Trotskyist Bulletin No. 8
AFGHANISTAN & THE LEFT
Document 2b.5
Soviets Abandon Women, Leftists to Mujahedin
Gorbachevs Afghan Sellout
Reprinted from 1917 No. 5,
Winter 1988-89
On 15 May the USSR began a pullout of its 115,000 troops from
Afghanistan. The withdrawal is being carried out as a result of an agreement
signed in Geneva a month earlier by Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Soviet Union and
the United States. The accord commits the USSR to terminate its military
presence entirely by February of next year. As of this writing, over half the
Soviet force has already been sent home. Whatever unfortunate fate may befall
those Afghans who identified themselves with the Kabul regime and its backers,
the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan is not likely to be reversed. It is thus
appropriate to draw up a balance sheet on the past eight-and-a-half years of
Soviet intervention.
When the USSR dispatched its first combat divisions across the
Afghan border in December 1979, the anti-Soviet din emanating from Washington
and other imperialist capitals grew into a deafening clamor. The intervention,
according to the Carter White House and various bourgeois media hacks, was the
first step in a Soviet expansionist drive upon the oil lanes of the Persian
Gulf. In response Carter slapped new trade restrictions on the Soviet Union,
reinstituted registration for the draft and boycotted the Moscow Olympics in
the summer of 1980. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carters chief anti-communist
crusader, stood rifle-in-hand at the Khyber Pass to urge the Afghan rebels on
against the red menace, the western media sang paeans of praise to
the fierce, loyal, and heroic Islamic
freedom fighters, defending Afghanistans independence from
Soviet aggression.
What was the appropriate Trotskyist response to these cold war
fulminations? It was necessary, in the first place, to counter the lie of
Soviet expansionism with the simple truth that the Afghan intervention
represented a defensive move on the Kremlins part, aimed at protecting a
client state on its southern flank against a threatened U. S.-sponsored,
right-wing takeover. But even more important was the elementary duty of
Trotskyists to denounce the hypocritical indignation over the violation of
Afghanistans national sovereignty, shared by liberals,
assorted Maoists, pro-Third World new leftists, and significant sections of the
ostensible Trotskyist movement.
In general, Marxists do not advocate the imposition of social
revolution upon nations by military force from without. The indigenous working
class, even when a small minority of the population, is best capable of leading
other oppressed classes forward in revolutionary struggle. Afghanistan,
however, is so monumentally backward that the working class does not exist as a
significant social force. In this situation, some kind of outside
intervention is necessary to emancipate the Afghan masses from quasi-feudal
despotism.
The Soviet intervention did not take place in the best of
circumstances. The reformist, pro-Soviet Peoples Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA) had come to power in a military coup and had little support
outside of a layer of the urban intelligentsia. The PDPA was faction-ridden
from the outset, and ineptly attempted to implement its program of reforms with
commandist methods. This fueled a popular rightist insurgency, which prompted
the Soviets attempted rescue of the regime.
There is no denying that the great majority of Afghanistans
population supports the jihad against the Soviets and their allies. Yet
Marxists do not choose sides in social conflicts on the basis of the relative
popularity of the opposing forces. Rather, we are guided by the social and
political character of the antagonists.
The nature of the contending forces in the Afghan war could not
have been clearer. On the one side was a government in Kabul which, through a
modest program of land reform, a moratorium on peasant debt, a literacy
campaign, and a ceiling on the bride price, was attempting to bring Afghanistan
out of the feudal darkness in which it had languished. It was no coincidence
that the reform-minded intellectuals and military officers of the PDPA took as
their model the Soviet Union, which, since 1917, has acted as an emancipator of
Moslem peoples on the Soviet side of the Afghan border. The opposing camp
comprised as unsavory a collection of reactionaries as can be found on the face
of the earth: tribal patriarchs, feudal landlords, fanatical mullahs and
opium-smuggling brigands, whose legendary hatred of social progress is matched
only by their reputation for barbaric cruelty. Taking up arms against such
threats to their traditional way of life as the spread of literacy
and the mitigation of female slavery, these champions of
self-determination found their natural allies in the military
dictatorship of Zias Pakistan, Khomeinis Islamic Republic and, most
significantly, in U. S. imperialism, the worlds chief
counterrevolutionary gendarme, which has lavished $2 billion on the insurgents.
