Trotskyist Bulletin No. 8
AFGHANISTAN & THE LEFT
Document 2a.1
Down with Islamic Reaction Hail the Red Army in
Afghanistan!
The following article, described as adapted from
Workers Vanguard, was printed in the February-March 1980 issue of
Spartacist Canada (no. 41). Tom Riley, currently the editor of
1917, edited Spartacist Canada at the time.
The effective deployment of several tens of thousands of Soviet
troops in Afghanistan is one more stinging humiliation for American imperialism
in the Near East. Seeing Washington at an impasse with the ayatollah, the
Kremlin bureaucrats seized the time to quell the uprising by the Afghan mullahs
and khans (religious and tribal heads).
Anti-Soviet opinion around the worldfrom the White House to
the Chinese Great Hall of the People, from the non-aligned
neo-colonies like Zambia to the Spanish and Italian Communist
Partiesrailed against Soviet expansionism which had
trampled on the national sovereignty and integrity of Afghanistan.
The imperialist media pulled out the stops to build sympathy for freedom
fighters battling sophisticated tanks and planes with sticks,
stones and chants of allah akbar.
But in the military confrontation pitting the Soviet soldiers
backing the nationalist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)
against the feudal and pre-feudal forces aided by imperialism, Marxists side
with the Russian tanks. Hail the Red Army!
Carters Cold-War Frenzy
The pretext of Soviet troops in Afghanistan was exploited by
President Carter and his Dr. Strangelove national security adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, to translate the Cold War rhetoric of their anti-Soviet human
rights crusade into action. On January 4 Carter went on TV to announce
that the U.S. was going to engage in economic warfare against the USSR: 17
million tons of grain already ordered by the Soviet Union would not be shipped;
sales of high technology products, such as advanced computers and oil-drilling
equipment would be cut off; four Coast Guard cutters were dispatched to Alaska
to protect the fish from Russian aggression; scheduled openings of consular
facilities were stopped, as were any new cultural and economic exchanges.
Carter has since pledged that the U.S. will boycott the Moscow Olympics if the
Soviet troops are not withdrawn from Afghanistan by mid-February.
Over the Teheran embassy crisis Carter pledged not to use food
deliveries as an economic weapon against Iran. In his State of the Union
message, Carter stated:
We have no basic quarrel with the nation,
revolution or the people of Iran. The threat to them comes not from American
policy but from Soviet actions in the region. We are prepared to work with the
Government of Iran to develop a new and mutually beneficial relationship.
New York Times, 23 January
But against the Soviet Union, which needs American grain in order
to increase meat production and improve the diet of its population, the United
States uses nutritional blackmail in the hopes of fomenting social discontent.
Carters message is: Starve for human rights! Canadas lame-duck
Prime Minister Joe Clark, following suit, agreed not to increase Canadian grain
shipments and halted all high technology trade and cultural exchanges with the
USSR.
American Secretary of Defense Brown was dispatched to Peking to
deepen the anti-Soviet U.S./China alliance, already twice tested militarily:
over the South African invasion of Angola and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam.
Now the Pentagon wants the Peoples Liberation Army to channel arms to the
reactionary Afghan rebels through their mutual military client, Pakistan. With
unprecedentedly forthright bellicosity, Browns toast at a state banquet
called on Peking to join American imperialism with complementary actions
in the field of defense as well as diplomacy. Now most of the cards are
on the table.
We are presently experiencing a major shift of the international
order as it was shaped in the aftermath of World War II. Such changes do not
occur overnight and to place the turning point at 1 January 1980 would be
dangerously misleading. From Potsdam, Trumans policies sought an
imperialist alliance against the USSR; and the new anti-Soviet action was
already foreshadowed by Washingtons complicity in last years
Chinese invasion of Vietnam. Whether it is the human rights
rhetoric of Vance or the McCarthyite demonology of Brzezinski, the target of
Carters onslaught is the Soviet Union and the threat of the new
realignment is imperialist war to obliterate the conquests of the October
Revolution.
