Since U.S. and British forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 the Militant has called for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of U.S. and allied troops from that country—as well as from throughout Central Asia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, the Korean peninsula, and everywhere else they are deployed.

Imperialism is not an epithet. Unlike its unscientific use by bourgeois commentators (like economist Joseph Schumpeter, cited in one letter) as an expression for a government policy or other superficial features, socialists use the term as Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin did in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism—a factual description of the nature of the worldwide capitalist system in its final historic stage.

Washington, London, Paris, other western European governments, and those of Australia, Canada, and Japan are imperialist powers. They are ruled by finance capital and driven by economic necessity—the need of their respective ruling capitalist classes to remain profitable— not only to exploit working people within their borders but to export capital and plunder the semicolonial world, competing among themselves over the division of the world’s territories and markets.

Many Democratic politicians, trying to outdo the White House as defenders of “America,” clamor for a more aggressive conduct of the Afghan war. They are echoed by middle-class radicals, backers of the liberal wing of the capitalist class, who criticize the Iraq war while supporting the imperialist forces in Afghanistan.

The argument about fighting the Taliban as an “enemy of civilized people” is a rationalization for a predatory war. Ever since the imperialist powers first carved up the world in the late 1800s, they have posed as agents of “civilization” against “barbarism” or “Islamic obscurantism”—now “Islamofascism”—to justify their rapacious aims. But it is U.S. imperialism and its allies that are the biggest threat to human progress.

Washington’s goal in toppling the Taliban-led capitalist regime and occupying the country has nothing to do with democratic rights, women’s equality, or the Afghan people’s well-being. It is part of the imperialist rulers’ “long war against terrorism” to assert their class interests worldwide. The invasion of Afghanistan served as a warning to other governments at odds with Washington to get in line or risk war. The U.S. rulers used the Afghan war to establish military bases there and across Central Asia. The current NATO occupation aims to consolidate a pro-imperialist regime in Kabul and reinforce imperialist domination in the region.

Socialists oppose the Taliban, which is a political—not primarily religious—force that represents part of the Afghan bourgeoisie. We explain, however, that the only road forward in Afghanistan is for workers and peasants in that nation to organize themselves and fight both the Taliban and the current U.S.-installed regime to establish a government that represents their interests. Getting the imperialist troops off their backs is essential to do this.
 
 
Related article:
Canadian gov’t sends tanks, more troops to Afghanistan  
 
 
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