Tudeh Party of Iran
The fall of Kabul and return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan on Sunday, August 15, is a colossal tragedy for its people. The designs of the G7 capitalist powers over the past forty years are the main factor and bear the main responsibility for this calamity. The financing and arming of Afghanistan’s Islamist “Mujahedeen” groups by the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan’s military rulers in the late 1970s, following the victory of the Saur (April) Revolution in Afghanistan, was aimed at undermining and bringing down the government of the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. At the end of the 1970s, global imperialism was in no way willing to accept a change in the balance of power in this region or the coming to power of national, progressive and democratic forces. The advancement of this plan paved the way for the growth of a variety of reactionary “jihadist” groups who enjoyed Saudi funds to impair any progressive socio-political change in West Asia. The government of the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan aimed to create a new and modern society through the implementation of national development policies, alleviation of poverty, and the elimination of socio-economic underdevelopment underpinned by the feudal system that had held sway in the country before the Saur Revolution. However, Western-backed reactionary Islamists in Afghanistan expressed their overt hostility to democratic human rights and freedoms as enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially those pertaining to women and children. The reactionary policies of the new Iranian regime after the February 1979 Revolution, along with the [1977] military coup in Pakistan that brought to power General Zia-ul-Haq, the instrument of British imperialism, and saw the execution [in 1979] of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, were other major factors contributing to the formation of events around Afghanistan. The Soviet military’s entry into Afghanistan at the repeated requests of its government [to uphold the fraternal Treaty of Friendship between the two neighbours] to help counter the violent insurgency of Islamic fundamentalists in the country, took place amidst an already underway unannounced war which was launched in coordination between the United States, Britain, Pakistan, and their reactionary allies in Afghanistan. The imperialist powers and their allies intensified their arming and full support of Islamic fundamentalist groups under the pretext of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, which they themselves had laid the groundwork for. The withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 and the efforts of the central government of Afghanistan to establish an inclusive government of national reconciliation made no difference to the warmongering intent and policies of the Western states, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Islamic Republic of Iran in support of “jihadist” forces. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the cessation of its economic assistance to Afghanistan, and the intensification of the Islamic fundamentalists’ activities, the Islamic Mujahedeen finally arrived in Kabul in spring 1992. From that point onwards, Afghanistan became embroiled in a civil war between Islamist forces that controlled various areas of Afghanistan, similar to the situation that followed years later in Libya after the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s government. In the 1990s, when Afghanistan’s Islamist forces operated under the ward of Western states, human rights abuses in the country, and the cultivation of opium and production of derivatives such as heroin for export to the world – a source of huge income for these groups – expanded massively. In the autumn of 1996, the Taliban seized Kabul and announced the establishment of an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The Taliban demonstrated the continuation of the previous Mujahedeen regime’s criminal…
Read full article on Tudeh Party of Iran:
The Tudeh Party of Iran Condemns Imperialist and Reactionary Policies in Afghanistan