Marxist-Leninist Organization Afghanistan

Heroically and successfully, the people of Afghanistan defeated Russian social-imperialism but did not achieve freedom themselves.

The defeat of the Russians proves the greatness of the resistance of the Afghan people, the burden of which was carried by the lower classes of society. The fact that the people did not achieve freedom, seemingly reveals its conspicuous weakness. But what can be seen is, in reality, the weakness going back to the revolutionary leaders who are not yet capable of taking over their leading role in the people’s struggle in accordance with the historical position of these struggles.

Subsequent to the decline of social-imperialism, the freedom and existence of our people have, once again and in a different way, fallen victim to the interests of imperialism and the regional reactionary forces.

Yesterday, social-imperialism tried to find its way to the Indian Ocean and to threaten the Gulf region — with the result that 1.5 million people were killed, two million people handicapped and 7 million people were driven away from their land — out of the former 15 million inhabitants of Afghanistan — and that 90 % of the infrastructure of our country fell prey to the destruction by the war machinery at the time. Today, the United States, that regard the oil and gas supplies of Central Asia as belonging to their own strategic resources, try to take advantage of the inheritance of social-imperialism by threatening to completely destroy the possessions of the remaining Afghan population which already lie in blood and ashes. The United States intend to build their oil and gas pipelines through the midst of the ruined Afghan landscape in order to reach the Indian Ocean.

The oil supplies around the Caspian Sea have an estimated value of 2,000 billion barrels; today, their price is estimated at US$ 4000 billion. The gas supplies of Turkmenistan are estimated at 2,890 billion m³. According to publications of 1995, the gas supplies in the West of Turkmenistan reach a level of 800 trillion m³. According to the figures of 1977 (before the war of resistance), the Afghan gas supplies were estimated 500 quadrillion ft³; subsequently, many more gas and oil resources were discovered.

There are the same resources in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The existence of such energy supplies causes merciless competition of multinational oil giants from the United States as well as from Europe and Asia. One must only recall the example that, according to official figures of the year 1996, the sale of arms in Central Asia ran up to US$ 15 billion, making up 40 % of the official arms sales of the world. This gives an outline of the horrifying face of competition for the oil resources of our region. These horrors can also be clearly seen in the form of the Taliban in Afghanistan which are supported by petro-dollars.

For the USA, in their pioneer role in the "big game", the installment of the pipelines through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean is the cheapest and simplest way and, at the same time, controllable; above all, another purpose reached by this is that Iran remains excluded from the "big game". In this respect, the USA also enjoy the support of Japanese imperialism because for Japan, too, oil from the Indian Ocean is cheaper; also, on the other hand, Japan finds a profitable way to the sources of raw materials and to the markets of Central Asia.

In the political field, the USA try to seize the initiative in the 6 plus 2 talks (six neighbors of Afghanistan plus the USA plus Russia) and to ally certain groupings in Afghanistan with each other. By leading them to power, they gain control of the situation in the region. Intelligence departments of Arab states give active support to the USA in this sector.

Another cause contributing to the significance Afghanistan has for the USA is the geographical situation of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a link between Iran and China, two enemies of the United States which, with support from Russia and in a military alliance, might threaten the US interests in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

Religious fundamentalism in Afghanistan has been produced by the complicated mechanism of imperialism and regional reactionaries dependent on imperialism. But when, after the decline of the former Soviet Union, it had lost its function and importance for the USA, the same fundamentalism started to strike back against the USA in various regions of the world; this fundamentalism started from Afghanistan, chosen as its base.

Iran, which cannot be sanctioned by the USA as Iraq, has now gone over from a defensive to an offensive position. With agreements on gas and railway construction to Turkmenistan, Iran intends to establish a transition from the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf on this side and Central Asia on the other side of Iran, in order to make itself indispensable for the region, on the one hand, and to enlarge its sphere of influence towards Central Asia, on the other hand.

But for the USA and their allies in the region, mainly Pakistan and Saudi-Arabia, this enlargement of the influence of Iran was intolerable; together, they created the Taliban model.

This model, irreconcilable for Iran due to ethnic and religious reasons, prevents, on the one hand, the expansion of the influence of Iran towards the East; on the other hand, the Taliban model replaces the failed Jihad groupings which had "expired" right after the time of resistance against the Russians. This "cutting the cord" was enforced by the qualitative insufficiencies and bloody internal conflicts among the groupings which turned them into a problem the USA and other bosses could not solve.

This time, however, the US will drop the big burden back onto their own feet: on the one hand, the USA try to keep their favored regime in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in power; on the other hand, with the help of Uzbekistan and Kirgyzstan, they try to activate gendarme forces to gain control over the region, defeat fundamentalism and restrict the power of Iran.

