An Injury To One Is An Injury To All.

Taliban bombers have killed 12 Afghan construction workers in two separate incidents in the eastern part of the country. Nine of the workers were killed in Bar Kunar, and three others were murdered in Ghazni, where the beheaded body of parliamentary candidate Najibullah Gulistani was dumped on a road last Friday near his home. Further, ten workers on a medical aid mission - two Afghan interpreters, a German, a Briton and six Americans - have been murdered in Badakhshan.

In July, there were nearly 300 acts of counterrevolutionary terror committed against Afghan civilians - more than 160 murders and assaults and more than 100 cases of coercion, including extortion, prohibiting girls from attending school, and attacks on development projects. During July alone, the Taliban killed 220 civilians and injured more than 360. Since January, Taliban bombers have murdered more than 400 Afghan civilians and injured more than 860 (Canada has lost 151 soldiers in the Afghan struggle, since 2001).

Credit for the slaughter of the medical aid workers is being claimed by the usual reactionary elements - both the Pakistani proxy, the Taliban, and by the Khomeinist-favoured Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Among the dead is Briton Karen Woo, a surgeon and volunteer with the NGO Bridge Afghanistan. She was in charge of the mission's mother-and-child clinics. Also murdered was American optometrist Tom Little, a beloved friend of the Afghan people and the guiding force behind the National Organization for Ophthalmic Rehabilitation, which runs about a dozen "eye camps" providing care to roughly 225,000 Afghans, including more than 14,000 surgeries, every year.

All this is to say that sooner or later, a winning strategy - one that has been proven to actually work - will have to be adopted.

For only thus can we deflate the enemy's arrogance and raise the people's morale. If we are weak and irresolute, if we are tolerant and indulgent, it will bring harm to the people and alienate us from the masses. To strike surely means to pay attention to tactics. To strike accurately means to avoid wrong executions. To strike relentlessly means resolutely to kill all such reactionary elements as deserve the death penalty (of course, those who don't will not be executed). So long as we avoid wrong executions, we don't have to worry even if the bourgeoisie raises an outcry.

From each according to one's abilities. To each according to one's needs.

For an end to slavery. One day, the people will win.

(Update: In memoriam. Regards to Mark Collins).