Four days after his confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama’s new Secretary of War Ashton Carter traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan, and “opened up the possibility of slowing the withdrawal of the last American troops in the country to help keep the Taliban at bay” (New York Times, 2/22/15). His speech was yet another signal that the U.S. capitalist class is accelerating toward the next round of slaughter over oil and gas in Afghanistan and Iraq. The bosses’ urgency to defend ExxonMobil’s profits in Central Asia points to a sharpening rivalry with the capitalists of Russia and China, who are vying to control the same region. A new infusion of ground troops seems inevitable. Once again, the U.S. rulers will send workers to do the fighting and dying—especially immigrant youth who have few other options in an economy with permanent, massive unemployment.
Nearly a century ago, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Vladimir Lenin analyzed the bloodbath of World War I as the unavoidable outcome of capitalist competition over resources. The Russian communists organized workers and soldiers and ended World War I with revolution; Chinese communists did the same in World War II. Today, as inter-imperialist rivalry intensifies, Progressive Labor Party is organizing the working class in 27 countries to turn the next global conflict over profits into a war for revolution, to smash racism and imperialism and to abolish the entire capitalist system with communism!
Bosses Ratchet Up War Plans
U.S. rulers knew what they were getting in Carter, a seasoned military hard-liner who pushed for a preemptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear capability as far back as 1994, during the Bill Clinton administration, even as he noted it could lead to war and a “horrific” loss of life (Politico, 12/2/14). In his recent nomination hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he advocated lethal military aid to Ukraine against Russia’s proxy separatists, a military solution for a “lasting defeat” of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the indefinite maintenance of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, and the recognition of Iran as a mortal threat to U.S. interests.
Carter’s Kabul speech borrows almost word-for-word from a new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan think tank closely tied to ExxonMobil, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Council on Foreign Relations—the heart of the dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. “Transition in Afghanistan: Losing the Forgotten War?” rejects Obama’s previous withdrawal timeline and calls for keeping as many soldiers in Afghanistan for as long as they are needed. Written by Anthony Cordesman, one of the leading ruling-class analysts on the intersection of military and energy policy, it warns:
The allocation of only some 11,000 US troops at the beginning of 2015, cutting that number in half by the end of 2015, and then removing all... by the end of 2016 – except for a small office of military cooperation – presents serious risks, and should – at a minimum – be cut on a conditions-based level rather than to a fixed schedule.
The latest escalation in Afghanistan also reflects the U.S. bosses’ aim to weaken Chinese and Iranian influence in the region. The Asian Development Bank, the prime sponsor of the long-stalled Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, is controlled by Japan, the U.S. and the European Union. The Diplomat, a Japanese policy magazine affiliated with the CSIS, voiced concern that the TAPI delay has already strengthened Chinese influence at U.S. expense in Turkmenistan, and risks pushing Pakistan further into the orbit of Russia and Iran:
China has turned Turkmenistan into something approaching a client state, with Ashgabat planning on transiting 65 billion cubic meters [of gas] to Beijing by 2020.. ..TAPI would create a viable alternative to the proposed Iran-Pakistan pipeline... [and] Pakistan can find a way to meet some of its energy needs without providing Tehran with an economic windfall (The Diplomat, 11/20/14).
Both Pakistan and Turkmenistan are vital to U.S. imperialist control of Central Asia, which the capitalists see as the center of the world’s “grand chessboard” — a game where workers are pawns to be sacrificed as needed. Of late, the U.S. has been losing ground. Turkmenistan’s regime has rebuffed demands by ExxonMobil and Chevron for exploration and property rights in TAPI gas fields. Pakistan has been under threat of U.S. sanctions since 2010 for partnering with Iran on a rival pipeline, already under construction. U.S. rulers need a stronger troop presence in Afghanistan to give them more leverage to protect their profit interests in the region.
Mosul: Flashpoint of the Next Oil War
As Ashton Carter beat the war drums in Afghanistan, the Pentagon announced plans for a near-term U.S.-led invasion to retake the northern Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State — an attack by big terrorists against smaller ones. Top U.S. military brass are weighing whether they “will need to deploy teams of American ground forces to...advise Iraqi troops on the battlefield” (NYT, 2/22/15).
Accordingly, the Brookings Institution, bankrolled by the same capitalists as the CSIS, claims there is growing U.S. popular support for war against ISIS. In “The American People to Its Leaders: Ground Troops Against ISIS and a Stronger National Defense” (2/20/15), it reported:
According to today’s CBS Poll, the American people...favor the use of American ground forces to combat ISIS. As recently as last September, only 39% favored that course, while 55% were opposed. Today, 57% favor ground forces; only 39% remain opposed….. Last fall, fully 64% of the people already believed that ground troops would be necessary...ISIS’s horrible torture and execution of innocent civilians...has increased Americans’ sense of urgency about confronting this threat.
The bosses’ hope is that these poll numbers will translate into a surge of working-class youth enlistment in the U.S. military in order to fortify the “ground forces,” a euphemism for cannon fodder. U.S. rulers cannot afford to cede Mosul to a small-time capitalist gang like ISIS, which is using the city as a base to attack Exxon’s operations in northern Iraq and, by extension, the broader U.S. strategy to enlist Turkey as an ally in a possible World War III. “ISIS militants have attacked Peshmerga [Kurdish/ northern Iraqi] forces... north of Mosul, with the aim of seizing equipment and machinery belonging to U.S. oil company ExxonMobil. Peshmerga forces have been guarding Exxon’s equipment since the company pulled its team from the area in June” (Iraq Business News, 2/12/15). The prize, for both ISIS and the U.S. and its corrupt Iraqi partners, is the area with the richest source of oil profits in Iraq.
The Only Solution is Communist Revolution
The working class across the Middle East and Central Asia has a proud history of fighting back for workers’ power, a history the world’s capitalist bosses would like to bury. After the Russian revolution of 1917, Turkmenistan, a Soviet Republic, immediately outlawed racism and declared women and men equal, with universal education and healthcare. Iraq’s Communist Party, which at its height united one million Sunni and Shia, organized the country’s railroads, oil industry, and dockworkers while leading massive strikes and uprisings during the 1940s. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, masses of workers backed the socialist PDPA government when it came under siege by U.S.-backed mujahideen terrorists, the forerunners of ISIS. But the weaknesses of the old communist movement — including nationalism and the preservation of wages and inequality — led to its own defeat.
The road to communist revolution is to organize anti-racist battles, using CHALLENGE to share news and analysis of workers’ struggles around the world, and ultimately to build our own mass Red Army and liberate our class. We need a movement of millions of working class leaders. Join us!
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Bosses Foment Racism
The troops needed by the U.S. ruling class come from working class youth. The capitalist class is working overtime to build nationalism to support their future wars by enticing immigrants and undocumented workers into joining the military. At the same time, they are escalating anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism. The executions of three students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is a call for workers to unite in solidarity with their Muslim working class sisters and brothers.
PLP calls on every club and every CHALLENGE reader to organize demonstrations, job and campus actions against the racist Chapel Hill massacre and to help build our international movement. Send letters and articles to CHALLENGE, describing what you have done and how you and your collective plan to build for May Day.
