Afghanistan and the new Silk Road (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following testimony by an oil and gas corporation executive (of Union Oil of California) to the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific of the US House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations on 12 February 1998 throws much light on the strategic importance of Afghanistan to the Western capitalist powers and goes a long way to explain why they have gone to war there.

Mr. Chairman, I am John Maresca, Vice President, International Relations, of Unocal Corporation. Unocal is one of the world’s leading energy resource and project development companies. Our activities are focused on three major regions – Asia, Latin America and the US Gulf of Mexico. In Asia and the US Gulf of Mexico, we are a major oil and gas producer. I appreciate your invitation to speak here today. I believe these hearings are important and timely, and I congratulate you for focusing on Central Asia oil and gas reserves and the role they play in shaping US policy.

Today we would like to focus on three issues concerning this region, its resources and US policy:

• The need for multiple pipeline routes for Central Asian oil and gas.
• The need for US support for international and regional efforts to achieve balanced and lasting political settlements within Russia, other newly independent states and in Afghanistan.
• The need for structured assistance to encourage economic reforms and the development of appropriate investment climates in the region. In this regard, we specifically support repeal or removal of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act.

For more than 2,000 years, Central Asia has been a meeting ground between Europe and Asia, the site of ancient east-west trade routes collectively called the Silk Road and, at various points in history, a cradle of scholarship, culture and power. It is also a region of truly enormous natural resources, which are revitalizing cross-border trade, creating positive political interaction and stimulating regional cooperation. These resources have the potential to recharge the economies of neighboring countries and put entire regions on the road to prosperity.

About 100 years ago, the international oil industry was born in the Caspian/Central Asian region with the discovery of oil. In the intervening years, under Soviet rule, the existence of the region’s oil and gas resources was generally known, but only partially or poorly developed.

As we near the end of the 20th century, history brings us full circle. With political barriers falling, Central Asia and the Caspian are once again attracting people from around the globe who are seeking ways to develop and deliver its bountiful energy resources to the markets of the world.

The Caspian region contains tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves, much of them located in the Caspian Sea basin itself. Proven natural gas reserves within Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan equal more than 236 trillion cubic feet. The region’s total oil reserves may reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil – enough to service Europe’s oil needs for 11 years. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels. In 1995, the region was producing only 870,000 barrels per day (44 million tons per year [Mt/y]).

By 2010, Western companies could increase production to about 4.5 million barrels a day (Mb/d) – an increase of more than 500 percent in only 15 years. If this occurs, the region would represent about five percent of the world’s total oil production, and almost 20 percent of oil produced among non-OPEC countries.

One major problem has yet to be resolved: how to get the region’s vast energy resources to the markets where they are needed. There are few, if any, other areas of the world where there can be such a dramatic increase in the supply of oil and gas to the world market. The solution seems simple: build a “new” Silk Road. Implementing this solution, however, is far from simple. The risks are high, but so are the rewards.

Finding and Building Routes to World Markets

One of the main problems is that Central Asia is isolated. The region is bounded on the north by the Arctic Circle, on the east and west by vast land distances, and on the south by a series of natural obstacles – mountains and seas – as well as political obstacles, such as conflict zones or sanctioned countries.

This means that the area’s natural resources are landlocked, both geographically and politically. Each of the countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia faces difficult political challenges. Some have unsettled wars or latent conflicts. Others have evolving systems where the laws – and even the courts – are dynamic and changing. Business commitments can be rescinded without warning, or they can be displaced by new geopolitical realities.

In addition, a chief technical obstacle we face in transporting oil is the region’s existing pipeline infrastructure. Because the region’s pipelines were constructed during the Moscow-centered Soviet period, they tend to head north and west toward Russia. There are no connections to the south and east.

Depending wholly on this infrastructure to export Central Asia oil is not practical. Russia currently is unlikely to absorb large new quantities of “foreign” oil, is unlikely to be a significant market for energy in the next decade, and lacks the capacity to deliver it to other markets.

Certainly there is no easy way out of Central Asia. If there are to be other routes, in other directions, they must be built.

Two major energy infrastructure projects are seeking to meet this challenge. One, under the aegis of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, or CPC, plans to build a pipeline west from the Northern Caspian to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossisk. From Novorossisk, oil from this line would be transported by tanker through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean and world markets.

The other project is sponsored by the Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), a consortium of 11 foreign oil companies including four American companies – Unocal, Amoco, Exxon and Pennzoil. It will follow one or both of two routes west from Baku. One line will angle north and cross the North Caucasus to Novorossisk. The other route would cross Georgia and extend to a shipping terminal on the Black Sea port of Supsa. This second route may be extended west and south across Turkey to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

But even if both pipelines were built, they would not have enough total capacity to transport all the oil expected to flow from the region in the future; nor would they have the capability to move it to the right markets. Other export pipelines must be built.

Unocal believes that the central factor in planning these pipelines should be the location of the future energy markets that are most likely to need these new supplies. Just as Central Asia was the meeting ground between Europe and Asia in centuries past, it is again in a unique position to potentially service markets in both of these regions – if export routes to these markets can be built. Let’s take a look at some of the potential markets.

Western Europe

Western Europe is a tough market. It is characterized by high prices for oil products, an aging population, and increasing competition from natural gas. Between 1995 and 2010, we estimate that demand for oil will increase from 14.1 Mb/d (705 Mt/y) to 15.0 Mb/d (750 Mt/y), an average growth rate of only 0.5 percent annually. Furthermore, the region is already amply supplied from fields in the Middle East, North Sea, Scandinavia and Russia. Although there is perhaps room for some of Central Asia’s oil, the Western European market is unlikely to be able to absorb all of the production from the Caspian region.

Central and Eastern Europe

Central and Eastern Europe markets do not look any better. Although there is increased demand for oil in the region’s transport sector, natural gas is gaining strength as a competitor. Between 1995 and 2010, demand for oil is expected to increase by only half a million barrels per day, from 1.3 Mb/d (67 Mt/y) to 1.8 Mb/d (91.5 Mt/y). Like Western Europe, this market is also very competitive. In addition to supplies of oil from the North Sea, Africa and the Middle East, Russia supplies the majority of the oil to this region.

The Domestic NIS Market

The growth in demand for oil also will be weak in the Newly Independent States (NIS). We expect Russian and other NIS markets to increase demand by only 1.2 percent annually between 1997 and 2010.

Asia/Pacific

In stark contrast to the other three markets, the Asia/Pacific region has a rapidly increasing demand for oil and an expected significant increase in population. Prior to the recent turbulence in the various Asian/Pacific economies, we anticipated that this region’s demand for oil would almost double by 2010. Although the short-term increase in demand will probably not meet these expectations, Unocal stands behind its long-term estimates.

Energy demand growth will remain strong for one key reason: the region’s population is expected to grow by 700 million people by 2010.

It is in everyone’s interests that there be adequate supplies for Asia’s increasing energy requirements. If Asia’s energy needs are not satisfied, they will simply put pressure on all world markets, driving prices upwards everywhere.

The key question is how the energy resources of Central Asia can be made available to satisfy the energy needs of nearby Asian markets. There are two possible solutions – with several variations.

Export Routes

East to China: Prohibitively Long?

