AFGHANISTAN Eight years on from the Soviet intervention THE LATEST session of the "indirect" negotiations between the Afghan and Pakistani governments, held under the aegis of the United Nations, concluded on March 10 in Geneva without reaching an agreement. The first session was held in June 1982. These negotiations enabled the Kabul and Islamabad governments to come to an understanding in June 1985 on the principal conditions for settling their conflict over the Afghan question.
They were the following: reciprocal noninterference, guaranteed by the United States and the USSR; return of those refugees wishing to; and phased withdrawal of the Soviet troops. Since then, the stumbling block in the negotiations has been the timetable for the withdrawal of the Soviet troops.
Under pressure from Washington, the Pakistani government was held firmly to the demand for a rapid withdrawal, not exceeding six months. The Soviet government has, through the intermediary of the Afghans, considerably softened its position. While the Afghans initially proposed a withdrawal of the Soviet troops over four years, they are now proposing a timetable of only 18 months. That is, the USSR considers that it still needs 18 months to assure that the regime it set up in Kabul will not collapse on the departure of its troops. Today, it is 87 months since the troops were sent in. SALAH JABER months, the fact remains that for the seven years that have gone by since December 1979 the balance sheet of the intervention of Soviet troops shows an appalling bankruptcy. "The causes that brought them here" have been aggravated by their presence, so that Afghanistan has become a bed of quicksand for the USSR -to the great satisfaction of the American imperialists still traumatized by their Indochinese experience.
For some who take a simplistic view of what is involved, these facts can be disconcerting. How could a workers' state, intervening on behalf of a progressive regime against a medieval reaction, get caught in such a blind alley? I will try to explain it.
While it is true that Trotskyists reject the Menshevik-Stalinist notion of countries that are ripe and countries that are not ripe for proletarian revolution, this refers, of course, only to the ripeness of the socio-economic conditions - that is, to the idea, largely discredited since 1917, that proletarian revolution is reserved for countries with an advanced capitalist development. But the question of the ripeness of the political conditions is another kettle of fish altogether. Disregarding this factor means falling into Blanquism or some other variety of putschism.
On the other hand, while the political conditions are autonomous to a large degree, dependent on domestic and external "subjective" factors, the fact remains that they are conditioned by the socio-economic context in which they develop.
Afghanistan shares with North Yemen the peculiarity of having been the only Islamic country to enjoy a real measure of independence before World War II. It was an independence that bordered on autarky, and the concomitant of that was preserving an archaic society that stood out as a medieval island in a rapidly changing world. A visit to these two countries in the early 1960s was like a trip in a time machine.
The Bolshevik revolution found itself confronting similar societies in Central Asia and on the borders of the former czarist empire. There was a great temptation to export the revolution, disregarding the extreme immaturity of the socio-political conditions. That was what Bukharin wanted to do in his ultraleft period in 1919, inspired by the example of Baskhkiria, where the nationalists had done an aboutface and gone over completely from an alliance with the Whites to an alliance with the Reds. This success contrasted with the difficulties encountered by the revolutionist troops with the Uzbeks (the defeat at Bukhara in 1918) and International Viewpoint 6 April 1987
Massive intervention of Soviet troops in Afghanistan began on December 24, 1979. First of all, on December 27, some 5,000 men took care of overthrowing Hafizullah Amin. Then, a few days later, "on the request of the Afghan government" of Babrak Karmal, their stooge, the Kremlin leaders boosted the numbers of their intervention army to 80,000.
Today, seven years later, the Soviet army is still there and includes more than a 100,000 soldiers. And if the latest successor of Stalin to mount Lenin's mausoleum looks genuinely anxious to disengage from Afghanistan, this is far from the simplest of the problems that Leonid Brezhnev bequeathed to him.
If Brezhnev's commitment to withdraw the Soviet forces from Afghanistan "as soon as the causes that brought them there have disappeared" is to be kept, then such a withdrawal is not right around the corner, nor even around the next bend in the road. 12
In fact, today, seven years after the Soviet intervention, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) regime installed in Kabul is as weak, if not weaker, than it was before the Soviet troops came in, and in particular from the military standpoint. The rebel forces, on the other hand, are far stronger than they were in 1979, even if they seem to have marked time for two years. Moreover, the support of US imperialism and its allies for the rebels is out of all proportion to what it was before, and there is no indication that it is going to be scaled down or ended. Bed of quicksand for USSR
Whatever gains. may have been scored by the Kabul government and its Soviet protectors over recent
in the Muslim territories in the Caucasus.
Ultraleftists and Great Russian chauvinists joined together on the Bolshevik side to call for forcible sovietization of these territories, against the will of the great majority of their inhabitants. Bukharin justified these designs by reserving the right of self-determination to those nations struggling against imperialism. Lenin, whose underlying democratic feelings are overlooked by "disillusioned ex-Marxists," rebelled against this cynicism:
"We cannot refuse any people of the former Russian empire the right to self-determination. Let us admit even that the Bashkirs overthrew their exploiters with our help. But that would only be possible if the revolution were completely ripe. It is necessary to act cautiously so that our intervention will not obstruct the process of the differentiation of the proletariat, a process that we want to accelerate. What can we, then, do for peoples such as the Kirghiz, the Uzbeks, the Tadzhiks and the Turkmenis who until now have been subject to the influence of their mullahs? ... Can we go and say to these peoples: We will overthrow your exploiters? We cannot do that, because they are completely under the influence of their mullahs. In such cases, we have to wait until the nation involved has evolved, until the proletariat has become differentiated from the bourgeois elements, as is inevitable." (1)
However, in the event, it was not Lenin's point of view that prevailed but Bukharin's - mainly because of the momentum of the war against the White armies and their imperialist allies. Thus, all the Muslim territories of the former czarist empire were reannexed by the Soviet state. And Lenin's warnings also proved correct.
