Athens: working class resistance breaks Pasok government posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, eu, greece, imf, imperialism, resistance, working class

Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: afghanistan, counterinsurgency, insurgency, isaf, NATO, occupation, resistance, taliban, US imperialism

Lion of the Desert posted by Richard Seymour

About Mussolini's conquest of Libya and the resistance:



Article here, review here.

Labels: anti-imperialism, colonialism, fascism, libya, mussolini, omar mukhtar, resistance

Peace in the valley posted by Richard Seymour

The Swat valley peace deal is over, which is exactly what President Obama wanted. The US and its allies opposed the deal from the beginning, applied immense pressure to the Pakistani state to overturn it, and finally offered another massive bribe to get them to resume war. This has resulted in the Pakistani army resuming its indiscriminate attacks, "flattening villages" into the bargain. As a consequence, the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) rescinded the deal and yesterday took control of the valley's largest town. The latest refugee exodus, apparently taking place on the instructions of the Pakistani state, comes on top of 1m refugees who had already fled Obama's air strikes and the attacks of the Pakistani army. The US administration has been using the threat of a nuclear-tipped "Talibanistan" to justify this intensified aggression, and that scaremongering has worked with the American public. (The surrounding press campaign also seems to be working with some antiwar liberals.) So, the Obama administration is now driving a regional apocalypse, using much the same propaganda tactics as the Bush administration to galvanise a sceptical public. Needless to say, it is also continuing that titanic air war in Afghanistan, which has just killed another 100 civilians in a single massacre. The next thing you'll hear is that the TTP caused the breakdown of the peace deal by seizing Mingora and that it just goes to show that you can never negotiate with such people.

Labels: 'global balkans', afghanistan, insurgency, pakistan, resistance, taliban, US imperialism

Afghanistan insurgency tactics posted by Richard Seymour

An interesting note about Helmand accompanies Simon Assaf's article on the collapse of the Afghanistan occupation:

According to intelligence sources quoted by the influential Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), Taliban leader Mullah Omar ordered his forces in September 2008 to concentrate on pinning down British troops in Helmand.

In 2006, occupation forces poured into the region in an attempt to expand the remit of the Afghan government.

Instead the move widened and deepened the resistance to foreign forces.

The Taliban hoped a “hard pounding” of British soldiers would draw in troops from other regions, freeing up the insurgency to spread. The tactic seems to be working.

The bulk of the new surge of US troops are heading to the region to bail out the British forces, while the British officers have been complaining that they have insufficient troops and equipment to fend off the insurgents.

Who knows if Mullah Omar really is dispensing orders from his underground bunker in Quetta? The point is that the strategy is being implemented, and it is working. The "neo-Taliban", as they have been dubbed, may well be the worst possible leadership for the resistance (which is of course far, far broader than the Talibs themselves). For a start, all indications are that they remain politically unpopular and couldn't possibly gain hegemony. However, the fact that the strategy is working is indicative of growing effective support for the Taliban. This could be in part due to the political tactics that Giustozzi attributes to them. Giustozzi notes, for example, that unlike some of their ideological confederates in Iraq, they have not targeted civilians. Intriguingly, Giustozzi also points out that the polls from Afghanistan are heavily biased toward educated, non-Pashtun sectors of the population, which he says explains why support for the insurgency has been so difficult to measure. There is, of course, a wider geopolitical reason why the tactic of pinning troops down in Helmand is proving effective. This is the disintegration of the Euro-American alliance, which was signposted during the Georgia crisis (which is back in the charts), and is increasingly obvious in the disinclination of many NATO states to contribute substantially to the occupation.

Update: interview with Giustozzi here.

Labels: afghanistan, insurgency, resistance

Help Visteon workers shut down plant posted by Richard Seymour

Tomorrow (Tuesday 14th), at 6am, workers will be picketing the Wharf Road entrance to Visteon at Enfield (EN3 4TA). It is requested that as many people join the picketers as possible to maximise its chances of success. There will be talks with employers later in the day, so the more the better.