One option is to go east across China. But this would mean constructing a pipeline of more than 3,000 kilometers to central China – as well as a 2,000-kilometer connection to reach the main population centers along the coast. Even with these formidable challenges, China National Petroleum Corporation is considering building a pipeline east from Kazakhstan to Chinese markets.

Unocal had a team in Beijing just last week for consultations with the Chinese. Given China’s long-range outlook and its ability to concentrate resources to meet its own needs, China is almost certain to build such a line. The question is what will the costs of transporting oil through this pipeline be and what netback will the producers receive.

South to the Indian Ocean: A Shorter Distance to Growing Markets

A second option is to build a pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean.

One obvious potential route south would be across Iran. However, this option is foreclosed for American companies because of US sanctions legislation. The only other possible route option is across Afghanistan, which has its own unique challenges.

The country has been involved in bitter warfare for almost two decades. The territory across which the pipeline would extend is controlled by the Taliban, an Islamic movement that is not recognized as a government by most other nations. From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of our proposed pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders and our company.

In spite of this, a route through Afghanistan appears to be the best option with the fewest technical obstacles. It is the shortest route to the sea and has relatively favorable terrain for a pipeline. The route through Afghanistan is the one that would bring Central Asian oil closest to Asian markets and thus would be the cheapest in terms of transporting the oil.

Unocal envisions the creation of a Central Asian Oil Pipeline Consortium. The pipeline would become an integral part of a regional oil pipeline system that will utilize and gather oil from existing pipeline infrastructure in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia.

The 1,040-mile-long oil pipeline would begin near the town of Chardzhou, in northern Turkmenistan, and extend southeasterly through Afghanistan to an export terminal that would be constructed on the Pakistan coast on the Arabian Sea. Only about 440 miles of the pipeline would be in Afghanistan.

This 42-inch-diameter pipeline will have a shipping capacity of one million barrels of oil per day. Estimated cost of the project – which is similar in scope to the Trans Alaska Pipeline – is about US$2.5 billion.

There is considerable international and regional political interest in this pipeline. Asian crude oil importers, particularly from Japan, are looking to Central Asia and the Caspian as a new strategic source of supply to satisfy their desire for resource diversity. The pipeline benefits Central Asian countries because it would allow them to sell their oil in expanding and highly prospective hard currency markets. The pipeline would benefit Afghanistan, which would receive revenues from transport tariffs, and would promote stability and encourage trade and economic development. Although Unocal has not negotiated with any one group, and does not favor any group, we have had contacts with and briefings for all of them. We know that the different factions in Afghanistan understand the importance of the pipeline project for their country, and have expressed their support of it.

A recent study for the World Bank states that the proposed pipeline from Central Asia across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea would provide more favorable netbacks to oil producers through access to higher value markets than those currently being accessed through the traditional Baltic and Black Sea export routes.

This is evidenced by the netback values producers will receive as determined by the World Bank study. For West Siberian crude, the netback value will increase by nearly $2.00 per barrel by going south to Asia. For a producer in western Kazakhstan, the netback value will increase by more than $1 per barrel by going south to Asia as compared to west to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea.

Natural Gas Export

Given the plentiful natural gas supplies of Central Asia, our aim is to link a specific natural resource with the nearest viable market. This is basic for the commercial viability of any gas project. As with all projects being considered in this region, the following projects face geo-political challenges, as well as market issues.

Unocal and the Turkish company, Koc Holding A.S., are interested in bringing competitive gas supplies to the Turkey market. The proposed Eurasia Natural Gas Pipeline would transport gas from Turkmenistan directly across the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey. Sixty percent of this proposed gas pipeline would follow the same route as the oil pipeline proposed to run from Baku to Ceyhan. Of course, the demarcation of the Caspian remains an issue.

Last October, the Central Asia Pipeline, Ltd. (CentGas) consortium, in which Unocal holds an interest, was formed to develop a gas pipeline that will link Turkmenistan’s vast natural gas reserves in the Dauletabad Field with markets in Pakistan and possibly India. An independent evaluation shows that the field’s resources are adequate for the project’s needs, assuming production rates rising over time to 2 billion cubic feet of gas per day for 30 years or more.

In production since 1983, the Dauletabad Field’s natural gas has been delivered north via Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia to markets in the Caspian and Black Sea areas. The proposed 790-mile pipeline will open up new markets for this gas, travelling from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Multan, Pakistan. A proposed extension would link with the existing Sui pipeline system, moving gas to near New Delhi, where it would connect with the existing HBJ pipeline. By serving these additional volumes, the extension would enhance the economics of the project, leading to overall reductions in delivered natural gas costs for all users and better margins. As currently planned, the CentGas pipeline would cost approximately $2 billion. A 400-mile extension into India could add $600 million to the overall project cost.

As with the proposed Central Asia Oil Pipeline, CentGas cannot begin construction until an internationally recognized Afghanistan government is in place. For the project to advance, it must have international financing, government-to-government agreements and government-to-consortium agreements.

Conclusion

The Central Asia and Caspian region is blessed with abundant oil and gas that can enhance the lives of the region’s residents and provide energy for growth for Europe and Asia.

The impact of these resources on US commercial interests and US foreign policy is also significant and intertwined. Without peaceful settlement of conflicts within the region, cross-border oil and gas pipelines are not likely to be built. We urge the Administration and the Congress to give strong support to the United Nations-led peace process in Afghanistan.

US assistance in developing these new economies will be crucial to business’ success. We encourage strong technical assistance programs throughout the region. We also urge repeal or removal of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. This section unfairly restricts US government assistance to the government of Azerbaijan and limits US influence in the region.

Developing cost-effective, profitable and efficient export routes for Central Asia resources is a formidable, but not impossible, task. It has been accomplished before. A commercial corridor, a “new” Silk Road, can link the Central Asia supply with the demand – once again making Central Asia the crossroads between Europe and Asia.

Thank you.

(Was to be found at: http://www.house.gov/international_relations/105th/ap/wsap212982.htm. Now not operational)

Interventions: Leaflets (2001)

Party News from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Party members have been present at ant-war demonstrations. Here are two examples of the leaflets we handed out there

Against war—against capitalism

It was good to hear of the anti-war demonstrations that took place recently in cities around the world, including Washington. It is heartening that many workers are refusing to accept this latest march towards bloodshed, despite the war propaganda blitzkrieg we have been subjected to.

However, we would say that slogans like “no more killing, no more war, no more violence any more” (though wholly admirable) do not go to the root of why war is such an ever-present feature of life. War does not occur because of “world leaders” being misguided or evil (though they may be these things), but because of the ruthless competition inherent to capitalism.

War is “business by other means” as they say. This war (whatever form it takes) will have its roots in the ongoing scramble for Middle East oil.

War is the inevitable result of world capitalism and the conflict between competing powers over markets, raw materials, trade routes and strategic territory – quite simply, war will not be banished from our lives until we have banished capitalism from our lives.

The companion parties of the World Socialist Movement have opposed every single war. We call on our fellow workers to reject and oppose all capitalist violence and bigotry, as we do. But it is also essential that our class understand the cause of war – the outdated capitalist system – and organise to abolish it.

www.worldsocialism.org

 

Another War – Another Tragedy For Humanity

The bombing of Afghanistan has begun. The alleged “war on terrorism” against America’s former islamic fundamentalist allies in Afghanistan is under way.

