After 20 years of brutal terrorism, genocide and imperialist plunder against Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire Middle East…

Amidst a heroic resistance of the masses in the whole region and the US workers unwillingness to die for Wall Street

After Iraq…
Today the USA withdraw from Afghanistan

Now it is the Taliban, its junior partner, the one that covers the US and all the imperialist powers' back and business deals in their withdrawal

The attack on Afghanistan 20 years ago: the USA “oil wars” for the control of energy sources in the planet

In 2001, with the “oil wars” launched by Bush and his policy of military aggression, which meant more than a million dead in Iraq in both the 1991 and 2003 invasions, the US embarked in a drive to control directly and militarily the gas, oil and all the wealth in the Middle East, from where it flows the main source of energy for the working of the world capitalist system.
This military action included the self-attacks on the Twin Towersan the Pentagon, organized and prepared by the CIA and the US government as a 21st century Pearl Harbor, in order to gain the US people’s support.

In a grotesque way, and with no serious analyst believing it, there was a new enemy of USA in those years: Bin Laden and his fraction of the Saudi bourgeoisie, so far the biggest allies of the US oil companies, particularly partners of Bush and his family in the construction businesses in Saudi Arabia. This is the same bourgeois fraction than the Taliban, which were armed to the teeth to control, as US direct agents, the decomposition process and fall of the USSR that started in the mid-80’s with Gorbachev and ended in 1989, as well as to put a contention disciplinary policy on the former Soviet bureaucracy that invaded Afghanistan in the ‘80s. They stabilized Afghanistan manu military to guard imperialism their businesses there in the ‘90s.

The mujahedeen of the high Saudi bourgeoisie and Taliban were the guardians of imperialism in the face of the danger that, as the USSR splintered, there could be revolutionary uprisings of the masses in the former Muslim Soviet Republics such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc.; while in Moscow, Yeltsin first and Putin later, launched an atrocious genocidal war against the Chechnyan nation, where they left no male older than 14  alive.

On the other hand, in the ‘80s, the Talibans and their “partners” of Al Qaeda prepared themselves with the US to contain the expansive waves of the huge Iranian revolution that left no trace of the pro-imperialist regime of Sha Reza Pahlevi in Iran. This revolution hit the very borders of Afghanistan.

Imperialism thus used the reactionary Muslim bourgeoisies, both Shiite in Iran and Sunnite in Afghanistan, as counterrevolutionary forces and to discipline the rebellious masses. The fall of the USSR weakened Stalinism as the big counterrevolutionary guarantor in the region.
That is to say, in the ‘80s and in the ‘90s “prince” Bin Laden and the Pashtun landowner bourgeoisie, with their theocratic armed political party, Taliban, were the biggest direct agents of imperialism in the region and in Afghanistan in particular.

A few days after the US withdrawal from Kabul, we can see now rivers of ink in the writings of a Euro-centric social-imperialist left about the US withdrawal of Afghanistan and the return of Taliban to power, liquidating every class characterization and class struggle view about the military events. This cannot lead us to something different than thinking that we are before cruel reformists covering up the imperialist adventures yesterday and their defeats and retreats  today. These "left" cover-ups liquidate the existence of a powerful working class in Afghanistan and in the entire Middle East, one of the most militant working classes in the world, as we have seen in the last decades, even if they are hidden by the bourgeois leaderships that manipulate them and by the betrayals of the western labour aristocracies and bureaucracies, which are accessories of their own imperialist powers' plunder in the region.

The US pirates in their “wars for oil”, as in their entire history, have proven to be the biggest terrorists in the planet and the carriers of the cruellest barbarism to the peoples they subjugate. They are called by the bourgeoisie, their spokesmen and the reformist left as “civilization” while the masses, the subjugated people that are defending from the looting of the oppressors are called “barbaric peoples” as it was said in Caesar’s Rome. Here, imperialism is barbarism and the antiimperialist struggle of the masses is the only way forward for civilization, that is to say, the victory of the revolution.

