Democratic Palestine : 16 (ص 32)
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- Democratic Palestine : 16 (ص 32)
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Fortune - the US magazine of an interna-
tional mercenary network. Other
Afghani contras have visited Soldiers of
Fortune, such as Ratmatullah Safi,
former colonel in the king’s special
forces when Afghanistan was a monar-
chy, now special forces training com-
mander for Reagan’s «freedom fight-
ers».
None of these counterrevolutionary
forces have been a military match for the
revolutionary governments they aim to
subvert. Instead they are reduced to ter-
rorizing civilians and sabotaging
economic and social institutions and
infrastructure. This is the truly dirty
aspect of US imperialism’s war, and it is
quite deliberate. The Reagan Administ-
ration knows that it would take much
more massive aid, and ultimately the
commitment of US or other imperialist
troops, to actually challenge the San-
dinistas’, MPLA’s or PDPA’s hold on
state power. The chosen alternative is
sabotage, so that the revolutionary gov-
ernments’ development plans _ falter.
This aims at eroding popular support to
these governments, forcing them to
negotiate power with the mercenaries,
i.e., rolling back the revolution. Short of
succeeding in this, the CIA's covert wars
are used by the Reagan Administration
to pressure the Soviet Union, Cuba and
other progressive forces.
Proxy wars and direct US
intervention
The reason for the viciousness of
the Reagan Administration’s attack on
Nicaragua, is to be found in the field. The
Sandinistas’ evaluation of 1985 noted
that «the counterrevolution entered into
a process of strategic decline; the
economy was_ sustained despite
attempts to devastate it» (Barricada
Internacional, January 16, 1986).
Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, in
an interview in the same newspaper,
pointed out that the setbacks suffered by
the contras drove them to remote areas
or outside the country, rendering them
incapable of launching _ significant
actions: «The trend in 1986, therefore,
will be toward the shifting of the war to
the border zones, with the objective of
generating tension with neighboring
countries and increasing interventionist
pressures. This is the option kept open
by the United States should the counter-
revolution fail. Toward this end, it has
supplied tons and tons of munitions in
recent months to the mercenaries based
in Honduras and Costa Rica.»
US aid to counterrevolutionary
30
bands actually paves the way to broader
intervention and all-out war. One angle
of this is igniting local wars where milit-
ary regimes, like Honduras and Pakis-
tan, would serve as the US's proxies in
attacking Nicaragua and Afghanistan
respectively. This is having ‘third world’
peoples fight each other, the policy
developed after the US defeat in Viet-
nam, to avoid war deployment of Ameri-
can soldiers. Today, with US impe-
rialism’s resurgent aggressiveness and
drive for global military presence, such
proxy wars don't necessarily replace
direct US intervention. They can just as
well be the prelude to sending the
Marines.
To this end, US imperialism has
turned Honduras into its own military
base. Most recently, the US administra-
tion fabricated a story about a «large-
scale Nicaraguan invasion» of Hon-
duras to draw the latter into the battle,
while securing passage of the contras
aid bill in the US Senate. Another indica-
tion of this trend is the administration’s
announced intention to send dozens of
Green Berets to train the contras, a job
that has previously been done on the sly.
Other signs of the US’s bent towards war
are its continued sabotage of the Con-
tadora group’s peace proposals for
Central America, and the designation of
Philip Habib as a special envoy to the
area. One has only to remember how his
shuttle diplomacy served as a smoke
screen during the 1982 Israeli invasion
of Lebanon. The growing unwillingness
of the Honduran military to be dragged
into carrying out all the US plans, which
are at the expense of Honduran
interests and sovereignty, is another
reason why the US may ultimately stage
its own invasion of Central America.
Pakistan is assigned a similar role
vis-a-vis Afghanistan, and the US has
therefore made sure Zia ul Haq’s military
dictatorship does not enter negotiations
with Kabul on a peaceful solution. Pakis-
tan’s military provides the infrastructure
for the counterrevolutionaries’ attacks
on Afghanistan, and lately it has taken
an even more open, aggressive role.
Pashtun and Baluch tribes, sympathe-
tic to revolutionary Afghanistan, have
blocked the gangs from crossing the
border in their territory. In response, the
Pakistani army engaged in a genocidal
operation against the tribal areas in the
north: Artillery, tanks and planes were
employed, and whole villages bulldozed
to the ground, as reported by the Cam-
paign for the Restoration of Human
Rights in Pakistan (New Worker, Feb-
ruary 7 1986). The tribes responded
with a general strike, and confronted the
troops sent to quell this, signalling that
the regime’s support to counterrevolu-
tion may only increase its own internal
problems.
Combatting US-sponsored
terrorism
In the USA, there is a broad move-
ment opposing intervention in Central
America, and the antiapartheid move-
ment has made opposition to funding
UNITA a part of its agenda. Unfortu-
nately, however, opposition to US inter-
ference in Afghanistan is much less
widespread, although the issue is
essentially the same. The reasons are
varied, starting with Afghanistan’s dis-
tance to distorted news coverage.
British journalist Jonathan Steele, writ-
ing in The Guardian on March 10, 1986,
relates how most western reporters take
their information from the US and British
embassies in Delhi and Islamabad. He
cites several instances of how the infor-
mation, especially at the US embassies,
was in direct contradiction with the real-
ity he himself had seen in the field. Most
journalists, however, do little about this
and simply repeat the fabricated stories,
for «when no western forces are directly
involved and the ‘enemy’ is the Soviet
Union, distinctions between hard news,
soft news and outright propaganda
seem to lose all validity.»
The Reagan Administration is now
busy reshuffling its definitions of dic-
tatorship, freedom fighters and _ter-
rorists, in order to meet new contingen-
cies, and justify support to mercenaries
and attacks on Libya and other indepen-
dent countries. As an example, Secret-
ary of State Schultz correctly labeled the
Pinochet regime in Chile as a dictator-
ship, but only in order to lump it together
with Paraguay, Cuba and Nicaragua!
Facing this psychological warfare, prog-
ressive forces must clearly define whom
they support and why, in order to effec-
tively oppose direct and indirect US
intervention wherever it occurs. Reagan
is raising the spectre of the Soviet Union
taking over Central - and then South -
America, to justify attacks on Nicaragua.
Yet the US sent its troops south of its
borders numerous times before the
advent of the Soviet Union. Similarly, the
US attack on Soviet presence in Af-
ghanistan is only a cover for impe-
rialism’s drive to maintain strategic con-
trol, in order to continue exploiting the
peoples and resources of the world. - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 16
- تاريخ
- مايو ١٩٨٦
- المنشئ
- الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين
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