Withdraw all troops from Afghanistan and Iraq! A socialist answer to war and militarism

[IndianaGreen]

Withdraw all troops from Afghanistan and Iraq! A socialist answer to war and militarism

Statement of the Socialist Equality Party (Britain) and Partei für Soziale Gleichheit (Germany)

20 September 2008

The war in Afghanistan is an imperialist war. The aim of the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force is to assert geostrategic control over access to oil and gas supplies in the region.

The plans for the conquest of Afghanistan had long been prepared when two airplanes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The roots of this process can be traced back to the 1970s, when the West began channelling funds to the local warlords and Islamic fundamentalists in an effort to bring down the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul. After the struggle between the warlords had reduced the country to a heap of rubble, the Taliban, who had been trained by Pakistan’s secret service, finally took control.

NATO has now bombed the warlords and drug barons back into power, with devastating consequences. Opium production reached 8,200 tons last year, representing 93 percent of world yield. Afghanistan sits fourth from last on the UN Human Poverty Index of 178 nations. Average life expectancy is barely over 40 years, and 700 children and 60 women die each day from hunger and lack of health care. The illiteracy rate is running at 70 percent in the cities and up to 99 percent in the countryside. Only a quarter of the population has access to clean water and just 10 percent have electricity.

Like every colonial occupation, the imperialist seizure of Afghanistan provokes popular resistance, which the Western media indiscriminately ascribes to the “Taliban” or “terrorists.” NATO reacts by striking back brutally, killing innumerable civilians.

In recent weeks, the United States has expanded the war into Pakistan’s national territory, threatening to drive this nuclear power into a civil war, destabilizing the entire Indian sub-continent.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/anti-s20.shtml

[provis99]

1. whatever we're doing in Afghanistan, we sure aren't there to get bin-Laden

but I doubt its a planned war of imperialism; our policy is too stupid and pointless to make me believe it was anything other than a half-assed attempt to convince the american public that the government was doing something, anything after 9/11. And now that we're there, we just don't know what to do.

Quite frankly, if it were an imperialist attack, I would ask, so what is our country getting out of it? What resources are we getting? Afghanistan is just a big, ugly, mountainous desert with no economy to speak of, and no natural resources. If it were a war of imperialism, I would at least expect America to be getting something out of it.

[billyoc]

2. You can't beat the Trotskyists on the war.

They're just never wrong. :shrug:

[IndianaGreen]

3. Over 9,000 American GIs and a million Iraqis are dead because we didn't listen to the Left

Keep following the same bankrupt policies of the past, and all you will accomplish is keep our military cemeteries well stocked with a fresh supply of bodies.