Labels: factory occupation, militancy, recession, resistance, strikes, visteon workers

Visteon workers fight on, end occupation posted by Richard Seymour

Check out this absolutely inspiring footage (via Socialist Worker):



Full story here. Do check out the blog of Ady Cousins, who edited the footage filmed by Mike Berry.

Labels: capitalism, militancy, occupation, recession, resistance, sit-in strike, socialism, visteon workers

Glorification of resistance posted by Richard Seymour

Seen on the Falls Road, Belfast:

Labels: air strikes, gaza, Israel, palestine, resistance, war crimes, zionism

Afghanistan by the numbers posted by Richard Seymour

Over NATO 100 trucks and 70 humvees destroyed in a single attack. 72% of the territory of Afghanistan has a permanent Taliban presence. Three of four supply routes to Kabul are susceptible to Taliban attack. And if you want to understand how this state of affairs could possibly have come about, there is no better guide than Jonathan Neale.

Labels: aghanistan, NATO, resistance, taliban, US imperialism

Evil Rising: demonising the Mau Mau posted by Richard Seymour

The history of anti-imperialist insurgency is predictably littered with demonic imagery. The foes of empire are invariably barbarised, and of course this is as true of the Iraqi resistance as it once was of the Mau Mau. But the Mau Mau were considered uniquely evil, unlike other enemies of the British Empire such as the Communists in Malaysia, even though the suppression of the latter was almost as brutal. The Mau Mau was a movement that the British could only consider a recrudescence of African savagery and tribalism. Louis Leakey's 1954 book, Defeating Mau Mau, described the movement as an essentially religious one, a debased version of Christianity, that had attempted to usurp legitimate grievances for its own unspecified (but nefarious) ends. Those grievances, for Leakey, did not call into question the supposition that "European civilization" or "the white man was superior", but rather confirmed it. The grievances had only arisen as a result of the civilizing impact of whitey, so the argument went. The settler leaders, who relied on the labour of the Kikuyu on the 'White Highlands', were certainly convinced of their innate superiority, and were enraged by the resistance to their dominance.

The Mau Mau had emerged initially in 1948, just when the old European colonial powers were looking vulnerable, and just after the Kikuyu Central Association - the main political organisation that had existed beforehand - was banned. The immediate cause of their emergence was the occupation of lands in the central highlands by 30,000 white settlers, who appropriated the labour of 250,000 indigenous workers in the process and had to defeat often highly localised resistance to achieve dominance. The Kikuyu were those most affected by this process, with 1 and a quarter million of them driven into a 2000 square miles of land. By 1948, the reserve system - strikingly similar to the forms of segregation that had existed in South Africa until that time - was entering into a severe crisis. A chiefly minority remained wealthy, but the majority were being driven into utter destitution as they were worked to the bone and subject to austere political surveillance and repression. The colonial authorities believed that the declining returns experienced by the Kikuyu on their diminished land was really the result of the 'primitive' farming methods of the natives, and so restricted them to subsistence production, denying them access to the expanding colonial market, which of course made the problem worse. So, although they had provided not only the stock troops of the labour market but also fought on Britain's behalf during the Second World War (in fact many of the early Mau Mau had been soldiers for the British), they were treated contemptuously, exploited intensely, and their political demands were ignored. Such were the "legitimate grievances" that colonial writers paid patronising lip service to.

The longer term cause of the emergence of the Mau Mau was the rise of nationalism, particularly among Kikuyu women, since the 1920s. And this is such an important element of the story that early accounts tended to give it as little attention as possible. Women were central to the Mau Mau's non-combatant wing, the 'passive wing' as the British called it, and were thus a target of British policies and propaganda designed to wean them away from the movement. In fact, the colonial records tended to treat the women in the movement as either victims or prostitutes who had become intimate with Mau Mau members. They were either 'forced' into the movement through degrading rituals, or taken up as 'concubines'. And, in the course of Mau Mau resistance, the British made a great effort to portray women as the main victims of its (actual and alleged) atrocities, even though women constituted a small minority of those actually killed.

