Stop the Terror Bombing of Afghanistan

Stop the U.S. Terror Bombing of Afghanistan!

By STEVE ARGUE
Americans watched in horror as the World Trade Center collapsed. Yet it was a horror no different from what the U.S. government has done with it's bombing of civilian populations in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea. The U.S. bombings of just these countries, not to mention many other U.S. acts of war, murdered millions of civilians.
Terror against civilians is never justified.
Now the U.S. government is terror bombing the people of Afghanistan. Civilians are dieing. For those who think this will bring peace and security to America it is time to think again.
The continued U.S. bombing of Iraq over the past ten years coupled with a U.S. imposed starvation blockade has killed a million and a half Iraqi children. Has this made the American people safe from terrorism?
Today in Israel billions of U.S. tax dollars are used to prop up a racist system that relegates Palestinians to second-class citizenship. Our tax dollars are used to gun down Palestinian children, systematically murder Palestinian leaders, and to carry out terror bombing from the sky. This has not made the American or Jewish people safe from terrorism.
Today the clerical fascists of the Taliban rule Afghanistan. They were put in power by the U.S. and Pakistani governments with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid and CIA training.
The massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was in opposition to a revolutionary government that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women's rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write.
Religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen (of which the Taliban were a faction). With massive assistance from the CIA these fanatical cutthroats waged a war that included skinning women alive for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil.
At the invitation of the Afghani government Soviet troops moved in to try to stop the Mujahideen. Unfortunately the billions of dollars provided by the U.S. government succeeded in putting the Taliban in power.
The Taliban counter-revolution put women back under the veil and stripped women of the right to work, education, and movement in public without a male escort. Women have been stoned to death for adultery and other so-called crimes against Islam.
Whole villages with people of differing Islamic beliefs have been rounded up and murdered. Homosexuals are executed for being homosexual. Hindus are forced to wear insignia showing they are not Muslim. Foreign aid workers are being tried for spreading Christianity. Irreplaceable ancient art has been destroyed. The people suffer the lowest per capita caloric intake in the world.
Yet the United States has continued to support the Taliban. In the year 2001 alone, the Taliban has received more than $120 million in U.S. aid. This means, if indeed it was Osama bin Laden who destroyed the World Trade Center, that this was possibly done with U.S. tax dollars paying for the operation including flight training. In any event there is no question as to who put the Taliban in power. By proxy the U.S. government killed over 6,000 people in the September 11th attack.
Will the U.S. war being waged now against the Taliban and former CIA aid recipient Osama bin Laden set things straight? No. It is the people of Afghanistan who are suffering death and destruction from war. Any other government put in power by U.S. intervention will also not be on the side of the poor and oppressed, but will be on the side of U.S. corporate interests. In this case the international interests are oil and the arms industry.
War and destruction in Afghanistan will not mean fewer suicide bombers from that part of the world.
The interests of America's multi-racial working-class are separate from our government. Working people make no profits off of the war industry or the oil industry.
In fact the same wealthy elite who order war against people abroad through the Democrat and Republican Parties carry out lay-offs and strike breaking at home. It will be working class youth coming home in body bags and suffer the other ailments of war.