With the 2001 invasion, USA wanted to get rid of that national bourgeoisie that had started to contest the business deals as a junior partner, but mainly the US also wanted to transform Afghanistan into a cover state, directly in the imperialist forces’ hands, to control the borders of Russia, China and Iran. Iraq and Afghanistan were two counterrevolutionary focuses where imperialism was settled to control the routs of oil and opium and to put its military forces (as it did with NATO in Eastern Europe) to control completely the world economy and politics that in 1997 hit the US with the first international crisis after 1989. This crisis exploded in Clinton government’s hands when the stocks of all the banks and technological companies fell and they falsified the profits they showed in their balance sheets in a parasitic rapacious way.

The US sought to control the world after the fall of the former USSR. At the same time, it sought to step on the raw material sources and spheres of influence and keep them to itself. Afghanistan has 2.3 billion dollars in oil and gas reserves and huge mineral deposits. Recently, they discovered lithium and cobalt, both critical raw materials for the high technology branches of production. These raw materials were not extracted, except by the Taliban in a rudimentary way. This bourgeois fraction is settled in the mountains and valleys of the Pashtun region not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan, with which Afghanistan shares most of its border. This is the region where 80% of the opium and heroin that is consumed in the world comes from. Those are the basic raw material for all the imperialist labs. In Afghanistan they pay 0.10 US dollars a gram, and when the product reaches Germany and France they pay 79.9 US dollars each gram (drugs global report, 2014, UNODC 2015, opiates traffic maps 2016). As we see, this is a great business for imperialism. When it comes down to business, it does not matter if men have long beard and wear tunics or if women wear a veil.

Quietly, Germany, France and England, from NATO, supported the US invasion to Afghanistan. The German lab Bayer, with its Foundation, opened schools and made propaganda that “boys and girls had to study”, during all these years. Bayer showed a human face to plunder opium and heroin. Thus it funded research centres together with French labs. This way they took to Frankfurt and Paris 42% of the heroin extracted from Afghanistan, through Turkey and Iran, to the European imperialist metropolises. Miserable cynics! They pay 10 cents of US dollars to the Afghan peasant for each heroin gram and they sell it at 80 dollars in France. They got raw materials for free from Afghanistan, and they also made millions by re-selling them to the biggest pharmacist labs in the world. This is what the military invasions in this imperialist declining phase are about; they are not to promote “civilization” nor expanding “democracy” or removing the veil and oppression from women.

Meanwhile, the big US gas companies (including Biden's, who is one of the gas barons), controlled Afghanistan’s gas production. So USA built and funded a phoney occupation state, which also provided juicy businesses for US war military industry. They had to feed and supply the US army that was settled in Afghanistan with 150,000 men plus the parasites of Kabul’s army. This meant a fabulous 90,000 million dollars a year business deal for the US war industry.

The world is upside down: the imperialist press and the lackey left want to show the US imperialism as “beneficent” and “democratic”

To save words, we could say Taliban is an “innocent” “kind” “kindergarten child” compared to the counterrevolutionary troops that made one of the worst genocides in the history of the Middle East, which is the one carried on by USA in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 21st century. Let alone the one they made in Syria with their partners of Turkey and Russia, splitting Syria and consolidating the fascist al-Assad government.
This is the US imperialism, which commanded huge bloody adventures, as pouring napalm upon Vietnam for years, or throwing 2 atomic bombs to Japan when it had already surrendered. End these hypocrisy, lies and infamy! Imperialism is barbarism!

This “child”, the Taliban, grew by being armed to the teeth by its master, the US imperialism. They learnt from their best “virtues”. For instance, Bin Laden’s fraction was educated in bourgeois terror, in making military actions killing civil population. He learnt it from Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Vietnam, and together “fought” in the Twin Towers attacking the very American people.

Fascism in the semi-colonial world is directly linked to imperialism, which is the counterrevolutionary force par excellence. Trotsky, in his Latin American Writings states this question, that fascism and Bonapartism in the semicolonial countries are settled in the imperialist offensive against the subjugated people, whether imperialism is shown as either “democratic” or “fascist”.
Stalinism, supporting the “democratic” imperialists, ended up supporting the “allies” of World War II and covering up all the counterrevolutionary offensives of the US imperialism during the Yalta pact.

