THE US and UK’s military and political defeat in Afghanistan has laid bare the crisis of imperialism for the workers of the world to see, and take advantage of.
After the US trained and financed Afghan army refused to fight the Taliban, the last two weeks has seen a mad scramble to get US and UK personnel and collaborators out of the country.
On Thursday, the situation for the imperialist powers became catastrophic. Two explosions rocked Kabul airport killing as many as 90 people and among them 13 US military personnel, the biggest casualty toll on the US Army in Afghanistan for many years. At least 150 people were also wounded in the attack.
Following the attacks, Daesh’s Amaq News Agency said on its Telegram channel that the terror group was behind the explosions. It reported that a suicide bomber from Daesh ‘managed to reach a large gathering of translators and collaborators with the American army at “Baran Camp” near Kabul Airport and detonated his explosive belt among them.’
In an address on Thursday night, US President Joe Biden promised to carry on with the evacuation, which is due to end on 31 August. The scramble to evacuate has seen thousands of Afghans storming the airport, chasing US planes down on the runways, and falling from the undercarriages of planes in their desperation.
The reality is that US and British imperialism have been defeated and humiliated by the Afghan people and could not even airlift all their collaborators out of the country. They have even been forced to turn to their victorious enemy the Taliban, to help them control the crowds at the airport!
Despite spending all of Thursday morning warning of an ‘imminent attack’ by IS terrorists, the US, with all its might on hand, could not even muster a force to protect its own troops.
Biden then vowed the US would ‘not forgive’ and ‘not forget’ the attack, telling the perpetrators: ‘We will hunt you down and make you pay.’
However revenge and ‘hunting down IS’ are not the issues.
The issue is that the imperialists have spent 20 years attempting to occupy Afghanistan and, after a colossal expenditure to try and build an Afghan army, they have been thrashed by the Taliban and are being chased out of the country.
The US and UK imperialist regimes are now in complete disarray.
Both the major US parties, the Democrats and Republicans, had the same policy on Afghanistan, to end the ‘never ending war’ and they have ended it with their own defeat. In the USA, both leading Republicans and Democrats are calling for Biden to be impeached.
In the UK, the weak ruling class has just been woken up to the shock of the ‘monstrous truth’ that it cannot count on the US ruling class to defend it any more, that NATO is now useless, and that it is on its own.
Last week Johnson admitted that there is no way the UK could have stayed in Afghanistan without ‘US might’.
The British rulers have had enough, the bomb blasts were the final straw. Yesterday they called their evacuation to a halt, throwing in the towel and announcing the 1,000 UK troops would leave immediately, leaving behind hundreds of their collaborators.
The defeat in Afghanistan is graver than the US defeat in Vietnam. The US, and its poodle the UK, have gone from country to country with grand plans to bomb nations into the Stone Age, invade, occupy, ‘regime change’ and impose puppet governments that will do their bidding. Those plans have come unstuck in Afghanistan, Iraq & Syria. The arrogant imperialist powers have been humiliated.
The Taliban has swept to victory with the overwhelming support of the Afghan people. The Afghan army – funded, trained, and armed by the US, UK and Germany – when the time came to fight dissolved into nothing. The US and UK invested $85bn in the Afghan army – gifting it the most sophisticated, top-of-the-range weapons, Black Hawk helicopters, armoured vehicles, military drones. All this is now in the hands of the Taliban.
However, no matter how desperate the crisis of imperialism is, it is being driven driven to new wars by its economic crisis, against the oppressed nations, and class wars against the working class in the UK and the USA who will have to pay the bill for the massive crisis of imperialism.
For US and UK workers the enemy is at home and it is the UK and US ruling classes. The time has come for the organisation of the UK and US socialist revolutions, to smash capitalism and lay the basis for worldwide socialism!