The Bashkirs soon rebelled against the new representatives of the Great Russian state, and joined the Basmachis and other Mujahideen of the time, who made life difficult for the Soviet Republic up until the advent of the Stalin terror at the end of the 1920s. Today, 70 years after the October revolution, the Sufi mystical brotherhoods have more native members in the Muslim regions of the USSR than the Communist Party. (2)
Lenin's concern not to violate the natural course of history was not limited to the problem of exporting the revolution. It was at the root of his polemic against "permanent revolution" prior to 1917. And if Lenin was mistaken in his predictions, as he later acknowledged, the fact remains that the idea of the representatives of the socialist proletariat taking power despite the hostility of
International Viewpoint 6 April 1987
Soviet troops in Afghanistan (DR) the large peasant majority in Russia -a false interpretation of Trotsky's thought, it should be noted - in fact was Blanquist and not Marxist.
Any seizure of power carried out without the active support of a decisive section, if not the majority, of the toiling population can only be a putsch, whatever measures its organizers may later take. Such a regime would bear the marks of that until it was overthrown, either by an authentic revolution or by reaction. Logically, the more the ambitions of the putschists involve transformations of their society, for which it has not been prepared, the more their government is doomed to fall or to resort to external aid. Failure of transformations "from above"
We already had the example of the palely republican and Nasserite putsch by Sallal in North Yemen in September 1962. This government could not maintain itself even for a few years against the tribal-monarchist reaction supported by neighboring Saudi Arabia without the massive intervention of the Egyptian army.
The history of Afghanistan itself offers an illustration of the inevitable failure of transformations "from above" in societies with little predisposition to change. King Amanullah, who succeeded to the throne in 1919, was an admirer of the Turkish dictator Mustafa Kemal and signatory of the first Soviet-Afghan friendship treaty. He was, as one historian put
734 it, "to try to place his country at one stroke in the ranks of the civilized states." He was forced to abdicate in 1929, after five years of warfare against a wide-spread Islamic, conservative tribal rebellion supported by the British.
The seizure of power in Kabul in April 1978 by the putschist faction of the PDPA - known by the name of its publication, Khalq ("The People"), and led by Taraki and Amin - was even more certainly doomed to isolation. Equipped with a "socialist-oriented revolutionary program," the PDPA-Khalq had made its putschism into a theory. According to Taraki-Amin, "in developing nations, since the working class is not developed to the point of forming a government there is another source that can overthrow the oppressor feudal government, and it was constituted by the armed forces in Afghanistan." (3) In essence this amounted to a so-called revolution by means of the ruling class's own army, along the lines of what Ethiopia went through shortly before Afghanistan.
This sort of putschist government with radical social ambitions is inevitably led to institute a regime of terror. Its putschist origins reveal themselves even in literacy campaigns and agrarian reform. In Afghanistan these campaigns were undertaken
1. V.I. Lenin, "Report of the Party Program" at the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (B), March 19, 1919.
2. See the works of Alexander Bennigsen, in 'Le Monde, November particularly his article published 15, 1984.
3. Cited by Fred Halliday in "War in Afghanistan", 'New Left Review, No. 119, January-February 1980.
13
in the worst possible ways, those most apt to provoke the hostility of the broad masses, instead of arousing their enthusiasm. (4)
In this regard, it is very instructive to compare the putschist methods of the PDPA-Khalq with the revolutionary democratic methods of the government that emerged from the revolution in South Yemen in 1969. (5) Whereas in Afghanistan, the agrarian reform - to cite only this example -was decreed from above and applied by military force, often against the will of those who were supposed to benefit from it, in South Yemen the leaders of the National Liberation Front were careful not to try to substitute themselves for the peasants and fisher people, and to arm them politically and materially to take control themselves of their own means
Whatever the later bureaucratic degeneration of the South Yemenite regime, the fact remains that it was able to overcome social and ideological resistance comparable to that existing in Afghanistan with infinitely more success and despite a much more hostile environment.
Only 20 months after the seizure of power by the PDPA-Khalq, the rebellion of Islamic, reactionary tribal forces was becoming so widespread that the survival of the Kabul regime seemed very doubtful. Accused of adventurism and ultraleftism for trying to skip "the stage of the national democratic revolution," Amin did not bow to the Kremlin. Called on to put some (holy) water in his wine and broaden his government to include other forces, starting with the moderate, reformist wing of the PDPA, the Parcham ("Flag") faction, which had been pushed out by the Kalq, Amin instead completed the concentration of power in his hands. In September 1979, he eliminated his old companion Taraki, who was inclined to follow Big Brother's advice. Two months later, Big Brother intervened massively, overthrowing Amin - who was killed - to replace him with the chief of the Parcham faction, Babrak Karmal.
