Clinton unleashes Pentagon terrorism
Missile attacks on Sudan, Afghanistan condemned
worldwide
By John Catalinotto
With a missile strike at what it described as a
terrorist base camp 90 miles southeast of Kabul, Afghanistan,
Washington has added an insult to that country's sovereignty
after inflicting 20 years of injury on its people.
Considering the recent U.S. record in Afghanistan, the
Clinton administration's complaints these days about the
reactionary and anti-woman Taliban regime in Kabul and its
railings against the so-called terrorist leader Osama bin Laden
ring hollow.
Starting in 1978 a progressive government came to power in
Kabul. It championed women's rights, spread education and tried
to replace feudal backwardness with enlightenment.
The U.S. financed a bloody counter-revolutionary war against
this progressive government. The war killed and displaced
millions and brought the Taliban to power.
More and more the big-business media are revealing
Washington's role in financing both Afghan reaction and bin
Laden. But they are unlikely to highlight the glorious attempt
of Afghan communists to bring that country into the modern
era.
To learn about the Afghan revolution, you can read the
Pentagon's own publication, "Afghanistan - a Country Study" for
1986. Written for U.S. personnel working abroad, this book
contains - along with the usual anti-communist propaganda -
much useful information about the changes instituted by the
1978 revolution.
Freeing women and peasants
Before the revolution, 5 percent of Afghanistan's rural
landowners owned more than 45 percent of the arable land. A
third of the rural people were landless laborers, sharecroppers
or tenants.
Debts to the landlords and to money lenders "were a regular
feature of rural life," says the U.S. Army report. An indebted
farmer turned over half his crop each year to the money
lender.
"When the PDPA [People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan]
took power, it quickly moved to remove both land-ownership
inequalities and usury," says the Pentagon report. Decree
number six of the revolution canceled mortgage debts of
agricultural laborers, tenants and small landowners.
The revolutionary regime set up extensive literacy programs,
especially for women. It printed textbooks in many languages -
Dari, Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic and Baluchi. "The government
trained many more teachers, built additional schools and
kindergartens, and instituted nurseries for orphans," says the
country study.
Before the revolution, female illiteracy had been 96.3
percent in Afghanistan. Rural illiteracy of both sexes was 90.5
percent.
By 1985, despite the CIA-financed counter-revolutionary war,
there had been an 80-percent increase in hospital beds. The
government initiated mobile medical units and brigades of women
and young people to go to the undeveloped countryside and
provide medical services to the peasants for the first
time.
Among the very first decrees of the revolutionary regime
were to prohibit bride-price and give women freedom of choice
in marriage. "Historically," said the U.S. manual, "gender
roles and women's status have been tied to property relations.
Women and children tend to be assimilated into the concept of
property and to belong to a male."
Also: "A bride who did not exhibit signs of virginity on the
wedding night could be murdered by her father and/or
brothers."
The revolution was challenging all this.
Young women in the cities, where the new government's
authority was strong, could tear off the veil, freely go out in
public, attend school and get a job.
Repression and revolution
The revolution had been thrust upon the PDPA in 1978. The
reactionary government of Mohammad Daoud, which was close to
both the Shah of Iran and the United States, arrested almost
the entire leadership of the PDPA on April 26, 1978. There had
been a huge funeral procession just a week earlier for a
murdered member of the party, and the progressive masses in
Kabul saw the new arrests as an attempt to annihilate the
party, just as the military junta had done to the workers'
parties in Chile five years earlier.
An uprising by the lower ranks of the military freed the
popular party leader, Nur Mohammad Taraki - the soldiers
actually broke down his prison walls with a tank. Within a day,
Daoud was overthrown and a revolutionary government proclaimed,
headed by Taraki.
This uprising of the soldiers and the city masses, many of
them low-paid civil servants in a country with very little
industry, held the promise of breaking down the old traditions
based on oppression and fear.
The leaders of the PDPA were educated, although some, like
Taraki, came from very poor families. But they had been to
Kabul University, some had studied abroad, and they yearned to
bring enlightenment and material progress to Afghanistan.
Had all this happened sometime between 1789, when the French
bourgeois revolution overthrew the feudal monarchy, and the
first proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917, Afghanistan
might have been welcomed into the fold of progressive bourgeois
nations. But it happened in the age of imperialism and the Cold
War.
U.S. builds
counter-revolutionary army
Instead of welcoming these steps toward progress, the U.S.
CIA began building a mercenary army, recruiting feudal warlords
and their servants for a "holy war" against the communists, who
had liberated "their" women and "their" peasants.
U.S. policy was to fight pro-socialist ele ments at all
costs, even if this meant promot ing the most reactionary
forces in society.
The only country in the area ready to help the Afghani
revolution was the Soviet Union. The USSR intervened
militarily. But it could not defeat this well-armed
counter-revolutionary force.
The Aug. 24 New York Times, in an article about the bases
struck by U.S. missiles Aug. 20, reports that these
counter-revolutionaries had been "backed by the intelligence
services of the United States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6
billion worth of weapons."
"The CIA's military and financial support for the Afghan
rebels indirectly helped build the camps that the United States
attacked," the Times continues. "And some of the same warriors
who fought the Soviets with the CIA's help are now fighting
under Mr. bin Laden's banner."
More than 2 million Afghanis were killed in the civil war,
and millions more made refugees. Now half the remaining
population - the women - have been returned to the status of
property without a single human right. A poor man unable to pay
his debts can now have his hand cut off for theft.
When the Taliban first seized Kabul in September 1996, the
Clinton administration immediately talked of establishing
relations. Unocal Corp., a U.S.-based oil company functioning
in the region, was almost jubilant as it readied a
multi-billion-dollar pipeline project to stretch from the oil
riches of the Caspian Sea to Indian Ocean ports in
Pakistan.
But the Taliban immediately revealed their most reactionary
side, executing without trial their political opponents,
barring women and girls from schools, and refusing to let women
work or even leave the house. Both Clinton and Unocal were
forced by an angry world response to mute their support.
Now the Clinton administration is pressuring the Taliban to
crush bin Laden or run the risk of being branded a "terrorist"
state. But a look at history shows the terror started in the
Pentagon and CIA.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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