Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.

V. I. Lenin 

Economic & Philosophic Science Review 

No 1156 October 15 2002

Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074  

www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk
[P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]       25p

The 'tourists only' bars (Indonesians not allowed) to boost a system whose savage 30-year fascist-military dictatorship was totally backed by Australia and the West and is more viciously repressive today than ever (five civil wars raging simultaneously) put Bali surfing and drinking on a par with a seaside family holiday on the Gaza Strip. And even if this was a CIA provocation, what anti-imperialists everywhere must decide is whether the Western dominated system of grotesquely unfair and now economically collapsing global exploitation and military repression is heading for revolution or not. If so, the fake-'left' inability to grasp the anti-imperialist significance of the Muslim Fundamentalist revolt and take the fight on from there will condemn Western workers to endless shameful defeats and warmongering class collaboration until the catastrophic theoretical influences of Stalinist Revisionism and counter-revolutionary Trotskyite opportunism are finally demolished.

The gruesome tragedy on Bali for pleasure seekers from Western imperialist countries, allegedly massacred by locals as "foreigners", emphasises the total and growing Third World hatred of economic exploitation by Western monopoly capitalism, and hatred of military domination by the US imperialist 'New World Order'.

Even if this unusual development (with some hard-to-believe aspects) should turn out to be the conspiracy theorists 'long-awaited 'deliberate provocation' by imperialist police agents themselves, (not entirely unlikely  given the collapse in world support for US imperialism's Iraq blitzkrieg plans), - it still makes more sense to take such phenomena at face value since there are now so many terrorist activities all round the world, the vast majority of them with obvious causes, clearly identified and loudly proclaimed, such as the desperate Palestinian suicide-bomb attempts to force the Jewish colonial-genocide tyranny to back off.

It misses the point entirely for people to react with "But that's not a fair way of fighting, though" in revulsion against the obviously unjust arbitrariness of such acts of terror.

In Palestine, for example, what is the effectively, concentration camped native Arab population supposed to fight with, being denied all statehood and all large-scale weaponry??

And what is the threatened blitzkrieg annihilation of Iraq all about but the fact that this Arab nation has dared to equip itself with some of the armaments that all imperialist states have, in order to defend itself from the brutal Western military domination constantly hanging over it??

And if the US imperialist Hitlers go through with their megalomaniac plans to totally colonially subjugate Iraq, and permanently occupy it, disarming Iraq and putting its 25 million people under US troop gun-law while seizing the priceless Iraqi oil industry for American interests, then how would any Iraqis (without a slave mentality) be able to fight back other than with terrorism???

And in already occupied Afghanistan, where total Western armed superiority routinely blitzkriegs entire villages from the air just on the merest suspicion of someone having fired a shot from there at something or other (see subsequent capitalist press admissions), and where the 'Afghan' government installed by the West is nothing but a stooge totally reliant on his massive armed bodyguard of us imperialist crack troops,  -  what tactics are left to any independence minded Afghans but to strike back with terrorism????

Westerners who nevertheless still insist on making the point that "massacring innocent young tourists is intolerable, however, and has to be condemned" are again missing the point entirely.

Every bit of energy spent on "condemning" is energy wasted on challenging the imperialist system with this simple understanding:

EITHER Western imperialism can carry on economically and militarily dominating the world, provoking more and more terrorist hatred to be thrown at it, and trying idiotically to reimpose a "war on terrorism" colonial policing back onto the whole Third World (which is what it will take eventually, at the cost of literally tens of millions of lives in all directions, and near total devastation everywhere);

OR the whole system of Western monopoly capitalist world rule can be challenged all along the line by the entire international working class of ordinary people, thus making this hated Western imperialist tyranny over the Third World a complete thing of the past.

Can't be done?? One of the biggest influences on negative thinking is the anti-revolutionary defeatism crucial to both Revisionist and Trotskyist fake-'left' petty-bourgeois outlooks, - forever over impressed with the 'strength and sophistication' of Western market forces, and endlessly seeking 'socialist' advance through longterm collaboration or entry into them, - and forever writing off the ability of anti-imperialist developments to make a far better world than capitalism can, believing that imperialism will always control.

Scargillism is undermining anti-war politics with this continued peddling of the line that the CIA staged Sept 11 itself as a new Gulf of Tonkin incident, or Reichstag Fire incident.

The historical parallels are not just hopelessly misleading, and defeatist, but they precisely condone the rotten Revisionist world view which hampered international revolutionary working class action in both periods.

This 'understanding' of Sept 11 also contemptuously belittles the colossal revolt by Middle East culture against Western imperialist domination; casts an unconscious racist doubt on what that revolt could be capable of; and continues the usual anti-Marxist philistinism of the fake-'left' by utterly ignoring the need to make a proper historical assessment of how this Islamic movement is having a serious influence on the international balance of class and national forces which will decide the world's future.

The worst reactionary opportunist dangers of such laughable shallowness were underlined, of course, when Scargillism lined up with the US imperialist tyranny (ruling the world) to "condemn" the suicide-bomber attacks on those symbols of colonial global domination, the Pentagon and the World Trade towers.

In this cowardly class-collaborating sycophancy towards the mass middle-class prejudices of "public opinion", Scargillism was fittingly representing the spineless opportunism lurking at the heart of all Revisionist history (which eventually saw Stalinism's deserved decay), and also the unconsciously racist arrogance of all imperialism-corrupted British Labour Movement history.

Before analysing in detail the wretched defeatism which wants to tell workers that Sept 11 was all the CIA's own work and that it was another Reichstag Fire event, the "challenge" has to be faced as to why the EPSR ever joined forces with the SLP in the first place.

Helping Scargill's independent political venture was a scientific Marxist requirement. It is not possible to know in advance how the exact character of centrist political movements will turn out. The movement for Soviets in Russia started out as a philistine centrist mish-mash, and was ignored by the Bolsheviks at first. But eventually that movement was won to Bolshevism.

