The Communist Party holds Britain, the US and other Western powers chiefly responsible for the latest tragedy in Afghanistan as Taliban Islamist forces secure their take-over of the country.
‘These events expose the so-called humanitarian case for imperialist intervention as a travesty and vindicate the stance of the anti-war movement in Britain and internationally’, Steve Johnson told the party’s political committee on Wednesday evening. He declared that Western imperialism and NATO have long been the problem, not any part of the solution. ‘Not just for the last 20 years’, Mr Johnson explained, ‘but from the late 1970s and 1980s, when the Western powers and their reactionary allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan financed, armed and trained jihadi insurgents in order to bring down the progressive People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan regime and its Soviet backers’. As a consequence of US, British and French military intervention, he pointed out, countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria had been plunged into catastrophic chaos and slaughter, while sectarian religious fundamentalism had grown massively in strength. The CP political committee called on the British government to provide generous refuge to people fleeing oppression in Afghanistan and urged the labour and progressive movements to stand in solidarity with women and others who are courageously defending democratic and human rights in defiance of the Taliban. ‘These rights have never been the genuine concern of Western governments, whose real interests are in mineral resources, trades routes and military bases’, Steve Johnson insisted. ‘As the climate emergency and the unfair distribution of Covid vaccines confirm, capitalism means continual conflict, war, disease and environmental degradation’, he concluded, ‘Rosa Luxemburg’s prophetic words that humanity’s choice is “Socialism or Barbarism” are more relevant than ever’.
