The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 69/No. 8           February 28, 2005  
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
February 29, 1980
Carter says the sending of Soviet troops to help the Afghan government makes it necessary for American men and women to accept the draft. What does Carter want us to fight for?

A report from Pakistan in the February 9 New York Times tells a lot about the “freedom fighters” Carter supports in Afghanistan and why they want to overturn the government there.

Take the former headmaster of an Afghan school-now one of those battling the government. He complained to Times reporter James Sterba, “The government imposed various ordinances allowing women freedom to marry anyone they choose without their parents’ consent.”

“They invited women to meetings,” declared another rightist.

“The Government said our women had to attend meetings and our children had to go to schools,” another said. “We had to fight.”

Many Afghan villagers don’t share his outrage, it seems. The “rebels” told Sterba how they raid villages and “bring [Afghans] with us forcefully until they see that our cause is right.”

And these reactionaries who oppose the first steps toward freeing women and ending illiteracy are presented to us as “freedom fighters”!  
 
February 28, 1955
How to keep one-and-a-half billion Asian and African people in colonial bondage or drive them back to it—that is the major problem confronting the U.S. State Department today.

What brings this problem acutely to the fore for the U.S. government is the 30-nation Africa-Asia conference scheduled for the end of April in Bandung, Indonesia. Its sponsors are the so-called Colombo powers—India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon—whose prime ministers originally met in April 1954 and issued a declaration condemning Western interference in the affairs of Asian nations.

The capitalist class in these countries struggles against imperialism only for limited aims and launches repressions against genuine freedom fighters—the workers and peasants—in their own countries.

Just the same, it is the tremendous groundswell of anti-imperialist sentiment among hundreds of millions of workers and peasants that is forcing the nationalist leaders in Asia and Africa to make anti-imperialist pronouncements.  
 
 
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