On the one hand, the USA want to prevent Russia and Iran taking possession of the natural gas and the oil in the region; on the other hand, they intend to lay their pipelines through the ashes, the fire and the blood of Afghanistan. In addition, the USA plan to get religious unrest in the Islamic countries of the region under control and, on the other hand, to deploy precisely this unrest as dynamite in China, etc.

Just like the other big "oil giants", Saudi-Arabia, too, takes advantage of the above-mentioned big trade; on top of that, since twenty years, it pursues the goal of investing tens of billions of US-Dollars into the war in Afghanistan, also in order to broaden its sphere of influence. It acts shoulder to shoulder with the USA in order to obscure their intervention with a religious legitimation.

Pakistan urgently needs investments in Central Asia in order to be able to keep up its army and secret police (ISI). One reason for this is the high debt mounting up to US$ 50 billion. The other reason is that Pakistan lost its importance as a defense zone of the former Soviet Union and as door to the world for China. The fact that the gas supplies of Pakistan (8.6 quadrillion ft³) will cover its energy needs only until the year 2010 plays an additional role; then, it must find new energy resources.

China does not show any interest in the Afghan pipelines but wants to take hold of the resources of Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, with a sum of US$ 34 trillion, over 8,000 km to China and Japan. To carry out this plan, China is supported by two Japanese firms. But Japan can cover its energy needs, with US help, with pipelines running through Afghan territory to the Indian Ocean.

These joint interests of the USA, Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan form one aspect of the Afghan tragedy; all of them use the extremist Taliban as an instrument to secure their interests in the region.

* For Iran, the exertion of power solely by the Taliban means a continued presence of the US and of Pakistan in Afghanistan; also, this situation would mean the completion of the process of encircling Iran. Therefore, Iran, with all its might, tries to give its own forces a share of political power in Afghanistan. On the other hand, it precisely takes advantage of the continued war in Afghanistan: it leads to the date for the construction of the pipeline through Afghanistan being postponed to a future time, in order to make a transition through Iran possible in the meantime.

Also, with the continued war in Afghanistan, Iran has the purpose of diverting its own people’s attention from their own internal problems in order to gear their interests towards their neighbor who, so to speak, provides the fertile ground for the great US conspiracies against Iran.

* Russia, which considers the energy resources of Central Asia as part of its own strategic resources, received, in competition with other "oil giants", a small share of ten percent. For this reason, it left the competitors’ ranks and opposes them now.

Also, it is a fact that Russia and its allies in Central Asia fear the influence of fundamentalism, supported by Pakistan and Saudi-Arabia, in the Muslim region. That is why Russia and its followers support the alliance against the Taliban. This alliance also integrates its political and ethnic lackeys.

In the countries of Central Asia, the old revisionists still maintain parts of their shaken power. They fear losing the rest because the people there, not offered any essential alternative to Islam, wait for the rule of Islam to come.

* India is afraid of the influence and the enlargement of power by its regional enemy in Pakistan, which wants to expand its influence in the north and, for religious reasons, wants to obtain support in the case of Cashmere. India wants to prevent this.

These contradictions of imperialist interests and regional reaction did not only bring the worst and unprecedented disaster to Afghanistan and its people, but also made Afghanistan the big center of drug production and Islamic terrorism, not to forget of smuggling — starting with weapons and ending up with uranium. The drug mafia is directly participating in the war in Afghanistan. Behind the black curtain of the war, it organizes its dirty business with the indirect support of the governments there. In 1997, drug production amounted to 2,800 tons, at an estimated value of DM 100 billion; compared to the year before, there was a 30 percent increase. In 1998, there was an increase by 25 percent. In the same year, production tripled in the Northeast of Afghanistan alone.

According to statistics, 90 percent of drugs in Europe and 50 percent of the drugs of the entire world come from Afghanistan. 96 percent of these drugs are produced in the areas occupied by the Taliban.

Poverty, disease, unemployment, homelessness, oppression and religious terror — all together make up a disaster which is probably unprecedented in the world.

Diseases caused by poverty spread at an extremely high rate. In the Northern and central regions of Afghanistan, 10 percent of all people lost their eye-sight or are about to lose it. Tuberculosis is so rampant that in one province alone, 40 people died within one month.

In a region in the Northeast of Afghanistan, 9,000 people fell ill last month to a disease which was at first completely unknown. Now, it was revealed that malnutrition was the cause; within two weeks, 300 people died.

The city of Kabul, which used to have a population of about 2 million people in the past, is now inhabited by only 250,000 people. 80 percent of them can survive only through UN aid. 50 percent of these people are widows. 28,000 children, half naked most of the time, are beggars; in most cases, they are the only breadwinner for the family. Every day, in Kabul alone, six children lose their lives due to quite normal diseases, simply because of lack of medicine.

The entire poverty and disaster concentrate themselves in one part of society that consists of workers, peasants and petty bourgeois. Wealth and power lie in the hands of the oppressing minority alone, formed by feudal landlords, warlords, bureaucrats of the Emarat (theocracy) and the comprador bourgeoisie.