Only those pseudo-Marxists who do not know the difference between progress and
reaction could have any doubt about which side to take in the Afghan war.
The Kremlin bureaucracy did not intervene in order to liberate the
Afghan masses, but to keep Afghanistan (a Soviet client state since 1921) from
falling into imperialist hands at a time when Washington was beating its
anti-Soviet war drums with renewed fervor. They also must have feared that the
reactionary contagion of Islamic fundamentalism which had just conquered Iran
might penetrate to the Moslem regions of the USSR. But, regardless of the
subjective motives of the Soviet bureaucrats, the Soviet army had joined a
life-and-death struggle against the forces of oppression. It was (and is)
unthinkable that the religious fanatics of the mujahedin would ever
consent to share power with the existing regime in Kabul. Therefore, to
prosecute the military struggle successfully, the Russian army could have been
compelled to extend the remaining gains of the October Revolution to those
areas under its control, thereby in effect imposing a social revolution from
above. Such a development would have constituted an immense step forward for
the Afghan masses, and a significant blow against imperialism. It was with
these hopes in mind that the Bolshevik Tendency joined the international
Spartacist tendency (to which the founding members of our group had previously
belonged) in proclaiming the slogan Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!
(see accompanying article).
Afghan Pullout: Humiliating Defeat for the USSR
Today those hopes are as far as ever from realization. The Soviet
Union is leaving Afghanistan with nothing to show for eight years of combat
except tens of thousands of dead and wounded. Far from transforming Afghan
society, the Soviet bureaucrats from the outset had as their objective merely
restoring the status quo ante: a Moscow-friendly regime in Kabul. The
Soviets paved the way for their intervention in 1979 by engineering the murder
of the militantly reformist Afghan president, Hafizullah Amin, and replacing
him with the more moderate Babrak Karmal. Since that time the
original PDPA land reform decrees have been annulled, religious instruction has
been reintroduced into the public schools, over one hundred new mosques have
been built under government auspices, tribal chiefs and Moslem clerics have
been elected to the government and the symbol of Islam has been
restored to the Afghan flag. By attempting to conciliate the khans and mullahs,
the Soviets deprived themselves of an important political weaponmeasures
aimed at social and economic emancipationthat could have infused their
ranks with fighting ardor and won the support of a substantial section of the
dispossessed peasantry. The result of the Stalinists attempts to
conciliate reaction was a debilitating military stalemate.
When Mikhail Gorbachev finally decided to throw in the towel, the
agreement signed in Geneva held no guarantees for the present Soviet client
government of Najibullah. It took only a little arm twisting from Moscow to
persuade the Afghan leader to sign his name to a document that he no doubt
perceived as his own political death warrant.
Throughout the negotiations leading to the Geneva accords,
Gorbachev acceded to one demand after another from the White House. The Soviets
had initially proposed to pull out of Afghanistan over a period of four years
but, when the Americans and Pakistanis suggested that they were thinking of
something more like four months, Moscow agreed to nine months. The U. S. then
demanded that the Russians agree to pull out half the troops in the first six
months, and again Moscow agreed.