Are the US “defenders of women”? Syria was demolished and sent to the Middle Ages, with 80% of the cities and houses destroyed by the bombs of USA, Russia, Turkey, all of them supporting al-Assad that slaughtered 600,000 syrians and sent 15 million to refugee camps, where women and girls were raped by the UN and its representatives, as well as the Turkish and American generals, in exchange for a piece of bread. And those are the ones talking about the inalienable rights that the Afghan women need to conquer as today they are under the guns of Taliban?
Those who massacred a million men and women in Iraq, the ones that with Zionist planes and bombs have killed women and children in the occupied Palestine, the ones that take women from Central America, Mexico and USA as pimps to get them to work in the maquilas of Mexico and USA, don’t have authority to talk about the rights of the female workers and their children. MISERABLE!
They are not the ones who will conquer the rights of the female workers in Afghanistan not in any place of the world.

The true story is that Taliban did not fire a single shot against the US invasion in that fatidic 2001. It imposed the rendition in Kandahar, the capital city of the Pashtun region, with its chief Mohammad Omar and Bin Laden. While tens of thousands of workers and poor peasants that today rose against the pro-imperialist government in Pakistan, while tens of thousands of agricultural workers of the Pashtun lands, Taliban property, marched to confront the US, the brave “Taliban” swiftly surrendered and agreed with the US invader generals all funded by the nation’s business plundering.
The best antiimperialist fighters were sold out by the very Taliban lot. They were detained, slaughtered and massively killed as it happened to 5,000 of them in Mazar-i-Shariff prison, at the hands of NATO generals.

Accompanying the outpost of the US invasion, which was attacking fiercely, the Gurkha-like troops of the Pentagon, settled in ethnic groups and in the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz from the Northern Front, mercenaries of the US, traveled from village to village and city by city in Afghanistan, mass raping women and girls, those who were murdered and buried in mass graves, which today throw bones to the surface.

And the Taliban surrendered. A cowardly national bourgeoisie, that of the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan, which is the only one that, if supported by imperialism, can itself give governance to the nation. A national bourgeoisie that controls and produces opium on their lands, in Afghanistan and Pakistan valleys. A great national agrarian bourgeoisie, in a Pashtun nation that doesn’t recognize borders between these countries, which is 40% of the Afghan population, with around 13 million inhabitants, while it’s 15% of the population of Pakistan, with 25 millions.

“Where did the Taliban come from?” the bourgeois press and the desperate leftist men and women are surprised, terrified by so much “barbarism”: it’s the ruling class of an oppressed nation of 40 million inhabitants. A nation brutally looted by imperialism, whose Pashtun bourgeoisie and their theocratic party, the Taliban, are its junior partner. Everything else is cheap charlatanism and imperialist ideology to hide their larceny and deceive the world labor movement.

The Pentagon and the US  imperialism took great care to put up a curtain so that the profile of the actors in this tragedy of Afghanistan invaded for 20 years is not seen. An Afghanistan that, as we have already said, is located in a strategic place in Central Asia, not only on the “silk road”, but also on the road of hydrocarbons, opium, and weapons' trades. And it’s a strategic place to install a counterrevolutionary focus to control the enormous energy reserves that are in the former Muslim Soviet republics, to contain as a nexus the Middle East revolution on its border with Iran and to play a role in the trade route with China and Pakistan. There the Gringos settled directly. But always the thief wants to hide the theft and also their partners. Let's look at the famous mystery of how the Taliban (that means "the student") sustains theirself. Simple. By running business, controlling entire branches of production linked to the world economy.

In the Pashtun area, the Taliban collects 10% taxes on wealth and 2.5% on opium production above the income that the Pashtun bourgeoisie takes from that production. The Taliban thus collects 1.6 billion dollars per semester, only on the Afghanistan side. Not to mention the trade it guarantees on its borders with Pakistan and Iran and the business with open-pit mining, with slave miners and hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers who collect poppies, which constitute 60% of the workforce in Afghanistan. Is there any Marxist worthy of calling himself a socialist who will show the world working class where his class siblings from Afghanistan are?

