Part of the imperialist campaign to justify its war against Afghanistan, is the "bogeyman" of Islamic fundamentalism, whom its spokesmen and paid journalists present as "barbarian and obscurantist" and whose maximum "diabolical power" would be embodied today in the new "public enemy number one” for mass consumption, the Saudi Osama Bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban.

However, while the Anglo-American butchers destroy Afghanistan with bombs, those so-called "mortal enemies of the United States", the Taliban, Bin Laden, the Pakistani mullahs who have called for a "holy war against the infidel", haven’t touched a sole property or imperialist interest in the region, nor have they called on the working class and the masses to do so, in addition to refusing to arming them to confront and defeat imperialism. The reason is they are nothing more than sectors of the national bourgeoisies of the semi-colonial countries of the Middle East - small partners of imperialism - and Islamic fundamentalism is the weapon they have to prevent the proletariat from organizing independently; today, Islamic fundamentalism is also their tool to prevent the proletarians from arming themselves, and gathering together their ranks throughout the region against the Anglo-American war. Despite this, they fail to prevent that the just hatred and the growing anti-imperialist consciousness of the workers and peasants of the Middle East, the Maghreb and Central Asia were expressed,albeit in a distorted way, through the Islamic movement itself,

THE FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAMIC MOVEMENT WAS DRIVEN BY THE IMPERIALIST POWERS TO CONTAIN THE WORKING CLASS AND THE MASSES OF THE MIDDLE EAST IN FRONT OF THE WEAR OUT OF THE POST-WAR SECULAR BOURGEOIS NATIONALISM

The emergence of the Islamic fundamentalist movement was very actively driven by the imperialist powers themselves from the 1970s and '80s, precisely as a mediation to contain and control the working class of the Arab nations, in the face of the exhaustion and wear out of the old secular bourgeois nationalist leaderships -like Nasserism in Egypt, or the National Liberation Front in Algeria, etc.- as well as the Stalinist Communist Parties.
Because during the World War II and in the immediate postwar period, and in the gaps opened by the inter-imperialist confrontation, the struggle for the national liberation of the colonies of Middle East and North Africa slipped through, which was expressed and continued as a process of struggle and emergence of the young and vigorous proletariat of those nations. Taking advantage of these gaps opened by inter-imperialist disputes and the revolutionary struggle of the masses, the classic bourgeois nationalist movements emerged, such as Nasserism in Egypt (Peronism in Argentina, Getulio Vargas in Brazil, the MNR in Bolivia, etc., were expressions of the same phenomenon).

These movements were the expression of sectors of the national bourgeoisie of those semi-colonial, that is to say, oppressed, countries, which were very rich in raw materials such as oil or fossil gas. These national bourgeoisies (which are at the same time an exploiter of their own proletariat and a class exploited by finance capital and imperialist monopolies that take most of the national surplus value and oil income) took advantage of the gaps opened between the different imperialist powers and the struggle of the masses to try to haggle a better slice of the oil income and of the national surplus value. To do this, they used the mobilization and struggle of the working class and the masses to blackmail imperialism; they took some measures such as the nationalization of oil (giving a juicy compensation to the expropriated monopolies, which the masses ended up paying with blood and super-exploitation), while exercising a hard control over the working class, state-izing their unions and all this with the collaboration of Stalinism. During the entire decade of the 1950s, and the first years of the 1960s, bourgeois nationalism emerged, creating governments of a sui generis Bonapartism, that is, governments that act as referees between the two giants that face each other in the semi-colonial nations: imperialism, and the working class as the leader of the oppressed nation. For this reason, these governments always last a short time: when the revolutionary struggle of the masses threatens their property and their rule, these national bourgeoisies quickly line up with and discipline themselves under imperialism -which sometimes uses some gun shots and bombs to discipline them- to crush the exploited. Thus, all the bourgeois nationalist movements of that period -the MNR in Bolivia, Peronism in Argentina, the FLN in Algeria, etc.- are today faithful agents of imperialism.

