Afghans have taken to the streets in recent protests with posters depicting Karzai as a U.S. puppet, showing mutilated women and dead bodies. They burned an effigy of Obama and shouted their anger at the corrupt government, the violence against women and night raids by U.S. troops, and demanded U.S. withdrawal.

In ten years of U.S. occupation, thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed in the fighting between the Taliban insurgents and U.S/NATO troops and in night raids and helicopter attacks by the occupying forces. 

Now the Afghan government and the United States have finalized a strategic partnership extending the U.S. presence until 2024. Under the agreement, to be signed by Karzai and Obama and ratified by the Afghan parliament and the U.S. Congress, the U.S. military will cede final authority on night raids (but not drone attacks) to Afghan security forces, and control of Afghanistan’s prisons to Afghan authorities. It pledges $4 billion a year for the Afghan police and army, with the bulk coming from the U.S. until 2014.

U.S. Forces Will Stay

Many Afghans reacted with skepticism to Afghan National Security Adviser Rangin Dadfar Spanta’s remark that, “ the document provides a strong foundation for the security of Afghanistan, the region and the world,” since it allows an unstated number of U.S forces to stay in Afghanistan for 12 years, and ignores the long-term U.S. access to its 30+ military bases. Afghans know this military presence will continue the fighting and killing, with the U.S effectively using Afghanistan to maintain a permanent military presence in the region. 

U. S. Ambassador Crocker said it cements a long-term strategic partnership between “two equal and sovereign states.” Afghans know this means the U.S will continue to prop up a government of thieves, warlords, drug dealers and war profiteers who run the country, continuing the misery and horror of daily life. 

Taliban Jockies for Position

Meanwhile the Taliban — who withdrew from talks with the U.S. and Karzai governments after a U.S. Marine massacre of 27 Afghans last month — is also maneuvering for a position in the country’s affairs. 

Violence moved to a new level when 35-40 suicide bombers launched coordinated attacks in Kabul and other cities on government buildings, Western embassies and NATO headquarters. The Taliban labeled the assault retaliation for U.S. military actions, the recent burning of Korans and the slaughter of 27 Afghan civilians. 

The U.S. ambassador said, “...these attackers [are] part of the Haqqani network; they enjoy safe haven in northern Waziristan” (an area of western Pakistan bordering Afghanistan). Afghans suspected that the U.S. motive in singling out the Haqqanis is a tactic in a political game to advance U.S. demands in its on-again, off-again negotiations with the Taliban and the Karzai government. The Haqqani network is one of eight anti-government, anti-U.S. groups, each with distinct goals, territorial and economic interests that comprise the Taliban movement. 

Richard Haass of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations outlined the strategy: make separate deals with different Taliban factions, carving Afghanistan into a “patchwork quilt” of territories overseen by various warlords and Taliban leaders. This would pacify areas protecting the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghan-Pakistan-India) pipeline which U.S. trans-nationals are planning and would safeguard permanent U.S. military bases. The Haqqanis have been included in the two-year talks with Taliban leaders. Hillary Clinton met with them in 2011.

Afghans, however, see no difference between the Taliban factions; they view all as terrorists. Neither do they trust U.S. rulers. They accuse them of using the insurgency to push the Strategic Partnership Agreement and continue the occupation. In addition, the targeting of the Haqqanis justifies more deadly drone attacks on Haqqanis bases in Pakistan, further destabilizing that country. 

Best Friends

Once a White House guest, Jalaluddin Haqqani, was a mujahideen commander in the U.S proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s. This previously unknown Afghan, along with other warlords, was on the CIA payroll, receiving millions of dollars and weapons, through Pakistan’s ISI (security service).

When the Taliban seized power in 1996, Haqqani became a government minister. After the 2001 U.S. invasion, he refused a position in the Karzai government, returning to Pakistan to expand his network. Today his son runs the network’s various business interests and funds a militia that rules by fear and violence in the territories it controls.

Contradictions between the Afghan working class and the fundamentalist warlords, drug dealers and war profiteers, both Afghan and foreign, who are now jockeying to maintain their position after 2014, are deepening at an alarming rate. Its present in downtown Kabul, where thousands displaced by the fighting and land-grabbing live in unspeakable squalor in shanties alongside new luxury buildings. 

Political parties are forming to bring radical social change. Afghans once organized a movement that identified capitalism as the problem and communism the solution, to end the vast economic disparity between rich and poor. In 1978, a Marxist party, the PDPA, took power and for 12 years — despite fighting a war, the USSR occupation and its own errors — conditions for the Afghan working class improved tremendously.

(Next issue: the history of the struggle for communism in Afghanistan and how Afghans are fighting for those ideas today.)

ALGIERS, April 17 — The common services in the health sector went on a two-day strike yesterday and invaded the grounds of the Mustapha Bacha hospital in the capital here. They’re striking against unbearable working conditions, receiving no compensation for possible contact with contagious diseases and are refused civil service status despite years of work.

Police used vans to block the gate opening onto May Day Square and cops were stationed behind the gate. Striking security guards helped organize the march and protected the workers from any attacks.