Can the social-imperialist left be so miserable as to hide the classes, class sectors and relations of production that explain the emergence of nations, political parties, armies, struggles and wars? It’s that trying to understand the US invasion of Afghanistan and its relationship with imperialism, and even the clothing mandates and the oppression suffered by women there, only through the "backwardness" of the Taliban, is like wanting to understand the functioning of the human body looking at the dirty hands of a patient.

The cultural backwardness, the oppression of women and the poor peasant, the exploitation of workers and the looting of the entire Afghan nation, are due to the capitalist system and its excrescence, the imperialist bandits

Afghanistan was in its history the main link of the "silk road". Today it is about opium… and about the centralization of the counterrevolution in the last 40 years for Central Asia and the Middle East. It was under the command of the "warlords", ruled by a cruel monarchy, which while giving democratic rights in the cities and in Kabul, in the '50s,' 60s and even with its Constitution of the '70s, maintained and supported a fierce and rich Pashtun landowning bourgeoisie. A country a thousand times invaded, looted, of capitalist transit of goods, dominated in localities by different ethnic groups with their own bourgeoisies, elites and "warlords", who dispute business with enormous violence. The Red Army of the former USSR in a state of decomposition passed through there. Twenty years of US imperialists' invasion. That is why the burqa is a tradition of the Afghan women of the Pashtun valleys: as a defense to centuries of rape against them and their girls.

This was used by the cruel Pashtun bourgeoisie and imperialism to redouble the oppression not only of women, but of the whole working family and the poor peasant, whom they enslaved in the opium fields, in the oil wells and in the open pit mining, using the work of women as slaves within the family.
There will be no liberation of the Afghan woman without sending all the "warlords" to the firing squad, without expelling all the imperialist troops, without expropriating the Taliban oligarchy and without putting the enormous resources of gas, oil, minerals, opiates for the pharmaceutical industry, at the service of the poor people. Because Afghanistan is a rich nation, stolen, looted and oppressed a thousand times by imperialism.
This will allow to open schools, remove the population from illiteracy, put a computer for every child at home, open universities, but capitalist barbarism doesn’t allow it. Capitalism is the backwardness and oppression of women. In its fight against the regime, the government and imperialism, the working class must raise as its first demand the conquest of unrestricted democratic and economic rights for working women. This combat is inseparable from the set up of organizations of self-determination of the masses.

Bourgeois feminists that today mourn the US escape from Afghanistan didn’t say anything when the US soldiers raped Afghan women, as they do in the refugee camps with Syrian women and as they did in the prisons of invaded Iraq, with mass rapes of male and female prisoners. Photos of torture have also traveled the world. And they speak of "democracy" and that they bring civilization?
The bandits of Wall Street, the Taliban and all the bourgeois gangs come out of the same sewer: this rotten world capitalist system.

There is the American slavers' democracy: in Guantanamo, a few miles from the US, thousands found themselves as shackled prisoners without lawyers, without trial, without the right to a phone call. The Taliban's treatment of its prisoners is one of a model prison compared to the 1,500 renditions in secret prisons of the CIA and the Pentagon. Miserable rascals!

The Taliban? Excellent students to take care of the business of the imperialist powers and the US prirates in their withdrawal from Afghanistan. After more than 40 years along which they were supported by imperialism,  with whom they later made a pact in the invasion, they have learned. Today they return to power renewed in some ways, to enter the "international community."

And 20 years passed… of torments, sacrifices and genocides for the masses of the Maghreb, the Middle East and the former Muslim Soviet republics. There is the Chechen genocide of that butcher Putin from Russia. But the masses didn’t stop fighting either in the Middle East or in the United States, and imperialism clashed with them in the face of its military and looting adventures.
The American working class revolted. That's the truth. That is the weakness of US imperialism, beyond the fact that reformism and the traitors of the world proletariat have subjected IS S masses to Biden, the scoundrel and pirate of Wall Street. In that force the anti-imperialist victory lies of the withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan today.

The Gringos' withdrawal: a step forward in the anti-imperialist struggle by the masses of the world who today find the pirates of Wall Street weakened

Now are the masses of Afghanistan who must break in to fight, as in the entire Middle East, the new regime of the protectorate and the Qatar pact and the bourgeois government of the Taliban.