It will really be aimed at installing another regime more favourable to US and other “great powers” interests in a region strategically important with regards to oil (the reason for the previous financial and military support for the fundamentalists).

The cause of this war, like all others, is the profit system and its inherent vicious competition, which constantly finds expression in war and destruction. And like all wars, this war has nothing to do with the interests of the global working class.

The interests at stake are the interests of the competing national sections of the capitalist class and hence at odds with the real interests of us, the workers of the world, whose exploitation is the source of capitalist power and profit. The killing of our fellow human beings runs counter to the interests of humanity, full stop.

As ever, the companion parties of the World Socialist Movement call on our fellow workers to stand with us in opposing both this war, and the anti-human capitalist system which has spawned it. We must reject all attempts to divide the working class into national camps, whether our class enemies use the ideologies of “democracy” or of “islam”.

We simply cannot afford to repeat the carnage of the Twentieth Century in the Twenty First. The potential for a united world society based on the common ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole human community has existed for some time now. It is vital for the future of humanity that the useless, war-prone capitalist system is abolished.

How much more blood can we allow to be shed?

World View: Strange values, denials and a few truths (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The proverbial line has been drawn in the sand and President George W Bush has told the world “either you’re with us or you’re against us.” It’s a catch-all sentiment that is taking hold. Indeed, one writer asked me through the letters page of the Shields Gazette: “A simple message to John Bissett. Which side are you on, ours or the terrorists?” “It’s that simple”, I’ve been told on the streets!

The mainstream view is that the forces of barbarism have declared war on the bastion of democracy. George Bush boldly declared: “They hate our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another”, yet wonders not why, if this were so, the Statue of Liberty, the White House or the Lincoln memorial was not attacked on 11 September. Why the Pentagon and the WTC – one a symbol of America’s global military reach, the other a symbol of US economic prowess?

Of course there is much missing from Bush’s assertion that Islamic terrorists are simply jealous as hell of the democratic freedoms “enjoyed” in the US. The simple truth is that throughout the Middle East, indeed the world, the US has, despite its alleged support for movements towards democracy and greater freedoms for all, generally hampered provisional steps in the direction of democratisation whilst it has increased its support for despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco.

Israel, for instance, gets 40 percent of all US overseas aid. Meanwhile Israel is in breach of six UN resolutions and continues oppressing people in Palestine. During Jordan’s despotic and repressive rule in the 1970s and 80s, US aid for the Amman regime was enormous. Then when Jordan decided to oil the cogs of its political machine in the 1990s, that aid was vastly reduced and for a while suspended. Similarly, aid to Yemen was cut off within months of that unified country’s first “democratic” election. In recent weeks, when it was discovered that Qatar’s satellite channel Al-Jazeera was beginning to sound a little “pro-democracy”, upsetting regional dictators, broadcasting images of the US bombings and airing bin Laden’s now famous video, it was Colin Powell who demanded the channel be closed down, insisting it fostered “anti-Americanism”.

When it comes to Middle Eastern peace, the US’s actions have ensured that the region is as unstable as ever, cocking a snook at UN Resolution 687 which calls for region-wide disarmament – which would also mean an end to Israel’s nuclear capability – and at the same time selling $60 billion worth of arms to Middle Eastern country in 10 years (80 percent of all world arms exports to the Middle East). Israel, by the way, receives $3 billion in US military aid on the pretext that it is defending itself from its Arab neighbours – those same neighbours the US has armed to the teeth.

Writing in the Guardian (29 September), Artundhati Roy goes a little further. “Could it be”, she asks, “that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support of exactly the opposite things, to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorships, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocides?”

Blair’s double-speak

This side of the Atlantic, in his finest Orwellian double-speak, Tony Blair could announce: “The values we believe in should shine through in Afghanistan”. Could this be the same Blair whose government armed the Indonesian military machine that not so long ago ran rampage through East Timor? Whose government has signed 91 military export licences for Israel in the last eight months of the current Intifada? Such instances fly in the face of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office claim that “we will not issue export licences where there is clearly identifiable risk that the equipment might be used for internal repression or adversely effect regional stability”. Are these the same “values” which, on the same day as the attacks on the US, allowed the DSEi arms fair to go ahead in London and to continue for another two days? And are these same “values” informing a Labour government who, without any mandate from the UN, has helped notch up 15,000 RAF/USAF bombing raids on Iraq since the second Gulf War?

These same values are now behind the decision that Britain and the US should support a proxy army, the Northern Alliance, an outfit with an impressive record of widespread rape, pillage and murder in Kabul, in its confrontation with the Taliban. One of the key figures in the Northern Alliance is Abdul Rashid Dostom, and ally of Uzbekistan’s President Karimov, who has made huge profits from exporting drugs via Uzbekistan, and who allegedly was all to keen to secure Russian weapons and military supplies in exchange for keeping the gas flowing north.

Just as Blair’s values can enable him to curry favour with Israel’s Ariel Sharon, architect of the slaughter in Qibya in 1953 and the 1982 massacres in Sabra and Shatila, so can these same ideals prompt him into friendly dialogue with President Karimov, whose airfields are suddenly strategically important now the bombing of Afghanistan has commenced. Karimov, incidentally, holds 7,000 political prisoners, allows no free press and no political opposition. And Karimov, of course, has other reasons for supporting the anti-Taliban alliance. His corrupt police state is facing bankruptcy and to prop it up he is intent on having a pipeline through Uzbekistan and Afghanistan to a Pakistani port.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was castigated by his boss for making a link between Palestine and the recent terrorist attacks in the US when he said that Middle Eastern terrorism was bred “by the anger many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine.” Tony Blair was to spend 15 minutes on the phone to Ariel Sharon, trying to calm him down and get him to agree to meet Straw.

US foreign policy aims

Neither will Washington acknowledge its complicity in other areas which have a direct bearing on the present. Whilst Bush is mouthing off about the importance of curbing the funding of terrorist groups and keen to see the Taliban’s overseas assets frozen, it was his own administration, May gone, that scuttled international efforts to clamp down on tax havens, withdrawing support for an OECD initiative that called for more transparency in tax and banking procedures.

Moreover, it was again in May of this year that the Bush administration was giving the Taliban $43 million as an incentive to reduce the cultivation of poppies, knowing full well the Taliban were notorious abusers of human rights and that they harboured terrorists from all over the Islamic world. And there was no criticism of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who for years gave the Taliban military and financial aid.

For quite some time now, US, German and Russian intelligence services have been alerting Washington to the fact that Osama bin Laden has been trying to acquire weapon’s grade nuclear material, indeed as early as 1993 from Russian outlets with poor controls. What was the response of the Bush administration to this? They proposed cutting funds for a programme aimed at preserving nuclear materials in the former USSR.

Of course all the cant and clever rhetoric and soldier speak of the last few weeks have helped mask what are now becoming the true intentions of the US. The attacks on the US on 11 September are now being used to serve US foreign and domestic policy.

The oil reserves of Central Asia are perhaps second to those of the Middle East and as Afghanistan is geographically located between the Caspian basin and the markets of Japan, China and the Indian sub-continent, we can well see the country’s strategic importance to foreign policy planners wishing to dictate the way in which the region’s oil and gas reserves are utilised to the benefit of the US dollar.