Scargillism had to be tested. Some centrist movement or other could end up playing a huge role in the development of revolutionary politics in Britain, with a serious Bolshevik party emerging at the end of it.

The criteria for isolated revolutionary voices, such as the EPSR, properly joining in the building up of such centrist movements, is only that its voice should not be silenced.

The EPSR's views on Scargill's weaknesses were well known. The Weekly Worker routinely re-published scathing EPSR criticisms of Scargill to try to halt the EPSR's ideological progress inside the SLP.

The EPSR continued to speak its mind on all questions of political theory, particularly trying to get articles into the Socialist News (but having more than 60o% of them spiked). But the EPSR comrades loyally, and without hypocrisy, worked to build a unitary SLP. Far from being in the party to recruit to its own ranks, the EPSR lost some of its own cadres to the SLP because it had argued so successfully that a broader centrist movement might be usefully supported by communists at certain early stages of serious anti-imperialist development.

In the excitement of seeing a bigger movement developing at last where communists could work openly, the crucial point that was forgotten, ignored, or not understood by the defectors was that without revolutionary theory, no sustained successful revolutionary practice will ever be possible.

And while it is true that everyone can claim to be 'Marxist-Leninist' and that any notion of a monopoly of wisdom residing in one particular place is itself indeed a piece of prize anti-Marxist nonsense, the ONLY way to sort out the more correct understandings of the world (on which to build a reliable Bolshevik cadre party) from the more opportunist bureaucratic philistinism which will eventually kill it, is by allowing constant polemical conflict.

With the sordid expulsion manoeuvre against the EPSR, Scargill effectively compromised all subsequent SLP 'polemical struggle'. What's left inside the SLP may like to think or pretend that it engages in 'real polemical struggle' but the stab-in-the-back for the EPSR (whose supporters were still loyally trying to build the SLP even after the expulsion stunt) proved that theoretical disputation would only be allowed within certain limits.

But a polemical struggle WITH LIMITS is a contradiction in terms.

A 'theoretical disputation' which dare not pursue a particular avenue of understanding of the world and party building, on pain of expulsion, - is just a sectarian bureaucratic joke, which is exactly where the whole vast world of Revisionism (which educated Scargill) ended up.

And the SLP's subsequent development has only confirmed this bad joke.

Leaving aside for the moment Lalkar's own laughable record of regular, routine theoretical nonsense (see countless past EPSR's for detailed polemics to which Lalkar never dares to make one word of reply), the Brar sect would like to challenge much of the more philistine political backwardness that Scargill comes out with, --- but simply cannot risk doing so in front of the working class (which is the vital arena) for fear of "losing its position" (expulsion).

This ludicrous opportunism means that the Braristas have to carry on being publicly identified with the UTTERLY REACTIONARY and COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY nonsense of "condemning" Sept 11.

With total cynicism, the Braristas hope that one day the working class will forget this utterly despicable treachery to the Third Wor'ld's desperate need for some belief in anti-imperialist possibilities, or hope that they never find out about it (even more cynically).

But, of course, this festering little opportunism inside the festering little SLP by no means stops at just this piece of class-collaborating wretchedness with the bourgeois world of "condemning" Sept 11.

Scargill's grotesque courting of fake-'left' TUC careerists like Crow and Rix is swallowed in silence, and ends embarrassingly in even more pained silence.

Is there nothing to be learned about building a serious revolutionary party from all these humiliating failed ventures of dishonest manoeuvring???

If there is, Lalkar dare not say it.

Likewise over Scargill's humiliating Little Englander stupidity of implying to the working class that 'British' capitalism is somehow better to deal with than 'European' capitalism in his campaigns to 'get out of the EU'.

Being an Indian nationalist himself (in favour of 'India' having its 'own' nuclear weapons, etc), Brar could only polemicise feebly with Scargill (if he had the honesty) on some aspects of this; but even the SLP's crass 'import controls' collaborative gift to future inter-imperialist warmongering dare not receive the booting that it ought to from the Braristas 'for fear of losing their position'.

It will never wash. These are not just canny manoeuvres. This crap IS Brarism, a line of such unbroken continuity from the sickest theoretical imbecilities of Stalinist Revisionism, that Lalkar still cannot properly address the monstrousness of the Stalinist bureaucracy APPROVING the brutal UN-backed Zionist colonisation and genocide of the Palestinian nation beginning in 1948.

Far from re-examining the huge continuing political implications TODAY on the wretchedness of much Palestinian nationalism (e.g. Arafat's pro-imperialist collaborationism) that this influential Stalinist history still has, the Braristas cannot get beyond the paralysed Moscow 'coexistence' view of old, which refused to look further than Arafat for 'leadership', (see recent EPSR polemic); - or develop much Scargill-challenging useful understanding of the important anti-imperialist role that Islamic fundamentalism has been able to play (in Palestine, al-Qaeda, etc, etc) precisely because of the clapped out Revisionist influences still hampering the international anti-imperialist struggle.

And what a serious struggle for Marxist science needs to point out to the Scargillites peddling the conspiracy theory (that Sept 21 was carried out by the CIA) is that even if it WERE true, the last place to compare it with for gauging the historical significance of such an event would be the Reichstag Fire provocation.

When the Nazis burned down their own parliament so as to blame the communists in order to set up a military dictatorship in Germany in 1933, Western imperialist tolerance of Hitler's police-state methods and warmongering arms-race intentions was already a fait accompli, - and also already one of the blackest stains of all on the Stalinist Revisionist record for having failed to use the German CP's enormous power in time to stop Hitlerism by revolution or die in the attempt (far better than the torture tyranny which did befall the communists, and all of Europe as well, eventually).

To say that Sept 11 is imperialist warmongering's new Reichstag is to accept yet another defeat by fascist tyranny before the real class war battles of this new imperialist system economic crisis have even started.

