Vol. 76/No. 40      November 5, 2012

U.S. forces are deployed around the world to defend and advance the propertied rulers’ investments, exploitation and control against their enemies and friendly competitors alike. They are a necessary complement to capitalist rule at home, where cops and other government forces—from the FBI to immigration agents and prison guards—are used to enforce oppressive class relations.

The U.S. rulers are preparing to substantially reduce their troop numbers in Afghanistan. At the same time, Obama says U.S. troops will remain in the area through 2024, and his administration is negotiating with the regime in Kabul about how many will stay.

It’s worth recalling that the economic and social devastation that gave rise to the Taliban is a direct product of U.S. imperialist policies there. It’s Washington that backed the mujahedeen, comprised of the most reactionary and murderous Islamist forces, in the 1980s to drown in blood both the Soviet-backed government and any aspirations of toilers there for social progress. And it is the two most powerful counterrevolutionary forces at the time—the U.S. capitalist rulers and the Stalinist Soviet bureaucracy—that mauled the country’s agriculture, infrastructure and society in their contest for influence, setting the undeveloped nation back decades.

Washington’s current goal is simply to prop up the warlords and other reactionary bourgeois forces who are least antithetical to its interests, at minimal cost.

Over the course of more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and the borders of Pakistan, U.S. forces have honed their technology and craft of aerial drone assassination. The Washington Post reports Oct. 24 that Washington is closing in on its 3,000th kill, the vast majority in Pakistan.

The Post adds that the Obama administration is expanding what it delicately calls a “disposition matrix”—the list of those around the world they have targeted for assassination. “The government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years,” the paper says.

Washington has expanded its forces in Africa and is engaged in a massive shift of military resources toward encircling China, its main competitor for economic markets, forging military blocs with others in Asia along the way.

The bosses’ two candidates for U.S. president, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, have no substantive differences on these matters. At bottom, either aspirant will do whatever the propertied rulers tell them to do, at home and abroad.

Workers need our own foreign policy—to unify the toilers worldwide against their national capitalist rulers and strengthen our ability to fight to overthrow their rule.

U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, South Korea, Guantánamo—out of every corner of the globe!
 
 
Related articles:
Washington discusses plans to keep troops in Afghanistan through 2024  
 
 
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