Aside from denying that crucial role of women in the insurgency, the British had to separate the Mau Mau from any claim on Kenyan nationalism, which would be potentially sympathetic. Instead, it had to be seen as an exclusively tribal movement, not only predominantly Kikuyu but in strict opposition to other tribal/ethnic groups in the country. (This happens an enduring issue in the historiography, with anti-Mau Mau intellectuals both inside and outside Kenya benefiting in part from a refulgence of imperialist sentiment in the 1980s and 1990s.) Leakey's account of the movement during the 1950s was the dominant one in colonial accounts of the period: the Mau Mau were tribalist and religious, not nationalist. Their "insane frenzy" and "fanatical discipline" could only be the manifestation of a cultish outfit, organised around leaders lusting for power (whereas the white settler elite and the colonial powers were apparently averse to their own enormous power). The Colonial Office held that the Mau Mau leaders not only wanted power, not only could not be animated by the real injustices of the colonial system, but were rejecting its benefits. Thus, the Mau Mau "seeks to lead the Africans of Kenya back to the bush and savagery, not forward into progress", according to a report to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In fact, as the historian Bruce Berman explains, this account of the Mau Mau as a fanatical cult was immediately taken up by the Western academia, particularly American anthropologists who inserted it into an account of "tribal revival movements" and "crisis cults" which had been developed to explain native American resistance to the white colonials.

Secrecy was a crucial component of the counterinsurgency, in part because it was decided that the less that left-wing anti-colonialists in Britain knew about what was going on, the better. What was known was therefore bound to lead to erroneous conclusions, even among the principled minority who were vocally hostile to colonialism. Of course, to the extent that this was successful, it enabled the British to subject people to processes of 'villagization' (concentration camps) and mass executions. Together with the hangings, the horrible conditions in the 'villages' for the duration of the war killed up to 100,000 Kenyans according to Caroline Elkins. British officials used a range of measures for controlling the imprisoned population, including sexual violence and physical punishment. Of course, it need hardly be added that the main victims of this widespread sexual violence were women, precisely the supposed objects of British paternal protection.

Well, today's counterinsurgency propaganda has as its goals the desire to separate the resistance from any claim on Iraqi nationalism, which would be potentially sympathetic. It has to bestialise the resistance by making it seems as if the minority of atrocities characterise the whole. It has to demonise it as inherently, and essentially, misogynistic, as well as a religious/tribal affair. And it has to deprive us of access to honest reporting on the situation, through various strategies of media management, including the odd ad hoc death penalty for those not embedded with the troops. To the extent that it is successful, it acculturates people to the grave atrocities that the occupiers see as necessary to maintain their rule and secure a pliant regime.

Labels: british empire, colonialism, concentration camps, kenya, kikuyu, mau mau, resistance

Afghanistan: suicide attacks increase; Taliban may enter the government. posted by Richard Seymour

Why do we know so little about the occupation of Afghanistan and the resistance to it? After all, we get regular detailed reviews of the security situation in Iraq, discussing reconstruction, attacks, operations, public opinion, etc etc. All of this from the US Department of Defense, provided in ideological camouflage, sure, but still quite useful because the ruling class requires accurate information. Nothing of the kind, so far as I can tell, about Afghanistan. I have seen detailed studies of provinces from the Senlis Council [pdf]. Every now and again an NGO discusses human rights abuses, insurgent violence, reconstruction problems. The UN provides us with breathless accounts of (ho ho) 'Peace Day' [pdf]. But there is no detailed, authoritative study of the kind we get about Iraq - none that is made public at any rate.