"It was not easy for us to take the decision to send Soviet forces to Afghanistan," Brezhnev told Pravda in January 1980. There was no reason not to believe him, although the inveterate anti-Sovieteers saw the intervention in Afghanistan as a striking demonstration of "Russian expansionism," which, according to them, only changed its flag in 1917. To take these people at their word, the Soviet operation was part of a vast expansionist offensive - marked by Angola, Ethiopia and other Soviet or Cuban military involvements - and in this case was heading for the "warm 14 seas." According to these completely outmoded strategic criteria, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was only a first step that was to be followed by an invasion of Iran or Pakistan.
In fact, as was well understood by those who do not look on the USSR as 'the evil empire," the intervention in Afghanistan was essentially a conservative, defensive reaction on the part of the Soviet bureaucracy. To make this intervention understandable, it has to be placed in its real historic and political context.
Since 1919, in fact, Afghanistan had maintained good-neighborly relations with the USSR, which accorded a considerable importance to this.
Had it chosen to act as a rear base for the Muslims fighting against the Soviet state, the Afghan kingdom -whose independence came from its position as a buffer state between British India and the USSR - could have caused the Soviet regime a lot of trouble. Afghan dependence on USSR
In fact, historical, religious and ethnic factors predisposed it to play such a role. After his defeat at the hands of the Reds, the emir of Bukara took refuge in Kabul in 1920. A number of his Basmachi supporters and other anti-Bolsheviks had also crossed the long Soviet-Afghan border.
Amanullah's kingdom could have played the same sort of role toward the USSR that Zia ul-Haq's Pakistan is playing today toward Afghanistan. But it would also have been forced to give up its autonomy from the British, its ancestral enemies. It did not do that. It disarmed the Basmachis on its territory, extracting a juicy quid pro quo from the USSR.
After World War II, Afghanistan became, after a fashion, the Middle Eastern equivalent of Finland as regards its relationship with the USSR. The latter was by far its main source of economic, cultural and also military foreign aid. The Afghan monarchy was equipped with Soviet arms, and the majority of its officers were trained in the USSR
Afghanistan's dependence on its big neighbor was, of course, qualitatively increased after the PDPA came to power. This was owing to ideological affinities, naturally, but also to the fragility of the new government, which was going to avail itself of direct Soviet military support well before December 1979.
The growing isolation of the Khalgi regime involved the risk that for the first time in 60 years a government openly hostile to the USSR would be installed in Afghanistan. A government dominated by forces including some that had accused King Zaher Shah, who was deposed in 1973 by his "republican" cousin, Prince Daud, and later Daud also, of infidelity to Islam and bowing the knee to Moscow.
If you add to this picture the victory of the "Islamic Revolution" in Iran in February 1979, it is understandable how great a fear gripped the Kremlin leaders at the time and impelled them to intervene in Afghanistan before, in their estimation, it was too late. The "Islamic Revolution" had proclaimed its profound hostility to "atheistic communism" and its determination to carry Islamic fundamentalist agitation to all areas, including the Soviet Muslim peoples, who total 50 million, or nearly 20% of the total population of the USSR. In their majority, the latter still identify with Islam, and in their conflict with the Great Russian chauvinism of the bureaucracy do not even have the consolation of being Slavs.
In ordering intervention, Brezhnev and his cohorts were in no way moved by a desire to "structurally assimilate" Afghanistan (according to the term that some use to explain the social transformation of Eastern Europe). Still less could an analogy be made between their intervention and that of the Red Army in Outer Mon. golia in 1921, which genuinely liberated the country from the domination of the Chinese and the debris of the Siberian White army, and established a revolutionary government that, overall, demonstrated a certain political tact in directing the transformation of the country.
The idea that Moscow, through "structural assimilation," could go further than Amin had would imply that the Kremlin had an "ultraleft" interpretation of why Amin failed. But all the Soviet statements point in the other direction. In fact, the Kremlin saw its intervention rather as a repeat of the intervention by Hanoi's army against the abominable Pol Pot. It expected that in overthrowing Amin its troops would be greeted by the Afghan population with at least the benevolent neutrality that greeted the Vietnamese troops in Kampuchea.
Moscow intended to bring the Afghan regime back to a moderate course of collaborating with the most retrograde social forces, so long as they were well disposed to the USSR.
Detailed descriptions of the Khalą regime's measures will be found in nost of the studies devoted to Afghanistai since 1978.
See the article by. S Jaber in 'International Marxist Review'; Spring 1987. International Viewpoint 6 April 1987
It thought that in this way it could cut the ground out from under the Islamic fundamentalists and other reactionary fanatics.
To perfect this operation, the Kremlin took care at the beginning to use forces made up of soldiers from the Soviet Muslim republics who belonged to ethnic components of the Afghan mosaic, so as to facilitate fraternization with the local population.
How great then was the disillusion of the Kremlin bureaucrats when they saw, from the first weeks, that the massive intervention of their soldiers had produced a result contrary to what they were counting on. Not only were the Soviet troops not greeted as liberators, but Amin himself, who was liquidated in the course of the intervention, suddenly emerged as a martyr of national independence, while Karmal was more isolated than ever his predecessor had been.
