The allegations that Russia paid cash bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with no response from the floundering U.S. government, is yet another sign of the decay of U.S. imperialism. Facing an out-of-control pandemic, a full-blown economic depression, and mass fightback against the racist kkkops, the U.S. ruling class is in crisis. Their institutions are in freefall. Their leadership—both Republican and Democrat—is incompetent and divided.
For the international working class and the revolutionary communist party that must lead it, the resulting chaos is both an opportunity and a danger. For the first time in many years, masses of workers are openly seeking alternatives to the bankrupt profit system. But we must also be aware that intensified state terror and inter-imperialist global war are heading our way.
Fascists big and small
After 18 years of fruitless U.S. combat in Central Asia and the Middle East, open racist President Donald Trump has pushed for a pullout from flashpoints like Afghanistan and Syria. Trump fronts for the isolationist Small Fascists, whose profits come mainly from U.S. energy and other domestic sources. Trump’s wing is fundamentally at odds with the imperialist finance capitalists, the liberal Big Fascists, who rely on dominance over cheap Middle Eastern oil. Both sides have become tired of “the forever war” in Afghanistan—a conflict, says the New York Times, the liberal bosses’ top mouthpiece, that “needs to be brought to an end” (7/7).
But we shouldn’t confuse the Big Fascists’ push for “peace” with any aversion to spilling workers’ blood. The liberal rulers want to conserve their military and political collateral for the superpower war to come. They see Trump’s failure to check rival Russia’s rise in the region as a dangerous strategic weakness. As U.S. finance capital fights to regain control in the upcoming elections and beyond, these splits within the ruling class will become only sharper and more violent.
As workers, we can have no illusions that the Big Fascists’ attacks on Trump will serve our class interests. These liberal capitalists represent the greatest danger to our class. They co-opt mass uprisings into voting and dead-end struggles for minor reforms as they build a patriotic boss-run movement for full-blown fascism and World War III.
For workers to escape this nightmare, our goal must be clear: communist revolution and the building of an egalitarian, worker-run society. The international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to organize the world’s masses, from Kabul to Moscow to Minneapolis, into an armed force of millions to crush this racist, sexist capitalist system forever.
Liberals pile on Trump in rush to war
The Big Fascists, represented mainly by Democratic Party stooges and sell-outs, wasted no time jumping on the bounty report to further discredit and discipline the rogue president. They recognize Trump for the deranged, self-serving clown that he is, completely unfit to manage the long-term interests of their U.S. empire.
Numerous past U.S. military leaders have joined the attack. John R. Allen, head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan under ex-President Barack Obama, a reliable Big Fascist front man, blasted Trump and Co. on the recent “peace” deal brokered between the arch-sexist, criminal Taliban and the battered and corrupt Afghan government:
From an administration that has… abandoned the Kurds in Syria and undercut the Palestinians, it’s hard to imagine an American strategic counterattack into Afghanistan when the Taliban inevitably violate the terms of this agreement….(Brookings, 3/5).
The Big Fascists are desperate to win back the presidency to try to “right the ship” of U.S. imperialism and prepare for war against Russia or China or both. Though they’ve yet to find the internal discipline required for the job, they’re seeking to restore some semblance of legitimacy to capitalist legal and economic institutions. Hence the liberals’ calls to address glaring racist and sexist inequalities in wealth, health, housing, jobs, and incarceration. They also realize that they need a more aggressive stance to keep their imperialist rivals from rolling over them.
Within days of the bounty scheme becoming public, prominent liberals like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded to be briefed by national intelligence officials while calling for renewed sanctions against Russia (NYT, 7/1). Joe Biden, the segregationist nitwit the Democrats plan to run against Trump, boasted that if he were elected, Russian President Vladimir Putin “would be confronted and we’ll impose serious costs on Russia” (MSN, 6/28).
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the premier Big Fascist think tank, chimed in on Twitter: “Russia is carrying out covert wars vs US troops in Afghanistan and our democracy here at home. A proportionate response would increase the costs to Russia of its military presence in Ukraine & Syria and, using sanctions & cyber, to challenge Putin at home” (6/27).
With the liberal world order and U.S. supremacy collapsing before their eyes, the Big Fascists will be forced to escalate their imperialist onslaughts—not out of strength, but out of weakness.
Russia’s covert imperialist game
A Russian covert intelligence attack against U.S. and British military forces in Afghanistan fits with Putin’s approach of “hybrid” warfare. With Russia’s military not up to the task of confronting U.S. or NATO forces head-on, its state capitalist bosses have sharpened their destabilization skills with cyberattacks, meddling in foreign elections, and arming proxy armies (RAND Corporation Report, 3/22/17).
As details of the alleged bounties surface, so too does evidence that Russia has been cultivating both the Taliban and the central Afghan government to engineer a quicker U.S. withdrawal (CNN, 7/1). A shrinking U.S. presence will leave a vacuum for the Russian bosses’ own imperialist designs on the region. After being forced out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s by the U.S.-backed mujahideen (the forerunners of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS), Russian imperialists are eager to restore their neighbor and greater Central Asia into their orbit for wider regional security, lucrative military contracts, and access to natural resource wealth (The Interpreter, 5/7).
Fight for communism!
When the contradictions of inter-imperialist rivalry eventually explode, all sets of national capitalist bosses will be eager to send countless workers to fight and die in their wars for profit. As communists, our revolutionary objective is to win millions of workers and students worldwide to join Progressive Labor Party. We must smash capitalism’s genocidal business as usual and fight for international workers’ power. We must link the struggles against racist police terror, devastating unemployment, and imperialist war into a unified revolutionary battle against this entire rotten system. PLP represents the mass working class, the one force that can wipe the profit system and all its misery from the face of the earth. Join us!