan in early 1989 in an attempt to placate the U.S. ruling class. We bitterly denounced this betrayal which paved the way for a bloody onslaught against the Afghan peoples. The restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union in 1991-92 was a historic defeat for the world’s working class and the oppressed.

It’s no surprise that McMahon confuses himself for a “Marxist” on the basis of some online Facebook poll, considering that most fake-left groups, including the misnamed International Socialist Organization, sided with the U.S. imperialists and their reactionary CIA-funded mujahedin, who threw acid in the faces of young women learning to read. More recently, just weeks before Obama announced he was sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, the ISO gushed that Obama’s election was “a reason to believe that change is possible” (Socialist Worker online, 21 January [2009]), building illusions once again in U.S. imperialism. The Democrats and the Republicans are the parties of the American capitalist class. Obama has worked tirelessly to break the back of the United Auto Workers union while giving billions to the banks. His “timetable” for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq is essentially the same as Bush’s, and since his election, anti-immigrant roundups have increased along with Predator missile strikes in Pakistan.

“Imperialistic” does not describe “certain facets of American foreign policy,” as McMahon writes. Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. The blood-soaked U.S. imperialists have wreaked untold misery the world over. Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class and, in this epoch of its decay, wars that divide and redivide the world’s markets. The only possibility of a future free of wars, misery and want rests in the victory of international socialist revolution. We in the Spartacus Youth Club, the youth auxiliary of the Spartacist League, seek to build a revolutionary workers party that can lead the struggle to sweep away this rotten system for good.