The “war on terrorism” is clearly being used to induce fear and mistrust in the US, and through this fear a justification will be found to curb all manner of civil liberties, increase police powers and military spending.

Furthermore, the current crisis serves to extend US power around the globe and perhaps set a definite agenda for the coming century, the ‘war on terrorism’ serving as a replacement for the Cold War, now that the US has had its anti-communist passport stamped null and void and is desperate to maintain a pretext to assert its hegemonic credentials.

None of which surprises socialists. We are well attuned to the machinations of the elites of powerful countries as they seek to promote the interests of their corporate backers. Though it is no easy task for the uninitiated, we urge our fellow workers to be as vigilant as ever. To believe the arguments of the likes of Bush and Blair is to disarm yourself intellectually – for it is at times like the present, when the media is dancing to the tunes of governments, when the trumpets of jingoism, patriotism and reaction are sounding, that we need to be fighting the war of ideas.

John Bissett

More reactions – from the front line (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

We reproduce below recent emails sent by a member of the World Socialist Movement living in Peshawar, near the Afghan border

Well, Pakistan as you might be aware is breathing heavily as the pressure is mounting on it by the US. The religious parties are furious over the government support for the Americans. They are bringing people out on the streets and protesting against the government and USA. Things could get worse if the attack on Afghanistan actually takes place. The place where I live is indeed very sensitive. There is a religious movement going on for the past six years in the frontier region here. They are armed, rebellious and can defy the government any time. They are pro-Taliban and are sending fresh recruits across the border into Afghanistan to fight the holy war. The imminent attack is sure to trigger off a far worse situation than can ever be imagined. People would rally around the religious parties as they have the street power and are bold enough to defy any ban by the government. Already life is too tough for the poor and destitute here and inside Afghanistan. Watching BBC and CNN it seems war is already here. They are whipping the drums of war just for nothing. The impact of this on the lives of the common people is worse. Thousands of refugees are crossing the border for safety and entering Pakistan for food and shelter. What is going to be their fate is anybody’s guess. We are living at only three hours drive distance from the border. There is a hectic activity on border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the frontier region to which I belong. Emotions are very high and even illiterate people are keen to know what is happening on that side. As we all know, Afghanistan is in a virtual grip of drought and fighting for the many years. People are already suffering in refugee camps set up in Peshawar. More are coming. There is going to be a huge catastrophe in terms loss to humans lives of the innocent and hapless who have nothing to defend themselves.

Well, this is how things are moving, not in the right direction which it never was.

(3 October)

Blair arrived and said what he had been saying all along since the attacks. The generals on this side obviously looked tense and confused. Yesterday’s dictators are today’s democrats. Blair praised Musharaf’s so-called roadmap to democracy and in turn promised large and hefty economic largesse. Obviously the government is happy as it has been bailed out of the economic stranglehold that has dogged it for three years. The government economic managers (mismanagers) hired from the IMF and World Bank (the finance and foreign ministers were former employees of the WB) are now lining up in Washington to thank their boss and to beg for more. Back at home people the majority whom the general terms minority are infuriated over the government “unstinted support” in the fight for terrorism. The armed religious are waiting for the strikes to happen and then there would be nobody to stop them from carrying out their agenda. Presently they are a bit silent and cautious.

(6 October)

So the strikes have begun, and so have the demonstrations in every nook and corner of Pakistan. The area where I live is considered to be very sensitive as there are many religious groups operating here. The schools were closed today for an indefinite period. There were more than ten demonstrations today here by students and parties protesting and chanting slogans against US. Across the country protestors have damaged vehicles and put a cinema on fire in Quetta alone. They were tear-gassed. Later in the day shops too were closed down as mark of solidarity with the Afghan brethren. The situation is very volatile and open to violence any time. Now we are living in the midst of war albeit fought at a distance from us. The government will soon come under severe attack by the religious and non-religious alike, as the strikes have paralyzed business here. The president in his press conference here said today the strikes would be short and targeted while the Americans say it would be sustained and relentless. One thing seems clear the Americans will take it too far no matter what happens to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the process.

(8 October)

Indictment of capitalism (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following letter from a member was published in The Belfast Telegraph on 28 September

George Bush has made it clear that if we do not support his plans to use absolute state terrorism to defeat the more “laissez faire” variety of terrorism, we will be marked down as an enemy. This is, we are assured, in the interests of the Bush definition of freedom.

Meanwhile, America’s astronomical “defence” budget must be going through the roof. Enormous bribes to old enemies and new friends are the order of the day and what are obviously staggering amounts of dollars are being laid out in the massive movement of men and equipment to terrify the enemy and, presumably—unless the Pentagon is absurdly wanton with its military resources—take the lives of a great many human beings. As in all wars, most of the latter will be completely innocent people, or, to use that brutal term taken from the lexicon of the US military establishment, mere “collateral damage”.

While the killing hasn’t yet started, the starving people of Afghanistan whose lives have been blighted by the brutality of the Russian imperialists and cynical usage by the agents of the West, are already being terrified. The UN, obviously bound hand and foot by the purchasing power of the West, has embargoed food aid to these starving people, caught between the religious madmen of the Taliban and the threat of the allegedly sane leaders of what they insist are the Western democracies.

Conversely, while the miserably poor of Afghanistan are being starved and terrified, the US President and the mayor of New York are appealing to Americans—obviously excluding the millions of poor in that country—to go out and spend to help American capitalism.

Could there be a more profound indictment of the system of international capitalism?

Richard Montague

Halo Halo (2025)

The Halo Halo! column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The observation by Doctor Samuel Johnson that, ‘Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all’ was recorded in 1763 in Boswell’s biography of Johnson. Well Doctor, you misogynist you, have you got egg on your face now because the first female Church of England archbishop of Canterbury has been appointed to the position? If that isn’t worthy of cheering around the flag-post what is? What …you didn’t know that and you don’t care? LOL. The only bishops of any value are those on the chess board.

A 2018 survey found that about ten million people identified as C of E. The C of E came into being because the English king at the time was told by the catholic pope that he couldn’t marry someone else so he said some rude words to the Vatican and made up his own religion so that that he could have as many wives as he wanted.

A religion that is basically irrelevant to the vast majority and has no impact on the daily lives of most is – whilst we continue to live in a social system that uses, or tries to use, religion as a method of control – arguably preferable to one that exercises a devastating impact upon the lives of those who blindly adhere to it.

***

‘Man’s inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn!’ comes from a 1784 poem by Robert Burns, Man Was Made To Mourn: A Dirge. History is, unfortunately, littered with examples but what of Man’s inhumanity toward women in the name of religion? A September Daily Telegraph report stated that following a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in Afghanistan women were left to die because of Taliban rules forbidding unrelated men from having contact with them so all male rescue teams were forbidden to do so (tinyurl.com/2s3wbazf ).

Also in September In Morocco a feminist activist Ibtissame Lachgar was sentenced for the heinous crime (sarcasm) of ‘offending Islam’, to 30 months behind bars and a 5,500 dollar fine. She was arrested after posting online a picture of herself wearing a T-shirt with the word ‘Allah’ in Arabic followed by ‘is lesbian’ (tinyurl.com/55uj2f5z).

‘A fire on 11 March 2002 at a girls’ school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, killed fifteen people, all young girls. Complaints were made that Saudi Arabia’s ‘religious police’, specifically the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, had prevented schoolgirls from leaving the burning building and hindered emergency services personnel because the students were not wearing modest clothing’ (tinyurl.com/mzcku99w ).