Feudal rule, a disgrace over centuries in our history, is caused by the fact that our people were never able to free themselves from the fetters of backwardness. They suffer dreadfully from feudal relations, of which Islamic fundamentalism is the most horrible and most dangerous representative. In addition to this class, a new type of political-military feudal landlords emerges in the shape of warlords. They revive the feudal system even more, through unlimited oppression and forced purchase of land.

Warlords and bureaucrats of the theocracy are high-ranking party members of the Islamic reactionary parties which, through unrestricted external aid by imperialism and support of the regional reactionaries and through smuggling and robbery of private and national wealth, have become a great economic and military power. The feudal mode of production is the prevailing mode of production which is, at the same time, the most basic obstacle for the further development of the productive forces.

In Afghanistan, the comprador bourgeoisie has always been working hand in hand with the feudal lords. One part of this bourgeoisie which was dependent on the former Soviet Union and whose political representatives were the revisionist parties of Afghanistan, deprived the feudal lords of power in 1978 for the first time by the coup d’état of the revisionists.

For the revisionists, the seizure of power did not mean final victory, because their political power was in contradiction to their economic and social weakness. This gap was so deep that not even the Russians could help them at the expense of the total destruction of Afghanistan.

After this rule was overthrown in 1992, the comprador bourgeois (dependent mainly on the West) and the feudal landlords once again took up the task of setting up a united feudal-comprador government. Although the comprador bourgeoisie can advance only slowly due to the war, many opportunities exist in our semi-colonial, semi-feudal country for their further development alongside feudalism. The disunited rule of reactionary forces advances with imperialist support. The aim is to overcome their former fragmentation and concentrate their forces. Also, efforts are taken to consolidate social-economic bases.

To achieve this, imperialism invested in the anti-Soviet resistance of our people to tear it away from its original direction and to estrange its national-democratic character. The imperialists instrumentalized the above-mentioned oppressive classes and abused the misery of the people of our country at war. Due to this massive intervention and shameless interference, accompanied by the delivery of a huge number of weapons, money and, last but not least, waves of terror against the revolutionaries of our society, our organization, as the political vanguard of the people’s liberation movement, did not succeed in keeping the general resistance movement on its original path.

The overthrow of the feudal-comprador rule is only possible by means of the new democratic revolution. At the present, this form of revolution proves to be the only valid task of our organization. This revolution cannot take place within a short time, but it will need a long, historically complex period which will be subdivided into parts and processes.

The proletariat of Afghanistan will go in the lead of this revolution. This is the historical task of this class in the era of the national liberation movements, of imperialism and the proletarian revolution.

The peasants are a main force of revolution. The main contradiction in our society is based on the contradiction between the people and feudalism. The main aspect of this contradiction is the contradiction between the peasants and the feudal landlords.

Until yesterday, classic contradictions were under the influence of the national contradictions. The highest aim was to fight the invading army of social-imperialism. For the present, the class-contradictions mentioned above, although they have sharpened more than ever, are under the influence of the ongoing destructive war. This war threatens the physical existence of all living people and leads the country to the brink of most dangerous catastrophes.

The natural survival instinct, the salvation of the country and the restoration of basic conditions of life are the main goals which determine the general tendency of the people. Therefore, there is now the opportunity to expose the real class interests of those who caused this destructive war in order to isolate them, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to unite an increasing number of people in a great people’s united front.

We are presently active within seven organizations and fronts as well as in various smaller cultural, local or ethnic groups in order to form an enlarged united front by spreading an anti-imperialist and anti-oppressive culture, together with the other democratic and freedom-loving elements. Besides this activity, taking place in the national-democratic field, our main activities are in the form of organizational tasks.

After the great and sad blows our organization had to suffer during the last years, our Party Congress was held in 1996; in the light of its decisions, we were now able to make substantial progress. Thus, we enter a new phase of the consolidation and formation of people’s bases. Our military activities consist of developing people’s army units. This is a prestage to create a people's army. In our country, where reactionary forces, who are very well versed in the art of war, have seized power, the normal masses of the people basically do not have anything else than the people’s army. That is why its construction is one of the most important tasks of the revolutionaries in Afghanistan.

In all the sectors already mentioned, our force manifests itself as not yet so large as being capable of exerting an essential influence on changing the current situation. This weakness is due to the great burden of the struggle. In the twenty years of war, we were in the cross-fire of various imperialist and reactionary forces. Due to this, we repeatedly lost our best cadres, including members of our Central Committee and the Politbureau as well as the chairman of our organization and of the national united front.

But we also collected precious experience, rising from the blood again — in order to rise once more — more solid and stronger than ever and to untiringly play our role in the defense of the international interests of the proletariat, side by side with our international comrades.