RAWA backs former King Mohammed Zahir Shah. The U.S. has also played with the idea of Zahir Shah being a good potential puppet in imposing U.S. interests on Afghanistan. After a concession to former King Zahir Shah from U.S. puppet president Pashtun royalist Hamid Karzai King Zahir Shah decided that he would back Hamid Karzai for president. The concession? That former King Zahir Shah could move back into his palace.

Zahir Shah was deposed in 1973. He ruled Afghanistan from 1933-1973. During Zahir Shah's rule he carried out ethnic cleansing against Tajiks and Hazaras, and suppressed all political parties, free speech, and free press.

In carrying out ethnic cleansing Zahir Shah was following in the footsteps of his father and of British Imperialism who drew the borders of Afghanistan. The British pushed the idea that the Pashtun nationality was the superior pure race in Afghanistan as part of getting the Pashtuns to do British bidding against other national groups. Later Zahir Shah's father echoed the same kind of Pashtun national racism when he seized power from the Tajiks in 1929. His Monarchy praised fascist Germany and worked closely with fascist Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan.

The massive U.S. intervention in Afghanistan that started in 1979 was in opposition to a revolutionary government led by the PDPA that came to power in 1978 on issues of promoting women's rights and land reform. Literacy campaigns began teaching the poor and women how to read and write. As early as 1979 the CIA was involved in trying to topple this progressive left nationalist government. Religious fanatics and wealthy defenders of the old feudal system came together in a terrorist organization called the Mujahideen (whose direct offspring are now called the Taliban and the so-called “Northern Alliance�).

With billions in assistance from the CIA these fanatical Mujahideen cutthroats waged a holy war against literacy and women that included murdering women for teaching little girls how to read and write and throwing acid into the faces of women who had become liberated from the veil. Also included in this holy war against women and literacy were up to 100,000 religious fanatics from other countries recruited to the Mujahideen by the CIA.

At the invitation of the Afghani government Soviet troops moved in to try to stop the Mujahideen. U.S. intervention devastated Afghanistan with war and put the worst possible elements in power. The Red Army was fighting a just cause in Afghanistan while the CIA was giving billions of dollars in military aid to misogynist killers.

Today the pundits of capitalism want to justify U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in the context of the cold war as the U.S. carries out it's next set of atrocities in the country.

A comparison between Afghanistan and neighboring Soviet Central Asia is helpful in seeing the potential modernizing influence of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. In 1980 Afghanistan had an illiteracy rate of 90% while Soviet Uzbekistan had a literacy rate on par with the United States. The average life expectancy was 40 in Afghanistan while Uzbekistan's was 70. Afghanistan had one doctor for every 20,000 people while Uzbekistan had one doctor per 380 people. The status of women in Soviet Central Asia was better than anywhere in the Islamic world. This was reflected in government with 18 percent of all judges and 45 percent of legislative members from the village level being women in Uzbekistan.

The role of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan had great potential in helping advance the country. Instead the victory of CIA financed counter-revolution has plunged the country backwards. While the Soviet model did not live up to the potential of a socialist society with real workers democracy the Soviet Union did, however, make advances that would have been impossible under their capitalist-feudalist system before the 1917 revolution.

Today as a result of Yeltsin's capitalist counter-revolution Uzbekistan is falling to the level of Afghanistan. We should not adopt the mistakes of the Soviet Union in the fight against capitalism, but it is also important to reassess what was reality in Afghanistan and what was cold war propaganda. In doing so we should be careful about what a pro-monarchy organization like RAWA really represents.

Ronald Reagan posed in a portrait with the Mujahideen calling them the moral equivalents of the founding fathers. The pundits of capitalism want to simply dismiss this as justified in the fight against communism, but we should never forget the cold war holocaust that was perpetrated in our names. In the 1980's alone U.S. support, from both the Democrats and Republicans alike, to the death squad governments of El Salvador and Guatemala; to the contras of Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan; to the racist governments of South Africa and Israel; to the genocidal governments of Indonesia in East Timor and Iraq and Turkey in Kurdistan; to U.S. invasions of Granada and Panama, the U.S. murdered millions and created misery throughout the world.

