Victory of Afghan resistance forces is a heavy blow against our shared enemy

The following resolution was carried unanimously at our party’s ninth congress in October.

This congress celebrates with unadulterated joy the defeat of the imperialist forces and the victory of the resistance in Afghanistan. In the face of the Taliban sweep across the country, the Nato-trained mercenary Afghan army collapsed, while Ashraf Ghani, the puppet president installed by the US imperialist-led forces, fled the country to the UAE, reportedly taking with him $169m.

Congress notes that on 15 August this year, in a sequel to the humiliating fall of Saigon in 1975, the Taliban marched into the Afghan presidential palace and live-streamed a press conference at which a resistance spokesman promised to provide safety for all foreign citizens and diplomatic missions, and stressed the Taliban’s willingness to hold a dialogue with all Afghan figures and to guarantee them the necessary protection.

After 20 years of the occupation of Afghanistan and the brutal war against its people, the US-led Nato forces have been thoroughly beaten and forced into a hasty and cowardly exit from the country, having failed to put in place a compliant puppet government.

This congress believes that the scale of the imperialist defeat may be gauged from the following few facts:

• The imperialist coalition was composed of 51 countries.
• The war’s estimated cost was a whopping $2.6tn.
• The number of US troops killed totalled 2,455, not counting the 3,864 contractors who lost their lives.
• 1,144 troops from other coalition countries perished in the war, including 457 British army personnel.
• 20,000 US troops were wounded.
• As many as 800,000 US troops served in Afghanistan.

Thus ended ingloriously the US-led predatory war of aggression – dubbed ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’!

Congress notes that aside from the 66,000 Afghan military personnel who died, this barbaric war claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians and caused massive material destruction, leaving the country in a state of utter ruin, with 2.5 million Afghans forced into refugee camps in neighbouring countries and hundreds of thousands internally displaced.

In the end, the imperialist occupation forces fled like thieves in the night, leaving behind those who had assisted them. Meanwhile, the resistance marked its victory with a military parade in Kabul using captured American vehicles and holding aloft captured weapons.

Congress further notes that the victory of the Afghan people has been accompanied by expressions in the imperialist countries of fake concern for education, especially of girls, for the rule of law and for various other freedoms under the new islamist rulers. Some of these pretended concerns have found their echo in the camp of the imperialist ‘left’.

This gentry ‘forget’ that it was the US- and British-funded and armed mujahideen who bombed and destroyed schools, clinics and hospitals and brought down a progressive government in the name of fighting against Godless progressives; it was they who gave every financial and military support to Osama bin Laden in cooperation with Pakistani military intelligence. In so doing, imperialism put paid to the secular and democratic route of development in Afghanistan and eventually created the conditions for the anti-imperialist resistance to be led by islamists.

This congress believes that it is indeed a sweet historical irony that the grandchildren of those obscurantists have delivered a shattering blow to the combined forces of imperialism. Whereas their ancestors played an extremely reactionary role, both subjectively and objectively, the present generation of Taliban, though medievalist in their outlook, have played an objectively progressive role, for, by successfully conducting the resistance and the Afghan national-liberation struggle over 20 years, they have weakened imperialism and contributed to the strength of the national-liberation movements against imperialism, and to the movement of the working class in the imperialist countries in its struggle for its own emancipation.

As Stalin observed nearly 100 years ago: “The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism.” By the same token, wars waged by the ‘socialist’ Labour government against Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, were reactionary wars aimed at the embellishment, strengthening and victory of imperialism.

In any event, it is the duty of the proletariat in the imperialist countries wholeheartedly to support the national-liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples against imperialism, for the “revolutionary movement in the advanced countries would actually be a sheer fraud if, in their struggle against capital, the workers of Europe and America were not closely and completely united with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of ‘colonial’ slaves who are oppressed by capital”. (Lenin)

This congress congratulates the Afghan people on their victory against imperialism, and resolves to continue propagating amongst the working class in Britain the necessity of wholeheartedly supporting the liberation struggles of the oppressed people against imperialism as part and parcel of the fight of the proletariat for socialism.