Ever since taking office Jimmy Carter has sought to morally and
militarily rearm American imperialism and pull the U.S. out of what the
Pentagon sees as its post-Vietnam paralysis. His claims to have recently
changed his opinion of the Russians to the contrary, Carter is simply milking
the Iran and faked-up Afghanistan crisis for all they are worth in building
jingoist support for his war drive against the USSR. Carter has increased the
U.S. military budget for three years running and in December he announced a
further hike in military spendingtaking inflation into account this
amounts to over one trillion dollars to be added to the war budget in
the next five years. Most of this is to pay for a rapid deployment
force and new ships which the Pentagon has had on its shopping list for
years.
Each escalation in American armament was palmed off as appeasing
opponents of SALT. Clearly Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty means
billions for more nuclear missiles, bombers, ships, etc. And these weapons are
not being built to liberate hostages held by Islamic students
chanting, Carter is a dog. They are aimed at the USSR. With the
Soviet army operation in Afghanistan, all the claptrap about
détente, SALT, etc.by which the imperialists seek to
negotiate the disarmament of the Soviet degenerated workers statehas been
put into mothballs.
Of course, this counterrevolutionary diplomatic farce would not
have gotten this far were it not for the class-collaborationist, pacifistic
illusions of the Kremlin bureaucracy in peaceful coexistence with
imperialism. But even as hamhanded intransigence by employers sometimes forces
even conservative union hacks to call a strike, so the septuagenarian Stalinist
leaders in Moscow got fed up and did the obvious thing. Recognizing that (as
American analysts have long admitted) Afghanistan has no strategic importance
for the U.S., the Soviets took the opportunity to shore up the secular
left-nationalists in Kabul and in the process extended their defense perimeter
by several hundred miles around the eastern flank of Iran. As for SALT, it was
obviously dead and only the impotent and frustrated Jimmy Carter could see
withdrawing it from Senate consideration as a warning
to Moscow.
Compared to twenty years ago, however, the United States
world position is greatly weakened and the role of its imperialist allies is
much greater. The end of unquestioned U.S. imperialist hegemony was marked by
Nixons 15 August 1971 action severing the dollars relation to
goldthe basis for the post-war monetary system. Now Carter meets
indifference to his calls for economic boycotts of Iran and the Soviet Union.
The French turned down U.S. requests to curb advanced computer exports to
Moscow and the Japanese are continuing with their multi-billion dollar project
to develop Siberian natural gas. The most Carter could come up with was German
diplomatic support and an agreement by major grain exporters not to increase
their sales to the USSR. On Iran, theyre willing to vote with the U.S. in
the United Nations, but no one is willing to jeopardize the vital crude oil
supplies for the sake of the hostages. Turkish Foreign Minister Hayrettin
Erkmen put it most clearly: Not approving of some action by a country is
not the same as announcing that that country is your enemy. Even
Pakistani despot Zia is queasy, terming Carters 400 million dollar aid
offer peanuts.
Only the Chinese appeared willing to go all the way for what
thats worth. Revising its earlier public verdict on
Dengs attack on Hanoi last year, the U.S. now concludes that the
Chinese were bloodied by the more experienced Vietnamese armed with modern
Soviet weapons (New York Times, 17 January). Pentagon officials
conservatively estimate that to bring Peking forces to the point that they
could threaten anyone would cost at least 35 billion dollars.
Carters call for preparations to reimpose the draft in the
U.S. reflect the current problems which the U.S. is having with its
alliesthe lack of a united response to the Soviet Union. Thus the
Sunday Times [London] reports:
Unquestionably the US could now blockade the [Persian]
Gulf and sow enough mines to bottle up the Iranian navy and any Soviet ships
using their Iraqi ports. But beyond that, Carters options are limited.
Without the use of Portugals Azores airstrips, heavy armour would have to
come from the States with five in-flight refuellings and even then might have
nowhere to land.