Furthermore, if Sept 11 is imperialist warmongering's sick plans for the planet (to get out of insoluble economic crisis as in the 1930s) already arrived at Feb 1933 (the date of the Reichstag Fire provocation) in terms of very advanced maturity of monopoly capitalism's crisis plans four years after the Wall Street Crash, and two years after Japan invaded China and German imperialism renewed its challenge (armed) to the US-Anglo French hegemony, making a new World War inevitable, - - then why has the SLP not been warning the world that a new fascist-militarist armageddon was on the way (as was certainly obvious by the time of the Reichstag Fire in 1933) ????????

If Sept 11 was the CIA just putting the finishing touches to worldwide aggressive blitzkrieg plans (as was the Reichstag Fire in terms of imperialism's drive towards renewed World War in the 1930s), then why is the entire SLP not out permanently on the streets warning the world to prepare to be incinerated or else build a REVOLUTIONARY PARTY - IMMEDIATELY???????????

No such revolutionary warning has been heard from the SLP. Revolution is never mentioned. The need for an all-out revolutionary party is never mentioned.

EITHER the Scargillites are hopelessly misleading the working class with these historical parallels by saying that Sept 11 is a New Reichstag Fire on the eve of an unstoppable drive by monopoly capitalism to impose total imperialist warmongering on the planet.

OR Scargillism is a self-confessed replica of cowardly and degenerate Revisionist retreat from Marxist-Leninism in the 1920s and 1930s which refused to mobilise for an openly REVOLUTIONARY attempt to stop Hitlerism in the chaos of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and totally perished as a result.

The truth is that US imperialism's warmongering plans are INDEED retracing the warmongering plans of imperialism's crisis in the 1930s, - as in fact the EPSR has ALONE been urgently repeating for some time in warning the working class that an openly REVOLUTIONARY party is now well overdue for being publicly called for and built (unlike the SLP and Lalkar who booted the EPSR out because of its insistence on fighting for its Leninist understanding).

But while the warmongering NEEDS and warmongering INTENTIONS of world imperialism are clear, - the practical advances it has been able to make towards an unchallenged World War scenario, fuelled by colonial fascist aggression, are vastly different from the circumstances Western monopoly capitalism enjoyed in the 1930s.

For its economic salvation purposes out of the worst slump collapse in 'free market' history, monopoly capitalism needs to be able to put itself back into TOTAL CONTROL of the entire Third World, - which exactly explains why Washington's astonishing plans for the total recolonisation of Iraq any for its longterm occupation by American forces, and total confiscation of Iraq's entire oil industry (potentially the world's richest) have just leaked out.

But in the 1930s, Western imperialism WAS ALREADY IN TOTAL MILITARY AND ECONOMIC CONTROL OF THE ENTIRE THIRD WORLD.

It is precisely the ludicrous insanity of the 'logic' of US imperialism's "war on terrorism" warmongering plans (which will require the whole world to be effectively re-colonised and policed to stop an everwidening anti-imperialist fightback), - and the immense, murderous, barbaric destructiveness that this will require, which is rapidly isolating the crazed Bush warmongers in the eyes of the whole planet.

Indeed, so disastrously has the US imperialist warmongering plan to dominate the Middle East started to fall apart recently that suspicions of a provocation conspiracy might well now be in order precisely in respect of this Bali dancehall fire (which is a vast distance away from, and also in many other ways utterly remote from the many centres of real civil-war anti-imperialist struggle now raging in Indonesia (against its pro-Western stooge regime which has just replaced US imperialism's 30-year-long Suharto fascist-stooge dictatorship, - and which was a complete nothing as a terrorist guerrilla war target, - unlike the Pentagon and the World Trade towers).

And the opposition today to a Western imperialist recolonisation of the planet (as threatened for Iraq next, following Afghanistan previously, and Palestine and Kosovo on other dimensions) is absolutely immense.

As the EPSR keeps pointing out, more brutality and a greater firepower military tyranny is poured out today just on keeping the tiny Palestinian nation repressed than had to be dished out to keep the entire colonial Third World quiet in the 1930s, and, moreover, this powerfully armed Zionist tyranny still FAILS in its mission. Palestinian resistance just keeps on growing and growing.

Worldwide, Western imperialism does not stand the slightest chance of pushing the entire Third World back into the bottle of total permanent colonial-police repression and control. It cannot happen. Even the poorest and weakest country in the world, Afghanistan, is proving impossible for the Western imperialists to control and manipulate as they would wish:

When America, began Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan a year ago it was largely welcomed. At last the west was promising to bring peace and reconstruction to a country run by warlords and ravaged by drought and 20 years of conflict.

But slowly Afghans have grown resentful of the thousands of US troops. The bitterness is especially deep in the southern Pashtun tribal lands, where the Stars and Stripes flies above isolated and heavily fortified bases in areas that were once the Taliban's heartland. Many Afghans, including powerful commanders, want them out.

Complaints of US army patrols becoming heavy handed in the past month have come from several villages in the southeast, particularly around the towns of Khost and Gardez. They say the soldiers have confiscated satellite telephones, passports, house and car documents and even family photographs.

No one was arrested in Aab Khiel last week and no trace of al-Qaida was found. The operation succeeded only in turning the village solidly against the US military presence.

"They took my satellite telephone to their base at Bagram," said Mir Ullah, a trader living in the village. "They told us they would give it back but they gave us no receipt and they never returned it. The Americans told us we were using the phone to contact Osama bin Laden and the Arabs. But that's just not true."

Further east, close to the Pakistani border, Wali Badshah described how Afghan soldiers backing up the US patrols stole 45,000 Pakistani rupees (about £500) from his house in the village of Kagow.

"They took out four boxes holding our savings. They threw the boxes back at us but they kept the money. I went to the Americans to complain but I still don't have my money back."

"The Americans came to Afghanistan to get rid of al-Qaida. Now they cannot help us any more and they should leave," said Bacha Khan Zadran, a renegade warlord and former mojahedin commander based in Khost province.