The U. S. and Pakistan had initially agreed to cease all aid to
the anti-Soviet mujahedin guerrillas in exchange for the Soviet
withdrawal. But before the Geneva accord was even signed, George Shultz stated
that the U. S. would not stop supplying the mujahedin unless the Soviet
Union reciprocated by terminating all military support to Kabul. Even this
outrageous demand, clearly designed to sabotage the negotiations, did not deter
the Soviets from surrendering. The deadlock was finally broken with a codicil
to the main accord in which the Russians accepted continued U. S.-Pakistani aid
to the guerrillas as long as the Soviets continued to support the Afghan
government. With a stroke of the pen, the Kremlin agreed to the continuation of
a CIA operation on the southern border of the USSR that dwarfs U. S. aid to the
Nicaraguan contras! (Meanwhile the U. S. continues to arrogantly threaten to
bomb Nicaragua should a single Soviet MIG fighter jet arrive in its ports.) In
short, American imperialism aimed forand inflicteda total
humiliation on the Russians in Afghanistan.
A good indication of the fate in store for Afghanistan after the
Russian withdrawal is given by the recent pronouncements of the Islamic
fundamentalists who dominate the guerrilla coalition headquartered in Peshawar,
Pakistan. Their chief spokesman is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who began his political
career at the University of Kabul by throwing acid in the faces of female
fellow students who declined to wear the veil. These holy warriors
bridle at the suggestion that the old king, Zahir Shah (who is equivalent to a
communist in their eyes) be summoned from exile in Rome to head a new
government, and have vowed to fight on, even after the Russians have left, for
a regime comprised exclusively of Koran-waving zealots. With apparent U. S. and
Pakistani backing, the fundamentalists have already begun to impose a virtual
reign of terror upon the moderate guerrilla factions. One such
moderate, Bahauddin Majrooh, a former philosophy professor at Kabul
University, was murdered by Hekmatyars men in Peshawar last February for
publishing a poll showing widespread support for Zahir Shah. If
Afghanistans traditional reactionary leaders are afraid to speak in
public for fear of being next on the fundamentalists hit list, what kind
of treatment can the pro-Soviet government in Kabul, and those who supported
it, expect at the hands of the mujahedin majority?
The withdrawal of Soviet troops will almost certainly be a prelude
to a massacre. Among the victims will be women who disdain to enshroud
themselves in the head-to-ankle veil, women who insist on their right to read,
students, intellectuals and army officers, as well as anyone who refuses to bow
five times a day to Meccain short, every progressive element in
Afghanistan today.
USec on Afghanistan: Menshevik Third Campism
While the bulk of the centrist and reformist currents which
proclaim themselves Trotskyist have joined the imperialist-orchestrated chorus
denouncing the Soviet intervention, probably the most cynical response has come
from Ernest Mandels United Secretariat. An official USec
statement issued on 21 March called for:
a withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan
without negotiations between Moscow and Washington. The USSR must withdraw its
forces from Afghanistan without delay, and continue to provide aid for the
Afghan progressive forces struggling against the feudal-tribal and Islamic
reactionaries....
The hypocrisy of calling for a defeat of the reactionary
forces, while at the same time demanding a pullout of the very forces
which could defeat reaction, is appalling. To call for a Soviet
withdrawal is in effect to call for victory to the imperialist-backed
counterrevolution. The USec leaders are fully aware that the inevitable
consequence of the Soviet pull-out will be a bloody carnival of reaction. These
charlatans claim that while they would like to see a genuine
revolution against the mujahedin, unfortunately the
conditions for that are a long way from being assembled today in
Afghanistan and therefore the Soviets must withdraw in order to
improve the chances for this [revolution] in the long term!
(International Viewpoint, 11 July). The cynicism inherent in describing
the impending massacre of those Afghans who have thrown in their lot with the
struggle against Islamic reaction, as a preparation for a genuine
revolution at some point in the distant future, is breathtaking.
The Mandelites visceral anti-Sovietism has led them to
revive the Menshevik/Stalinist theory of stages, which holds that
every country around the globe must indigenously generate the conditions for
socialism before the time is right for genuine revolution. But
Professor Mandel and his coterie of flabby petty-bourgeois literary
commentators and armchair solidarity specialists who constitute the
USec leadership wont be on the spot in Kabul when the mujahedin
arrive, and so wont personally participate in improv[ing] the
chances for revolution. Perhaps if they held tenure in Kabul instead of
in Brussels and Paris they might view the prospect of a Soviet pullout with
less equanimity.