In Afghanistan a few years ago females between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one were imprisoned, for the heinous crime (more sarcasm) of having ‘failed’ a virginity test. The report said that that more than 200 young women and girls were incarcerated. Their release, it was said, would see them all expecting a future ‘full of shame, exclusion and poverty.’ ‘Although supposed to be imprisoned for only three months, many are held for a year or a year and a half’ (tinyurl.com/yz5uw7ke).

DC

Material World: Standing by your trained killers (2025)

The Material World Column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 2020, the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force published its long-awaited findings on the behaviour of the nation’s special forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. It became widely known as the Brereton Report, after Major General Paul Brereton, the investigation’s lead.

Its findings were simple: Australian special forces had committed murder in Afghanistan. Thirty-nine cases were identified. The report found evidence of collusion to cover the atrocities up. Troops carried ‘throw down weapons’ to plant on their victims, to claim they were actually insurgents and the slaying was within the terms of engagement. New recruits were ‘blooded,’ ordered by their officer to kill prisoners to get their first kill. The report identified 25 individuals responsible, and stated that no-one above the rank of sergeant was involved or had knowledge of these atrocities.

So far, only one man has even been charged with murder, and is still awaiting trial. The Office of The Special Investigator, set up by the Australian Government, has noted the difficulty in reliably investigating the incidents, especially with the Taliban in power.

It is likely that only political obsessives in Australia, let alone around the world, will have even heard of the very serious findings of the report. It is unlikely that the culture of the Australian forces evolved on its own.

The British government, for its part, sprang into action and passed The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021, which created a

‘presumption that it is to be exceptional for a prosecutor to determine that a Service person or veteran should be prosecuted for alleged offences on operations outside the UK […] These measures do not apply to allegations of sexual offences, torture, crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes’.

(Although the law as originally drafted would have included them – tinyurl.com/spgbBRE3).

The BBC has been picking up stories of abuses by British forces. The 2022 Panorama programme, ‘SAS Death Squads Exposed: A British War Crime?’ observed that: ‘British special forces killed hundreds of people on night raids in Afghanistan’, and asked, ‘but were some of the shootings executions?’ More recently, the episode ‘Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes’ (May 2025) relayed stories from service personnel:

‘Killing of detainees “became routine”, the veteran said. “They’d search someone, handcuff them, then shoot them”, before cutting off the plastic handcuffs used to restrain people and “planting a pistol” by the body, he said’.

And:

‘The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.’

The story sounds almost exactly the same as the Australian one.

The BBC has, inevitably, received pushback for this reporting from the usual ‘support the troops’ types, usually of the ‘so what, war is hell’ variety, or ‘who are we to judge the actions of soldiers under pressure’. But the main response has been crickets. There has been no full bore coverage or outrage on the front pages of the national press. The stories have been simply left to sink down into the archives to be quietly forgotten.

This is the propaganda tool of ‘worthy versus unworthy victims’: the crimes of the British state will receive less attention than the crimes of official enemies. A genuinely democratic press interested in holding authorities to account for the citizenry would operate on the opposite principle.

This is hardly new. In her book Legacy of violence Caroline Elkins explores what she calls ‘legalized lawlessness’ which involves ‘legalizing, bureaucratizing and legitimating of exceptional state-directed violence when ordinary laws proved insufficient for maintaining order and control.’

One example she gives is of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in India in 1919. The event saw Brigadier General Dyer order his troops to open fire on a crowd, killing around 400 and wounding around three times as many. Despite the outrage around the world, Dyer stood by his actions, as producing a salutary terror to prevent an uprising.

His only punishment was dismissal (though the press and well-wishers raised a substantial sum of money for him). In a debate in the House of Commons on the incident, Winston Churchill depicted it as ‘a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’, that is, as an exceptional one-off, out of character with the spirit of the British army.

The House of Commons passed a resolution of censure of Dyer, but the House of Lords passed a motion condemning the lower house’s resolution. In that debate, Elkins quotes one noble peer, Viscount Finlay stating:

‘One of the mainstays of our Empire has been the feeling that every officer, whose duty it was to take action in times of difficulty, might rely, so long as he acted honestly and in the discharge of his duty, upon his superiors standing by him’.

Looking at Elkins’ narrative, this is a recurring theme: violent excesses by imperial forces are met with official investigation and sanction, only for the perpetrator to be let off after a vociferous public campaign. The most recent example of this being Sergeant Blackman, who was convicted of murder in Afghanistan.

After a strenuous campaign, the charge was downgraded to manslaughter, and he was released after serving four years in prison. Appeal judges accepted he had a stress-related mental illness leading to diminished responsibility.

The British state has opened a public enquiry under Justice Haddon-Cave. This will likely be a full and conscientious enquiry that will shed some light on the operations of the British forces in Afghanistan. The most likely outcome will be that junior heads will roll (gently), and the report will join others on the shelf, forgotten except by historians

The interests served by the British state create a need for killers, and it is unsurprising when they cross the line. What is harder to understand is the minds of people who will determinedly keep violence and slaughter available as a policy option.

Pik Smeet

Halo, Halo (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not for the first time comes a report of a 45-year-old Afghanistan man marrying a six-year-old girl. He reportedly has two wives already and paid the child’s family for the ‘marriage’. The report notes that ‘since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, child and early marriages have been on the rise’. It’s said that this rise is due to ‘worsening poverty and strict restrictions on women and girls, especially the ban on female education. UN Women reported in 2024 that this restriction has led to a 25 percent increase in child marriages’ (tinyurl.com/m54ty4jy ).

A Pakistani 72 year old Catholic male has, after 23 years on death row, been acquitted of a blasphemy conviction. He was originally charged with ‘insulting the Prophet Muhammad” – a capital offence in Pakistan’ (tinyurl.com/yu8xpysj). It has now been ascertained that he had mental health problems, so could not be held accountable. It’s expected that this defence will be used in dozens of other blasphemy cases.

****************************************

Did you know that the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum is striking at the very foundation of European civilisation? If you’re going to pee people off you might as well go the whole hog. The museum, supposedly, has also ‘insulted’ god and every catholic in the world. Respect!

Who is making this outrageous claim? TFP Student Action Europe is. This is a right-wing catholic organisation founded in 1960. It would appear to want to set the world clock back to medieval times, unlike the global political movement masquerading as a religion which sanctions child abuse and wishes to turn the clock back to the seventh century. What does TFP mean? Apparently, it stands for tradition, family and property.

This is to be found on its website: ‘The Seventh and Tenth Commandments protect property. Property… (is) the guarantee of freedom. If it is not respected, we will automatically be led by socialism. Together, these three values, tradition, family and property form a protective wall against Marxist, socialist, and communist ideology’.

So why all the kerfuffle? It’s caused by a condom. The item in question is a very old condom, one that’s two hundred years old. We would suggest that it shouldn’t be utilised for its intended use as it’s probably well past its best before date. The condom ‘features an erotic print of a nun and three naked clergymen about to engage in a sexual act’. Surely the important question should be, was it consensual? So, the TFPSA finds this condom ‘sacrilegious’ and displaying it goes ‘far beyond moral and spiritual boundaries.’ What one wonders do these would-be moral arbiters think of the temples in India where they could view the erotic carvings on the walls? How do they find the Amsterdam red light district?

