The defeat and ignominious withdrawal of the imperialist occupation forces in Afghanistan brought the Taliban back to power. Read more...

First published in Fifth International 22.
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After 40 years of war Afghanistan momentarily seemed to be at peace after the Taliban took power for the second time in mid-August. But the Taliban have taken over a devastated country.
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Afghan women are leading the way in organising anti-Taliban protests in Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan. They are doing what US and allied occupying forces failed to do: stand up to the Taliban. Read more...

The victory of the Taliban and the fall of the Ghani government are a humiliating defeat of global significance for the US and its Western allies. Read more...

Just short of the twentieth anniversary of George W Bush’s declaration of his War on Terrorism, Joe Biden announced the final exit of the remaining 2500 US troops from Afghanistan. Read more...

In late August the number of American troops killed in the war in Afghanistan reached a total of 2,000. This includes those killed in Pakistan and other countries where US forces are involved. Read more...

Mass protests against the occupation and the puppet government have broken out as Afghan people are outrage over another insult by foreign troops Read more...

The real threat posed to our governments, by the website Wikileaks’ disclosure of around 93,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan, is not that it may put the imperialist war effort at risk. Read more...

This article is available in French
Jeff Albertson argues that giving President Obama the Nobel peace prize cannot hide the warmongering policies of his administration Read more...

As casualties continue to soar, Gordon Brown has pledged an extra 500 troops for Afghanistan and President Obama is to send 30,000 more soldiers to the country. Marcus Halaby criticises the campaign by the media and generals to promote support and better equipment for the troops in Afghanistan, and discusses the bankruptcy of the puppet regime installed by the imperialists Read more...

The elections in Afghanistan have turned out to be a disaster for the West's dreams of a democratic Afghanistan. After widespread claims of electoral fraud, it is clear that the occupation is leading to disaster for the Afghan people Read more...

The world is gripped by an economic crisis that threatens billions with even greater misery under the capitalist system. Read more...

The Taliban originated in the chaos that engulfed Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviet occupation in 1988. The resistance to the Soviets had included both local tribal leaders and foreign Islamist guerrillas, such as Osama Bin Laden, who were supported by the CIA and ISI (Pakistani secret service). These latter two agencies also encouraged a huge expansion of heroin and opium production. After their victory, the US left Afghanistanis without money or support and the country effectively fell apart as rival warlords seized territory. Read more...

Iraq and the US have negotiated a draft agreement setting out a timetable for US troop withdrawal. It states that combat troops must be removed from Iraqi cities by 2009 and from the rest of the country by 31 December 2011. Some are heralding the agreement as the beginning of Iraq's future as an independent state. But as the US struggles to maintain its economic and political influence in Iraq and steps up the pressure against the resistance in Afghanistan where there are 60,000 foreign troops  the need for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of US and UK troops from the region is as urgent as ever. Read more...

From the outset Afghanistan was posed as the "winnable war". The invasion was underway within four weeks of 9/11 with little opposition in North America or Europe. But after seven years of bloody fighting  longer than World War II  opinion is now divided as to whether the quagmire in Afghanistan can in fact be resolved. Gordon Brown still insists Afghanistan is the "good war" in the Middle East. He told Parliament at the end of last year, "We are winning the battle in Afghanistan." Read more...

Britain has deployed 3,000 troops in southern Afghanistan, for a three year stint, at a cost of £1 billion. Tony Blair, who famously said about Iraq that the price in British lives was “worth paying”, is again asking working class 22 year-olds to stump up the “blood price”. Read more...

Afghanistan is not simply a poor country. It is one of the most economically and socially backward, war ravaged, famine stricken and desperate places on earth. Yet the USA, the world’s biggest imperialist power, has launched a prolonged military onslaught on it. This can only add to the devastation which Soviet intervention, CIA sponsored civil war and the reactionary medievalists of the Taliban have so far achieved. Read more...

The US-led attack on Afghanistan is an atrocity. The war that Bush and Blair have unleashed from the comfort of Washington and Westminster will kill and maim thousands more innocent victims.

We have to be clear that in this war we want to see the imperialist coalition defeated, and that means supporting all Afghan military resistance against imperialism, including Taliban resistance. Why? Read more...

The Taliban’s shock troops were the dispossessed youth of the refugee camps in Pakistan. But how did such a makeshift force win so many stunning victories in such a short time? Who backed the Taliban?

In the light of the west’s fulminations against the Taliban after 11 September the answer to this question will catch the unwary by surprise. The Taliban could not have won without the backing of the USA. Imperialism helped them to power and then kept them in power. Read more...

The Taliban – which literally means “students” or “seekers” of Islamic knowledge – grew from nothing in 1994 to become rulers of 90 per cent of Afghanistan by 1996.

It is an extremely young movement. The average age of its partisans is 14 to 24, and its leader Mullah Omar is 40 years old. It is an exclusively male Muslim brotherhood. Read more...

What does Workers Power say about the war?
Our position on the imperialist attack on Afghanistan is that we are for the defeat of Britain/USA and its allies and for the victory of all the Afghan forces that resist them. Read more...

With the capture of Kabul by the forces led by Ahmed Shah Massoud and the installation of an Interim Commission of the Mujahedin in power on 28 April the fourteen year long Afghan civil war came to an end. Another may follow, as Mike Evans explains Read more...

Adopted by the MRCI conference, April 1988

1. In 1978 the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power. It was a party based on the urban intelligentsia and the upper ranks of the armed forces. The party was based on the Stalinist monolithic model but was riven by factional conflicts. The PDPA’s programme consisted of a series of democratic reforms, based on continuing the policy of co-operation with the USSR which had been pursued by the king until 1973, and which Daoud, in conjunction with the CIA and the Shah of Iran, was attempting to stop. The seizure of power had popular support in the towns. It was, however, not a Soviet organised putsch. The Soviet Union had hitherto been content with Afghanistan as a neutral buffer state. In return the Soviet Union pumped in large amounts of aid being concerned only that the Afghan regime was “friendly”. But the effects of Soviet aid (army training, education etc) were to pro-Sovietise the majority of the army officer corps and state bureaucracy. Read more...