Well, there are two recent studies, one by the UN and one by the Associated Press, reported here and here. The UN estimates in the Secretary-General's report that suicide attacks in Afghanistan have increased by 30% in the last year, and states that 75% are directed at occupying forces and Afghan security forces. Recently it was suggested by the UN, quoting a Taliban commander, that over half of the suicide attacks are international combatants rather than people from Afghanistan. However, this seems to conflict with a study carried out by the same body which showed that suicide attackers are Afghans "motivated by a variety of grievances such as foreign occupation, anger over civilian casualties and humiliation rather than a 'martyrdom culture'". This confirms what General Dannatt said about the resistance as a whole. The UN explains that they are "duped" into carrying out the attacks, or coerced, but they know perfectly well that it is never that simple. On the other hand, though most of the focus on violent deaths is on that caused by the insurgents, most of the deaths appear to be caused by the occupiers. Associated Press estimates that the total deaths from all violence in Afghanistan in the last 9 months is approximately 5,100, most of them "militants" killed by the occupiers. That's almost certainly a vast underestimate of the actual deaths, and there's always the problem of the 'mere haji rule'. (Anyway, since when were AP in the business of doing body counts?).

Curiously, the US is signalling a possible rapprochement with the Taliban, cautiously endorsing Hamid Karzai's plans for a meeting with Mullah Omar. Hold on a minute. Go back over that a minute. Mullah Omar? Isn't he evil? Didn't America have to invade in order to get the evil-doer? Apparently, the empire is all-forgiving. Karzai has said he will offer Taliban leaders posts in exchange for giving up violence, and he has for a long time supported the idea of including the Taliban in the government. The Taliban are for the first time seriously considering his offer. This isn't because by bringing the Talibs into the government they can stop the war: the root cause of the war is not the Taliban. The Taliban is a heavily armed force that taps into popular discontent rather than a popular movement itself, and the puppet regime has always felt it's better to have such a force inside the tent pissing out. With the Taliban on the side of the government, they could help enforce the crackdown on small farmers by the ruling elite of landowners and rentiers rather than arming the small farmers as they presently do.

Labels: afghanistan, karzai, resistance, taliban, US imperialism

Guérin posted by Richard Seymour

The library is an erotic sort of place anyway, or at least it is to me, but imagine encountering Daniel Guérin for the first time in such a place. Of course, I've read Fascism and Big Business (excerpts here) in a non-commital sort of way, but I didn't know much about the author. About Guérin's life, you can read extensively elsewhere (he has a brief entry in Paul Avrich's Anarchist Voices). About his politics, you can discover some concise summaries online, as well as his own lengthy exposition. I only wanted to say what I like about him. I suppose you would expect me to admire his anti-colonialism, his outrage about American racism, his tireless combat against fascism (about which he theorised brilliantly), his anti-Zionism, his sympathy with Trotskyism and so on, especially since he held these views when both the reformist and Stalinist left in France had pathetic records on colonialism, fascism and Zionism (the less said about their approach to Trotskyism, the better). Well, yes. And there is the small matter of him being a sort of pioneer of gay liberation. But it was the Front Ouvrier International, and the Appeal to the German Proletariat Against the War, that left an indelible impression on my otherwise impassive kisser (as you know, I am one of those strong, silent types that Hemingway so admired). The attempt, that is, to revive the Zimmerwald Left in theory and practise during the darkest years of the Twentieth Century, in the most unpromising circumstances. That was bold, in a sense of the word that has been lost to an age pundits who are persuaded that a slight inflection in a Brown speech on Darfur can so be characterised. That was revolutionary.

