Mao assessed that U.S. imperialism is at the same time a real tiger, and a paper tiger. It’s capable of doing great damage, but it has key weaknesses that can be exploited by the world’s liberation movements.
The post-9/11 era, which just reached a pivotal point with the defeat of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has shown one of imperialism’s most important weaknesses at this stage: the hubris of the empire and its proxy states. The Taliban has managed to drive out the vastly more militarily powerful U.S. forces, and the Palestinian resistance has managed to remain competitive with the vastly more equipped Israelis, because the oppressor countries overestimate their strength. Having more firepower isn’t necessarily enough to win. Asymmetrical warfare grants rebels key strengths, namely the ability to get the masses on the side of the rebels by pointing to the massive atrocities of the oppressors.
The imperialists are always trying to turn the situation around, to use asymmetrical warfare for their own benefit. And they’ve succeeded at times, like when they got the Mujahideen to overthrow Afghanistan’s socialist republic through guerrilla tactics like sabotaging the country’s infrastructure. But as Mao also observed, the imperialists are divorced from the masses. So these counterrevolutionary wars they wage, even when dressed up in the veneer of popular revolutions via “freedom-fighting” terrorist proxies like the Mujahideen, always produce popular backlash. In Afghanistan’s case, the theocratic regime the imperialists installed went rogue, became the Taliban, and deprived the empire of the $1 trillion in minerals that U.S. capital desperately seeks to extract from Afghanistan.
By backing Afghanistan’s East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the Uyghur nationalist terrorist group that’s posing a growing threat to China, Washington is seeking to carry out a guerrilla insurgency against the PRC. The hope of the imperialists is that the ETIM’s growing violence will spill across the border into Xinjiang.
But the agitation propaganda that this attempted weaponization of the Uyghurs relies on—namely the narrative that China is committing a “genocide” in Xinjiang—is so diametrically opposed to the actual conditions of China’s ethnic minorities that Washington’s envisioned Chinese civil war can never be realized. Xinjiang’s Uyghurs are sharing in the benefits from the economic growth from Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, as is the case for every other ethnic group in China. And the U.S. State Department’s charges of human rights abuses within China’s Uyghur terrorist deradicalization facilities are so baseless that Xinjiang Uyghurs have themselves publicly shamed Washington officials for lying.
In contrast to these forces of counterrevolutionary asymmetrical warfare, which rely on fabricated atrocity propaganda to justify their terroristic actions, the forces of revolutionary asymmetrical warfare can point to actual injustices within capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.
They can point to the fact that 100 million people throughout the capitalist world have been driven into poverty during the pandemic, as opposed to how poverty has decreased in socialist China during the same months. They can point to how the U.S. empire’s military is the largest institutional polluter, making Washington imperialism to blame for the world’s 21.5 million climate refugees. They can point to how the U.S. empire has driven Afghanistan back into an unstable feudalism, and how the country had overcome feudal rule during its era of being a socialist republic. They can point to how Washington is backing Zionism, Hindutva fascism, Bolsonaroism, Uribismo, and so many other brutal ruling ideologies.
It’s because of this advantage of the anti-imperialists that foreign policy analyst Fareed Zakaria wrote this about anti-imperialist asymmetrical warfare in his 2008 book The Post-American World: “The United States has the most powerful military in the history of the world. And yet it has found it difficult to prevail in Iraq. The Israeli military is vastly superior to Hezbollah’s forces. But it was not able to win a decisive victory over the latter in its conflict with it. Why? Because the current era is one in which asymmetrical responses have become easier to execute and difficult to defeat.”
This vulnerability in capital and empire is continuously being proven, and not just by ultra-reactionary forces that happen to be anti-imperialist like the Taliban. In Colombia, the new revolutionary guerrilla organization Segunda Marquetalia has been gradually growing in membership, and has garnered perceived legitimacy among the masses it so far holds jurisdiction over. This increasing success comes in spite of Plan Colombia, the scorched-earth counterinsurgency model that’s been viewed as a victory route for counterinsurgencies from Mexico to Afghanistan.
Colombia’s neo-colonial regime has been riding off the successes of Plan Colombia to regain more territory from the guerrillas, but at the same time it’s been losing support from the people, who’ve granted Segunda Marquetalia its victories. Once again, the reactionaries are at the same time real tigers and paper tigers, simultaneously strong and weak—with their weakness being what may decide the war.
This has become especially true throughout Colombia’s anti-austerity protests of recent months, wherein the Uribismo-controlled regime has carried out world-shocking repressive violence. This last week, the anti-guerrilla Latin American publication InsightCrime lamented the resilience of the insurgency in the face of this year’s assassination of a top rebel leader, declaring: “New Guerrilla Boss, Same as Old Guerrilla Boss in Colombia…The death of a top guerrilla commander in southern Colombia has unveiled an all-too-familiar situation: the leaders of criminal groups may be replaced, but this rarely leads to any meaningful change in the security situation.”
In Yemen, the imperialists have faced a similar situation of pro-Washington security strategists anticipating military victory by the U.S. and its proxies, then being slapped by the reality of guerrilla strength. As researcher Michael Horton wrote this summer:
The defeat of the Houthis has, according to many analysts and think tanks, been imminent for much of the past five years. The better equipped militaries of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and their various proxy forces were supposed to rapidly defeat the Houthis and their allies. Great emphasis was placed on the technical superiority of the Western-equipped militaries of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Yet despite the expenditure of vast sums on weapons and materiel by Riyadh and the Abu Dhabi, the Houthis have consolidated their control of northwest Yemen and are poised to capture the governorate of Marib. The Houthis’ ability to defy and defeat technologically superior forces is a reminder that, as the military strategist and fighter pilot Colonel John Boyd argued, “machines don’t fight wars, terrain doesn’t fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the minds of humans. That’s where the battles are won.” The Houthis excel on the battlefield and this is unlikely to change, no matter how much Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their backers spend on the war in Yemen.
Despite these growing strategic weaknesses of the imperialists, we must be ever vigilant of how they can still exploit the weaknesses of the liberation forces—whether militarily, socially, or narratively. Horton also points out that the contradictions within the power structure of the Houthis—whether real or exaggerated by imperialist propaganda—have the potential to fracture Yemen’s anti-imperialist alliance. The imperialists are eager to inflame whatever tensions, legitimate or manufactured, exist within this and all other anti-U.S. coalitions.
This is why as we in the center of the empire build up our revolutionary cadres, we must consistently expose the empire’s propaganda about other anti-imperialists while maintaining international solidarity. Unity and proper research, combined with the strengths of our modern revolutionary tactics, can bring us to victory.
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