QUEENS, NY, June 15 — Twenty students and faculty at Queens College held a protest today against the longest war in U.S. history. The war in Afghanistan, which began with a U.S. invasion in late 2001, continues today with a deadly occupation that has killed tens of thousands of Afghans, has spilled over to Pakistan, and shows no sign of ending.
The demonstrators held up anti-war signs and chanted “Occupation Is A Crime, From Iraq to Palestine!” and “Exxon-Mobil, BP, Shell, Take Your War and Go to Hell!” as they marched across campus, giving out flyers and talking to students. The rally was the idea of one student, who thought the occasion of Afghanistan becoming the longest war had to be marked by protest, not silence. He gave a speech decrying the many U.S. war crimes — the repeated killing of innocent civilians by U.S. drone and helicopter attacks along with nighttime raids by U.S. Special Forces.
Although it is now summer session, this demonstration drew almost as many students as an anti-war protest during the regular school year, and we got a good response from other students. Our multi-racial group of protestors was spirited and determined. Party comrades who participated and distributed CHALLENGE were proud to take part.
Our chants and speeches connected various aspects of capitalist oppression — unemployment, budget cuts and a racist prison system at home, along with brutal wars of occupation for economic gain. Working people and the poor pay for these wars, either with their lives or through cuts in services. It is the big-business owners who profit handsomely from the control of raw materials, markets, cheap labor, investment opportunities and fat military contracts — that’s imperialist profits.
One speaker pointed out that there are now another trillion reasons why Obama will not withdraw U.S. troops next summer, as he promised. The Obama administration has just announced what has been known for decades: Afghanistan possesses a trillion dollars worth of valuable mineral deposits, “including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium.” In fact, the deposits are so large that “Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.” (NY Times, 6/14/10)
Nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers will remain to guarantee that U.S. companies, rather than China or another rival, get the lion’s share of these mineral concessions. These troops will be stationed on permanent bases that the U.S. had built for a possible war against Iran, which possesses the world’s second largest reserves of oil and gas. Iran is a rival to the U.S. for dominance in the energy-rich Persian Gulf.
In addition, these troops will guard the building of a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India (the TAPI pipeline), part of an overall U.S. plan to control world oil and gas spigots in the likely event of a future military conflict with China.
U.S. wars of occupation have been going on for more than two centuries — against the indigenous people of North America, against dozens of Latin American countries, in Vietnam, in Iraq and throughout Africa and Asia. Millions have demonstrated against these wars. But they won’t end for good until the profit system that causes them — capitalism — is terminated, and the working class has smashed all borders and won a communist world.