He and other Pashtuns are deeply resentful of the western-backed government it Kabul. which they regard as biased against them

There is no doubt that the Loya Jirga, the grand council in June which decided the shape of the new government, failed to correct the continued dominance of the Northern Alliance, the largely ethnic Tajik commanders from the north who took the capital after the Taliban fled last November. Pashtuns tend to consider themselves the natural rulers of the country and complain that they have little influence in the current administration.

"The government is only working for one group of people," Mr Zadran said in an interview in a mountain hideout near the Pakistani border, conducted by satellite telephone.

In the past year he has carried out a string of raids against pro-government commanders in Gardez and Khost. Last month at least 15 people were killed and 50 injured in Khost when he tried to recapture his positions. "There will be a lot more fighting in Khost because the government is making a big problem here," he said.

Although Washington backs the government in Kabul, the US military has recruited, armed and paid 600 of Mr Zadran's soldiers to help them patrol the south-east.

In Kabul the US, Britain and the UN have allowed the Northern Alliance to cement its power under Mohammad Fahim the defence minister, who promoted himself to field marshal earlier this year.

The creation of a multi-ethnic national army has stalled but Marshal Fahim's own force of Tajiks, largely from the Panjsher Valley, has grown substantially.

At the same time Mr Karzai, who is a Pashtun, is looking increasingly vulnerable. He replaced his ethnic Tajik bodyguards with US special forces soldiers earlier this year and last month narrowly survived an assassination attempt blamed on Taliban remnants.

Two weeks ago a Kabul newspaper, the Payame Mujahid Weekly, which represents Marshal Fahim's Panjsher faction, openly criticised Mr Kauai and told him, to "correct his policies".

Many western officials privately accept that the dominance of the Northern Alliance is a destabilising force. "The Loya Jirga was really a missed opportunity. The west played it too safe," an aid worker with more than 10 years experience in Afghanistan said.

"It is unsustainable for the Panjsheris to run the country. Now I don't see a way out for the next 10 years that doesn't result in more conflict."

This growing swell of Pashtun resentment may take time to surface. There is no obvious Pashtun leader who unites the tribes in the southern half of the country.

Some believe an alliance of lslamist leaders, less extreme than the Taliban, may take up the role.

Across the border in Pakistan, which has always been a natural ally of the Pashtuns, there are fears that a revolt in the south may yet split Afghanistan in two.

"Everything is going wrong in Afghanistan and we are moving towards a division of the country," said Sahnan Ahmad, a retired Pakistani intelligence colonel.

"For 250 years the Tajiks have not been in power and now for the past 10 month: they have put them in Kabul. Everything is going against history and culture."

These new voices of criticism have reached the grey-brick compound in Khost where the provincial government is based and Mohammad Khan Gulbaz is a senior official representing President Hamid Karzai's national government, which is publicly still effusive in its support of the US military presence. Mr Gulbaz, however, is distinctly frustrated. 

"The Americans are not doing well. If this carries on they will begin to seem lace the Russians," he said.

Khost was one of the strongest areas of mojahedin resistance during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. "I have tried to explain to the Americans in more than to meetings that they should not carry on like this. But they are not listening. The people of Khost are religious people and they should not be bothered like this."

He believes the problems began when paratroopers from the 82nd airborne division were sent to Khost and Gardez to take part in patrols and raids which, until then, had been the preserve of highly experienced US special forces troops. Several special forces soldiers have privately criticised the 82nd Airborne's raids as clumsy and careless.

Publicly the army denies that there is a problem. The south-east is a legitimate target for military operations: it was one of the Taliban's strongest support bases and housed several al-Qaida training camps, including those attacked in 1998 by US cruise missiles: US troops suffered heavy casualties in a month long operation against Taliban and al-Qaida fighters outside Gardez in March.

Major Steve Clutter, a spokesman at the US military headquarters at Bagram, admitted that there had been as internal investigation into the conduct of the  62nd. 

It does not take costly assessment missions by aid agencies to understand the resentment of villagers in areas such as Khost. South-east from Kabul the paved road runs as far as Gardez. The next 100 miles are a backbreaking five-hour drive on a pitted unmade track. There is not one school, hospital or clinic on the way. Khost's once-famous timber industry is on its knees.

Yet not one cent of the promised $4.5bn (£31n) reconstruction money has been spent on the area; despite the west having to work harder there than perhaps anywhere else to win over the religiously conservative and fiercely independent Pashtuns.

Few people paid a higher price when America's military machine launched its war in Afghanistan a year ago today than Orfa. She was away visiting relatives when the American fighter jet dropped out of the clear midday sky and lived towards her village in the hills outside Kabul. When she returned home a few days later it was left to her neighbours to explain the inexplicable.

They told her that the aircraft, almost certainly an F-16, had mistakenly fired a precision Mk 82,  500lb bomb directly at her small mud and stone house, killing her, husband, Gul Ahmad, a carpet weaver, his second wife, five of their daughters and one son. Two children from the house next door also died.

When the Guardian first found Orfa last year, four weeks after the bombing, she was still deep in shock, haunted by the horrifying image of her family's remains. Their bodies were so badly torn apart they could not be identified for separate graves.

A year on, a line of eight green flags tied to stout wooden poles stands above the family grave just yards away. from Orfa's ruined home in Bibi Mahru. The village sits several hundred metres below what used to be an important Taliban radar and gun emplacement.

"Mistakes can be made by anyone but the pilot who has bombed this house should come here and see how many people died. Maybe he could help us, "she said.

From the start of the US campaign in Afghanistan on October 7, western governments promised that this time it would be different. Afghans would not be abandoned to their fate, as they had been after the end of Soviet occupation in 1989. 

Once the bombing was done, and the Taliban removed, humanitarian aid amounting to $4.5bn (£2.8bn) would be pumped in to rebuild the country, brick by brick, home by home. There can be few better qualified subjects for western help than Orfa as she struggles to raise her surviving four daughters and two sons. Today, on the anniversary of the bombing, her house is still a pile of rubble, she has received no compensation and reconstruction remains a pipe dream.

"I don't know how long it will be now until the Americans help us," Orfa, 32, said. "They have done nothing for us and I don't know what to do with my children or how to support them."

