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 dont 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 itthat 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 powersIndia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylonwhose 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 fightersthe workers and peasantsin 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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