Apparently ‘Dutch conservative Christian group Civitas Christiana has been demonstrating outside the museum calling for the condom to be removed.’ Is the removal of a condom really wise? One thought that Catholics were mandated to practice safe sex at all times? (tinyurl.com/2jsk59bw).

DC

People in Glasshouses (1937)

From the July 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Manchester Guardian (April 7th, 1937) published a letter appealing for its help and influence in securing the release from a German concentration camp of Anton Hausladen, a German social-democrat, who had been interned for four years without a charge being brought against him. If the Manchester Guardian can help Anton Hausladen it will be doing something useful. It could do something else just as useful. In its issue for the same day the Guardian reported a speech by Mr. Carl Heath at Friends' House, in which it was stated that between 1,500 and 2,000 people were detained in Bengal prisons without charge or trial. They are chiefly trade union and political leaders.

Another Press report, Daily Telegraph (March 10th, 1937), shows how embarrassing criticism of the policies of foreign governments can be to the British Government. The Telegraph quotes from the Italian Giornale d'Italia about:—

Atrocities committed by the British quite recently on the Afghan frontier. There the tribes were bombed by British air squadrons well supplied with poison gas.

The Italian statements were in answer to the British Government’s concern about the massacre of Abyssinians in Addis Ababa by the Italians. The Italian allegation that the British used poison gas on the Afghan frontier was denied by Mr. Eden in the House of Commons. A minor point really. The Italians can teach the British very little in the business of Empire building.

Voice From The Back: The Seeds of War (2011)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Seeds of War

Many reasons are put forward for the conflict in Afghanistan. Some would argue it is a conflict over religion, others that it is a struggle for democracy. The following piece of information seems a more likely cause for the hostilities. “Afghanistan and Central Asia are abundant with natural resources worth billions. So far, they are largely untapped but the battle is raging for who will be able to exploit them in the 21st century. In the 19th century it was the Russians and the British who wrestled for influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia in a highly-explosive endeavour known as the Great Game. Today, Afghanistan’s natural resources are estimated to be worth billions of dollars. The resources in the neighbouring Central Asian states are thought to be worth even more – the cake is huge and as yet largely untouched.” (Deutche Welle, 15 July) The seeds of all modern wars has been the rivalries over sources of raw materials, markets and political spheres of interest.

Premature Celebrations                            

The abolition of the hateful system of Apartheid in 1994 was correctly celebrated throughout the world, but capitalism remained intact and as long as capitalism survives it will throw up problems of exploitation and inequality. “South Africa celebrated Nelson Mandela’s 93rd birthday on Monday with songs by millions of children and calls for public service, but the nation he led out of apartheid is divided by poverty and his ANC movement seems to many to be losing its moral compass. … Mandela’s calls for greater access to the economy for the poor black majority have been dealt blows by corruption eating into welfare programmes and entitlements that benefit a sliver of the black elite with close ties to the ANC.” (Reuters, 18 July) .

The Future is Bleak

                              

The illusion that many workers share is that as they reach retirement age they will be able to live in a sort of rocking-chair contentment.  In reality most of us will live even more parsimonious existences than we do at present whilst we are surviving from pay-day to pay-day. “Millions of people face a ‘bleak old age’ because they are falling through the cracks of private sector pension provision, a review suggests. The Workplace Retirement Income Commission says 14 million people are not saving into a workplace pension scheme at all.” (BBC News, 1 August) Working for a wage or a salary as we all have to do is a precarious existence but when we are finally thrown on the industrial and commercial scrapheap the future for most workers according to the Commission is apparently even more awful.

The Perfect Worker                          

Newspaper editors have a difficult task every day – what should be their front page headline? Millions starving in a famine in East Africa? Demonstrators gunned down in Syria? A difficult choice perhaps but the editor of The Times led with a really important headline. “Welfare in chaos as thousands live to 100” (Times, 4 August). In any sane society the news that human beings are managing to live a little longer would be the cause for celebration, but this is capitalism and there will be no dancing in the street at the news. The news that the working class who produce all the wealth of the world are tending to live longer is bad news for the capitalist class who live on the surplus value that the workers produce. To the owning class the perfect worker is one who goes to work after they leave school, works two nights overtime and a Sunday and on the day he retires goes to the Post Office to collect his state pension and drops dead at the counter. No pension, no drain on the owning class’s surplus value. Perfect!

Who Are The "Primitives"?                       

For thousands of years small tribal groups have lived in the forests between what is now Brazil and Peru. They are looked upon by many as “backward” or “primitive”, but nevertheless they have survived in isolation and relative security. The advent of capitalism has changed all that. “The head of Brazil’s indigenous protection service is to make an emergency visit to a remote jungle outpost amid fears that members of an isolated Amazon tribe may have been ‘massacred’ by drug traffickers. …. On 5 August Brazilian federal police launched an operation in the region, arresting Joaquim Antonio Custodio Fadista, a Portuguese man alleged to have been operating as a cocaine trafficker. But after the police pulled out, officers with the indigenous protection service (Funai) decided to return fearing a ‘massacre’. They claimed that groups of men with rifles and machine guns were still at large in the rainforest. Reports suggest the traffickers may have been attempting to set up new smuggling routes, running through the tribe’s land.” (Guardian, 9 August)

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

$8 Million Gold-Plated Rolls Redefines Excess. Nothing says class warfare quite like an armored, gold-plated car that costs $8 million:

[Link.]

Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish “We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.

[Dead Link.]

On Saturday night, as rioters in Tottenham threw fireworks and bottles at police officers, one man shouted, “This is our battle!” When asked what he meant, the man, Paul Rook, 47, explained that he felt the rioters were taking on “the ruling class.”

[Link.]

“Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I worry about.” That was what an unidentified billionaire told Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal a while back. Rich people are scared of global unrest, Frank reported, citing a survey by Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of people with liquid assets of $1 million or more (translation: folks who have or can get their hands on $1 million in cash fairly easily) that says 94 percent of the wealthy are concerned about “global unrest” around the world. He noted: Of course, Insite has an interest in getting the paranoid rich to beef up their security. Still, the numbers are backed up by other trends seen throughout the world of wealth today: the rich keeping a lower profile, hiring $230,000 guard dogs, and arming their yachts, planes and cars with military-style security features:

[Dead Link.]

Starving parents are marrying off girls for food as famine devastates Africa. Nearly half of kids in Kenya and Somalia had not eaten at all for a day this week, research reveals today and desperate mums and dads are selling girls as young as nine for just £100. Under-18s cannot legally marry in Kenya and child brides face terrible abuse, but World Vision UK’s Philippa Lei said: “Girls can traditionally be sold for a bride price, cattle or food. But now girls are being sold off much earlier.

[Link.]

“We are all human. God created us from one dirt. Why can we not marry each other, or love each other?” Halima Mohammedi, an Afghan teenager whose love for another teenager, Rafi Mohammed, set off a riot by flouting their village’s tradition of arranged marriages. “What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them.” Kher Mohammed, her father:

[Link.]

