------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Nov. 1, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
BOMBS DESTROY AFGHAN CITIES: PENTAGON TERROR FORCES MASS EXODUS By Fred Goldstein Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the U.S. military is bringing massive destruction and devastation to the people of Afghanistan. Pentagon claims that it is not targeting civilians are of little solace to the hundreds of thousands of people whose cities, livelihoods and means of survival are being destroyed in the relentless bombing campaign, which has gone on now for 17 days. According to the Washington Post of Oct. 23, "Pentagon officials say more than 3,000 bombs have dropped on Afghanistan since Oct. 7." These bombs have rained down on all the major population centers of the country. All the talk about precision bombing of military targets in order to avoid "collateral damage" is just so much Pentagon smokescreen for a war that is being deliberately escalated to terrorize and disrupt the mass of the population. There are daily raids on the capital city of Kabul. The Pentagon just expressed its "regrets" that two 500-pound bombs dropped by a Navy F-14 Tomcat had landed in a residential area of the city on Oct. 20. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied that Navy F-18 planes had bombed a hospital in Herat the next day, even though a United Nations observer witnessed and confirmed the strike. These denials and regrets follow the same script as the statements made after the destruction of the village of Karam, the bombing of a Red Cross storage facility, the bombing of a UN mine-searching headquarters, a previous bombing of Kabul suburbs, and so on. NO ELECTRICITY, NO WATER, NO SHELTER But in addition to the bombing of civilians is the devastation being brought to the cities themselves. The Boston Globe of Oct. 24 carried a dispatch from Quetta, Pakistan, a border town just east of Afghanistan. Entitled "Airstrikes Forge a Ghost Town," the article describes the destruction: "When darkness falls, it is absolute; there's no electricity.... This city is not only a Taliban garrison- it is home to half a million people, or was before the air assault began. "The city's electrical grid was knocked out in airstrikes last week," continued the Globe. "That has essentially deprived the city of water, since the electrical pumps do not work. Some people on the outskirts of the town were trying to dig wells in their backyards." Haji Mussajan, a 60-year-old farmer, said he abandoned his orchard on the outskirts of Kandahar to seek shelter, bringing his daughter and infant granddaughter with him. " 'We left in fear of our lives,' he said. 'Every day and every night we hear the roaring and roaring of planes, we see the smoke, the fire.... Life there is totally ruined.'" Mohammed Nabi, 55, who left the city, told the Globe that Kandahar "has a deserted look... And of those who remain, everyone is talking only about how they can get away... Even if it is an accident, you are still dead." The Financial Times of London carried a story from the Pakistan border on Oct. 24 about the city of Herat. " 'There is no life left in Herat,' said a woman holding a four-year- old child in her arms. 'All the men are dying. No one can live there anymore,' she said. " 'Since Friday there has been no halt in the attacks,' said Muhammed Wali, a Herat shopkeeper now stranded with his wife and two children. 'The bombardment has been huge.'" The French press agency AFP carried a dispatch Oct. 24 from Quetta saying that, "At least 20 Afghan civilians, including nine children, were killed as they tried to flee a town under attack by U.S. warplanes, according to survivors who managed to escape to Pakistan. The refugees were on the outskirts of the southern Afghan town of Tirin Kot on Sunday when the tractor and trailer they were traveling on was struck by a bomb. Some of those who survived managed to cross the border today and have been hospitalized in Quetta." This is the planned and inevitable result of sending up to 100 bombing missions a day, augmented by cruise missiles, over this impoverished country already ravaged by 20 years of war. Any policy that calls for dropping 3,000 bombs in 17 days on or near the population center of a country can only be described as a policy of terror. HISTORY OF OPPRESSION BEFORE SEPT. 11 The horrific attacks on thousands of innocent civilians that took place in the United States on Sept. 11 are being matched many times over by the wholesale destruction of urban life in Afghanistan. Over a million people are being driven from shelter, their jobs, their sources of food and medicine. Hundreds of thousands are in grave peril. The people of the U.S. must understand that the Sept. 11 attacks, as horrible as they were, arose out of the long history of the oppression of the people in the Middle East and Central Asia by the forces of imperialism, in particular the U.S. government, the Pentagon and the multinational corporations. Washington has for decades supported the absolute rulers of the hereditary monarchy in Saudi Arabia, guardians of the profits of U.S. oil companies. The U.S. ruling class has backed the settler state of Israel in its 53-year occupation of Palestinian land, which has led to the killing and jailing of tens of thousands of Palestinians who are fighting against poverty and colonial domination. Washington killed 200,000 Iraqis in the Gulf War and has killed five times that many since then by the deadly sanctions. U.S. TOPPLED PROGRESSIVE AFGHAN REGIME Indeed, the suffering of the Afghani people is the doing of the U.S. government. The CIA beginning in 1979 led a 10-year war against a progressive socialist regime in Kabul that championed the rights of women, the workers and the peasants against the landlords. Threatened with counter-revolution supported from outside, this government asked for the assistance of Soviet troops. The USSR withdrew and the progressive regime in Kabul was finally destroyed after an $8-billion effort by international imperialism, in alliance with reactionary forces in the Middle East and Central Asia--the Saudi monarchy, the right-wing Islamic military regime in Pakistan, and many other counter-revolutionary forces, including the Taliban. Afghanistan was then subjected to more years of civil war as various counter-revolutionary elements fought to control the country. These are the forces that Washington is trying to fashion into a puppet regime in Kabul, if it can bring about the defeat of the Taliban. The reactionary clerical regime of the Taliban has cruelly suppressed women and all modern manifestations of society, but that is no excuse for the U.S. to destroy and take over the country. Washington is trying to destroy the state not in order to liberate anyone, but to establish its domination over the region and pave the way for greater exploitation by the transnational corporations. The anti-war movement in the U.S. has a duty to fight to end the suffering of the Afghani people at the hands of the terror bombing campaign. It must fight to get the U.S. military out of Central Asia and the Middle East and keep it from backing oppressive governments in the area. The people of the region must be free to settle their affairs without imperialist intervention. Otherwise, this struggle that is already decades old will never end. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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