The withdrawal of imperialism yesterday from Iraq and today from Afghanistan are tactical victories of the workers and the American people who no longer accept the conditions of misery imposed by the economic crisis in the US to keep the war parasites, and are not willing to die for the Wall Street pirates.

The US withdrawal from Iraq, which was caused by a fierce resistance of the Iraqi masses and the European and American working class in 2008, left a national coalition government of the Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite bourgeoisie. But at the first serious crisis, this government Burt's apart because of a huge mass offensive that is already an open part of the revolutionary struggle that has been shaking the entire Middle East since 2011.

There is the fantasy of comparing the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, with US debacle in Saigon, though there was a workers and peasants army that imposed a defeat to the US and, beyond the so many attempts of the Vietnamese Communist Party to impose a bourgeois solution by uniting the north and south of Vietnam with a Constituent Assembly, they were united by the guns of the exploited expropriating the capitalists and imperialism.
Whoever raises this fantasy hides that all those tasks are still ahead for the working class of Afghanistan and internationally.

Nor did Iraq become Saigon and even Afghanistan is not Iraq, that is, there has not yet been a mass irruption that leaves the Taliban government in crisis. Those are the policy and program of the revolutionaries at the present time, which have to be with the immediate tasks of the masses.
An offensive must be prepared against the regime that seeks to settle against the clock in Afghanistan, which will be none other than that of an imperialist protectorate, with agents managed from abroad with extraterritorial pacts. And this is so, regardless of the fact that for now the Kabul gang has escaped, led by former President Ashraf Ghani.

It is the members of the Doha (Qatar) summit who will decide their future and regulate the behavior of the Taliban. Not surprisingly the US army left most of its weapons and military equipment to them.
But also, to cover its withdrawal, the US looks with one eye at Turkey and with the other at Russia. They are steadfast and proven allies. They imposed the victory of the fascist al-Assad in Syria together with the Gringos. They defined the Nagorno Karabakh crisis in favor of world imperialism so that British Petroleum could steal the oil from that region. In the General Staff of the Turkish and Russian generals the war coordinates of Afghanistan are already being discussed, coordinated with the US imperialists. Everyone looks to the Islamic counterrevolutionary guard of the Iranian theocracy, always ready to act as an economic butcher, in order to maintain its business in Tehran.
The Taliban know they are "under control." A mass offensive is pending that leaves no trace not only of the US, but of the Taliban and the entire protectorate regime that the Yankees have organized since the Qatar summit. That is a task of the workers and peasants of Afghanistan and Central Asia, supported by the revolutionary struggles of the revolted masses of the Middle East. Only a workers and peasants Afghanistan, based on the shoras and the workers and people's militia, will win the real independence of Afghanistan as the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan did with the October Revolution of 1917.

Afghanistan needs a mass offensive for the exploited to break through the crisis that is opening up in the heights, in a decisive combat like that of their brothers and sisters in Iran, who face the regime of the clerics of the Ayatollahs, Lebanon and Iraq, and fighting as the heroic Syrian partisans and the Palestinian masses fight in the resistance.
The task of the moment is none other than to set up, as in the Iranian revolution of the 1980s, the shoras: the councils of workers, poor peasants and armed soldiers. These are the only ones capable of uniting the Afghan nation and finally defeating imperialism, expropriating without compensation all the transnationals that steal the wealth of Afghanistan and their native partners, putting the land in the hands of the poor peasantry and nationalizing foreign trade.
All revolutionary offensive of the masses will face the Qatar pact of the European imperialist powers, the US, Russia and the Taliban which, like the Geneva Conference that leads the massacre and partition of Syria, has already begun to act openly to stabilize the government and Taliban control of the Afghan state. Nothing different from supporting the greatest genocidist in the Middle East, the fascist government of al-Assad.

For a workers and peasants' Afghanistan, based on the shorahs and the workers and popular militia!

