Gerard Chaliand, Report From Afghanistan (Penguin, 1982).
Based on two visits made to Afghanistan in October and November 1980. this report is a condemnation of Russia as “the bloodiest and most deceptive caricature in modern history, a cruel parody of the ideas that supposedly inspire it" (p. 7). Chaliand claims that all peoples have the right to self-determination, as defined by United Nations charter, and that Russia has violated that right.
Afghanistan is the only country outside the Warsaw Pact to have been occupied by Russian troops since the Second World War. Although the justification of the intervention of December 1979 was the threatened collapse of socialism in Afghanistan, the reality is that Russia now guards the Pakistani frontier only a few hundred kilometres from the Indian Ocean and also has a significant presence on Iran’s western border.
Modern Afghanistan was created towards the end of the nineteenth century as a buffer state between Tsarist Russia and the British Empire and has remained since that period largely undeveloped. The rural population is dominated by the mullahs, who have for decades opposed any reform which might threaten their influence or undermine traditional customs. In 1950 Russia and Afghanistan signed an economic agreement whereby Russia would provide sugar, cotton and oil in exchange for wool and raw cotton; $740 million of aid was provided for Afghanistan between 1954 and 1968 and in 1955 the Russo-Afghan Treaty of Neutrality and Non-Aggression was signed. There was the building of an airport at Kabul and a road through the Salang Pass from the Russian border to Kabul (the road used by Soviet troops in 1979). In 1967 Afghanistan and Russia signed a protocol guaranteeing the delivery of Afghan natural gas from 1967-1985.
On 24 April 1978 President Daud was overthrown and executed while attempting to arrest leading members of the Afghan left including Nur Mohammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal and Hafizullah Amin of the Democratic Party of the People of Afghanistan. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was proclaimed and recognised by Russia on 30 April with Taraki as President. There followed a breakdown between the Khalq and Parcham factions of the Party and hostility to the government from the population. Hafizullah Amin’s secret police and army troops were sent to subdue the resistance. On 27 July 1979 Amin became secretary of the Party and Central Committee and minister of defence. He was also prime minister and overseer of the secret police.
On 10 September Taraki, while visiting Moscow, agreed with Brezhnev to institute a programme of democratic nationalism and to invite the Parcham faction to rejoin the government. They had been ousted from key government posts in July 1978 with Karmal being sent as ambassador to Prague. Meanwhile Amin, who totally controlled the Khalq faction, arranged for the arrest of Taraki on 14 September. Taraki was then executed some weeks later. Amin now became head of state. Repression continued under Amin's rule, as did hostility to his government. The Russian military intervention began on 25 December 1979 and by 27 December Russian troops occupied Kabul. Amin was immediately overthrown and executed and Babrak Karmal was proclaimed president and prime minister.
Opposition to the government continued but Chaliand points out that because of "its leadership organisation, coordination and strategy . . . [it] is one of the weakest liberation struggles in the world today” (p. 47). The opposition is conservative in that it expresses no political alternative other than the retention of traditional customs and religious values. No reforms have been posited other than opposition to government and herein lies its weakness. There is no coordination of strategy among the individual factions which remain regionally based and regionally ambitious.
Chaliand argues that the Russians have not followed the strategy adopted by the Americans in Vietnam and have only sufficient troops to control the cities and principal roads. The strategy is one in which Russia
expects to draw the country into its economic sphere, taking advantage of the unexploited and underexploited natural resources like oil, uranium, chrome, manganese, copper, coal, iron, and semiprecious stones . . . during 1979 and 1980 the Soviets launched a number of economic projects to strengthen the industrial infrastructure of Afghanistan and increase its trade with Russia (p.66)
Opposition has been restricted to sabotaging roads, skirmishes outside forts and fortified villages and terrorist strikes on towns. Chaliand says that the West must recognise that this resistance is one of “a people fighting for their liberty" (p. 71) and that it should be supported. In this he is taking sides in a conflict of interests between rival capitalist spheres of influence.
Afghanistan is seen as a step in Russia's expansion of its empire by conquering neighbouring territories and in that it adds to the "tarnished image of socialism" (p. 76). This is a basic flaw in Chaliand’s argument. His major concern is in drawing attention to the shift of the regional balance in Western Asia away from the interests of Western Europe and America. He calls on the West to challenge Russia whenever and wherever it is necessary for we are entering an era of "open competition and antagonism between East and West” (p. 88). But that competition is not between “tarnished” socialism and free capitalism but between conflicting capitalist interests. Russia may hypocritically claim to have cast off the mantle of Tsarist imperialism but its action in seizing economic and political control of Afghanistan is no less imperialist in its outcome.
Chaliand’s report recognises the cynicism of Russia's position but ascribes that to a corrupted socialism rather than as another manifestation of the Soviet Union’s essential capitalism. To take sides in the conflict between opposing spheres of capitalist interests is to give credibility to the system which generates the very conditions that Chaliand laments. Rather he should emphasise the reality of capitalism at its most cynical; it is manifested in the annexation of Afghanistan.
Philip Bentley
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