Estimates of the numbers killed by air strikes from B52 high-altitude bombers, F-16 and F-18 fighter jets and the devastating AC-130 Spectre gunships are elusive. The Afghan and American governments say fewer than 400 people died. A San Francisco-based human rights group, Global Exchange, has painstakingly confirmed at least 812 deaths. Many suspect the true number could, be as high as 2,000, scattered in towns and villages across the map.

Far harder to calculate is the extent of psychological trauma inflicted on a population already struggling to survive after years of drought, economic collapse and 20 years of war.

The relatives of the civilian victims of the US bombing campaign have joined Afghanistan's large underclass. Often the survivors are women who lost sons or husbands and who find it most difficult to obtain work in this conservative Islamic society.

The flood of two million refugees returning home from Pakistan and Iran is also forcing the most vulnerable single parent families and widows out of cheap rented accommodation.

Although $1.8bn was due to be spent on reconstruction in this first year, bureaucracy, particularly at the UN, and the cost of emergency humanitarian aid have swallowed most of the money. There are still huge areas of the country where people are on the brink of starvation and aid workers have warned that the situation is likely to get even worse as winter approaches in the weeks ahead.

A four-year drought is also consuming more of the money than was expected, leaving only $100m this year for reconstruction.

The average cost of maintaining a foreign UN employee in Afghanistan for a year is around $250,000.  Add to that the soaring cost of house rentals, which means some UN agencies are paying $15,000 a month for their Kabul offices, and it is little wonder funds are running out.

Some aid experts are starting to question the assumption that development work alone can bring peace and security to countries like Afghanistan that have been racked by years of conflict.

Today Orfa and her five children share with another family a small two-room hit, a few metres from the ruins of her former home. Her share of the monthly rent is 500,000 afghanis (£7.50) and she earns just 800,000 afghanis a month tailoring for her neighbours. When people in the village want to repair their clothes they bring them to her because they know she cannot support her family on her own.

Standing in the courtyard of her home she clutched the only photograph she has left of her husband. It is, a small, creased black and white picture showing him 10 years ago, a handsome young man. "Under the Taliban, life was bad but at least my husband and my son were working," she said. "Now how can I support us all? What am I supposed to do?"

It was night when the American military helicopters landed in the dry cornfields around the village of Aab Khiel. Within minutes dozens of soldiers surrounded the small cluster of mud and brick homes, and the house to house search began.

"When they came to my house they didn't knock on the door, they just forced their way in," said Qarimullah, 28, a young farmer in the village, recalling last week's raid. They broke the locks on the doors and our safe boxes. They took my camera and they threw all our clothes on the floor. They said they were looking for al-Qaida but why did they come into our houses like this? This is not right."

In Aab Khiel the villagers are again beginning to talk fondly of the days of Taliban  rule. Few believe the west is still the saviour of Afghanistan.

And now Pakistan is openly turning against any further truck with this Western colonial tyranny, despite rigged elections:

America's attempts to hunt down Taliban and al-Qaida suspects hiding in Pakistan were dealt a significant blow yesterday when hardline Islamic parties took power in the two tribal provinces next to Afghanistan, after doing unexpectedly well in Pakistan's elections.

The religious parties won at least 48 seats in the national assembly and were poised last night to play a key role in the new parliament.

Yesterday, political observers and ordinary Pakistanis were trying to come to terms with a new political landscape - and the stunning success of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), an alliance of six anti-American Islamic groups.

"It is a revolution," the MMA's leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, told supporters in Peshawar on Thursday night. "We will not accept US bases and western culture." 

The alliance won control of the provincial assembly in North West Frontier province, and is likely to govern in coalition in neighbouring Baluchistan. Several senior Taliban and al-Qaida figures are believed to be hiding out in these two tribal regions, next to the Afghan border. Last night, Mian Aslam, the MMA's general secretary and new Islamabad MP, was asked whether the alliance mould hand over Taliban suspects to Washington. He replied: "No. Never."

"The Taliban are our brothers. They are good people. The idea they are bad is a misconception of the west," he said. "George Bush should try and make friends, not enemies." US troops should leave Pakistan immediately, he added.

The MMA's rise suggests that Gen Musharraf's backing for America's war in Afghanistan has been deeply unpopular in the conservative tribal belt.

The religious parties now control its administration and police force. "The task of hunting down the rebellious Taliban and hostile al-Qaida will become almost impossible,' Najam Sethi, the editor of the respected Daily Times, said yesterday.

"Having 'lost' Afghanistan, they have now acquired a large base area of their own in their own homeland."

The surprising gains by the MMA were the most interesting aspect of an otherwise unsurprising election following claims that Gen Musharraf had rigged the polls in advance to ensure victory for the compliant PML (QA).

The main opposition Pakistan People's party led from London by Benazir Bhutto, came second with at least 62 seats.

Gen Musharraf has promised to hand over power to a new, civilian government by November. But constitutional amendments giving him the right to dismiss the prime minister and parliament, and formalising the military's role in government, mean he will still run the country, observers say.

He remains Pakistan's president, following a dubious referendum in April extending his term by five years.

Islamabad: European Union observers said that last week's parliamentary elections were flawed and expressed strong reservations about Pakistan returning to democracy.

Their interim report said that voting secrecy had been compromised, that there had been serious shortcomings in vote-counting and that pro-government candidates had been favoured.

Attempting to recolonise Iraq could be Western imperialism's insane new warmongering crusade's Waterloo.

And even if Iraq can be brutally subjugated and alienated as Afghanistan has been, and Pakistan, (via the assistance of a military dictator who rigs elections which simply ridicules Western colonialism's pretence of "bringing democracy"), there is then Indonesia to recolonise and pacify (ten times Iraq's population, and 14,000 jungle islands to occupy and police).

And even after that, there is the Philippines (another vast island-jungle territory with a huge population and several civil wars already raging of its own).

And that would still only have taken care of the first three on a list of over 100 Third World countries where anti-imperialism is already, or will soon be in open revolt against any further continuation in history of Western imperialist economic and military colonial domination.

