1975 Vietnam - 2013 Afghanistan

It is not the fact that the US is now going to be talking to the Taliban that is of real interest. It is true that all conflicts end with some kind of talks between the contending parties, even if it is only for one to sign a declaration of unconditional surrender! The US will not be doing the latter, and the Taliban certainly will not. But, the suggestion, that some politicians have made, that the proposed talks are comparable to the talks between Britain and the Provisional IRA, is ridiculous. On the contrary, these talks are comparable to those between the US and the North Vietnamese, in Paris, just before the US made its hurried departure from Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese tanks rolled in.

Its no wonder the Afghan government has called off its bilateral talks with the US following the news. The US, UK and others have been pulling out of Afghanistan for some time, and these talks are simply a formal recognition that that process is about to be speeded up, and control will return to the Taliban. It is not that which is interesting, but what lies behind it, what it says about the fruits of the US, UK, Al Qaeda Alliance .

According to Channel 4 News, yesterday, the talks will be between the US and representatives of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the most significant Taliban faction. In fact, it has also been revealed that the US a couple of years ago, secretly flew out Taliban representatives to Qatar, where the Taliban now also has its office. The significance of that is also fairly obvious. Qatar, is one of those feudal, Gulf regimes with which the US and UK are closely allied. It is Qatar that has been responsible, alongside Saudi Arabia, and other Sunni dominated, Gulf regimes, for providing masses of arms to the jihadist fighters in Syria, and in Libya before that, and which is supporting the same forces that are destabilising the Shia regime in Iraq.

Its not surprising that in these US-Taliban talks, the Taliban Political Commission will also be representing the, Al Qaeda linked, Haqqani Network. What is becoming clearer, by the day, is the extent to which an undeclared alliance exists between the US and UK with Al Qaeda, as the mercenary, jihadist wing of the Gulf Regimes. That alliance is a means of furthering the strategic interests both of the US and UK, who seek to minimise the power of Russia and China in the region, and consequently of Iran as their client. But, it is also a means by which the feudal, Gulf regimes assert their own local interests, as against Iran, and other Shia dominated states in the area.

Cameron is only using weasel words, that no one can believe, when he claims that UK support, for arming the jihadists, in Syria, is only intended to support “legitimate” forces. The bourgeois politicians, put up the Syrian National Council, have no more real legitimacy than did the bourgeois politicians of the Libyan National Council before them. Real legitimacy, in these conditions, comes down to who has control of the streets, and in Syria, as in Libya before it, the answer to that question is the jihadists. Cameron and other western bourgeois politicians are not stupid, and even if they were there has been literally billions of dollars spent in academic institutions to understand this basic political theory. Talk of wanting to support democracy by such politicians, therefore, is merely intended for public consumption back home, to sell their platitudes to a public that does not have the benefit of such academic research, but which, simply on the basis of its own experience, knows where such adventures lead, and what their consequences inevitably become.

The US talks with the Taliban no doubt have a further element to them. The reason the USSR invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, was itself based on the fears it has always had, going back to Lenin, and to the Tsarist Empire before that, of its own Islamists. Its what led Lenin to warn specifically in the Theses on The National and Colonial Questions about the danger of Pan-Islamism. Sooner or later, Lenin himself must have realised that ultimately Bolshevism would have to go to war with Political Islam. The extent of that problem is demonstrated, for Russia, almost daily, in the attacks it faces from jihadists, based in Chechnya, and the Central Asian Republics.

As part of its Great Game, the US undoubtedly seeks to keep Russia busy contending with its own terror problems, with Afghanistan once more becoming the swamp from which it rises. That is the more so, given that a rising China has itself begun to show interest in Afghanistan's mineral riches, in a similar way to its involvement in Africa. Without US troops as a target, the US, no doubt hopes that attention will once more focus on these other external powers, and given the US links with the Gulf regimes, that provide much of the financial backing for the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, its obvious how such encouragement might be given.