Socialist Viewpoint

IMAGINE a place where people are decapitated in public squares for sorcery and sodomy. Where public displays of music, cinema, art and theatre are banned.

A country where women are forced to cover every part of their body in public and are banned from driving. Where they must receive written permission from their closest male relative before they can board public transport or receive hospital treatment.

A country where trade unions and strikes are banned and where no elections are ever held. Where people who abandon the Muslim faith can be sentenced to death.

It sounds like Afghanistan under the Taliban. But this is a description of life in Saudi Arabia, by a signed-up member of Operation Enduring Freedom: “America has no problem with tyranny as long as the tyrants are rich and obedient rather than poor and disobedient.”

Last week, in a small town in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, I met the leadership of the Afghan Revolutionary Labor Organization. They have more reason than Tony Blair or George W. Bush to hate the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. As socialists fighting for democracy, women’s rights, and human rights in Afghanistan, they live in fear of assassination by right-wing religious extremists.

Yet they will not be celebrating the conquest of Kabul by the Northern Alliance. Like most Afghans I met in Pakistan, they regard this as a war between “alligators and crocodiles.” To illustrate the point, I was shown video filmed secretly in Kabul when the Northern Alliance mujahideen turned the streets of the city crimson with blood in the mid-1990s. At least 1000 Afghan civilians—most of whom had never heard of Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, or Tony Blair before September 11—have been killed by American bombs.

So has it all been worthwhile? Is the world a safer place than it was on October 15, when the first bombs exploded? According to Afghan and Pakistani left-wing activists I have met over the past few weeks, the Taliban’s social base had been narrowed down to the most fanatical religious extremists. It was only a matter of time before the regime imploded.

Yet countless Afghans and Pakistanis told me that, although they hated the Taliban, they supported their refusal to give up Osama bin Laden in the absence of any clear evidence of his guilt. Bin Laden himself has been transformed into a folk hero, especially among the impoverished youth in the cities of Pakistan.

George W. Bush and Tony Blair may claim that they are winning this war. Over time, they may even succeed in their goal of killing or capturing bin Laden. Certainly, the Taliban regime is finished. But the starving, battered country it leaves behind now looks likely to become the Balkans of the East.

Alan McCombes is editor of Scottish Socialist Voice