Unfortunately the billions of dollars provided by the U.S. government succeeded in putting the Taliban in power and now the other fanatics of the Mujahideen are back. The Taliban counter-revolution put women back under the veil and stripped women of the right to work, education, and movement in public without a male relative for escort. Women are beaten in public. Women have been stoned to death for adultery and other so-called crimes against Islam. Starving widows are buried alive. Whole villages with people of differing ethnicities and Islamic beliefs have been rounded up and murdered. Homosexuals are executed for being homosexual. Hindus are forced to wear insignia showing they are not Muslim. Atheists are executed for being atheists. Foreign aid workers are being tried for spreading Christianity. Dancing is not allowed and irreplaceable ancient art has been destroyed. Today the U.S. backed Northern Alliance is no better because they carry out many similar policies.

Instead of seeing that the biggest threat to Afghan women were the Mujahideen, RAWA instead fought on the same side as the CIA and Mujahideen against the PDPA and the Soviet Union. In addition they have made themselves irrelevant by backing a hated former King that is embraced by imperialism and has put his stamp of approval on the puppet Karzai government.

U.S. Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!

No to the religious fanatics of the Northern Alliance Mujahideen and the Taliban!

No to the U.S. puppet government of Pashtun royalist Hamid Karzai!

No to ethnic cleanser King Zahir Shah!

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

there've been comments by mr. argue on this site in regards to noam chomsky to the effect of 'chomsky sits in an ivory tower' and therefore has a disconnect from reality.

it's ironic that mr. argue then has the audacity to sit in santa cruz and correct the ideology of women (and other people) who have their feet on the ground in afghanistan daily; who were born there and who risk their lives there.

who knows more about what is good for afghans?

rawa or mr. argue

You are backing one particular Afghan organization while ignoring others. To say that I must agree with your one organization because a lot of liberals and leftists in the United States make the mistake in backing it and parading it around, is wrong. RAWA is an organization that backs an oppressive deposed king and took the side of U.S. imperialism against the Afghani PDPA. There were plenty of Afghanis who agreed with my point of view, but unfortunately most of those who were organized and outspoken were executed by the CIA/Osama bin Laden counter-revolutionary forces.

In Iran I have watched organizations on the left go full circle from supporting Islamists against the hated and horrible U.S. backed monarchy in the 1970s and into the Islamic Revolution 1980s to now supporting the monarchy against the Islamists. Both forces, however, have been the executioners of the left. Silence on this fact among some on the left in the United States during the 1980s resulted in many exiled Iranian leftists returning to support the Islamic Revolution only to be executed by the Islamic clerical fascists a few years into the revolution. King Mohammed Zahir Shah was an oppressive and chauvinistic ruler. As a revolutionary internationalist I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t say that neither the monarchists nor the Islamists are the solution in Iran, nor are they in Afghanistan.

A country facing similar conditions of women’s oppression under a U.S. backed king is Nepal. Many areas of that country are now under the control of a popular Maoist insurrection. Despite the Maoist deformed nature of the leadership of the revolution taking place, in the areas controlled by the Maoists sweeping land reforms and tremendous gains for women’s rights have been carried out.

It will take a revolutionary socialist movement to liberate the women in Afghanistan. This is the only real world solution. RAWA, in backing a deposed oppressive king, is revolutionary in name only.

Liberation News
groups.yahoo.com/group/Liberation_News/

So I see Mr. Ague has brought his pro-Soviet and PDPA rant to this section as well. Again, Mr. Argue, is carpet bombing a progressive policy to be supported? Rather than rehash what has been said elsewhere, go to santacruz.indymedia.org/newswire/display/8543/index.php

RAWA is not pro monarchist, and Imperial occupation and control (Soviet or U.S.) can not be justified by its "potential modernizing influence". (or do you agree with Niall Ferguson's "Empire", which asserts that
imperialism was good for India because it brought literacy and railroads)?

RAWA is pro-monarchist. Among other sources I read it right off of their web site.