The institutions of the PDPA regime broke down, beginning with the army. The reactionary and Islamic fundamentalist forces experienced a massive influx of volunteers and a sudden growth of their popularity, so that while it had been doubtful that the Khalqi regime could survive on its own, it was quite unthinkable from the outset that the Parchami regime could.
Moreover, the international commotion against the Soviet intervention was a lot greater than Moscow had expected, especially among the Islamic and other non-aligned coun tries. This was reflected by majority disapproval in the UN. There was a similar outcry from many Communist parties.
SOVIET UNION Otte (Are Darys)
As for the supreme objective of the intervention, that is, preserving the Muslim republics of the USSR against the danger of nationalist and Islamic contamination, the failure was glaring. Barely a month after the start of the intervention, Moscow withdrew soldiers coming from those republics, to replace them with Russians. Hostility to Russian troops
Fraternization with the Afghan population was no longer an objective but a risk to be avoided, since the latter were almost unanimously hostile to the Russians. The Soviet troops had very quickly to be put in quarantine, if only to protect them against the numerous terrorist attacks.
The Soviet-Afghan frontier became more permeable than ever to Islamic, anti-Communist and anti-Russian propaganda. In recent years, several studies have been devoted to the expansion of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic nationalism in the USSR. They all agree in recognizing the breadth of the phenomenon, which is reflected, moreover, by an accelerated development of government counter-propaganda and all sorts of measures aimed at holding back the development of Islamic nationalistic moods, such as mixing populations in other words, still more Russifi. cation!)
If there were still some septics, December's anti-Russian riots in Kazakhstan, which is the most Russified of the Soviet "Muslim" republics
CHINA
(PANJSHIR
VALLEY ethnically and culturally, provided a demonstration of the gravity of the situation.
On Afghan soil, Soviet troops were supposed to put an end to the tyranny of Amin and inaugurate an era of liberty. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this objective. The Karmal government's first measure was to declare a general amnesty and to release thousands of prisoners. But these troops were drawn by the same logic of a minority regime described above to act like an army of occupation.
The Parchami regime, still less legitimate in the eyes of the population than the Khalqi government had been, could only put its "good intentions" (with which, as we know, the "road to hell" is paved) into practice for a minority of the population concentrated in the cities and their immediate surroundings - the "useful part of the country," which the Soviet army could control and where it sought to concentrate the largest possible • number of inhabitants through forced settlement.
For most of the rural areas coming outside the direct control of the Soviet and governmental forces, what the Soviet army sought to do was to neutralize them by patrolling the main arteries of communications and isolating them from the Mujahideen's Pakistani and Iranian sanctuaries.
Those regions constituting the Mujahideen's main bastions, or their main transit zones, were deliberately depopulated by Soviet bombing and the massive destruction it caused. The result - besides the slaughter inherent in this sort of warfare - was that nearly a quarter of the Afghan population was forced to take refuge in Pakistan and Iran, creating an impressive reserve army for the Mujahideen. (6)
I have spoken of slaughter. That is the appropriate term. (7) To characterize the Afghan war as genocide, as has been done by a certain press seeking to prove that "Communism" and Nazism are twins, amounts to belittling the term that was coined in 1944 to describe an operation of systematic extermination, which bears no comparison to what is
6. In fact, a large part of the refugees in Pakistan and Iran are there for economic reasons rather than political ones.
7. Estimates of the number of victims of the Afghan war vary between 100,000 and a million, the figure advanced by the Mujahideen, which, judging the number of Soviet soldiers they claim to have killed, is rather fantastical. If you consider that the Soviet army has limited itself to controlling the "useful part of the coun try" and the arteries of communication and has not used big bombers of the B-52 type between 100,000 and 200,000, the real number of the dead must
100,000 and 200,000, including those killed by the Mujahideen, who have not been inactive either.
15
Gulbahar
Shotal
SALANG HIGHWAY.
U d
•Jabat us-Siraj,
Khyber
Pass
Jalalabad
Kabul
Herat
Charikar
TRAN
Isla
INDIA
PAVED ROAD
AFGHANISTAN
SOVIET UNION
CHINA
Kandahar
AFGHANISTAN
PAKISTAN
Quetta
IRAN
PAKISTAN
INDIA
Arabian Sea
0 Mile 150
International Viewpoint 6 April 1987
happening in Afghanistan today.
Despite its cruelty and its many and inevitable similarities with the US war in Indochina - forced settlement and desertification, for example - the
Soviet intervention is still clearly less murderous and destructive than that was, even in relative terms. Pointing up these differences does not mean absolving the Soviet bureaucracy of its crimes. It means simply refusing to trivialize the crimes of Nazism and
American imperialism.
The paradox of the Soviet intervention is that the cruelty of the military campaign it has waged is not associated with forced collectivization, combined with a ferocious campaign against religion, as was the case at the high point of the Stalin terror in the USSR. On the contrary, the Kremlin leaders and their Afghan stooges have remained faithful to their initial objective, which was to undo what Amin had set out to do in that respect.
Hardly had he been installed in government before Karmal began stressing his government's determination to assure "a genuine respect for the holy religion, Islam, for the clergy, the noble national traditions and customs, the bases of family life and of personal property." (Message of December 29, 1979.)