You can read the appeal here, and for what it's worth, Google has a decent translation. Here he differed from those Trotskyists (including Trotsky) who advocated a Proletarian Military Policy which tried to turn an imperialist war into a revolutionary one, the Stalinists who offered a 'grand alliance' with bourgeois imperialism (after the tremendous success of the grand carve-up with Hitler), and the reformist left, which subordinated its anti-fascism to straightforward patriotic defense. I am not completely convinced that Guérin's position was the right one, but it's important to stress that it wasn't simple pacifism, or Beautiful Soul purity. He himself worked, after being freed from a Nazi internment camp, for the Comité d'Organisation du Livre, which regulated the publishing business in occupied France. His own Fascism and Big Business was one of the books on his 'banned' list. The opposition to the war was a revolutionary one, based on a rigorous marxist analysis of fascism. Guerin had himself spent some time in Germany before and during the Nazi years (see Dave Renton's review of The Brown Plague). As he wrote in 1945:

[T]he fascist regime, despite its “totalitarian” pretensions is not homogeneous. It never succeeded in dissolving into one single alloy the different elements of which it was composed. Its different wheels did not function without friction. Despite Hitler’s attempts for several years to find a compromise formula between the party and the army, the Wehrmacht on the one hand, and the Gestapo and the SS on the other, continued their cat and dog fight. Behind this conflict is a class question. The fascist regime, despite appearances, appearances that it delighted in maintaining, never domesticated the bourgeoisie.

The regime, despite appearances, was extremely fragile, and its unstable class formation was itself one of the reasons why war was pursued. It was also in part, as both Adam Tooze and Paul Hehn argue from different perspectives, a result of frenetic competition with the United States of America: as a model of development, and in terms of inter-capitalist competition over markets, particularly in Eastern Europe. Like most other revolutionaries, Guérin saw the war for what it was - not 'democracy versus fascism', but an imperialist conflict. So, while resisting the Nazi occupation, he and his confederates would not ally with De Gaulle as Maurice Thorez did. They sought to fraternise with German soldiers and encourage their revolutionary opposition to the war, to prise open the fissures in the regime and force its earliest possible downfall. We know that Hitler was funding his war in large part from extensive 'borrowing' from the German workers, which transaction - however coercive - relied on a certain amount of acquiescence. So it is by no means implausible that an upsurge in military and civil disobedience would have hastened the Nazi regime's implosion, and also hastened the end of the genocidal component of Drang nach Osten. But to think and act in such terms when the left has mostly sought to rely on the strength of the imperialist powers to defeat Hitler and Mussolini? When there were few visible signs that organised dissent was even possible within the Nazi war machine?

Such historical optimism seems insanely out of place, especially in light of the popularity of a version of Arendt's account of 'totalitarianism' in which social classes are liquidated, in which the individual is reduced to a fragment of the 'totalitarian' machinery and likes it, in which there is no match for the policeman inside the head of every 'totalitarian' subject. In light of accounts that accentuate the shadow of catastrophe under which we labour, alleged impulses to evil in the human make-up, the psychological appeal of mass violence - all of which would militate against the idea of socialist internationalism - the idea of a revolutionary struggle against both the war and fascism at that time seems impossible. But Guérin knew what we have been encouraged to forget: that the Nazis could not have succeeded without the timidity, confusion and pessimism of the Left. Had it understood the capitalist state, it would not have been disoriented by the failure of reformism; had it understood fully the threat of fascism, it would not have subordinated the struggle against it to sectarian rivalries or (as the German SPD did) passively sit out its coming to power, pursuing only legalist parliamentary opposition until liquidation; had it understood the rapid degeneration of the Russian bureaucracy, it would not have engaged in the criminal stupidity of 'third period' politics (or been surprised at the de-radicalising role of the Stalinists after the war); had it understood the significance of the Spanish Civil War, it would not have allowed the struggle to be subordinated to Stalin's foreign policy priorities; and so on (one really could go on).

It was through Guérin's analysis of fascism and the reasons for its success that he was able to look beyond the immediately self-evident, renounce the reigning pessimism, and try to subvert a war that killed 50 million people, and yet is still remembered as a 'good war'.

Labels: anarchism, anti-fascism, daniel guérin, leninism, marxism, resistance, trotskyism

Who are the insurgents in Afghanistan? posted by Richard Seymour

The one-word answer supplied in most news reports to this question is, of course, "Taliban". It would be astonishing if this was all there was to it, so occasionally we get the admission that it includes other elements. For example, a UNAMA spokesperson says:

"The Taliban are not the only component of Afghanistan's insurgency. There is factional fighting in parts of the country, insecurity caused by drug traffickers and those fighting because they have been intimidated or paid to do so ... They all form important elements of this insurgency.

