Afghanistan

Part III: Conclusions

The Russian bureaucracy and their Afghan supporters are in effect carrying through the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution in that country”, says Woods — though they are doing it in a “distorted”, Bonapartist fashion. The same idea is expressed by Grant in his 1978 article: the “proletarian Bonapartist” regimes “carry out in backward countries the historic job which was carried out by the bourgeoisie in the capitalist countries in the past”. They are alluding and making comparisons — Grant explicitly — to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, according to which the tasks of a...

Part IV: Afghanistan: Defend the cities!

For nine years, the army and air force of the bureaucratic ruling class of the Soviet Union waged a brutal war of conquest against the peoples of Afghanistan. They napalmed villages and burned the crops in the fields. They devastated the countryside, wrecked the primitive economy, and drove as many as five million refugees — one quarter of the entire population — over the borders into Pakistan and Iran. Yet they never even came near conquering the people. Western military experts calculated that a full conquest would have taken at least three times as many as the 100,000 soldiers and flyers...

What’s wrong with “Stop the War”?

The Stop The War Coalition enjoyed its heyday around the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but has regained some prominence since David Cameron’s government first proposed the bombing of Syria in August 2013. Feeding on perceptions that UK involvement in the Middle East has led to prolonged campaigns of bombing, loss of life, and the creation of unstable regimes, with very little of the humanity supposed to exist in “humanitarian intervention”, the STWC has called a number of demonstrations and got some media coverage for its opposition to the UK and US involvement in coalition bombing of...

Taliban consolidating gains in Afghanistan

It has been fourteen years since United States forces invaded Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks in New York. The ostensible reason for the invasion and subsequent toppling from power of the Taliban-controlled government was due to their links with Al-Qaeda and jihadist networks. Since then, though it is undeniable that large parts of Afghanistan have much improved, the country is still plagued by many problems such as corruption, and all the while the Taliban have shown recently that they are far from a spent force in the country. Last month, the Taliban managed to claim what was...

US and Afghan forces clash with Taliban

Afghan and US forces have found themselves under intense criticism after the bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in the city of Kunduz, during an attempted recapture of the city. Kunduz, an ethnically mixed city in the north of the country and close to the border with Tajikistan, has previously been under threat from Taliban forces that have long held sway in provincial areas around the city. Following a planned offensive on 28 September, the Taliban captured most of the city. After being embarrassed by the fact that even now, fourteen years after they were...

What's it like to be a refugee?

In 1996, when I was three years old, my parents and I fled our native Afghanistan. Over the course of the next three years we made our way across Europe before we arrived in Britain in 1999. This is an account from my parents about why they did what they did and how they have come to react to the current refugee crisis from their perspectives of already having been through it. I hope this gives people a small idea of what it’s like to be a refugee. Why did you leave Afghanistan? Dad: We left, like all the people who left with us, because our lives were in danger. There was a civil war going on...

Afghan teachers' pay strike

Since 31 May teachers in Afghanistan have been on continuous strike to demand that they are properly paid. As Solidarity went to press the teachers had been on strike for two weeks. The strike started in Kabul where it shut as many as 80 schools (the government claim 27) but spread across the country in rolling action affecting 18 out of the 34 provinces. Afghani teachers are the lowest paid public servants and often have to wait months before receiving their salaries due to the government’s permanent financial problems and incompetence. There are 200,000 teachers in Afghanistan and they are...

Syria: four million refugees

Lebanon has now revoked the six month residency that it granted Syrians and is enforcing new visa restrictions. Since 2011 four million Syrians have been forced to leave Syria. Almost half Syria’s population of 11 million people have been displaced. Lebanon alone has taken in 1.5 million refugees. Many refugees are now living in only slightly worse conditions than the local population and competition for work, aid and resources is now provoking a backlash among Lebanese; a further 220,000 became unemployed in the last quarter of 2014. In comparison, the UK has taken just 1,500 asylum seekers...

Malala Yousafzai: activist, feminist and socialist

Recently, the Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai was much-deservedly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous stand against the Taliban’s oppression of women. She was jointly awarded the prize with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian activist who fought against child labour. In a year of stiff (but more controversial) competition from whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, Malala’s award is a change from recent years in which the Nobel committee has been criticised, such as Obama’s pre-emptive 2009 Peace Prize given before even a full year in office, and during...

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