Voice From The Back: Coal, steel and blood (2002)

The Voice From The Back Column from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Coal, steel and blood

For generations apologists for capitalism have churned out the lie that modern war is caused by different ideologies. We have been told that the First World War was a war against militarism and the Second was a war for democracy against fascism. The socialist view is that war is the logical outcome of economic rivalry and now one of the pillars of capitalism confirms our view, inadvertently while he discourses on another subject. As Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the Italian economist who is now a major influence at the European Central Bank, has written: “It can hardly be denied that establishing joint supra-national management of coal and steel – the two fundamental natural resources of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over which France, Germany and the rest of Europe fought cruel wars was a highly political project.” Observer (9 December).

The cause of poverty

For almost a hundred years the Labour Party have argued that poverty can be abolished inside capitalism. Socialists have always argued that capitalism with its class divisions and production for profit is the cause of poverty. The latest figures on Labour’s failure to deal with poverty inside capitalism illustrate our point. “More families are classified as very poor now than under the last full year of Conservative government, according to new research. The number of people living in households with less than 40 per cent of the average income in 1999-2000 was 8.3 million, 100,000 more than in 1996-97, a study published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says.” Times (10 December).

Terror thugs and terrorist teachers

Under the heading “Terror thugs groom future suicide killers” The New York Post (11 December) reported that kids between 4 and 8 years of age were being taught how to be suicidal terrorists by the Palestine terrorist group Hamas. What they didn’t report is that the US government are also guilty of “robbing kids of their childhood”. “On another front, the Pentagon has succeeded in establishing its first Military Institute, as a public middle school in Oakland, CA. The school’s 1,200 cadets, whose average age is twelve, wear uniforms, perform military drills, and are instructed by military approved teachers.” (WWW.CITIZEN-SOLDIER.ORG).

Who needs the brain scan?

One of Labour’s election boasts was that it would improve the NHS, but what is the reality? “A medical scanner costing millions of pounds is being used to treat pets at an NHS hospital which does not have enough nurses to treat its patients . . . News of the animal treatment scheme comes as the Bedford Hospital Trust has warned it will have to close an operating theatre to avoid a £3 million deficit by the end of the financial year.” Observer (23 December). It is good news for well-heeled pet owners though. A London divorce lawyer was delighted that her 13-year-old poodle had a brain scan and prompt medical treatment at the hospital. This must be a great consolation to workers waiting for treatment on Labour’s new, “improved” NHS.

Inappropriate tears

After the horrendous events at the Twin Towers the outgoing Mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani talked about the site being devoted to a memorial to those killed. The new mayor Mike Bloomberg would now like to distance himself from such foolish, unelectable sentiments. “Mr Bloomberg all but ruled out using the whole site for a memorial. He said that the value of the 16 acre property and the demands of the area for jobs and businesses meant that it would be inappropriate to devote the whole of the space to a single monument.” Times (5 January). Sympathy, condolences and sentiment are all very well, but inside capitalism profit is the driving force, so let us not have inappropriate tears. Although as human beings, they are the only ones we’ve got. Nearly 3,000 human beings died that morning. We still cry, inappropriately, of course, at the madness of capitalism.

Scandal? What scandal?

Under the headline “Scandal of NHS beds auction” (Observer, 6 January) reported that more than 10,000 private patients were treated last year in the UK’s NHS hospitals. That these patients jumped the queue for treatment and cited the case of NHS patients having to wait six months to a year for a heart by-pass operation while for a fee of £15,000 “they can be operated on almost immediately by a surgeon of their choice”. So where is the scandal? Inside capitalism if you are poor you can be homeless, if you are rich you can live in a beautiful house. If poor you will probably get a sub-standard education, if rich you can get the best that money can buy. That is the way capitalism operates – if you can afford it you can buy the best medical treatment, if not get to the back of the queue.

This is progress?

All the slaughter, maiming and terror of the recent Afghanistan conflict was justified according to the Western press by the wonderful improvements in human rights in that country. A report in the Brussels newspaper (Le Soir, 19 December) would seem to indicate that this is far from the truth. “Public executions, stonings and amputations are going to continue in Afghanistan in accordance with the Sharia law, a top Afghan magistrate has stated, while promising more fairness and clemency than during the time of the Taliban. “For example, the Taliban used to hang the bodies of victims in public for four days”, the judge Ullah Zarif explained, “we will only expose them for a short time, say 15 minutes”. As for those guilty of adultery, they will certainly be stoned ‘but we will use smaller stones’, judge Zarif said.”

Letter: Afghanistan (2002)

Letter to the Editors from the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Afghanistan

Dear Editors,

Very little has been heard on the media to counter the general assumption that the Afghanistan war is an example of the result of an inevitable ideological/religious antagonism in capitalism between religions, languages, cultures – in this case Islam and Christianity.

In giving the lie to this theory as the cause of war in capitalism, an early Socialist Party pamphlet on war gave examples of countries or groups of the same and of different religions etc. who had fought both against and in alliance with, each other at different times. If the Socialist Standard could provide such information if could prove very useful in countering such theories at the present time.

W. Robertson, 

Hove, Sussex

Masters of War (2010)

From the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘You can fool all of the people some of the time … and some of the people all of the time … but …

The US occupation forces in Afghanistan have learned a particular lesson from the disaster that is Iraq, and they have learned it big time. In the first, largely contracted out war in history, US and other foreign civilians were brought in to carry out just about every task, from the mundane to those viewed as ‘front-line’. A direct consequence of this strategy was millions of unemployed and very disgruntled Iraqis, a large percentage of whom became active or passive supporters of the forces of insurgency/resistance against the perceived injustices of the occupation. In the corporate boardrooms of US War Machine Inc. the alarm bells were ringing; costs (dead bodies and bodies with bits missing) were eating into public opinion and support for the corporations’ products (perpetual war and war materials/services) was declining and, potentially, could severely impact their bottom lines. A slight shift in strategy was called for.

Afghanistan, in recent times, has never really been a nation state; it is an area of the world that is a patch-work of tribal fiefdoms that shift in and out of local alliances at the whim of chieftains or as balances of power dictate. In order for US and NATO forces to function, in what they like to call the ‘Battlespace’, they have to factor these tribal leaders and their shifting alliances into their planning. The logistics for any invader/occupier of this land are daunting in the extreme. It is a wild, unforgiving place peopled by proud, largely unconquered tribes with very long memories who do not take kindly to uninvited foreigners trying to lord it over them. Ameliorating some of that hostility would enable more focus on the ‘flagged-up’ enemy, al-Qa’ida and their Taliban associates.

As the conflict dragged on and soon to be president of US War Machine Inc. Senator Obama announced that, in his opinion, it was a ‘war of necessity’, the strategic planners came up with an ingenious ploy that would give gainful employment to Afghans, put money into their pockets and just might persuade them to view the occupiers of their lands in a sufficiently different light that they would stop shooting at or blowing up corporate assets and personnel. The name of this new strategy – ‘Host Nation Trucking’, and it works something like this . .