Efforts to open up new facilities have run in
to opposition, as in Somalia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia, or hesitation, as in
Oman
. And the Rapid Deployment Force
. will take five years to
prepare. 20 January
When the Soviets felt the hot breath of counterrevolution next
door, the Kremlin was not seized by rotten liberalism. The treatment of the
pro-imperialist dissidents may force some governments to make hard
choices between continued cooperation with the Soviet Union and lining up
behind Carters renewed Cold War. Thus the exiling of Russian physicist
Andrei Sakharov caused the president of the French National Assembly, Jacques
Chaban-Delmas, to cut short his visit to the USSR and return to France in
protest. When these dissidents called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from
Afghanistan, they were branded for what they are: traitors to the
proletarian cause.
Afghanistan and the Soviet Union
U.S. imperialism has tried to portray the Soviet military
operation in Afghanistan as akin to its invasion of Hungary in 1956 and
Czechoslovakia in 1968. In Hungary the Kremlin suppressed a working-class
political revolution. In Czechoslovakia it clamped on a bureaucratic
stranglehold and cut short potentially revolutionary ferment. Both invasions
were neither in the interest of the international working class nor of the
defense of the gains of the October Revolution. Afghanistan is entirely
different.
Commanded by a parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy which has usurped
political power from the Soviet workers, the lives of Red Army soldiers have
often been squandered for counterrevolutionary ends: from the Sino-Soviet
border war to supporting the blood-drenched, genocidal bonapartist Derg in
Ethiopia. But the Red Army in Afghanistan, the Russian support to the heroic
Vietnamese and the Soviet-backed Cuban defense of Angola against the
U.S.-instigated South African invasion in 1975-76 are three instances since the
end of World War II where Russian military action has clearly aided the
liberation of the oppressed and the defense of the Soviet state against
imperialism.
Afghanistan and Russia share a common border of over 1,000 miles.
Like most backward regions, Afghanistan is a mosaic of peoples none of which
has been able to compact a modern nation and many of which extend into the
Soviet Union or other neighbouring countries. Out of an estimated population of
17 million there are more than 250,000 mullahsa tremendous weight on the
skimpy social surplus of this barren land. Some 70 percent of the population is
engaged in agriculture, but two-fifths of them are landless. While 15 percent
of the people are urbanized, there are only two factories in the whole country.
The enormous burden of the Islamic priest-caste in Afghanistan, as
in Iran, is rooted in barbaric social institutions which are in turn
conditioned by extreme economic backwardness. Marxists point out that social
progress can be measured by the position of women, and what really drove the
Afghan mullahs into opposition was the attempt by the Kabul regime to restrict
(not even outlaw) bride price. For centuries women have been sold like chattel
slaves. For most men the bride price was a lifetimes savings or a
life-long debt to money lenders who charged usurious interest rates and gave
the mullahs their cut in donations.
Clearly within the framework of Afghanistan alone there was no
solution to national and social oppression. These questions are linked,
historically as well as socially, to the fate of the Russian Revolution. The
extension of the October Revolution to Afghanistan in 1921 was prevented only
by the presence of British imperialism in India. And one need only look at the
gains that women have made in the Soviet East to see what proletarian
liberation of these pre-capitalist areas meant. The October Revolution
proclaimed the full equality of women, and Bolshevik cadres in the Asian
regions where the mullahs held sway struggled, often at the cost of their
lives, to draw women out of enforced seclusion. Even though this work suffered
with the Stalinist political counterrevolution, nevertheless women in the
Muslim areas of the USSR have vastly more social gains and real equality than
in any bourgeois Islamic country.
