Afghani revolt exposes U.S. myth

Thousands of Afghanis have demonstrated and protested in Kabul beginning May 28, throwing stones at U.S. and other foreigners and literally risking death. They were shot at and some actually killed following a fatal auto crash on May 29 involving U.S. military vehicles. The explosion of popular fury exposed a White House myth.

What the “accident” and ensuing revolt did was clear away the myth of political stability that Washing ton had created about its puppet government in Kabul.

No, the situation will not be resolved by fixing the brakes on U.S. trucks. No, the new NATO forces now scheduled to replace U.S. troops won’t make it all better. No, it won’t put things right if it is proved that U.S. troops didn’t fire until someone fired on them—which is doubtful, anyway. No, a few more jobs for the unemployed Afghani youths won’t win their hearts and minds.

Most of Afghanistan’s hungry 24 million people hate the U.S. occu pa tion and a few crumbs won’t win them over.

This story didn’t begin on May 28. For decades U.S. imperialism has intervened in Afghanistan, always to the detriment of its people. Forget Washington’s current propaganda against “fundamentalist Islam” and local warlords. After a revolution there in 1978, Wash ington fed billions of dollars in cash and weapons to reactionary religious leaders and warlords in order to oust a progressive regime that had the audacity to educate women and promote rights for peasants. This prompted the anti-feudal government to call for Soviet help, but they were no match for Washing ton’s proxy army.

After Soviet troops left and what remained of the 1978 revolution was wiped out in blood in the 1990s, Afghanistan was ruled by competing feudal lords. They were then ousted by the Pakistan-backed Taliban. In the beginning, Washington welcomed this change. However, the 2001 U.S. invasion, allegedly aimed at Osama bin-Laden’s al-Qaeda forces, pushed out the Taliban and led to the current situation.

The White House myth is that a democratically elected central government in Kabul legitimately runs the country but faces a “Taliban insurgency” led by “terrorists” in certain remote provinces, and that U.S. and NATO troops are assisting this government to control and finally defeat the “terrorists.”

The truth—and this is what the May 28 revolt helped clarify—is that feudal lords based on an opium trade facilitated by the U.S. run the various provinces, that the “Tali ban insurgency” is developing into a national resistance movement against foreign occupation, and that most Afghanis see the U.S. and NATO troops as a brutal, arrogant occupation force. Hamid Karzai, a former executive of the U.S. energy company Unocal, is supposed to be president of the whole country but is already being called “the mayor of Kabul.”

The Rumsfeld Pentagon thought that with “shock and awe”—the 21st-century version of “a few shots across the bow”—it could rule the world. It can’t even run Kabul, and May 28, 2006, will be seen as the turning point in making that clear.