Outlook Reactionary opponents of US imperialism: Bin Laden and colleagues in 1998 do not need one to operate fighters but as a means of reinforcine the most reliable Ibrahim Naggar, one of the conservatives defendants in the trial that Afghanistan. brought Al-Zawahri's death In fact, the main leaders of said that Bin the Afghan struggle, like the recently assassinated Sheikh attacks on the Egyptian gov- Massoud, the hero of the ernment, calling on the ter- Panjir valley and generally acknowledged to be the most U.S. and Isracli interests, and effective of the military commanders, were calling for focusing their propaganda on military per- pushed from power by the Taliban with the aid of forces These groups appear thus linked to Bin Laden. to be narrow circles totally The Taliban was created by innocent of any orientation the Pakistani special forces with the assent, and perhaps opposed to imperialism in even the blessing he decisive countries of the United States.
appeared only in 1994, five and more a social powder years after the Soviet withtrawal from In general, such Islamicist And Incy fundamentalist groups, no guards of Pakistani convoys.
After the Taliban captured Violin Te sent little threat to imperial- ie capital, Kabul, in 199€ ism's basic interests in the the ashington Post wrot can even manipulated by the imperial- opportunity" seen in years "to put an end to the anarchy long term, they that has beset Afghanistan have been more of an asset the Soviet invasion in than a liability for imperialThe same paper noted, with In the past, Islamicists were implicit approval, that the used to help bring down the governments Mossadesh in Iran in 1953 than anti-Western." and Sukharno in Indonesia Taliban victory was a defcat case, gangs for the Islamic government organized by Islamicist lead- in Tehran, which backed the ers massacred at least half-a- Mujahadin and still supports million poor peasants and the Communist against the Taliban. Party, with U.S. approval. The Afghan resistance to the note backce n fact, the state that largely local and fragmented, nas given by "aid and com- and divided among the difBin Ladin is ferent ethnic groups that live itself, which used him as an The guerrillas the Afghan civil united alternative to war. He played no political Soviet-backed regime. After This Afghan the Soviets withdrew and the involvement, beginning in regime fell, they splintered.
In those conditions, a relaThe U.S. government did tively small not use him simply as a conAfghan rom casily able to gain control of most of the country According Massoud, many local commanders were simply bought by Pakistani moncy based nationality, which straddles the border Afghanistan and Pakistan.
quickly Pakistan, which the enlisted in its "war on terrorism," is a state based Islam. It is the product of the The Taliban of using Islamicists against the Indian national libera. Afghanistan. And religious parties bave always been a fundamental prop of the successive reac tionary regimes that ruica tae country During the cold "the best Pakistan was the key ally the region. It was the Alliance, which was a threat aimed at the Soviet until it was shattered by the Iraqi revolution of 1957. fundamentalists Now, of course, many of the "more antimodernist lently anti-American. Washington However prey were a double deed were a double-edged sword. like most of the U.s allies in the neocolonial Counta In this way they are similar to the Salvadoran landlords, who could be relied on to organise murder gangs crush the rebellious peasants but refused to carry out the limited land reform United States had necessary to anay social ich sions. They also call to mind the ruthless military regimes of Latin America, whose atroci. embarrassed the Us disciplined government before its own people. foreign backers was The United States is now seeking new allies in the Middle East, from the surSheikh viving mujahadin in Afghanistan, to the Iranian government, Pakistani ( dictatorship. and the Hindu chauvinist gor. Pushtun ernment of India.
imperialists have always had to use reactionary allies in an attempt to mainwho tended at some point to become too discredited or HOW too hot to handle. stable, much less humane. world order can be bandy chances have inevitably ples of the colonial and neocolonial world and ultimately peoples of the developed have For example, 40,000 pcople killed the "war war. against terrorism" conducted of by the Argentine military the 1970s and central 1980s. CENTO The declaration of a "war on terrorafter attacks Washington New York promises slaughter. Hundreds of thou. sands of desperate people are already trying Afghanistan in anticipation of U.S. strikes. However, no matter how much the imperialists may be blinaca by taeir greca and they are hardly so stupid as to think that the small conspiratorial groups can be destroyed by HESSIC THAN ACHE considered Whatever military strikes the U.S. military and its allies make the real objective is to lay the political basis for repression throughout the world. And the whole history of such attemnts sugeests there will be attacks on the rights of citizens of developed countries as well. The Taliban, however, deceived both: they