The world is set for the greatest round of revolutionary struggles ever known, just in the Third World alone.

Meanwhile, the global 'free-market' economy is now plummeting towards a chaotic tradewar collapse - such as has never even been dreamed of hitherto in modern times.

And every country on Earth is going to suffer monstrously.

As the EPSR has systematically explained, only conscious REVOLUTIONARY politics will be able to do anything with this incurable capitalist disaster, in every country on Earth.

A good time to start building the openly REVOLUTIONARY party was about five years ago at the very least; and if Leninism had prevailed instead of Stalin's Revisionist theoretical nonsense and its even worse Trotskyite opportunist alternative in the Western world of petty bourgeois fake-'left' politics, building a properly theoretically educated REVOLUTI0NARY party would never have ceased in the world. Build Leninism. EPSR

The sooner that Unionist politicians are bluntly told to stop playing personal career survival games with the Good Friday Agreement, the sooner will this hazardous turmoil surrounding the snail's pace British imperialist retreat from Ireland be sorted out. These police-coup stunts would have been brought to a close ages ago if anything other than poodle brains presided in Downing Street. New Ulster is crying out for London to put a stop to Orange fascist intransigence. The 'war' that needs to be over is Britain's own degenerate legacy. The IRA is already only building for peace, and its wisely still organised self-protection could end too if dog-in-the-manger Loyalist revenge seeking could be routed.

Blair's cowardly lack of leadership and philistine muddleheadedness has allowed British Empire establishment backwoodsmen in the reactionary security services to once again attempt to bring down the Good Friday Agreement.

The pantomime police coup to try to humiliate Sinn Fein in its Stormont offices and thereby undermine its rapidly-growing reputation as the only worthwhile political movement for solving ALL of Ireland's problems, Protestant and Catholic alike, North and South alike, - was made urgent by the Trimble Unionist upheaval ordering the First Minister to quit office by January to wreck the GFA because it is leading relentlessly towards Ireland's reunification and the burying forever of British colonial supremacism in the North, (exactly as it was meant to do, as the EPSR alone has consistently explained, grasping the colossal defeat that British imperialism has suffered in modern times, both internationally, and specifically in Ireland at the hands of the revolutionary guerrilla-war national-liberation struggle).

The ludicrous political shallowness of New Labour has repeatedly permitted these colonial minded stunts to disrupt the GFA in reaction's never-ending efforts to re-fight the already lost battles and insist that "terrorists" should never have been caved in to in the first place, and least of all should they be allowed into government.

But the stunts have not worked before, and they will not work this time over the longer term. To stop Sinn Fein remaining a force in government and becoming an ever-growing influence throughout Ireland, taking it steadily on its way to reunification, a new colonial war would have to be launched by Britain.

In today's hysterical international warmongering climate produced by Western monopoly imperialism's insoluble economic crisis and imminent collapse, such a total change of direction by the British Establishment over Ireland, effectively recolonising the place, could not be ruled as utterly impossible (as the EPSR has also always explained).

But it is hardly likely. It would not be the smartest way to play warmongering stooge for US imperialist blitzkrieg and recolonisation tyranny throughout the Middle East and beyond (see previous discussion), with the colossal manpower and achievement difficulties that will present, - and at the same time have half the British armed force tied up again fighting an unwinnable colonial war against national-liberation struggle in Ireland.

Interestingly, the stupidity of this threatened return-to-war destruction of the GFA by banning Sinn Fein (as all shades of official political Unionism now demand) is being openly challenge at last, and in the capitalist press, by other bourgeois voices from the British colonial 'Northern Ireland' tradition, who are loudly telling Trimble & Co not to be so stupid, including professors from Queens and Ulster Universities, plus even a Unionist Assemblyman (in that order, below), plus other capitalist press voices from normally viciously anti-SF and anti-revolutionary quarters.

If Blair were not such a ridiculous political lightweight, he could turn to the same 'Northern Ireland' community (these voices represent) and invite alternative representatives to prolong GFA and inter-Irish dimensions (alongside Sinn Fein and the SDLP), and that way put a stop to these endless fascist police coup-like moves to bring down the GFA or provoke Sinn Fein and the national liberation movement into bringing it down.

If a huge crucial Middle East country like Iraq can be invaded despite huge international repercussions, and a new regime imposed (to the even greater damage to the fraud of "Western democracy traditions"), then finding some sensibles to see out the devolved last twilight years of the hated and catastrophic 'Northern Ireland' colonial failure should be seen as child's play to a politician with even half a brain:

The courts will decide on the validity of the Police Service of Northern Ireland's search of Sinn Fein's premises at Stormont on Friday. But the character of that search is another matter entirely. Noting the apology by the Chief Constable (report, October 8) for that bizarre invasion of Stormont by a column of armoured vehicles and many police officers (frankly reminiscent of a coup d'état), I still do not understand why it happened in that exaggerated manner. If anything was guaranteed to enhance the paranoia of republicans and nationalists over the PSNI and the peace process, it was the character of that action.

I have consistently supported the PSNI since its inception, despite the dilution of the Patten reforms. But there appears to be within the PSNI a capacity by some senior officers unilaterally to "wreck" the present tenuous agreement. Apart from the grotesque incursion into Stormont we have the continuing saga of the investigation into the Castlereagh burglary. Much partisan innuendo by Special Branch but nothing of substance has connected the IRA with that breach.

Similarly, when government documents (including the Patten Report) have been leaked by security personnel to anti-agreement groups, there has been no such reaction from the PSNI. The failure to act decisively against predominantly loyalist instigators of sectarian attacks in Belfast, despite the wealth of data on such people, is similarly becoming something of a scandal.

I have only support for Chief Constable Hugh Orde and his new regime. But certain personnel within the security services are still dragging their heels, if not directly hindering the development of social harmony in Northern Ireland. The only benefit will be to the extremists on both sides.