During this time, the imperialist powers -and mainly US imperialism, which had come out of the war as the dominant power- controlled the Middle East, a key region in the oil reserves and routes, with its two main gendarmes armed to the teeth, i.e., the Zionist-fascist State of Israel crushing the Palestinian people (inserted as a wedge between North Africa, the Arabian peninsula and the Mediterranean), and the regime of the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlevi, controlling the passage between the Middle East and Central Asia, where the then Muslim republics of the USSR were located; To which the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR was added as it -after having supported the creation of the State of Israel- served as a containment to the bourgeois nationalist movements, as in Syria and India, to prevent the working class in its struggle for the National liberation from ending end up opening the proletarian revolution. This is how the Yalta pact was expressed in the Middle East - a deal to contain the world revolution: while imperialism controlled with its direct gendarmes, the Stalinist bureaucracy contained the proletarian revolution by supporting the bourgeois nationalist movements to help tough control the working class.

Added to this was the arch-reactionary monarchy of Saudi Arabia -a country where Mecca and other sacred places to Islam are located-, from which imperialism began to preventively populate the Middle East with mosques (remember that the Pakistani Quran schools, the "madrasas", and the Taliban version of Islam have their origin in the Saudi monarchy version of Sunni, and the Saudis have generously funded them). This enormous counterrevolutionary device to crush the masses of the Middle East and control the oil routes was the expression in that region of the postwar "Pax Americana".

STRANGLING THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION OF 1979, THE FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAMIC MOVEMENT SHOWED FOR THE FIRST TIME ITS THROUGH AND THROUGH ANTI-WORKER AND ARCH-REACTIONARY ROLE

As we have said, it’s fundamentally since the 1970s that the Islamic fundamentalist movement emerged as a mediation to control the masses in the face of the erosion of the bourgeois nationalist movements and their transformation into faithful agents of imperialism. It was a response to the revolutionary struggle of the masses, and first of all, to the heroic Palestinian working class and people who started an uprising not only in Palestine, but also in Lebanon and Jordan, and became the vanguard of the anti-imperialist struggle and against the gendarme Zionist State.
That great Palestinian uprising was crushed by the State of Israel and its Zionist army in Palestine; by the Syrian bourgeoisie massacring these people in Lebanon; and by King Hussein in Jordan, repressing with iron and fire the Palestinian refugee camps in that country and murdering 20,000 workers and peasants. Meanwhile, US imperialism completed its disciplining of the Egyptian national bourgeoisie that had dared to nationalize the Suez Canal, and began to impose the Islamic fundamentalist movement to control the masses.

Imperialism was forced for the first time to use exhaustively the arch-reactionary role of the Islamic bourgeoisie in the face of the great revolution by the Iranian proletariat and popular masses that in 1979 overthrew the gendarme of imperialism, the regime of the Shah. They set up their own councils of workers, peasants and soldiers -the shoras-, surpassing the control of the Communist Party (the Tudeh) that, like the Communist Parties throughout the region, had worn itself out containing the revolution throughout the postwar period.
It’s then that this Islamic movement -expression of commercial and landowner sectors of the native bourgeoisies, with a fundamentally peasant social base- that imperialism had been feeding preventively, emerges as a new counterrevolutionary mediation to prevent the triumph of the proletarian revolution and crush the working class with methods of civil war. It was that sector of the bourgeoisie, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini that strangled the Iranian revolution, massacring with its armed bands - the "mujahideen", or "warriors of God" – more than 200,000 workers, the cream of the crop of the revolutionary vanguard of the workers' councils (shoras).