The US withdrawal is a step forward in the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses of the world, while today the pirates of Wall Street are weakened. In the hands of the Taliban, this will quickly turn into a strategic defeat for the Afghan nation, if the worker and peasant masses do not prevent it. They have a huge power and have great lessons. Millions of miners, oil workers, agricultural workers and poor peasants, had the experience and learnt about their foreign and native enslavers. In Pakistan, the Pashtun working class is ally of the very powerful proletariat in that nation. Iran is shaken by a powerful workers and popular uprising. The Iraqi masses have not given up. Neither those of Lebanon gave up.
The masses of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in the former Soviet republics have entered huge processes of struggle in the last 10 years. They come from the Soviet experience and today they suffer all the calamities of the capitalist restoration. In them, the Afghan people will find enormous forces for their national and social liberation struggle.
The Central Asian working class is destined to play a key role and, just as the bourgeoisie opened the route of its trade, it will surely open the route of revolution. 

When the masses of the Maghreb, Middle East and Central Asia claim to be Muslim, the pro-imperialist reformist left gets goosebumps. However we, Marxists, know to distinguish what it means to be “Muslim” for the masses, not for their executioners. For the masses it is a national entity against the imperialist offensive and plunder. We know to distinguish that anti-imperialist starting point of the masses in the region from the reactionary character of the Muslim bourgeois fractions and their institutions, which are the ones that tie the hands of the masses, those that, defending the interests of imperialism, deals them the most ferocious counterrevolutionary blows.

There is no solution for the invaded looted tormented Afghanistan without conquering a workers and peasants Afghanistan, based on the shorahs and the workers and people's militia, in a Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics of Central Asia, together with its siblings, the working class and the exploited masses of the entire Middle East today in their uprising.

The working class of Europe and the US must commit themselves to fight decisively in support of the Afghan masses, to make sure that never an imperialist company nor a single counterrevolutionary soldier from their countries attack the Afghan nation again; so that never again the rapacious imperialist laboratories, their banks, oil and mining companies lead to hunger and misery the millions of exploited in Afghanistan and all the Muslim republics of Central Asia. The day the European and American proletariat have the leadership they deserve to fight this battle will be the day the working class and the poor peasants of the Maghreb and the Middle East, starting from their anti-imperialist conscience and combat, will advance in the fight for the socialist revolution, and the time of death of the Taliban will arrive.

In the hands of the Taliban, this step forward in the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses of Afghanistan and the world threatens to be lost under a bloody counterrevolution. The native bourgeoisies and imperialism learnt from the experience of Syria: they had to cut off the heads of the hydra of the revolution before it was too late, as al-Assad's generals said. A fierce counterrevolutionary blow of the Taliban, with a state of extreme militarization of the country, is undoubtedly also in the manual of the protectorate regime in which Afghanistan remains. This is why they already have, as we said, the highly sophisticated weapons that the US left them.

The pro-US policy of the social-imperialist left, on the one hand, and on the other hand that of the opportunists who do not prepare the masses to openly confront the junior partner of imperialism, the Taliban, are the two sides of the same coin that will only take the exploited to a heavy cruel defeat.
The setting up of an independent workers' strategy is the starting point to set up an internationalist revolutionary combat party of the Afghan masses.
Its construction is inseparable from the struggle to recover the banners of the Fourth International, handed over by opportunism and revisionism to Stalinism.

The economic marasmus, the crisis of the US and the imperialist powers, the fierce resistance and a state of pre-insurrectional revolt of the masses in the Maghreb and the Middle East are pushing for a revolutionary crisis at the top in Afghanistan, which would put the Taliban in trouble and in crisis. But the policy of reformism, tied to the apron-strings of imperialism, only strengthens and will strengthen imperialism.
The Afghan working class and the resistance of the Pashtun masses against imperialism did too much good to the world proletariat. As in Vietnam or Iraq, the black bags of the US troops arriving to New York, made the fierce American working class to rise. There is the great ally of the masses of Afghanistan. It will not be Biden or Trump, but the exploited in the United States the ones who will have the last word. The exploited masses of Afghanistan, like those of Iraq, today in revolutionary offensive, have their future tied to their alliance and solidarity with the American workers who fought the same white supremacist forces of the US army that committed one of the worst genocides in the21st century in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Carlos Munzer
For the Editorial Board of "The International Workers Organizer"

Abu Muad
For the Editorial Board of the newspaper "The Truth of the Oppressed" of Syria and the entire Middle East