Although the Stalinist bureaucracy is imbued with Great Russian
chauvinism, its conduct is conditioned by the fact that Russians are a minority
people within the Soviet statealbeit the predominant minority. In order
to integrate the peoples of diverse national and ethnic backgrounds who make up
the Soviet Union, the bureaucracy retained a democratic national heritage. In
contrast, the Chinese bureaucracy can and does resort to a policy of ruthless
Sinification. The contrast between the USSR and China is clearest in their
shared borderlands. For example, the Mongolians living in Outer Mongolia (a
Soviet satellite) do not suffer anything like the national oppression of
Mongolians living in Chinas Inner Mongolia, before that token of regional
autonomy was abolished during the Cultural Revolution. And an
estimated 200,000 Turkic speaking people from Sinkiang, seeking to escape the
oppressive chauvinism of the Han Chinese, have fled to the USSR since 1961.
The Soviet regime is particularly sensitive regarding its Muslim
borderlands, where it has often made the greatest efforts to grant local and
national autonomy in order to maintain the loyalty of peoples related to the
rest of Central Asia. Muslim peoples number 50 million in the Soviet Union and
they dominate six of the 16 republics of the USSR. Notably many of the soldiers
of the Soviet army units in Afghanistan are recruited from Uzbeks and Tajiks.
And if fiercely independent Afghanistan is about to suffer such
horrendous national oppression at the hands of the Soviets, why indeed can
Moscow use Muslim-derived troops without fear? Obviously because they know
theyre better off than they would be under the Afghan mullahs or
Khomeini. Reportedly one reason why the Soviet army deployed substantial forces
in Afghanistan was the feeling that the Kabul regime was being too high-handed
and insensitive to the problems of carrying out reforms and consolidating a
centralized governmental authority in backward areas with diverse peoples and
was thereby fueling the reactionary Islamic insurgency.
From a military point of view the Soviet intervention may or may
not have been wise, though certainly it is deeply just to oppose the Islamic
reactionary insurgents backed by imperialism. There can be no question that for
revolutionaries our side in this conflict is with the Red Army. In fact,
although it is surely uncalled for militarily, a natural response on the part
of the worlds young leftists would be an enthusiastic desire to join an
international brigade to Afghanistan to fight the CIA-connected mullahs. Most
of the fake-leftists cannot see this, howeverjust as they cannot
understand how workers are beginning to speak of particularly oppressive bosses
as ayatollahsbecause they support the analogous movement,
Khomeinis Islamic Revolution, next door in Iran.
Defend the Soviet Union!
By giving unconditional military support to the Soviet army and
PDPA Afghan forces we in no way place political confidence in the Kremlin
bureaucracy or the left-nationalists in Kabul. While the Moscow Stalinists
apparently presently intend to shore up the PDPA regime, and if anything limit
the pace of democratic and modernizing reforms, the prolonged presence in
Afghanistan of the Soviet army opens up more far-reaching possibilities.
Speaking on the national and colonial question at the Second Congress of the
Communist International in 1920, Lenin foresaw that
with the aid of
the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to
the Soviet system, and through certain stages of development, to communism,
without having to pass through the capitalist stage. Extend social gains
of the October Revolution to Afghan peoples!
If Afghanistan is effectively incorporated into the Soviet bloc
this can today be only as a bureaucratically deformed workers state.
Compared to present conditions in Afghanistan this would represent a giant step
forward. The sharp contrast between the condition of women in Soviet Central
Asia and that in any Islamic state provides an index. But the road to
the socialist future of economic plenty and internationalist equality lies in a
proletarian political revolution to oust the parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy.
This in turn must be linked with socialist revolutions from South Asia to the
imperialist centers.
The Kremlin and its flunkies of the pro-Moscow CPs will
predictably launch a peace offensive to isolate the
warmongers and revive détente. To these shibboleths we
respond as James P. Cannon did to the Stalinists in the 1950s:
The class struggle of the workers, merging with the
colonial revolutions in a common struggle against imperialism, is the only
genuine fight against war. The Stalinists who preach otherwise are liars and
deceivers. The workers and colonial peoples will have peace when they have the
power and use their power to take it and make it for themselves. That is the
road of Lenin. There is no other road to peace. The Road to
Peace, 1951 |