There is, of course, a way to put this that saves the basic underlying claim that anyone resisting the occupiers, in military or other ways, must have obscure and disreputable motives. The occupiers are innocent, everyone else is guilty until proven innocent. USA Today put it thus last year: "The insurgency is a loose alliance of Taliban guerrillas, followers of former prime minister and fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Qaeda terrorists recruited from across the Islamic world, opium traffickers and local fighters whose murky motives are rooted in tribal politics." Pro-occupation think-tanks like the Senlis Council and the International Crisis Group advise the occupiers to meet the grievances of the local population, who can thus be won away from supporting the insurgency. The Senlis Council's report, focusing on Helmand, Kandahar and Nangarhar, describes a number of reasons why local populations are increasingly turning toward support for the insurgency, and thus putting local politicians under pressure to support it as well, and the main one is Dyncorp's destruction of the opium farms of the poor (those belonging to the wealthy warlords are left well alone). Senlis has advocated legalising opium production for medicinal purposes There is a misperception that opium production is especially controlled by the Taliban. It is true that the biggest increase in product lately has been in Helmand - taking it to almost 70,000 hectares. But across the country, according to the UNODC, total production last year was 165,000 hectares. In those areas controlled by US-allied warlords, and for Afghanistan's wealthy landlords more generally, opium production is a vital component of their continued control. Various commentators have suggested legalising opium production rather than destroying livelihoods, but this sort of misses the point: keeping it illegal makes it an excellent source of funds for covert action, and right now it is providing America's allies in Afghanistan with enormous leverage over the country. In other words, the current war to secure a successful client regime relies on extirpating production that could generate revenue for the opposition, while leaving the resources of the ruling elite well alone. Indeed, billions of US dollars have been ploughed through the channels of a patrimonial state into the hands of the pro-American rentier elite. The "war on drugs" is what it has always been: a free-form, wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign; meanwhile, the insurgency has, as a result of this, an element of class warfare, since what is now fuelling it, in part, is the misery of poor farmers being deprived of their means of livelihood, with massive starvation and misery, while the rich prosper.

So, then, perhaps we should also ask a question about who exactly the Taliban are. For, although we assume we know, Najib Manalai, an Afghan government adviser, insists that the Taliban are a very different kind of movement today:

the Taliban are no longer a single group, one single entity. The Taliban, at first, were students -- Afghan students who traditionally wanted to study theology. In the beginning, they were a group of Afghans who had very good intentions after five years of anarchy in Afghanistan -- they just wanted to bring peace to Afghanistan. They were very popular. Then this movement was somehow hijacked by Pakistani intelligence services and by international terrorist groups. Now when we talk about the Taliban, we are talking about a kind of amalgam of different forces, such as people who are unhappy about government forces because they can't find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies; people who are committed to other interests -- foreign interests, mainly from the Pakistani circle; and there are people with the fundamentalist ideology of the international Islamic movements. "The Taliban" is a composite of these components.

There is a great deal of euphemism in that. Afghanistan's current polity is a sectarian one, which largely excludes Pashtuns (Karzai is in this respect a useful token). Recall that the initial success against the Taliban involved the ethnic cleansing of some 50,000 Pashtuns. But this sectarian dynamic is in part a result of the failure of the US to win Pashtun allies prior to the war beginning. They had tried with Abdul Haq, the anti-Taliban 'moderate' who had broken with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb e-Islami before fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under the CIA-funded Yunus Khalis. But he wouldn't follow orders and publicly criticised the bombing of the country. It was his aim to mobilise a domestic insurgency independently of the CIA and the ISI. One or the other of these two agencies leaked his plans to the Taliban during the bombing and ensured his death. At any rate, the US was only interested in pro-American Pashtun leaders, and could find precious few. As such they had to rely on the Northern Alliance with whom they started making a secret alliance in 1999. So, those who "can't find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies" are those who are being specifically excluded. The predominantly Pashtun Taliban regime was in fact more representative of the different ethnic groups than the current one. Aside from the various groups in the south, there is a growing insurgency in the north-west of the country, due to conflict with the warlords in government such as Ismail Khan, and the ridiculously brutal spate of Nato bombardment (apparently these recent massacres are the result of a deliberate policy shift).