Leon Trotsky, whose legacy the USec falsely claims, explicitly
rejected such stagist notions. Trotsky was aware that despite the fundamentally
counterrevolutionary role of the Stalinist ruling caste, it is occasionally
forced to take steps to defend, and even extend, the social gains of the
October Revolution upon which its rule rests. Had the Kremlin opted to crush
the Afghan reactionaries and incorporate that wretched country into the USSR,
genuine Marxists would have defended this as a step forward for the Afghan
masses. In The Revolution Betrayed Trotsky specifically addressed the
relation between the survival of the social gains of the October Revolution and
the backward peoples of Central Asia when he wrote that, despite
immoderate overhead expenses, the Stalinist bureaucracy, is
laying down a bridge for them to the elementary benefits of bourgeois, and in
part even pre-bourgeois, culture. To be consistent the USec should
logically reject the extension of the Russian Revolution throughout Soviet
Central Asia and into Mongoliaafter all, these areas had hardly assembled
the conditions for the genuine revolution which these modern-day
Mensheviks advocate.
Afghan Pullout: Fruits of Perestroika
The Soviet Union is not retreating from Afghanistan in the face of
superior military force. By breaking the rebel siege of the provincial city of
Khost in December, Soviet troops demonstrated that they are more than able to
hold their own against the mujahedin, even though the latter have
recently been equipped with American Stinger missiles and British anti-aircraft
guns. The Soviet decision to withdraw is only the most outstanding example to
date of Gorbachevs policy of global capitulation to U. S. imperialism and
its allies.
The Soviet retreat from Afghanistan follows close on the heels of
the INF treaty, in which the Soviet Union agreed to accept the zero
option on intermediate-range missiles in Europe, at great military
disadvantage to itself. Fidel Castro, at Gorbachevs behest, is now
offering to withdraw Cuban troops from Angola and accept a deal that would
bring the rapacious cutthroats of Jonas Savimbis South African-backed
UNITA forces into the government of that country. Aid to Nicaragua has been
curtailed, and the Kremlin is bringing increased pressure on Vietnam to
withdraw its forces from Kampuchea. And at the very moment when Israel is up to
its elbows in the blood of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Kremlin
has initiated moves toward the restoration of diplomatic relations with the
Zionist state.
These betrayals are the reflection in foreign policy of the
economic restructuring (perestroika) now under way in the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev has apparently decided that the USSRs foreign
commitments (read: aid to anti-imperialist struggles throughout the
world) are incompatible with his efforts to modernize the Soviet economy. By
placating the imperialists on the international front, Gorbachev hopes to
undercut Reagans anti-Soviet war drive and reduce Western pressure on the
Soviet Union. He thinks this will allow him to channel part of the resources
now used for military production and foreign aid into the flagging Soviet
domestic economy.
Such policies are a recipe for disaster. They can only succeed in
convincing the imperialists that the get-tough approach to the
Soviet Union has finally paid off. This will in turn whet their appetite for
reconquest of the land of the October Revolution. The Soviet bureaucrats are
practiced in the art of treachery. Just as the belief in economic autarky and
peaceful coexistence led the Stalinists to betray revolutions in
China in 1927, Spain in 1936, Greece in 1946, so it leads them today to deliver
Afghanistan into the deadly embrace of khans and mullahs.
Gorbachevs willingness to abandon the thousands of Afghan
women, students and progressive intellectuals who trusted the Kremlin
oligarchs, serves as a stark reminder that the rule of the Stalinist
bureaucracy endangers the social gains upon which it rests. The defense of
those gains, and their extension, ultimately depends on the success of a
proletarian political revolution, led by a conscious Trotskyist party, which
will obliterate the parasitic caste that Gorbachev represents and restore the
internationalist and revolutionary mission of the state established by the
October Revolution. |