George Bernard Shaw once described a projected Ulster entity as "an autonomous political lunatic asylum" with Sir Edward Carson as "the chief keeper".

More than 60 years later a sober psychologist borrowed the phrase "paranocracy" to describe a system in which "the basis of power was the successful appeal to paranoid fears in the Protestant electorate about the political, social, philosophical and military potential of their Catholic neighbours". He allowed that it was a relatively mild and insulated form of paranocracy that appeared at appropriate moments in the political and social calendar.

No one can doubt that we have had a healthy ration of lunacy and dollops of paranoia in our history. With the signing of the 1998 Belfast agreement we were supposed to have put all of that behind us.

Mr Adams will be full of righteous indignation; we can expect that the issue of the "securocrats" - that shadowy group at the heart of the security apparatus whom, the republicans assure us, are working night and day to destroy the agreement and all its works will be near the top of the agenda. Mr Adams will remind the Prime Minister of the huge political risks republicans have taken in bedding down the institutions. And he will want to draw Mr Blair's attention to the - enormity of the decision taken by the Ulster Unionist Council more than two weeks ago. Essentially he will be asserting that the lunatics have taken control.

It is possible to have some sympathy with this position, up to a point. When the police service (PSNI) raided the Sinn Fein offices in the parliament buildings last week it had all the elements of the Keystone Kops. But its impact drew on the cliché of the hour that there is no smoke without fire.

That perception, on top of allegations of IRA involvement in Colombia and the persistent claim that the IRA had stolen confidential documents from Castlereagh police station last March, appeared to many as confirmation of a concerted IRA campaign.

Here we have one of those sublime ironies that can only be called Irish. It is the republican movement that shouts most about due process. The image of Gerry Kelly, a senior republican, railing against the desecration of parliamentary sanctity when the PSNI invaded its offices indicates the distance Sinn Fein has travelled. Its historic aim had been to demolish all that Stormont stood for and it will not have been lost on its dissidents. It will have been noted too that in recent weeks Sinn Fein had been edging its way towards some sort of recognition of the PSNI: it had been the usual case of two steps forward, one step back.

We must assume that forward momentum is on hold. In the present circumstances the IRA will not make a gesture sufficient to assuage unionist fears. Indeed it is difficult to imagine any gesture that will not be treated with the deepest scepticism.

That is the reality of the present tense. Paranoia rules. It's the politics of the goldfish bowl. In attempting to address their internal audiences, neither side realises that it has an external audience to consider. The UUP leader, Mr Trimble, is weary. He has been bloodied once too often by his own dissidents. His party represents the most ill-disciplined within the Assembly. He is succumbing to a dangerous wishlist culture for ever raising the ante in negotiations with the Government.

Mr Adams is bemused and bewildered. His has become the party of the status quo. No one doubts that under him Sinn Fein is committed to the peace process. But he seems to be buffeted on the right by "securocrats" and on the left by old habits that die hard. One of his major contributions has been to move decommissioning on from being a big event to a process.

Beyond the rhetoric, people know that the institutions have been working. With the exception of one Assembly member, I know of no one who relishes its collapse. Two of its most successful ministers are members of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party. Memories are long enough for the general public to know that a return to the past is a return to the jungle.

Mr Blair can call on Margaret Thatcher to move the process forward: there is no alternative or, at least, none until it is demonstrably proven that the IRA is pursuing war by other means. In the meantime both Prime Ministers have to address (the sometimes justified reasons for) paranoia. They can fall back on the workings of the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference which will impose its own realism the need to return to an inclusive devolved system. 

Those opposed to the Good Friday agreement hardly hide, their delight that their much prophesied disasters have come true. For those like myself, in the fast-dwindling pro-agreement unionist camp, the saga has been a depressing reminder of how half-hearted the republican movement has been about moving to exclusively peaceful means. Consequently, all of unionism is united upon the demand that either Sinn Fein be excluded, or unionists themselves walk, from the executive.

With the DUP now breathing down his neck in electoral terms, David Trimble has been forced to reposition his party's attitude to continuing to share power with Sinn Fein. New conditions have been laid down, including the demand that the IRA disbands before January 18 2003.

This stance is unrealistic - at no time in Irish history has the IRA unilaterally disbanded in this fashion and it seems unlikely that it will do so now. However, it is clearly politically impossible for David Trimble, or any other unionist leader, to take the kind of chances that he took previously in voluntarily sharing power with Sinn Fein. It therefore is now patently obvious that in the absence of Sinn Fein's exclusion, or the disbandment of the IRA before Tuesday, the assembly will collapse.

In an effort to stave off that eventuality, the British and Irish governments are considering suspension.

This will prevent an immediate crash, but it is difficult to see any possibility of creating the conditions to reinstate the assembly in its present form.

An attempt will probably be made to try to renegotiate aspects of the agreement, but ultimately the problems will remain the same. Sinn Fein is presently well poised to take the position of the largest nationalist party in the assembly and so any future devolved structure without Sinn Fein's involvement would simply not be feasible. What we are left with is a, seemingly unsquareable circle.

In these circumstances the government should consider some radical solutions: One option might be to build upon the concept of an inclusive executive where every party has the right to be in government, but no party has a veto over the institutions by refusing to take part. The exact mechanism would need to be carefully constructed and this would need to be balanced by stronger sanctions to be used against parties that were not demonstrably committed to exclusively peaceful means. 

It may now be the case that an element of political coercion will be required to get unionism to act in its own interests and the non-cooperation veto created by the current structure should be removed. Without such out-of-the-box thinking in the immediate future the assembly will be in the dustbin of history and the British government will be forced to re-introduce direct rule and take power back to Westminster and the Northern Ireland Office. But there is no prospect of any prolonged period of solely British rule. The provisions of the agreement under strand 3 created the British Irish intergovernmental conference, which deals with all nondevolved matters on a cooperative basis between the two governments; and in the event of a failure to reinstate the assembly, it seems likely this cooperation will deepen into a de facto joint authority.