Aside from the growing armed insurgency, there is of course an unarmed political opposition developing. The Taliban era was a desperate one, but this regime is hardly more progressive. Aside from the fairly serious matter of occupying troops rampaging through cities, airplanes lobbing bombs at villages, secret prisons, torture cells, kidnappings and so on, there is the small problem that the state built and the groups empowered by the occupiers are client despots. They murder and torture their enemies with impunity, and their police chiefs rape and extort. They steal taxes, bulldoze houses, steal land. Northern Alliance rulers kidnap people and ransom them back to their families with the pretense that they were Taliban arrestees. There is nothing the attorney general likes more than to lock up media workers who displease him. Critics like Malalai Joya are unwelcome (she has recently been suspended for the remainder of her term). The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice continues to operate. Reports last year that it would 'return' after a resolution passed by Karzai's cabinet last year were misleading: the department, although now synonymous with Taliban terror, had actually originated under the US-recognised Rabbani regime, and continued under Karzai's regime in various forms. The Vice and Virtue squads continued to operate in Kabul, warlords like Ismail Khan imposed the old regime, and Karzai's 'Accountability Department' took over many of the roles of the department. In this respect, it is worth noting that, as NGO workers Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie point out in their widely praised Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace, that the Taliban have been demonised out of all proportion. This isn't simply an artefact of war propaganda, but in part a result of NGO misconceptions. Their repression, as brutal as it was, should not have been understood as simply an emanation of their own peculiar, reactionary ideology. It was rooted in the common social practises of the most conservative elements of society in Afghanistan, which fused with the conditions of war, and then civil war, to produce a militant war on 'sin' and 'vice' (with well-known, and savage punishments such as stonings and amputations). If you go back and have a look at the scholarly studies of Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban, this is a frequent theme raised by the regime in justification for some of its worst policies (excluding girls from education for example). Nasreen Ghufran noted in Asian Survey in May 2001 that the regime's claim was that it needed time to develop the correct environment for girls and women to be educated and work: it saw its model, ironically, as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nevertheless, women's struggles were able to exert some effects. As Jeanette O'Malley wrote in 2000: "In early June, supreme leader Mullah Omar issued an edict allowing for the expansion of mosque schools for young boys and girls. The mosque schools are apparently little more than a substitute acceptable to clerics and hard-line officials for state-run schools, as they offer the same curriculum." NGO groups who worked in Afghanistan were able to set up schooling for girls by simply telling local Taliban officials that it was a mosque. The point is that the assumption that hardline religious and social conservatism was something that could be pinned exclusively on the Taliban has been at best a misguided one. Today, of course, the imposition of the burqa is still enforced even if not by edict. Women must now struggle against empowered warlords, who are given to raping women (and children) they like the look of. A recent study found that most women in Afghanistan suffer mental and physical abuse. So-called 'honour killings' continue, as do slavery and stonings.

