Against European calls for UN conference on Afghanistan

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Against European calls for UN conference on Afghanistan
8 September 2009

Plans for a United Nations conference on Afghanistan early next year,
announced Sunday by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime
Minister Gordon Brown in Berlin, are a political fraud directed
against the Afghan people and the working class.

The European powers are seeking to disorient popular opposition to the
US-led occupation of Afghanistan by obtaining a UN imprimatur for
their continued collaboration with Washington.

Brown’s purpose in visiting Berlin was reportedly to request that
Merkel increase German troop strength in Afghanistan from 4,200 to
6,000. However, as the British Times noted, publicly agreeing to
Brown’s request would have been “electoral suicide” for Merkel, who is
running for re-election in the September 27 German federal elections.

Popular opposition in all the European countries and in the United
States is growing. July polls found 62 percent support in Germany and
52 percent support in Britain for withdrawing their country’s troops
from Afghanistan.

Brown and Merkel announced that, together with French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, they would propose to UN Secretary-General Ban
Ki-Moon the organization of a UN conference on Afghanistan, to be held
early next year. The purpose of this conference, as their comments
made clear, is to organize further intervention in the Afghan war.

Brown said that the aim was to ensure the build-up of Afghan police
and army forces was “properly supported.” Downing Street officials
said the conference would take place in Kabul or London.

Merkel declared: “The goal is not to lose sight of a lasting security
structure in Afghanistan…We need decisive progress on this matter and,
when Afghans will take more responsibility, we will be able to reduce
international engagement.”

This shameless trampling of popular anti-war sentiment comes amid the
discrediting of all the ostensible justifications for the fighting in
Afghanistan. The US government’s stated target in launching the
war—Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaeda network was accused of organizing
the September 11 terrorist attacks—has been mentioned only
intermittently after he somehow escaped US pursuit in 2001. The
Western press’ accusations of vote-rigging against the US-backed
puppet regime of Afghan president Hamid Karzai have only highlighted
the fundamentally fraudulent character of claims that the West was
fighting for democracy in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the political establishment in the US and Europe is
pressing ahead for an intensification of the war. The Obama
administration recently began a large-scale offensive by Marines in
the Helmand Valley, and it is in the process of sending 21,000 US
reinforcements to Afghanistan—a figure that will likely be increased.

Another demonstration of the criminal character of the Afghan war was
the September 4 bombing atrocity implicating German and US forces near
Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Rather than sending out troops to retrieve fuel trucks captured and
then abandoned by Taliban forces, the local German commander near
Kunduz arranged for US fighter jets to bomb them. According to local
reports, 130 Afghans were killed, including scores of civilians who
were trying to siphon fuel from the trucks. This is the greatest death
toll in a German military operation abroad since the defeat of Nazi
Germany in World War II.

The massacre has become a political issue in the German election
campaign, after US officials tried to blame the atrocity on the German
commander’s alleged violations of NATO rules of engagement. German
Foreign Ministry officials have cynically adopted the absurd position
that no civilians were killed in the bombing.

The entire war stands indicted as a naked imperialist enterprise to
colonize Afghanistan. The September 11 attacks were exploited as a
convenient pretext to deploy US and NATO troops into a country that is
the gateway to oil-rich Central Asia, and that increasingly plays a
critical role in the commercial and strategic equilibrium of Eurasia.

This poses immense risks not only to the people of Afghanistan, but of
the entire world. The war into which Brown, Merkel, and Sarkozy
propose to throw more European troops already threatens to assume the
character of a direct conflict between the world’s major powers.

Citing support for Afghan resistance fighters in Pakistani border
regions, the Obama administration has seized on the Afghan fighting to
launch military operations into neighboring Pakistan. Pakistan and its
arch-rival India increasingly compete for political influence in
Afghanistan. This stokes tensions between Pakistan’s ally China and
India, which the US is trying to build up as a counterweight to China
in Asia, through such devices as the Indo-US nuclear treaty signed
last November.

At the same time, competition for control in export routes for Central
Asia’s energy resources westward through the Caucasus has already led
to a proxy war between the US and Russia: in August 2008, Washington
encouraged the Georgian government to attack Russian forces in South
Ossetia. The Obama administration continues to press for Georgia and
the Ukraine to be incorporated into NATO, despite the opposition of
several of NATO members, including Germany and France.

These rising tensions doubtless play a significant role in the
decision to launch a conference where the European powers will be able
to bargain with Washington for the interests of their own energy,
defense, and other corporate conglomerates.

However, participation in the Afghan war is to a greater extent an
attempt by the European powers to maintain their alliance with the US.
Dependent on Washington as the world’s policeman, to which the
European imperialists have thoroughly accommodated themselves, they do
not want to risk a return to the US unilateralism that marked the
policy of the Bush administration. Their goal is an escalation of war
worked out in harmony with Washington.

Working people must completely reject the cynical and militarist
policies of European imperialism. The demand must be raised for the
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops from
Afghanistan.

The fight against war must be based on a revolutionary and socialist
appeal to the interests of the international working class. The
billions spent on weapons and troop deployments will be taken from the
working class of all the belligerent countries, on top of the
trillions already handed out to the major banks in the US and Europe.
Besides the economic costs, workers will suffer the brunt of the
casualties and destruction in coming wars, which increasingly threaten
to spark a catastrophic global conflict.

No workers’ movement against the war can develop without learning the
bitter lessons of the failure of the anti-war movement before the US
invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003. Despite overwhelming international
opposition to the war, expressed in the largest coordinated
demonstrations in history, the brutal war crime was launched. The
occupation of Iraq continues today under the Obama administration,
with the full complicity of all the European powers.

The 2002-2003 movement proved impotent because it remained politically
subordinate to the bourgeoisie and its parties. In the US,
demonstrations were addressed by politicians from the same Democratic
Party that today wages the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In European
demonstrations, organizations such as the Stop the War Coalition
organized chants of “Vive la France,” whose government was temporarily
opposing the US war drive at the UN. Today, France has roughly 3,000
troops in Afghanistan.

The middle-class organizations that led these protests have shifted
decisively to the right in the intervening six years. In the US, they
have integrated themselves into the Obama administration, and through
their support for this government bear political responsibility for
the escalation of war in Afghanistan. Their counterparts in Europe are
increasingly drawn into government or its immediate periphery. This
was symbolized most prominently by the universal support among middle
class organizations for the Western media campaign behind defeated
Iranian presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi in June’s Iranian
elections.

The collapse of opposition to war in the bourgeoisie and the middle
class ex-left paves the way for the emergence of the working class as
the central social force in the coming anti-war movements. The
International Committee of the Fourth International sets itself the
task of politically preparing such a movement.

Alex Lantier

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/pers-s08.shtml

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