In February 1980, the new regime freed the bazaar merchants from state control. And it has not ceased since then to shower boons on private entrepreneurs. Amin's cherished agrarian reform has been in fact annulled since 1980, even even in those rural areas controlled by Kabul (except of course, for the lands of landowners liquidated by the Kahlq or who have fled the country). Big landlords, moreover, have rallied to the side of the new regime.
The status of women has returned virtually to what it was before Amin, except for a minority of urban women. The government boasts that it has built, with public money, more than 100 mosques in six years! It is paying fat salaries to collaborationist clerics, and has reintroduced religious teaching into the schools (three hours a week) and established a daily religious program on the radio. Its attempts to outbid the fundamentalists in pious works in fact sometimes border on the grotesque. (8)
Rather than commiting itself to transforming Afghan society, the new regime, acting as a proxy for Moscow, is literally trying to buy it. It has been trying to do this not only by stepping up its spending on development in all areas, but also by the more unpretentious practice of bribing clan or tribal chiefs. The latter then, with their arms and their villages, leave the ranks of the Mujahideen and pledge fealty to the central power, 16 9L while maintaining their local autonomy. Thus, the so-called "Guardians of the Revolution" militias in
Afghanistan have more in common with the armed tribes of the Arabian peninsula than with the militias of
Cuba or even South Yemen. Kabul is trying to beat the Mujahideen on their own ground.
Adept nationalities policy
1 should add, finally, that the
Parchami regime has practiced an adept nationalities policy, promoting the specific cultures of the various
Afghan ethnic groups. This has had the effect of counteracting the unifying role of Islam among the Mujahideen. It has given special attention to the Pushtun and Baluchis. Since these two peoples also inhabit Pakistani regions bordering on Afghanistan, the objective is also to whip up their opposition to the Punjabi regime of Zia ul-Haq, in order to put pressure on him, and in order to divide these populations from the Mujahideen who control the Afghan refugees massed on their territories. (9)
The Parchami regime's tribal policy and its nationalities policy, which are combined, have proven to be by far its most effective weapons. They include a good dose of "special" actions and are directed by the Afghan political police, the Khad, headed by none other than Najibullah, who succeeded Karmal at the helm of the party in May 1986. It was natural therefore for the Khad to be the spearhead of the new strategy that the Kremlin has adopted under Gorbachev.
This strategy has two sides to it: One is "Afghanization" of the war, through broadening the Kabul government's social base and building up its own military force. The other side is the neutralization of Pakistan, in order to end that country's role as the main rear base for the Mujahideen. Progress toward these two objectives is to be accompanied by proposals for a settlement formulated from the position of strength, but not failing to include important concessions, so as to keep the ball in the opponents' court and provoke some defections.
The implementation of Gorbachev's strategy started in 1985, and accelerated in the fall of the same year. In the best traditions of the Afghan monarchy, an assembly of notables (a loya jirga) - tribal chiefs, mullahs and other "personalities" - was convoked. Then in September, 3,700 delegates attended an assembly of
Pushtu tribal and clan chiefs. They included several hundred from Pushtu areas in Pakistan. This did not fail to prompt Islamabad immediately to order military deployments aimed at having a sobering effect on the tribes concerned and to offer enticing counter proposals.
In November Karmal presented "ten theses" confirming this new course of political ecumenism. A system of local elections was instituted, in order to give posts to notables who were not members of the PDPA, including mullahs. The "Revolutionary
Council" and the Council of Ministers were broadened to include some notables and mullahs.
Najibullah's appointment in May 1986, which was clearly dictated by Moscow, inaugurated a new phase in this strategy. Karmal had been too discredited since December 1979. His "aristocratic" origins made him even more unpopular. As for the number two man in the regime, Heshmand, he belonged to a Shiite ethnic minority of Mongol origin, the Hazaras, who are despised by the other Afghan ethnic groups (and even by the Persian Shiites). So, Najibullah, the number three, was the man for the job. Along with the know-how that he demonstrated at the head of the Khad, he had one of the best Pushtu genealogies for the new course.
Najibullah's first actions and declarations were devoted to reinforcing the regime's armed forces, the primordial element in Gorbachev's Afghan strategy. Then, in December, from Moscow where he had met with the new Soviet party chief, Najibullah, whom the new ecumenism had made a preacher of "national reconciliation," proposed the "formation of a government of national unity into which can come forces that have found themselves temporarily outside the frontiers of the country." This clearly meant Mujahideen leaders and the partisans of the former king (if not the king himself) who would agree to turn their coats.
January, the Soviet-Afghan offensive culminated in anticipation of a new round of negotiations between Kabul and Islamabad, under the aegis of the United Nations, for February in Geneva. The proposals formulated in Moscow were confirmed in Kabul: the Revolutionary Council declared a renewable sixmonths unilateral ceasefire starting on
See the description of the regime's measures by J. Steele, 'The Guardian' (London), March 15-17, 1986. These articles were reprinted in : 'Merip', Vol. 16, No. 4, July-August 1986.
