MORE than a dozen labour movement campaign groups and two Labour-affiliated unions have announced a fightback conference against the party’s rightward lurch.
This could hardly be more important after a week in which the fall of Kabul has thrown into relief the disastrous consequences of the “war on terror.”
The failure of “humanitarian intervention” to spread anything but chaos and bloodshed, demonstrated already in the catastrophes of Iraq and Libya, is clearer than ever in the ruins of the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.
Defence select committee chair Tobias Ellwood, going head to head on Channel 4 News with Jeremy Corbyn (the programme’s presenters evidently realising that Labour’s current front bench have nothing pertinent to say) might argue that Afghan troops had proven able to “contain” the Taliban and a Western military presence had given the now deposed government “space ... to move forward,” but the claim is as delusional as it is vague.
Emerging protests against the Taliban undermine its pretensions to represent the will of the people, but the total collapse of the Afghan government within a few weeks of US withdrawal makes it very clear that the ousted regime rested on nothing but Western military might, even if Ellwood was correct (he was not) that it had been containing the Taliban rather than steadily losing territory to it.
Despite the efforts of MPs of all parties – with a handful of honourable exceptions – to avoid the question, the catastrophe in Kabul passes a damning verdict on the foreign policy consensus of the last two decades.
This is not because any supposed “nation-building” effort failed: as US President Joe Biden at least admits, this was never the reason for the war.
From the bombed weddings to the blood money and the grim evidence of war crimes like the murder of an unarmed Afghan farmer by an Australian SAS trooper, captured on video released last November, the occupying powers had no moral superiority.
Neither the United States nor Britain was at war to build democracy or advance women’s rights and neither government is genuinely concerned about the failure to do so.
But the debacle exposes the emptiness of the war propaganda spouted by MPs, newspaper columnists and TV anchors every time a new conflict is in the offing. It vindicates the peace movement’s contention that armed intervention is not capable of delivering the outcomes claimed for it.
This could not be more relevant to the Establishment restoration in Labour and the party machine’s anti-socialist purges. It was always Corbyn’s anti-imperialist politics that most rattled the powers that be, more even than public ownership or taxing the rich.
This was the reason for the endless attacks on his supposed lack of patriotism, the BBC mock-up of him against the Moscow skyline after the Salisbury poisonings, the slander that he was an apologist for terror or a Czech spy.
And yet the independent foreign policy that Corbyn sketched out in 2017, one in which we do not ride to war on the coat-tails of Washington but promote peace and co-operation, looks more pressing than ever — just as Labour is trying to rehabilitate Blair and military interventionism, while vying with the Tories in ratcheting up the new cold war against China.
The left must be clear: nobody who supports sending warships to the Chinese coasts or playing games of chicken with Russia in the Black Sea has learned the lessons of Afghanistan. The imperialist aggression must end.
For that to happen, the political space opened up by the Corbyn leadership in Labour to make the case for peace and socialism must be held and extended.
That means pushing back against Keir Starmer’s effort to erase its legacy and declare its supporters beyond the pale of British politics.
The left organisations standing together to do just that, regardless of their varying policies and priorities, deserve all our support.