Take a gaggle of well connected, powerful and non-too-scrupulous ‘business men’ and award them six trucking contracts currently worth $2.2 billion. People like the Popal brothers, owners of the huge Watan Group, both convicted whilst in the US of dealing in heroin and cousins of Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Or Hamed Wardek, owner of NCL Holdings and son of current Afghan defence minister, General Abdul Wardek. NCL includes such luminaries as ‘legendary former CIA case officer and clear-headed thinker and writer’ (says Senator John Kerry, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, October 2009) Milton Beardon on its advisory board. Or Asia Security Group, owned by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. (Aram Roston, ‘How the US Funds the Taliban’, The Nation, 30 November) These companies already have a well oiled model for doing business along the ancient trading routes and in the minefield that is present day Afghanistan – each has an armed ‘private security division’ and field agents who buy-off attacks by fractious warlords along any route. In this way US and NATO troops should get everything from ammunition to toilet paper supplied to even the their furthest-flung outposts with fewer inconvenient disruptions.

That was the theory behind the plan and in reality it mostly works pretty well. The US Defense Dept. throws huge quantities of dollars to the contractors, who in turn buy off the warlords who control those routes that pass through their territories. Many of these warlords are associated with the Taliban or are the local Taliban commanders, so extensive funding finds its way into Taliban coffers. Even the Taliban, who are the supreme warlords in control of the south of the country, are not immune from getting in on the action directly. Pay the premiums for their ‘insurance’ and it is sufficient for just two of their escorting ‘technicals’ to ensure the safe passage of any convoy through any stretch of hostile territory, which in reality is everywhere. Fail to pay up and the consequences are guaranteed to be devastating and deadly. Drivers can be picked off by snipers and rocket propelled grenades will blow the vehicles to pieces. One US owned firm, Four Horsemen International, has so far refused to pay and has tried to take on the Taliban with its own security teams; their convoys are attacked on almost every mission and the price in lives has been high. At some stage, no doubt, they will have to follow other security firms and do what they must in order to survive. An indication of premium rates can be gleaned from the following: per truck, per section of territory under a particular warlord = approx. $800, although it depends on what is being carried. Highway 1 from Kabul to Kandahar is about 300 kms, the local warlord, Commander Ruhullah, levies around $1,500 per truck and for military supplies this is the only route to the south, to Helmand and the Taliban heartland. The NCL company alone is billed $500,000 per month for ‘services’ rendered en-route through Ruhullah’s turf, an indication of the scale of business.

Throwing money at a problem to make it go away has been elevated to the level of a doctrine within the US military, which goes under the title of ‘Money as a Weapons System’. To give some perspective, the $2.2 billion, two-year effort to hire Afghani trucks and truckers represents around 10 percent of that country’s GDP and although firm figures are hard to come by it is estimated that between 10-20 percent is finding its way to the Taliban. The regime in Kabul has recently increased the wages of its police and army by $45 to around $125 per month, far less than the Taliban pays its fighters, so why work for that lot when the ‘firm’ down the road is offering a better deal? No surprise then that the effective strength of these two organisations is around half of the claimed 90,000 for the police and 95,000 for the army, or that the power and influence of the Taliban continues to grow. They have their very own milch cow with a seeming never-ending stream of greenbacks. US spin would have us believe that it is drugs money that funds the Taliban in direct opposition to their actions when in power. Under Taliban rule poppy/opium production was almost eliminated; by contrast, since the US invasion and the re-establishment of the warlords, production is at an historic high. None the less, this is the lie fed to the US public rather than revealing the truth which could well swing public opinion so strongly as to imperil the very profitable merry-go-round that is the conflict in Afghanistan. Better to keep the mushrooms in the dark than let them see the light of truth!

Step back for a moment and look at it this way; the US military, possibly the world’s ultimate ‘service provider’, is a gigantic consumer of goods and services. Its top people are highly paid executives who are guaranteed lucrative positions in supplying corporations when the time comes to move on. Working with their associates in government they benefit from continuing conflicts/wars that use up existing stockpiles/services which then need re-stocking from their appreciative suppliers. Prolonging the production run of any particular product or model is a well-proven policy for squeezing the last drop of profit from any venture. So it follows that in the context of modern, contracted-out warfare any strategy that strings out a conflict will mean more profits in the pockets of those corporations, organisations and their stock-holders who agree to play it by the rules of the capitalist system, and that includes Messrs. Taliban Associates Inc. In this lethal capitalist game, it is mostly the workers, the cannon-fodder on each side of any conflict who pay the supreme price; the elite, whether they wear the pin-stripped suits of corporate boardrooms or the black turbans of a Taliban leader, largely escape the extreme consequences of these policies.

The average US citizen thinks that it is ‘their’ money that’s paying for ‘their’ military to fight a war in Afghanistan that will protect ‘their’ homeland from another 9/11 or some crazed mullah with a suicide atomic bomb under his jacket. Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. The media has convinced them that it is a price worth paying, and anyway, aren’t there tens of thousands of good US households that, directly or indirectly, depend on defence company salaries to pay the mortgage? If they ever wake up to the fact that it is also ‘their’ money that is paying for the munitions that kill their sons and daughters and is providing the Taliban with much of what it needs to carry on its campaign indefinitely, to the benefit and enrichment of all the stakeholders in the business of war and conflict, might they not get very angry? Might they not rise up against the Masters of War and their corrupt system? Don’t hold your breath!

‘You can fool some of the people . . .’ Was this saying concocted by some US president or other to convince his people that they are really too smart to have the wool pulled over their eyes by a system devised to enrich the few whilst keeping the majority in bondage? How else to explain the predatory economic ways of the world and the widespread apathy towards them in the so-called ‘world’s only superpower’ and its war-mongering allies?

'… you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’

Oh, yeah!

Alan Fenn

Tiny (URL) Tips (2009)

The Tiny Tips column from the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In the wake of the horrific events of the day, his captain is cool. He walks up to Massey and asks; “Are you doing all right, Staff Sergeant?” Massey responds: “No, sir. I am not doing O.K. Today was a bad day. We killed a lot of innocent civilians.”

Fully aware of the civilian carnage, his captain asserts: “No, today was a good day.” Relatives wailing, cars destroyed, blood all over the ground, Marines celebrating, civilians dead, and “it was good day”!:

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Even as the financial system collapsed last year, and millions of investors lost billions of dollars, one unlikely investor was racking up historic profits: John Paulson, a hedge-fund manager in New York. His firm made $20 billion between 2007 and early 2009 by betting against the housing market and big financial companies. Mr. Paulson’s personal cut would amount to nearly $4 billion, or more than $10 million a day. That was more than the 2007 earnings of J.K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods combined:

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Sixteen workers are killed a day in the United States because of reckless negligence on the part of their employers. Under existing laws, these employers get a slap on the wrist, or walk away scot-free. Meanwhile, workers who blow the whistle face threats and retaliation at the workplace:

[Dead Link.]

Its ruler re-named the days of the week after himself and his mother. Opera, ballet and the circus are banned. To get a driving licence, citizens must sit an exam on the dead leader’s autobiography. Welcome to Turkmenistan:

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When veterans die — from lack of health insurance More than 1.5 million vets don’t have it, and 2,200 vets die every year because of it :

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“. . . We suggest that it will be pretty much like this in socialist society. Although it will be global as opposed to tribal, people will still live in small localised communities..” But some people I imagine will choose a clean, green high-rise city lifestyle instead:

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Why are so many Americans now toying with socialism, in a country that created the most successful free market economic system in history and spent half of the last century fighting the heresy of Marx’s socialism?

[Dead Link.]

“Americans are saying that with their planes they can see an egg 18 kilometers away, so why can’t they see the Taliban?” ABDULLAH WASAY, an Afghan pharmacist:

[Link.]