To give the coup the grace to that great revolution that had been liquidated by one of its main gendarmes, US imperialism framed up new counterrevolutionary devices throughout the 1980s: it armed Saddam Hussein and the Bath Party bourgeoisie in Iraq to the teeth, to crush first the fight of the Iraqi oil workers and destroy their unions, and to launch a fratricidal war against Iran that cost this country a million more deaths.
Meanwhile, on the eastern border of Iran, they used Afghanistan as a counterrevolutionary stopper to prevent the impulse of the Iranian revolution from penetrating the USSR through the Muslim Soviet republics of Central Asia and ending up causing the irruption of the political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy that had already begun a steady move to the side of capitalist restoration. Thus, while Reagan and Thatcher put their direct agent Gorbachev in the Kremlin, they created, financed and armed in Afghanistan the "Mujahideen guerilla" (the same Taliban, Bin Laden and company that today they present as their "enemy number one”), to defeat the Red Army, demoralize its base of Red soldiers, and thus disciplining completely the Stalinist bureaucracy to become its direct restorationist agent.

Provoking that defeat to the Red Army was also the conscious policy of Gorbachev and the Kremlin bureaucracy who had become direct agents of the capitalist restoration. The myth of an impregnable Afghanistan was raised by the Stalinist bureaucrats to dissimulate that the frozen and starving Soviet soldiers deserted by the hundreds of thousands, leaving their weapons and their tanks to the Mujahideen that were armed, trained, paid and fed by the CIA. The "impregnable" Afghanistan is a real myth, because that war could have been won by the workers' state of the USSR with almost no bullets, only with loudspeakers and propagandists, if the Red Army had been the armed wing of a workers' dictatorship headed by the revolutionary proletariat.

That is, if a political revolution had triumphed in the USSR; if the workers and the Soviet masses - starting by calling on the Red Army soldiers to setting up soldiers' committees and blow up the restorationist officer caste- would have brought down the bureaucracy, putting the revolutionary Soviets back on their feet as an outpost of the world revolution. Because only that army could have expropriated the Afghan bourgeoisie, first of all the landowning bourgeoisie (where the current Taliban, at that time "mujahideen guerrillas" trained by the CIA, originated), nationalizing the land and giving it to the poor peasants and dispossessed, winning the support of the exploited masses with which those supposed "terribly brave", "unbeatable" mujahideen wouldn’t have lasted a week.

For this reason, the Kremlin's criminal military policy in Afghanistan was fully conscious, part of a plan agreed with US and British imperialism; the defeat and disbandment of the Soviet army was then essential to reinforce its recycling and accelerate the transformation of the restorationist bureaucracy into a bourgeoisie.
As we explain in the Statement, the Taliban regime is a by-product of that counterrevolutionary success of imperialism in Afghanistan, a triumph that was strengthened by the defeat and abortion of the processes that marked the beginning of the political revolution from 1989 and the imposition of the capitalist restoration in the old workers states; and later with the crushing of Iraq in the Gulf War.

Thus, if in the 1980s Afghanistan had been a counterrevolutionary stopper so that the Iranian revolution didn’t impact the Muslim nations of the USSR, starting the political revolution in them, in 1989 and the early 1990s, it was also a stopper, but exactly the reverse: that is, to prevent the political revolution that began in the form of the national struggle of the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus and the south of the USSR - blowing it up as the prison of nations that it was - from infecting the working class and the exploited masses of the Middle East, and in particular the heroic Palestinian Intifada.

For this reason, against all the social democratic revisionists usurpers of the Fourth International who clucked like stupid hens in the '90s that imperialism was weakened by the fall of the world Stalinist apparatus and the masses had a handicap in their favor to make the revolution, the emergence of the Islamic movement led by sectors of the native bourgeoisies, by ayatollahs, mullahs, ulamas, etc., as a counterrevolutionary mediation to prevent the revolution of the working class and the masses of the Middle East and the entire Arab and Muslim world only confirms that the imperialist finance capital creates and recycles at every step new and old bourgeois, petty bourgeois leaderships, paid and bought union bureaucracies, without which the dominance of a handful of parasites over the billions of exploited could not be maintained.