Warning to GI's and workers, A-10 Warthog Ammunition and DU Shields are Highly Radioactive.
A-10 Warthog ammunition is made from nuclear waste called Depleted Uranium (DU) and also contains other radioactive isotopes.
On impact DU has the pyrotechnic ability to burn through the steel of tanks and blow up the tanks occupants. As DU burns, according to the U.S. military's own studies, 70% is vaporized. This vapor then turns to radioactive dust that then settles into the soil, water, or lungs of anyone who breaths it in.
DU ammunition was used in the war against Iraq and in the wars against Yugoslavia (Kosovo and Bosnia). DU has also poisoned the Puerto Rican Island of Vieques where the U.S. military used it in testing.
A commission of the UN has called the military use of DU a weapon of mass destruction and called for banning its use.
Last year Italy pulled its troops out of Kosovo due to 8 cases of leukemia in their military which they attributed to the U.S. use of DU ammunition during the war.
The London Guardian has sent reporters to southern Iraq who found radiation levels 30 times normal background radiation in the battlefields of the Gulf War. On tanks destroyed by A-10 ammunition the radiation level was 50 times higher than normal.
300 tons of DU were shot into Iraq and Kuwait, 3 tons in Bosnia, 10 tons in Kosovo.
In both the Gulf War and in Yugoslavia the U.S. government did not inform U.S. soldiers of the deadly materials that they were being exposed to, nor did they supply them with the protective suits they needed. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in Iraq were exposed to high levels of radiation. These soldiers came home with the symptoms of radiation poisoning. Those sets of conditions became known as the Persian Gulf War Syndrome. The U.S. military brass knew what the soldiers had been exposed to but denied they knew anything.
Just as the U.S. government knowingly exposed U.S. soldiers and the Vietnamese people to the extremely toxic effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam they now knowingly expose U.S. soldiers, U.S. arms industry workers, Iraqis, Yugoslavians, Puerto Ricans, and most likely Afghanis to deadly radiation from DU.
The DU that has poisoned Iraq has contaminated their water and food. Hospital cancer wards are filled with children dying from childhood leukemia. According to the British Guardian the number of extreme birth defects in one town in southern Iraq are so high that nobody dares to try to have children. A similar situation is unfolding in Yugoslavia where Kosovo women have been warned not to have children for the next ten years, but for all practical purposes the radiation will never go away.
It is now known, through new federal studies reported on AP Feb. 3, 2001, that the DU used in combat for shields and for ammunition contain much more deadly isotopes than just uranium-238, which would be bad enough. These other isotopes include highly radioactive materials such as plutonium 239 which is 200,000 times more radioactive than uranium-238.
According to former government scientist and health physicist Dr. Donald Geesaman, plutonium, "…is carcinogenic to animals in microgram quantities (a millionth of an ounce). The…lung cancer risk…is unknown to orders of magnitude. Present plutonium standards are certainly irrelevant."
The use of such a weapon of mass destruction gives lie to any concern the U.S. government claims to have for the American people or the victims of U.S. wars in other countries. The terrorists who killed innocent civilians in the U.S. are cut from the same cloth as the better financed terrorists now bombing Afghanistan and Iraq (the U.S. military). In fact Osama bin Laden was trained and financed by the U.S. government, and like the U.S. government he sees targeting innocent civilians for death as acceptable.
Past experience has shown CNN to be an extremely unreliable source of information as they cheerlead U.S. bombing and give official Pentagon excuses for civilian casualties, if mentioning them at all. It is already well documented that hundreds of civilians have died in the bombing. We also know that the U.S. has used cluster bombs in Afghanistan which have no pinpoint accuracy and who's only purpose is to kill and maim. Add to this death from radiation for generations to come.
In addition the U.N. World Food Agency says 7.5 million Afghanis will starve to death this winter with an additional 2 million starving to death as a direct result of the bombing. On October 21st the UN suspended its Afghanistan food operations because of the dangers of bombing. The small amounts of food being dropped from U.S. bombers don't even begin to resolve the crisis, but are instead intended for the purpose of propaganda directed at the American people. Oxfam has called for a halt in the bombing on humanitarian grounds.
This is not a war against terrorism. It is a terrorist war.
This war will not make Americans safe either. So what is Bush Junior's goal?

It's About Oil and Gas!
The goal of the current war is building a pipeline through Afghanistan to exploit oil from nations of the former Soviet Republic. To do so the U.S. is attempting to install a stable regime in Afghanistan and has moved troops into oil rich Uzbekistan. The 1,000 troops in Uzbekistan are the beginnings of what the U.S. intends to be a permanent military presence for U.S. corporate control of their rich oil and gas reserves. These points were made clear by John J. Maresca, vice president of Unocal, when he explained the high stakes in Afghanistan in testimony before a House committee on Feb. 12, 1998. He stated:

"Today we would like to focus on issues concerning this region, its resources and U.S. policy: The need for multiple pipeline routes for Central Asian oil and gas. ... The Caspian region contains tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves, much of them located in the Caspian Sea basin itself. Proven natural gas reserves within Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan equal more than 236 trillion cubic feet. The region's total oil reserves may reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil - enough to service Europe's oil needs for 11 years. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels. ...
"[An] option is to build a pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. ... The only other possible route option is across Afghanistan, which has its own unique challenges. The country has
been involved in bitter warfare for almost two decades. The territory across which the pipeline would extend is controlled by the Taliban, an Islamic movement that is not recognized as a government by most other nations.
"From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of our proposed pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders and our
company. In spite of this, a route through Afghanistan appears to be the best option with the fewest technical obstacles. It is the shortest route to the sea and has relatively favorable terrain for a
pipeline. The route through Afghanistan is the one that would bring Central Asian oil closest to Asian markets and thus would be the cheapest in terms of transporting the oil.
"Unocal envisions the creation of a Central Asian Oil Pipeline Consortium. The pipeline would become an integral part of a regional oil pipeline system that will utilize and gather oil from existing
pipeline infrastructure in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. The 1,040-mile-long oil pipeline would begin near the town of Chardzhou, in northern Turkmenistan, and extend southeasterly through Afghanistan to an export terminal that would be constructed on the Pakistan coast on the Arabian Sea. Only about 440 miles of the pipeline would be in Afghanistan. This 42-inch-diameter pipeline will have a shipping capacity of one million barrels of oil per day. Estimated cost of the project -- which is similar in scope to the Trans Alaska Pipeline -- is about $2.5 billion."
Though these Central Asian pipelines have been put on hold for some time, on account of the instability in Afghanistan, it is evident Unocal is chomping at the bit to get this project off the ground, with U.S. troops on the ground if need be.
To them multi-billions in oil and gas revenues are at stake. For us the lives of our sons and daughters and the lives of millions of people are on the line.

Build the Anti-War Movement.
A mass anti-war movement is already building in the streets opposing the war-mongers of the Democrat and Republican Parties who voted, with only one dissenting vote, nearly unanimously for war. On September 29th 20,000 people marched against the war in Washington D. C. and 10,000 in San Francisco. Protests have occurred on college campuses across the country. The San Francisco Central Labor Council, the International Longshore and Warehouseman's Union Local 6 and other unions have taken positions against the war as well. These are good beginnings.
. Recent events should be one more verification of the fact that we should not be trying to appeal to the conscience of our rulers, because we should know they have none.
The main purpose of our events is to educate the public and build an ever larger movement against the war. In the future our movement has the potential to stop the war in three ways. (1) By educating the soldiers fighting the war to the point that they refuse to fight. (The Vietnam anti-war movement accomplished this goal.) (2) By educating the working class to the point where we refuse to build or move the munitions, or even shut down the economy in a general strike against the war. (3) Through socialist revolution, which may not be very far off if we accomplish any of the first two goals.

Defend Our Unions! Defend Social Security!
Also coming under attack is Social Security as the Bush Jr. administration uses this crisis to pilfer money from the Social Security Administration. Bush, get your bloody hands off our retirement money!
In addition, the crisis has been used as an argument by Minnesota Governor Ventura as to why 28,000 striking government workers should accept a lousy contract. These workers did not accept Ventura's argument that they should "bite the bullet" because of the war and won a better contract than Ventura's "final offer." The bosses and their politicians always want workers to suffer the consequences of their wars while they sit back in their mansions of luxury.
Now that Ventura wasn't able to force workers to "bite the bullet" he is saying he is going to use the strike and the war as an excuse to cut needed government programs and government jobs. On October 22 he went further in his attacks saying government workers should not have the right to strike.
It is a law of capitalist politics that the closer the American people feel aligned with this government the more the government feels it can take away from us.

Fight against Racism! Defend Civil Liberties!
As part of our movement we also must be vigilant in defending the civil liberties of political dissidents, people of color, and of the working class in general. The U.S. government is trying to use recent events to crack down on rights, but if we build the resistance in the long run we can do much to expand civil liberties. The Vietnam anti-war movement did a lot in this regard in terms of fighting for free speech and in creating spin off movements for women's rights, gay rights, and the environment, while also supporting anti-racist movements as well.
We should realize that it is murderous racism and national chauvinism that sees a difference between killing innocent Iraqis, Palestinians, and Afghanis and killing innocent Americans. That kind of hatred is also being directed against Mid-Eastern immigrants in the U.S.
People of Middle Eastern origin are coming under violent attack all across the nation. At one point 600 were known to be held by police agencies under investigation. As of Oct. 22 that number may be down to 150 according to the London Guardian. The FBI is now speaking publicly about their desire to torture these same suspects. In addition eye-witnesses saw one Arab-American beaten by FBI agents. There have been many beatings, shootings, and other incidents against Arabs and Sikhs by civilian racists as well.
We can not allow these violations of human rights or allow them to escalate as happened with the U.S. imprisonment of the Japanese during World War 2.

Oil Companies and arms suppliers are the only ones who stand to gain from this catastrophic human tragedy of death by bombing, cancer, and starvation, but we are not helpless in the face of the horrors being committed by our government. We can resist! We must resist!