Blows to Empire in Afghanistan and Iraq
Contemporary imperialists speak the language of human dignity, democracy and gender equality while orchestrating devastating wars. The boots of racism and neoliberal capitalist expansion crush basic rights. Recent events highlight the hypocrisy and arrogance of occupiers in Afghanistan and Iraq and open up space for the renewal of anti-war movements on the demand of Troops Out Now!
On April 2, speaking of Canada’s relationship with Afghan security forces, federal Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said, “We’ve got good confidence levels … We’re seeing an increased understanding and appreciation for human rights.” On April 23, an explosive report by Globe and Mail reporter Graeme Smith shattered Day’s cover-up of the torture and abuse of detainees handed over by Canadian troops to Afghan forces.
Graeme interviewed 30 men captured in Kandahar. The report reads: “Afghans detained by Canadian soldiers and sent to Kandahar’s notorious jails say they were beaten, whipped, starved, frozen, choked and subjected to electric shocks during interrogation.” Many of those interviewed have never been convicted.
The report sparked a week-long festival of denial by the Conservatives, who initially held firm to the defence of their Afghan allies. Meanwhile, there were calls for the resignation of Minister of Defence Gordon O’Connor and Amnesty International launched a court challenge to stop Canadian forces from transferring detainees to Afghan jails.
Pulling a page from George W. Bush’s play book, Prime Minister Stephen Harper claimed: “The real problem is the willingness of the leader of the Liberal Party and his colleagues to believe, to repeat and to exaggerate any charge against the Canadian military as they fight these fanatics and killers who are called the Taliban. It is a disgrace.”
Soon, however, the Conservatives were forced to renegotiate the detainee transfer policy, claiming that the new pact provides checks against torture and abuse. This exposure of abuse by Afghan authorities is extremely important. But the new deal is premised on the idea that Canadian—and other NATO—military contingents are benevolent forces who can be trusted to monitor human rights and democratic norms.
After five and a half years, the authority of the Afghan client regime, and the NATO forces that defend them, barely extends beyond Kabul. The Taliban control large areas of the country as well as small parts of neighbouring Pakistan. Even in many non-Taliban-controlled zones, government officials are resentful of the occupiers and sympathetic to insurgents.
Bloodshed has not reached the astronomical Iraqi levels. But no one bothers to count the Afghan dead. Fifty-four Canadian soldiers have been killed. Suicide bombings are escalating: only two in 2003, 21 in 2005 and 136 in 2006.
Meanwhile, repression continues against the narcotics trade which provides one of the only sources of subsistence for many impoverished Afghanis. And, in this sea of poverty and war, Tariq Ali reports that corruption grows “like an untreated tumour … The real estate market in Kabul has reached unprecedented heights as the occupiers and the local enforcers buy up properties and flaunt their affluence under the protection of NATO forces.”
Harper’s Afghanistan debacle mirrors setbacks to American imperialism in recent years. His drive to push on with the project parallels Bush’s desperate adventurism. American elites as well as the US populace recognize Iraq for the disaster it is. Against the Current reports: “Within a week of the ‘surge,’ US helicopters were shot down and a heavily fortified compound stormed by suicide bombers; horrific bombings in Baghdad markets escalated as the local militia, the only force providing some security for the Shia community, went into hiding; at the same time, a Sunni woman told her story of kidnap and rape by militia-infested police—certainly not the first such incident, but the first victim to take it to Arab television.”
Iraq’s health minister admits that 150,000 civilians have been killed and the British journal Lancet puts the figure at 655,000. According to a report in the Indian journal Frontline, “Some two million refugees have left the country; almost an equal number have become refugees within Iraq; over half of Iraq’s 4.5 million children are malnourished; and unemployment stands at over 70 percent.”
Meanwhile, on May 4, Michael T. Klare reported that a US aircraft carrier is fast approaching the Persian Gulf, “where it will join two other US aircraft carriers and the French carrier Charles De Gaulle in the largest concentration of naval firepower in the region since the launching of the US invasion of Iraq four years ago.”
There is still time to prevent a war in Iran, and the deepening and prolonging of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. We must not depend on the Democrats in the US, or the Liberals and the NDP in Canada. The acceleration and widening of the anti-war movement at home is a necessary part of the struggle to bring the warmongers to their knees. The setbacks and debacles suffered in recent times provide new cracks in the imperial edifice that we must pry open, hopefully to bring the whole project crashing down.
