By Jose Maria Sison
General Consultant
International League of Peoples’ Struggle

A month has passed since the US began its war of aggression against Afghanistan and the Afghan people on 7 October 2001. Cruise missiles, cluster bombs, bunker busters, daisy cutters and other types of bombs continue to hit the civilian population and civil infrastructure of Afghanistan.

The US has already killed and wounded thousands of Afghan civilians. It has forced the displacement of millions of Afghans and made them vulnerable to starvation, disease and death, especially during the approaching winter. It has dismantled the work of UN and other international agencies concerned with refugees, medical assistance, relief and rehabilitation. It has destroyed such infrastructure as dams, electric plants, water systems, hospitals and schools.

The cowardly high-tech bombing campaign being undertaken by the US is well on the way of directly and indirectly causing the death of so many times more people than those killed (less than 5000) in the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US. The terrorism of those responsible for these attacks pales in comparison to the terrorism and barbarism of the genocidal US war of aggression against Afghanistan and the Afghan people.

True to its nature as the No. 1 imperialist power, the US is using the September 11 attacks as the pretext for conquering Afghanistan and imposing US hegemony over Central Asia and South Asia. It seeks to have a firmer grip on these global regions and develop a second oil route via Afghanistan from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia in addition to the route via Turkey to the Mediterranean.

The objective of having these two oil routes is to frustrate the wish of Germany and Russia to build an oil and gas pipeline directly to Western Europe as well as the plan of China to extend a similar pipeline across her borders. The US is determined to keep both Germany and Japan dependent on the US for their fuel supply.

But under the cover of so-called antiterror coalition, these losers of World War II are able to widen the way for rearming themselves and taking a combat role in wars of aggression. Although they now follow the baton of US imperialism, they gain war capability that would enable them someday to challenge US hegemony. In various imperialist countries, the economic crisis is breeding the forces of fascism and war.

Currently, the US has gained military bases in such recesses of Central Asia as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In the meantime, Russia and China bend to the wishes of the US imperialists in the vain hope of ending efforts of the US to instigate and manipulate ethnic and religious conflicts in Chechnya and Xingjiang. They also expect to gain concessions from the US elsewhere.

However, the US is laying the basis for sharp contradictions with both Russia and China in the near future. It has the propensity for holding on to military bases abroad for the purpose of expansion. As it succeeds in gaining a foothold in Central Asia, it will tighten its grip on the resources of the region and manipulate the local governments against Russia and China.

The US is using in Central Asia and South Asia basically the same strategy and tactics that it has used for gaining overall hegemony in the Middle East through the war of aggression against Iraq and in Eastern Europe through the Balkan wars.

In South Asia, the US is using the Pakistani government to undermine and overthrow the Afghan government. The Musharraf regime is actively collaborating with the US but demands that the bombing campaign be "short and targeted". It is increasingly afraid of Pakistan’s Muslim population, which sides with the people of Afghanistan against US imperialism.

The longer the US war of aggression against Afghanistan runs, the bigger is the prospect of an upheaval in Pakistan. Furthermore, India is now agitated by the growing closeness between the US and Pakistan and is taking aggressive actions in connection with the issue of Kashmir. The US is practically stirring up trouble between two countries possessing nuclear weapons.

In the Middle East, the Israeli government is using the "anti-terrorist" line of the US to depict the Palestinians as terrorists and to slaughter them. The US is thus finding itself in serious self-contradiction as it supports the barbarism of the Israeli government and tries to woo the support of the Arab and Islamic countries.

Arab and Islamic countries (especially Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan) are demanding the immediate establishment of a viable Palestinian state in order to fend off charges that they are mere puppets of the US and thereby avert the rise of popular movements against them.

Acting as the No. 1 terrorist and No. 1 plunderer of the world, the US is now intensifying its contradictions with peoples who want revolution, nations that want liberation and countries that want independence. It labels them as terrorists and threatens to go after them in a "global assault on terrorism". It has gone so far as to announce that it has the license to assassinate anti-imperialist leaders.

The US is using the 11 September attacks and the so-called war on terrorism to push the curtailment of democratic rights in the US and in the entire world and to call for the extrajudicial execution of anti-imperialist leaders by US agents and local assets. It is using the same to obscure the root causes of the global economic crisis and to aggravate this crisis by delivering more public resources to the monopoly bourgeoisie, especially the military-industrial complex, and by intensifying arms production and wars of aggression.

On a global scale, the broad masses of the people are fighting back along an anti-imperialist, antiwar and democratic line. The International League for Peoples’ Struggle is doing everything it can on its own and in cooperation with all other forces in a broad international united front to oppose the US imperialist system of terror and plunder.

All over the world, the anti-imperialist, antiwar and democratic movement is growing. The level of mass participation in protest actions is sharply rising. So far, the most widespread, most frequent, biggest and most militant mass actions against the US war of aggression have broken out in Arab, Islamic and other third world countries.

The mass protests in the US have also been the biggest among those in the industrial capitalist countries. There is a growing realization among the American people that the US has become the target of popular hatred because it has incurred so much blood debt through wars of aggression and counterrevolution as well as through the daily violence of superexploitation.

The broad masses of the people suffer the daily worsening conditions of oppression and exploitation and are outraged by the concurrent bankruptcy of "free market" globalization, the curtailment of democratic rights and the war of aggression against Afghanistan. They wish to liberate themselves from the clutches of US imperialism and its diehard puppets and attain national independence, democracy and socialism. #

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