(The following article is from the April 16-30, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

By Kimball Cariou

The latest revelations from Afghanistan have triggered a hypocritical response from the Harper Tories - a reaction that would be astonishing if it was not so utterly predictable.

     The anger concerns a new law adopted by the Afghan parliament, regarding the status of the country's minority Shia Muslim population. Parts of the legislation impose a controversial version of Islamic sharia law on women from this 15% of the population, basically categorizing them as second-class citizens with less power than men in terms of property rights, family status, and sexual relations.

     Shock erupted from the Harperites when this news was revealed in the House of Commons by NDP MP Dawn Black. With their NATO allies, the Canadian government demanded that this law be rescinded, and the Karzai regime has obediently promised to "reconsider."

     Why this reaction from Mr. Harper? Because the Tories are deeply committed to equality for women? No, because the law shatters the central myth created by imperialism to cloak its real motives for the occupation of Afghanistan.

     For over eight years, the U.S. and its allies have claimed that NATO troops are fighting for women's rights. The absurdity of this argument is easily exposed by just a few facts: women's rights are forcibly repressed in other countries which are allies of U.S. imperialism, such as Saudi Arabia; U.S. funds and weapons were a crucial factor in the defeat of the People's Democratic Party which governed Afghanistan during the 1980s, and which extended full equality to women; the current Karzai government in Kabul depends heavily on bitterly anti-women fundamentalist forces which overthrew the former progressive government; women's rights have made little progress in Afghanistan since the imperialist occupation began in 2001, other than a few small pockets in urban centres; the most outspoken defender of women's rights in the Afghan parliament, Malalai Joya, was expelled for her courageous stand and is forced to live outside the country after constant death threats.

     These facts are well known to Canadian politicians, but the Harper Tories in particular simply ignore such inconvenient realities. Unfortunately, most of the corporate media in Canada takes the same approach, preferring to rely on the coverage of "embedded" journalists who pen glowing accounts of the bravery and pure hearts of our boys and girls in uniform.

     The truth is that Canadian troops are killing and dying in Afghanistan, not to improve the lives of women, but to advance the global interests of U.S. imperialism. Increasingly, Canadians are realizing that this war is not only unjustified, it is utterly unsuccessful.

     Despite the constant "back foot" refrain ("They're on their back foot, and we need to keep them there" ‑ US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Sept. 29, 2004; "[The Taliban] have been set on their back foot recently" ‑ Canadian General Rick Hillier, Sept. 29, 2006; "[T]he Taliban are on their back foot with the recent arrival of aggressively on‑the‑offence U.S. Marines" ‑ Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star, May 19, 2008; "The Taliban are very much on the backfoot" - British Brigadier Gordon Messenger, June 1, 2008; etc. etc.), support for the "insurgents" and for a negotiated end to the conflict are growing as the Afghan population wearies of western occupation. Thousands of civilians have been killed in NATO raids over the past eight years, and the numbers are on the rise.

     The costs of this war are far higher for the Afghan people than for Canada, but it hurts our country as well. As Crawford Kilian reported in The www.Tyee.ca site recently, "Canada's price for fighting in Afghanistan has not yet been fully paid ‑ or even known. Liberal and Conservative governments have avoided reporting the cost of the war. But Carleton University researcher David Perry estimates that as of March 2009, Afghanistan has cost us $4.78 billion. By 2012, he says, the war will have cost us $7.55 billion." Even more shocking, Perry concludes after a comparison with U.S. estimates on the cost of veterans' care that "the lifetime care for 41,000 Canadian Afghanistan veterans could cost around $11.5 billion."

     So what's the "upside" for imperialism in this expensive slaughter? As one analyst recently observed, "Afghanistan has become a permanent training ground and firing range for providing the US and its NATO allies and candidate members opportunities to test out new weapons systems, wage 21st Century counterinsurgency operations and integrate so‑called niche deployment military units from over 42 nations to achieve weapons and warfighting interoperability."

     And the Russia Novosti website featured this observation: "Central Asian states think the U.S. started the Afghan war to change the regional regimes into local analogues of Georgia's Saakashvili and Ukraine's Yushchenko, and that it began with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Iran, China and Russia think the war could be Washington's attempt to reduce their influence in Central Asia to zero."

     What are we fighting for? Certainly not for the women of Afghanistan.

     (PV Editor Kimball Cariou is a founding member of Vancouver's StopWar coalition.)