This Week in History: Kabul Falls, India's Emergency Is Codified, and Korean War Atrocity Claims Surface

In the middle of November 2001, the capital of Afghanistan changed hands almost without a fight. On November 13 and 14, forces of the Northern Alliance entered Kabul after Taliban fighters, outmatched and pounded by US and British airstrikes, fled south and left the city undefended. The Alliance was a Washington-backed coalition of battle-hardened factions, warlords and ethnic minorities. Its advance came with defections of troops, commanders and the governor of Bamyan province. This week's anniversary retrospective from the World Socialist Web Site, a Trotskyist outlet, marks that moment and three other November events, each read through its own political lens.

The Kabul victory had a darker side. Northern Alliance fighters summarily executed Taliban prisoners in view of Western journalists. UN spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker confirmed the killing in Mazar-e-Sharif of more than 100 Taliban fighters, mostly young and inexperienced recruits found hiding in a school. Looting was reported in numerous incidents. The piece also says US-British bombing killed thousands of civilians in the war's first days and destroyed infrastructure and essential supplies.

Washington had not wanted the Alliance to take the city. President Bush had said the US would encourage its friends to head south but not into Kabul itself. Secretary of State Colin Powell called for an open city, and Tony Blair urged the UN to establish a presence as soon as possible, putting several thousand British troops on standby. The piece argues that Washington turned to a UN-backed coalition of Muslim nations, among them Turkey, Indonesia and Bangladesh, to keep the outcome from being settled by Afghan factions and their backers Russia, Iran and India, and to reassure Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf, who opposed an Alliance-dominated government.

Fifty years ago, in India, the legal machinery of the Emergency was completed. On November 11, 1976, the Rajya Sabha voted 191 to 0 for the 42nd Amendment. The Lok Sabha had passed it on November 2 by 366 to 4, with most opposition MPs jailed or boycotting. Members of the Communist Party of India voted with the ruling party. Indira Gandhi's emergency rule had begun on June 25, 1975, after the Allahabad High Court convicted her of electoral corruption and voided her 1971 election. She jailed over 100,000 opponents and banned strikes. The amendment, often called the Mini-Constitution, stripped courts of judicial review, and its Article 31D let the central government ban any organization or activity deemed anti-national.

The most hated policy, the piece says, was compulsory sterilization, driven by Gandhi's son Sanjay, who held no office but gave orders to ministers and civil servants through the Youth Congress. The piece says Western capital and the World Bank encouraged and financed it, tying aid to population quotas. Officials threatened to withhold salaries, rations and trade licenses unless targets were met. On November 6, in the Meo Muslim village of Uttawar, hundreds of police surrounded the town and took nearly 800 men to makeshift clinics for vasectomies. Over 6 million people were sterilized in 1976, and thousands died of infection and neglect. The CPI's support is attributed to its alignment with Moscow, which valued India as a partner under the 1971 Indo-Soviet treaty.

Seventy-five years ago, on November 14, 1951, Colonel James M. Hanley, head of the US Eighth Army's war crimes section, told a press conference in Pusan that Chinese and North Korean forces had massacred thousands of captured American and Allied soldiers. He said Chinese forces alone had executed 2,513 American prisoners since November 1950, and two days later raised his count of Americans murdered in the war to 6,270. On November 20, General Matthew Ridgway acknowledged the figures mixed unconfirmed estimates with firmer cases. The military could point to only 365 recovered bodies, 259 identified, though an earlier Ridgway report to the UN had alleged as many as 8,000. Armistice talks had resumed October 25, and Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins warned Ridgway on November 15 of the repercussions, asking for a clarification disclaiming any link to the talks. Truman called the alleged massacres the most uncivilized thing in a century, while conceding he had no official facts, adding "if it's true."

A century ago, on November 12, 1926, the Communist Party of Indonesia led revolts against Dutch colonial rule in Batavia, Padang, Bantam and Surabaya. Insurgents in Batavia stormed the telephone and telegraph exchange and marched on government buildings, police posts and Glodok prison, but were repelled by rifle fire. The piece says urban actions failed to draw in the working class and the risings were largely isolated rural revolts of peasants and villagers angered by land-tax surveys and livestock taxes. In Bantam, rebels in white garments of martyrdom gathered near mosques with bludgeons and homemade explosives. Colonial forces quickly crushed them.

The retrospective is openly partisan, so its casualty figures and characterizations are worth checking against mainstream scholarship.