The Tragedy of Afghanistan

This issue of Workers' Liberty magazine from 2002, just after the fall of the Taliban last time, looks in depth at the history of Afghanistan in the 20th century and how it fits into wider world history.

Afghanistan's "Great Saur Revolution" in April 1978, and the Russian invasion at Christmas the following year, were two of the most important events in the latter half of the 20th century. The invasion brought about the end of a thaw in relations between the USA and USSR, and brought about the so-called "second cold war". The decade long colonial war the USSR was bogged down in, and its failure to subjugate Afghanistan under its bureaucracy, shattered the Stalinist State's self-confidence and ultimately contributed to its downfall.

The April 1978 revolution was, in fact, a coup of army and airforce officers aligned to the People's Democratic Party - the tiny, middle-class, town based Afghan Stalinist party of a few thousand. Stalinist revolutions in China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia had involved mass movements, but there was no such social base in Afghanistan. It had only officer corps and military discipline. The synthesis of the PDP and the Afghan armed forces came about over the previous 25 years, during which the USSR had equipped and trained them. The officers and the army took the USSR as their model for modernising Afghanistan.

Lack of support outside the cities led the PDP to resort to armed and airborn militarism to enforce their revolutionary decrees. Within months of the coup, the government was at war with most of rural Afghanistan; napalm bombing villages, destroying crops, killing large numbers and driving many over the border into Pakistan as refugees.

The two factions at in the PDP soon started killing each other. The USSR invaded at Christmas 1989, killing the leaders in power and had the leaders installed in their place invite the invasion.

At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the majority of orthodox Trotskyist and Labour Left were in support of the USSR. Socialist Organiser, the predecessor organisation to Workers' Liberty, stood all but alone in opposing that invasion whilst others defended the occupation, with one section of the Mandelite Left even going so far as to jubilantly claim the USSR had "gone to the aid of a revolution." In the decade which followed, the USSR became bogged down in the last great colonial war of the 20th century, comparable in its brutality to the US war in Vietnam and causing more casualties than the US invasion in 2001 and the troop surge under Obama in 2008.

(In addition to Afghanistan, this magazine contains essays on Islamism and capitalism; the Third Camp; Marx, Engels and war; and more.)