Peshawar. the "capital" of the Mujahideen, is located in the heart of the Pushtun area of Pakistan. International Viewpoint 6 April 1987
Without the Soviet intervention, there would be
January 15 and a general amnesty. Najibullah called on "all the belligerent parties to cease fire and begin a process of national renewal"
At the same time, the pressure on Pakistan reached its peak. Zia ul-Hag's government was already very annoyed by Kabul's agitation aimed at the Pushtun and Baluchis on its territory. It should not be forgotten that Pakistan is a multinational state, separated from India solely on the basis of its inhabitants' adherence to Islam, and that it already experienced the breakaway of one national group in 1971, with the secession of Bangladesh. Now, it faces a veritable "Lebanization" of the country. (10)
All of the ingredients of the Lebanese situation have, in fact, been assembled today in Pakistan. There are ethnic antagonisms (in Lebanon they are confessional) and a large mass of refugees (three million Afghans) under the control of autonomous armed organizations. These armed groups are well financed. And they support a gigantic black market in arms of all sorts, where the local ethnic groups also do not fail to supply themselves.
As in Lebanon, this situation of relative anarchy has opened the way for a spectacular growth of drug production and traffic. Moreover, as in south Lebanon, the areas where refugees are concentrated are more and more becoming targets for reprisals, in this case by the SovietAfghan forces against the Mujahideen.
International Viewpoint 6 April 1987
All these problems are being aggravated by the actions of the Khad - in particular bombs planted at carefully selected spots, so that in the Peshawar region the resentment of the refugees on the part of the local people is beginning to assume Lebanese forms. In that area, clashes erupted not long ago between the two communities.
In November, a jirga of the Pushtun tribes in the Pakistani provinces bordering on Afghanistan warned Islamabad and the Mujahideen to reach a settlement with Kabul, or else these tribes would take it on themselves to make sure that no military actions were carried out from their territories.
Zia ul-Hag's regime for some time has been hard pressed by the opposition parties. They have been very active since the return in April 1986 of Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the former Pakistani premier overthrown and executed by the present regime. On top of this, in December, Islamabad had to face bloody clashes in Karachi between Pushtun and Muhajirs (Urdu-speaking Muslims who left India after the partitition of 1947). These riots, the worst in 40 years, are another aspect of the "Lebanization" of Pakistan.
Thus, a regime in a very precarious situation at home finds itself caught internationally between the SovietAfghan hammer and the Indian anvil, the latter far from being the least of its worries. In January, the fewer candidates for the Afghan guerrillas (DR) Indian army, without bothering to give notice to Islamabad, opened up large-scale mechanized military maneuvers in the regions bordering Pakistan. This was followed by an explosive rise of tensions between the two states, which was reflected in the concentration of nearly a million soldiers on both sides of the border.
It took five days of intensive negotiations between the two governments before, on February 4, an agreement was reached providing for a limited disengagement "within two weeks." A broader agreement was put off, pending new discussions, which were to take place at the end of the month.
Chance can account for many things. But in this case, it is evident that Moscow was not uninvolved in the behavior of its traditional ally, India, in particular since the Indian threat was hanging over Zia ul-Hag's head, like the sword of Damocles, at the very moment that the negotiations were going on in Geneva.
Thus, Islamabad faces a formidable combination of domestic and external pressures. In Moscow's eyes, they make Pakistan the weak link that has to be broken in order that it can cast off its Afghan millstone. From this position of relative strength, the by Ahmed tashidubit, he ate artere 10. On this subject, see the York) of January 31, 1987.
17
Soviet bureaucracy can afford to emit a stream of soothing statements, which were recently echoed by Henry
Kissinger in person in Newsweek of
March 2, 1987, where he wrote:
"I had arrived in Moscow persuaded that the Soviet Union would never permit the overthrow of a regime established by Soviet power ... I am no longer so sure."
In reality, the former US secretary of state mistook his desires for possible realities. Nothing, in fact, indicates that Moscow is ready to accept a debacle involving its Afghan allies comparable to that which befell
Kissinger's Vietnamese allies in 1975.
The proximity of Afghanistan to the
USSR and the potential source of contagion it could represent are out of all proportion to what Vietnam meant for the US.
The minimum relationship that Moscow can accept with Afghanistan is one of the Finnish type. Within these well-defined limits, the Kremlin is ready to contemplate any sort of socio-political compromise, even a return of former king Zaher Shah from his exile in Rome, if he. agreed to play the game.
On the other hand, Moscow could not accept an overthrow of the Kabul regime. That could be accomplished only by the Mujahideen, its sworn enemies. It is only because they consider that they are on the brink of removing this danger that the Kremlin and its proteges are showing flexibility.
If it depended only on him, Zia ulHaq would probably give in without further delay. But it does not. He has to take account, first of all, of the US attitude. Islamabad is, in fact, Washington's protege. As the kingpin, owing to its geopolitical position, in the imperialist strategic deployment in western Asia, Pakistan has seen its importance grow considerably in the eyes of the US government since 1979.
Thus, Zia ul-Hag's regime unquestionably benefitted from the Afghan crisis before it turned into a source of worry for him. It enabled him to overcome the tensions in his relations with the West created by his Islamicrepressive excesses and his determination to equip himself with nuclear weapons - the celebrated "Islamic bomb," which has made news again recently - and to get a very large increase in US economic and military aid.
In seven years, US aid has gone up to nearly 4,000 million dollars. To this has to be added, moreover, another 4,000 million in supplementary aid spread out over the next six years. And this does not count the US army's enormous direct military investments (bases and equipment) 18 in Pakistan, or the economic benefits derived indirectly or directly (in part, through diversion) from international aid to the Mujahideen.