The irony of this for unionists is that, just as 30 years of IRA violence was effective in preventing any political settlement developing, now the unwillingness of republicans to divest themselves of the threat of violence is having a similar effect - and by reacting in such a predictable and Pavlovian manner, unionism is again allowing republicans to dictate the future for Northern Ireland.

The assembly delivered for all the people of Northern Ireland a more accountable system of government and demonstrated our ability to cooperate together on a wide range of socio-economic issues. More importantly for unionists, though, it provided control and influence in how they themselves were governed. The fact that unionists are prepared to sacrifice all of this is an indication of how uncomfortable they feel in the present circumstances. However, the British and Irish governments have a wider responsibility than the discomfort of the unionist parties: they have an overriding responsibility to make the agreement work.

Unionists should bear this unpleasant reality in mind before they rush to what could prove to be a pointless self-sacrifice. 

Will there ever be justice in the north of Ireland? The Stormont raid on Sinn Fein's office and the simultaneous arrests of four people are like a macabre joke, proving that the new police service is no different from the old one, making a laughing stock of the concept of fairness and equality. The police can't catch murderers - even when they know their identities - but they are terrific at hunting down alleged spies.

A year ago, a journalist, Marty O'Hagan, was shot dead by loyalist gunmen. No one has been arrested. In 1999, solicitor Rosemary Nelson was murdered by a car bomb. No one has been arrested. It took years before anyone was arrested for the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989, and when someone was charged, he too was murdered by loyalists. Again, no arrests.

These are just the high profile cases people in Britain know about. Very little media coverage has been given to scores of unpunished loyalist murders and attacks during years in which they have made a mockery of previous ceasefire claims.

All manner of provocative acts against the nationalist population, particularly in Belfast, have failed to achieve the obvious aim of luring the IRA to retaliate and so breach its ceasefire. There have been sporadic instances of indiscipline by IRA members, but they haven't been on anything like the scale of the daily lawlessness of the UDA and its offshoots, such as the venal Red Hand Defenders.

Yet the loyalist mayhem continues under the noses of police, because the IRA remains the bogeyman for the security forces - police special branch, army and MI5 - known in republican terminology as the securocrats. 

The securocrats have been sceptical about the IRA giving up the gun. They have therefore devoted a great deal more time to intelligence-gathering on the IRA's now peaceful members than to investigating loyalists who continue to murder with impunity. It is this anti-republican bias that led to those ridiculous raids and to the breathtaking pre-judgment of arrested men who have been presumed guilty before trial.

But even if we accept that all the leaks about what the police are supposed to have discovered are correct, we must stand back from the government hype to consider its implications. Does it really matter a damn if the IRA knows what the prime minister said to John Reid, the Northern Ireland secretary of state? Does it matter if it knows the name of every serving prison officer, every policeman's address, every ministerial security briefing?

The IRA hasn't done anything about it and, most importantly, isn't remotely likely to, as even that puffed-up, joyless unionist "renegade", Jeffrey Donaldson, has conceded. He knows how implausible it would be for the Provisional IRA to go back to war. There wouldn't be any public support and the leadership of Sinn Fein is now so wedded to the peaceful path it simply couldn't turn around.

If either Sinn Fein or the IRA has spied on the government, they have done so either for political reasons or because they know they are still under constant surveillance and are merely imitating the spooks. Sauce for goose and gander, surely? It may well be possible to argue that some material may be useful to terrorists. But the IRA hasn't engaged in terrorism for years. 

Now look at the problem from the other direction: how did unionist politicians know within minutes of the raids not only why they had taken place but what was in the confiscated documents? The answer, of course, is that they were given the information by their contacts in the police and the Northern Ireland Office. Unionists have traditionally benefited from leaks by the NIO and the security forces, while their militant supporters - the loyalist gangs they disdain in public and applaud in private - have been handed sensitive material to carry out attacks. This case also supports those who believe that the security forces, rather than the government, direct what happens. The government is more or less bound by their advice and, most importantly, by their control of operational matters in which they can manufacture "events" to suit their political aim (ie to prevent reunification).

If this sounds too conspiratorial, note the timing of the raids. Reid says he knew about these matters in July. One of the accused, the so-called infiltrator, left the NIO in September 2001. If there was real danger, it was scandalous for the police to have waited so long.

Launching the raid the day before the start of the Colombia trial of three alleged IRA members may have been a coincidence. But there is a much more pressing domestic matter because of the unionists' ultimatum to collapse the assembly in January. Was that prospect too awful for the government and its securocrats to contemplate? Instead, would it not be far better if republicans could be blamed? 

The sad truth, since partition, is that the British will do, almost anything to frustrate the republican agenda and bolster the unionists. It is frightening to realise that the only people smiling now are the dissident IRA members who refused to follow Sinn Fein down the political road.

The feeble Blairites allow reactionary British propaganda (BBC, etc) to ceaselessly confuse public opinion on Ireland by parroting the challenge to Sinn Fein about "is the IRA's war over yet?", etc.

To which the obvious answer is to ask when will this grotesque partisan policing be over, which staged this needless coup-stunt against Sinn Fein's government offices?

When will the Special, Branch, MI5, and Military Intelligence persecution surveillance against Sinn Fein (a continuation of Britain's colonial war by other means) be over??

When will the non-stop bugging and intelligence-gathering against Sinn Fein, which forces the national-liberation movement to reply in kind, come to an end??

When will the police-protected permanent Loyalist violence against Nationalist areas (still thousands of bombings, and beatings, and intimidation incidents every year), backed by triumphalist intimidatory marches, be put a stop to??

When 	will the unregulated, uncontrolled, and unauthorised (by the Irish) military operations by the British Army over Ireland be terminated??

In other words, when will the colonial war which Britain took to Ireland 800 years ago (and not vice versa) be over????

For its own safety, the Irish national-liberation struggle simply cannot yet disband or disarm. It will happen without fail as soon as British colonial interference, and Unionist intransigence against Ireland's reunification, is abandoned once and for all, along with British military domination. EPSR