Now, whatever the prevailing barbarism in Afghanistan, the insurgency doesn't command significant support anywhere beyond the southern provinces at the moment. If the only dynamic involved here were the insurgency, which is widely understood as a Taliban affair and whose tactics are becoming increasingly brutal, then this state of affairs would remain permanent. However, it is not. The attempt by the United States to impose and maintain a pro-US regime is developing several oppositional currents. Its barbaric air campaign is galvanising communities of resistance in surprising places, while also driving people into the arms of the Talibs and their allies. This is why British military leaders are worried that they may lose Afghanistan. They couldn't possibly lose militarily to a rag-tag collection of militants: it is the political nature of the war they are fighting, the fact that is for US domination, that is producing this resistance, and that will ensure - if we don't force our governments to end the occupation - that a prolonged and vicious war is afoot. This may also take the form of a civil war at some point. Unfortunately, the resources for a left or even secular nationalist movement in Afghanistan are extremely limited. Military resistance to the this brutal occupation is obviously legitimate, and no occupation force has a right to complain if it is tormented by its enemies ("awe, shucks, the insurgents are holding up all our good work"). However, if there is hope for Afghanistan it lies in a broader, more grassroots and less fissiparous movement than the austere and brutal Talibs or Hekmatyarists could ever deliver. How much chance is there of that happening? After almost thirty years of devastating war in which the most reactionary elements have been promoted and defended by imperial interlopers, in which rival imperial powers have tortured the people of Afghanistan for decades, it is easy to be pessimistic. After all, neither the CIA or the ISI will ever leave Afghanistan alone, and even if they did it would be a long struggle to unite a sufficient coalition of women and the poor to displace the conservative elites. A great deal depends on external factors such as what happens to the US in Iraq, whether we can force our states to withdraw their troops, whether Musharraf survives in Pakistan and who replaces him, etc. But, the more the insurgency becomes an armed movement of the poor, the more political independence they will have to develop, and the greater chance they will have to confront the landlord class. And groups like RAWA and fiercely independent figures like Malalai Joya are still fighting.

Labels: afghanistan, occupation, resistance, taliban, US imperialism

Have you heard about Johannesburg? posted by Richard Seymour

One of the most depressing political spectacles of the 1990s was the sight of a great political victory against apartheid in South Africa turn into a victory for neoliberalism. This is papered over in official memory with the canonisation of Nelson Mandela, whose immense aura then blots out the subsequent disappointments and degeneration of ANC rule (richly symbolic was Mandela bestowing a medal on Suharto of Indonesia precisely at the moment when student and worker revolts were beginning to topple his rule). This was an annoying fact about the ending to the otherwise excellent film, Catch a Fire, written by Joe Slovo's daughter. It is a realistic, hard-headed and rousing film about the South African working class and its resistance, about the ANC and its "terrorist" tactics, and about the barbarity of the security services. And yet it concludes with some drivel about 'our father', Nelson Mandela, equipped with a sun-beating halo, teaching everyone 'forgiveness'. Forgiveness in fact meant allowing most of the economic bases of apartheid to continue within a democratic state. Aside from some modest and mismanaged land reforms modeled on the lines of those undertaken in Zimbabwe since the 1980s, there have been repeated, failed, structural adjustment programs. It has been excellent for multinationals, but . The trade unions have repeatedly threatened anti-privatisation strikes, but usually little has been done. The relationship between the union leaders and the government has been close. In 2002, COSATU withdrew from some strikes because of pressure from the ANC.

So this is a first. For the last five days, we have had the biggest strikes in South Africa since the end of apartheid, and a huge crisis for the ANC has ensued. The public sector workers now on strike look like they may soon be accompanied by the miners, who have enormous clout. It is reported that police have fired on striking nurses, and used stun grenades to break up picket lines. Mbeki insists his government will not meet union demands. But if there is a risk of the gold and platinum mines being shut down for a long period of time, the pressure will be on from international capital to sort the crisis out. Mineworkers are among the most exploited and abused workers in South Africa. Almost a third of them suffer from work-related diseases, and huge numbers of workers are wounded due to company negligence. Anglo Platinum, 70% owned by Anglo American, is also currently locked in a struggle with South Africans whose communities are being destroyed by its mining policies. So, this has the potential to enmesh the ANC government in a crisis much larger than it even looks at the moment. At any rate, it is the first time that the leaders of South Africa's mass unions have taken on the ANC since they formed the government.

Labels: neoliberalism, resistance, south africa, strike, working class