Islamabad, therefore, is dependent on Washington economically and militarily. For the Reagan administration, it is out of the question for its Pakistani ally to yeild to Moscow. In response to the signs of weakness shown by Islamabad since 1985, Washington stepped up its pressure to make sure that Pakistan took a firm stance in the Geneva negotiations. At the same time, it increased its promises of support (besides, Zia ul-Haq has made his attitude a bargaining card since 1979). Reagan administration steps up support
On the other hand, the Reagan administration is also considerably stepping up its support, both quantitively and qualitatively, to the Mujahideen, especially to those factions opposed to any compromise with Kabul. From a few tens of millions of dollars a year up to 19831984, "covert aid" (provided by the CIA) to the "freedom fighters," as the US establishment calls them, rose to 280 million dollars in 19841985, leaped to 470 million in 19851986, and, according to the figures commonly cited in the US press, will exceed 600 million in the present fiscal year.
This US financing is linked with that of the Saudi monarchy, which is recycling a part of its petro-dollars into subsidies for the world antiCommunist crusade orchestrated by Washington. This has been revealed recently by the Contragate affair in the US. Along with this, there are all sorts of other aid, including from Iran, and the major profits that the Mujahideen derives from all of the traffic in which they are involved.
Washington has, moreover, taken steps toward more official support for the Afghan rebels. The reception of their representatives in the White House last June was preceded by the decision of the US administration in March 1986 to supply them with portable anti-aircraft missiles of American and British makes (respectively, Stingers and Blowpipes).
Does this mean that the US administration is hardly worried by the internal problems facing its Pakistani ally. By no means. What Washington is looking for in reality is not all-out war - although seeing the Soviets bogged down in Afghanistan could only please them, were it not for their own ally's precarious health. Rather, what it wants is a chance to trade a solution to the Afghan crisis acceptable to Moscow for a major Soviet concession, in Central America for example.
In other words, the US administration wants to keep Zia ul-Haq from giving away the Afghan card, in which it has invested considerable sums of money. Facing the weakening of Pakistan and the recent military and political successes scored by the Soviet
The Mujahideen - organizations more often at odds than united (DR)
International Viewpoint 6 April 1987
strategy in Afghanistan, it wants to shore up its allies in order to keep the stakes high.
In any case, for Washington the Mujahideen cannot be more than "disposable" pawns. That is the reason for the ambiguity of its attitude. While it has called for firmness on the ground, and it has the means for that, it has given its approval to the negotiations in Geneva. And it has refused to close its embassy in Kabul and give the Mujahideen the diplomatic recognition that they are demanding.
To this end, Tehran is trying to outbid Islamabad and Washington. It rejected the Geneva negotiations, proposing instead a conference of the USSR, Pakistan, Iran of course, and the Mujahideen, without the participation of the Kabul government, which Tehran refuses to recognize, even indirectly. Thus, the Khomeini regime is trying to get in place to succeed Pakistan as the Mujahideen's main handler, if Zia ul-Haq should chose to drop them.
What Washington wants to see come out of the fight of the Mujahi. deen is not so much victory as an improvement in the overall terms for negotiating with Moscow. With this perspective, the US administration is avoiding tying its hands on the Afghan question.
The attitude of Iran, the Mujahideen's other major backer and rear base, is more radical, although its motivations are similar to those of the US. Tehran wants also to play the Afghan card for the sake of its own interests, which focus today on its war with Iraq. The Khomeini regime wants to get Moscow to cut back, if not suspend, its arms shipments to Baghad. Without them, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein could not hold on.
This perspective is not very appealing for the organizations based in Peshawar, which represent the great majority of the forces waging armed struggle against the Kabul regime and the Soviet troops. These organizations (the major ones are in the Islamic Alliance of the Afghan Mujahideen) recruit their members from the Sunni ethnic groups that make up the majority (more than 80%) of the Afghan population. Nonetheless, it is not so much this religious difference that is the problem as it is political and financial considerations.
The Khomeini regime has not, in fact, hidden its ambition to dominate all or part of Afghanistan. (11) It already plays a dominant role in its relations with the Shiite organizations in the Hazarajat (see following article). It is trying to establish similar relations unsuccessfully, with some of the groups in Peshawar, in particular
International Viewpoint 6 April 1987 the most fanatical of them, Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami, demanding that they break with the Saudi monarchy, which after the US is the Mujahideen's biggest source of funds (and also of Saddam Hussein's Iraq!)
However, the Peshawar Alliance organizations are not only anxious to maintain the relative political autonomy that Pakistan has allowed up till now, but also and above all to keep getting the manna from Saudi Arabia. Some of them, especially the "moderates" (in reality, traditionalists), would prefer a compromise with Kabul and Moscow to domination from Tehran, which would mean their being wiped out.
In that respect, the "moderates" are the weak links in the Alliance, capable of yielding to Pakistani pressure in the event of an agreement between Islamabad and Kabul-Moscow. Najibullah's offers of reconciliation have been directed especially to them.