Workers chanted slogans against the Minister of Health, shouting, “No to marginalization” and waving their pay stubs, charging that talk of an increase in the gross salary was an April Fool’s joke.

The strikers include women cleaners, administrative staff and security guards. Their stories reveal the extent of the special oppression of women. 

“We were totally fed up; it was high time to raise our voices against such conditions, in short, to blow our tops,” said one woman cleaner. “I’ve been working for 32 years, receive shabby pay, no transport bonus, no contagious diseases bonus, no health-risk bonus,” she continued. She’s past 50 and nearing retirement age.

Another women cleaner showed her pay stub: “I get 10,000 Algerian dinars ($135) a month and — pinch yourself! — they even give me the job of cleaning the medical instruments, getting the patients dressed and more,” she shouted angrily.

Another striker said disgustedly: “I was contaminated by a microbe on the job and I was even operated on for that. I filed to demand my rights, and they told me that you can be contaminated even outside the hospital and rejected my demand.”

These stories expose the lengths capitalism will go to super-exploit women workers. And it shows how ready they are to fight back. Only a communist society that eliminates bosses, profits and the exploitative wage system can free women workers from this special oppression and all workers from this bondage.

PARIS, April 20 – President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for reelection, wants to renegotiate the preferential immigration treaty with Algeria. Sarkozy’s anti-Algerian announcement in this week’s Express magazine is an electoral maneuver to appeal to right-wing voters, particularly supporters of the fascist National Front party. But Sarkozy’s Socialist rival, François Hollande, also says it’s necessary to reduce immigration to France from the current level of 180,000 people a year. (Le Nouvel Observateur article, 3/7)

Both Sarkozy and Hollande play to the racist idea that immigrants “steal jobs” from people born in France and thus worsen unemployment. In reality, unemployment is a built into capitalism (see Marx’s analysis below).

The 1968 treaty with Algeria has made it much easier for Algerians to obtain initial one-year and renewal 10-year residence permits than people of other nationalities.

Around 25,000 Algerians (the treaty limit) obtain residence permits each year. The Algerian immigrant community — around 578,000 — is France’s largest.

Sarkozy wants to renegotiate the treaty to make it as difficult for Algerians as for other nationalities to obtain a residence permit. The Algerian government indicated that it wants the treaty left as is. The French government may try to buy the Algerian bosses’ consent by offering development aid.

Karl Marx wrote in “Capital,” chapter 25, that, “It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labor out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of laborers...”

This means capitalists are continually pushed to introduce machinery (or speed up the pace of work) to make workers more productive, in order to squeeze more work out of fewer workers. The “excess” workers are laid off and form “a disposable industrial reserve army” of the unemployed. They are used as a threat to employed workers to refrain from making demands and to accept give-backs or they will be replaced by the jobless.

Anti-immigrant racism divides the working class in France and weakens it in its struggle against the capitalist class. When Hollande and Sarkozy build racism in an attempt to win votes, they do the capitalist class a big favor.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — The struggle of healthcare union workers in the General Hospital proves that capitalism can’t provide healthcare for the working class. This hospital is the only one in the country open to the working class. The workers in this hospital make miserable wages of $100-$125 monthly. That’s less than the country’s minimum wage!

To add insult to injury, the services this hospital provides do not meet the patients’ needs. Patients must pay before receiving any medical care. The few who are able to pay can’t even be treated properly because medical equipment is “borrowed” by the doctors for use in their own private practices.

The government ignores this hospital because the rich doesn’t use it; they go to private hospitals. The government does not provide the needed budget. Most of the budget goes to the training and maintaining of the national police who repress workers’ anger about their situation. In fact, despite the high numbers of residents that have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to the earthquake, only one percent of the budget funds mental care services. That is less than $10,000 for the whole country! 

The process to privatize this hospital has begun, similar to the privatization of schools that occurred in the 19^th century. The government began giving the public schools’ money to the Catholic Church so it could open the “Faith and Happiness” schools. This served to keep much of the working class illiterate in the same way privatizing the General Hospital will sentence more workers to death.

Workers at this hospital, along with university students, have organized protests, sit-ins, and press conferences to condemn the bosses’ neglect of this hospital.  This class struggle is important and courageous, given the extreme fascist repression and racism they face. This struggle also unmasks President Martelly’s unkept promises made during the election campaign to give healthcare to all, similar to Obama’s promises to extend healthcare to all.

During this struggle, the Health Minister stepped down and the hospital director was transferred to another hospital so that the workers would have a hard time directing their anger at someone specific and therefore deflating their struggle.

PLP brought a communist analysis to all of these struggles. We have exposed the unions’ misleadership of not fighting for the unity of these hospital workers with their patients. This has  allowed the bosses to continue dividing our class by not confronting the lies they push when they blame the union for all of the hospital’s problems.

 We have distributed Defi (CHALLENGE in Kreyòl) and exposed how the union misleadership helps the bosses make more profits off the workers. We have explained that capitalism, a system of profits, will never give our class the healthcare we need. Only under communism, a system run by workers to meet the needs of all workers, without bosses, their state and inequality, will we free ourselves from the murderous chains of this system.