IN THE HEAT OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS, THROUGH THE GAPS OPENED BY INTERIMPERIALIST DISPUTES OVER THE OIL ROUTES AND BY THE EMERGENCY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE OF THE MASSES, AN ISLAMIC BOURGEOIS NATIONALIST MOVEMENT EMERGED

Thus, the same Bin Laden or the Taliban that the imperialist propaganda presents today as "public enemy number one", are none other than those sectors of the Islamic Arab, Persian or Central Asian national bourgeoisies that were used by imperialism to crush the working class and the masses of the region. Far from being "backward and obscurantist" they are, like the Taliban, a landowning bourgeoisie; or as Bin Laden (engineer and son of a bourgeois contractor of the Saudi state who was given as a present in the 1970s all the contracts to build and maintain mosques, Islamic holy places and American bases) the expression of a generation of children of the new rich emerged in the heat of the oil boom of the '70s, to whom the Saudi monarchy, in the midst of a terrible economic crisis that has shaken Saudi Arabia in recent years, has displaced from business and the possibility of be a junior partner of imperialism.

In other words, today we are again faced with the emergency -taking advantage of the gaps opened by the inter-imperialist disputes over oil and fossil gas, and by the irruption of the Palestinian revolution- of sectors of the national bourgeoisies that try to haggle with the imperialist powers and their monopolies their cut of the oil and fossil gas income, using the mobilization of the masses as blackmail, and also their own terrorist attacks.
It’s then, new attempts to impose sui generis Bonapartist governments. But, unlike the postwar bourgeois nationalist movements that relied on the working class -and at the same time controlled it tightly- today they are landlord or displaced bourgeoisies, with a fundamentally peasant base.

Islamic fundamentalism, even in its most extreme expressions - such as executions and mutilations, in the case of the Taliban- is nothing more than the form acquired by the mechanisms of control and discipline through terror of the proletariat of the Arab and Muslim nations, an errant working class, which goes from oil well to oil well, from country to country, and is super-exploited with salaries of up to 10 dollar cents a day by the imperialist oil companies and construction companies and also by these servile national bourgeoisies that are their junior partners. It’s the way to keep under control that super-exploited proletariat that today has its revolutionary vanguard in Palestine, and in the hundreds of Pakistani oil and construction workers who are beginning to return to Pakistan from Yemen, Saudi Arabia and even Indonesia, to enlist as volunteers to fight against imperialism.

The arch-reactionary role of the Islamic bourgeoisie -as seen in the face of the Anglo-American imperialist war of aggression- is to prevent the national and anti-imperialist struggle of the Arab an Central Asian peoples from generalizing and spreading in a single revolutionary struggle; it’s to prevent the arming of the masses and that they attack the property of the imperialist monopolies. As we explained in the Statement, these bourgeoisies even prefer a national defeat at the hands of imperialism than to promote the revolutionary mobilization of the masses -the only way to defeat the imperialist butchers- because they are terrified that this struggle will turn into revolution and civil war, putting their own property and their domination at risk.
And secondly, the national bourgeoisies are used at will by the imperialist powers, as pawns  in their disputes over raw materials, markets and spheres of influence, and also as devices of counterrevolutionary control. Thus, for example, Great Britain armed Pakistan with the atomic bomb, while US imperialism did the same with India. They did it either to push them to use that nuclear power against each other when a fratricidal war is necessary -like the one they are already promoting in Kashmir, but on a larger scale- to crush revolutions and discipline the masses; or either against a third country, for example against China, when its proletariat and its peasantry that are super-exploited by the imperialist monopolies and the new restorationist bourgeois mandarins rise up again, starting the fourth Chinese revolution.

That is why no sector of the national bourgeoisies of the oppressed, semi-colonial or colonial countries can carry out the struggle for national independence and defeat imperialism all the way: only the proletariat as the leader of the oppressed nation can carry out fully and effectively the democratic-revolutionary ends that the bourgeoisie can no longer solve -that is, the break with imperialism and the agrarian revolution-, overthrowing the servile national bourgeoisies, be they Islamic or secular, and establishing worker-peasant governments supported by the self-organization and  generalized arming of the working class and the masses that break with imperialism, nationalize the land, and expropriate both the imperialist monopolies and their own native bourgeoisies.