So the Islamic fundamentalists, the hawks in the Peshawar Alliance, had to react before it was too late. They opposed any suggestion of a move toward coexistence with the Kabul regime, no matter how democratic it might be. That includes the idea of having UN forces supervise free elections in the country. This idea was advanced by some of the Peshawar groups. But it was explicitly rejected by Hekmatyar in a January 14 statement. Transitional measures
The fundamentalists managed to impose their point of view, getting the Alliance to adopt counter proposals designed to block the SovietAfghan diplomatic offensive. These counter proposals were made public on January 17. They turn around two axes. One is programmatic, concerning the future of Afghanistan as the Mujahideen see it. The other is transitional measures designed to prepare the Alliance to play the role to which it aspires. (12) On the basis of rejecting an?, dialogue with the "puppet regime, the Alliance demands a "total, unconditional and immediate withdrawal of Russian forces." It calls for armed struggle not only to this end but also for "the establishment of an Islamic order." Thus, the Alliance confirmed that it is not simply waging a nationalist struggle for an eminently reactionary and totalitarian sociopolitical objective. The model, depending on the groups, comes somewhere between the Iranian example and the Saudi or Pakistani one.
Reading the scenario projected by the Alliance is instructive in this regard: 1) "An interim government of the Mujahideen takes power." 2) It supervises "free and honest" (sic) elections, which will lead to an Islamic government and parliament." 3) A "constitution for the Islamic state" will be drawn up that will "guarantee the application of Islam in all individual actions and in the life of our nation".
The transitional measures concern the creation of two bodies: 1) "juridical delegations" (guided by Islamic law, the sharia) "responsible for arbitrating between individuals and armed groups of Mujahideen in order to smoothe out their differences and issue fetwa (verdicts) based on the sharia; 2) a commission charged with drawing up rules and procedures for "establishing an interim government." This commission was to begin to work on February 1, and complete it at the end of the same month. Since that time, nothing has transpired in this respect.
Clearly, the Alliance is closing the door to the offers from Kabul and Moscow and trying to acquire the political credibility that it has lacked up until now. First of all, it is seeking to accomplish this by trying to settle the innumerable differences that have led the Mujahideen to fight each other almost as much as they have fought their common enemies through religious tribunals, since Islam is the only common denominator of a heterogeneous alliance. However, while such arbitration can be effective in disputes relating to petty theft and other divisions of the booty, it is highly dubious that it could end the struggle for dominance among the gangs, or the tribal rangles, which are a tradition that antedates even Islam.
The Alliance proposed, subsequently, to set up a government in exile, which would be the only body empowered to represent the Mujahideen. This is a means, especially for th Peshawar hawks, not only to achieve the unity advocated by their American and Saudi patrons, but also to put the latter on the spot by creating a political fact conceived of as irreversible. Diplomatic recognition of this government in exile would then be demanded from the allied governments.
In other words, while Washington demanded that the Mujahideen close ranks in order to be in the best position to go into negotiations, the
11. In this vein, Iran has proposed that its troops participate in an "Islamic force" that would replace the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
12. The following quotations come from the translation published in "Le Monde' of January 18-19, 1987.
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AFGHANISTAN
Alliance today is proposing to close ranks around an intransigent attitude excluding all negotiations. Washington may find an advantage in this stiffening of the Alliance, inasmuch as it enables them to up the ante to
Moscow. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the US administration, as well as its Pakistani ally, would be annoyed if the "interim government" operation came off. Nonetheless, the heterogeneity of the Alliance is such that the risk remains very limited.
The big advantage that Moscow and its proteges in Kabul have in the
Afghan conflict is that they are pursuing a single strategy, decided on in the Kremlin, against an enemy
"camp" comprising forces with motives as disparate as those of the various groups of Mujahideen and the
American, Pakistani and Iranian government.
The Soviet bureaucracy is undeniably anxious to extricate itself from the quicksand that Afghanistan has become. But it is trying to accomplish this without having to make any accounting to Washington. Operating in its own traditional sphere of influence, Moscow wants to prevent the US administration from playing the Afghan card.
If Moscow's pressures on Pakistan, which are today at a peak, do not succeed in forcing the hand of Zia ul-Hag's government, because of countervailing US pressures, it is not out of the question that Moscow will try to pursue its strategy of disengagement all the way without an agreement.
The Kremlin could then manage with a tacit agreement with a Pakistani government at the end of its tether. Or it could keep up the pressure on Pakistan until the council broke apart (in that case, Washington's Afghan card could be replaced by a Pakistani card in Moscow's hand). It could progressively withdraw the bulk of its infantry and tanks, which it is using less and less, and keep a military force in Afghanistan quantitively closer to what was there before December 1979 (5,000 military "advisors") than to the massive military presence it has had in recent years.
On the other hand, this reduced force would be comprised of elite airborne units (paratroops) that have proven their effectiveness against the Mujahideen. These units have the advantage of being highly mobile and therefore able to be used intensively.
The USSR would not even have to send in its airforce. It has trained enough Afghan pilots to fly the planes that it has given the Kabul airforce and which are sufficient to carry out the sort of bombing mis20 sions that would be required. The shipments of portable anti-aircraft missiles to the Mujahideen are not such as to transform radically the operating conditions for an airforce that up till now has functioned with total impunity. It was, moreover, the Afghan airforce that carried out the raids in February against refugee camps in Pakistani territory in order to put pressure on the Islamabad government at the start of the last round of negotiations in Geneva.
The hypothesis I presented about Moscow's attitude seemed confirmed as this article was being completed by a rumor circulating in Kabul about