How U.S. destroyed progressive secular forces in
Afghanistan
By Deirdre Griswold
The media are suddenly full of opinions about
Afghanistan, now that the Bush administration is accusing Osama
bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists of being behind the
attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
In the 1980s, the reactionary political elements now
ruling Afghanistan were working with the CIA to overthrow a
progressive Afghani government supported by the Soviet Union.
After the spending of an ocean of blood and billions of U.S.
dollars, the reactionaries won.
Washington was happy and unconcerned as its
protégés went on to butcher Afghani progressives,
restore landlordism and repress women while fighting among
themselves.
The eventual triumph of the Taleban faction represented a
catastrophe for the Afghani people. Just in the last year
thousands of Afghani refugees have died of starvation and
exposure and Kabul, the capital, is such a wasteland that the
U.S., demanding vengeance, can't even find anything to
bomb.
On Oct. 10, 1996, Workers World printed the following
article about how the U.S. strangled a popular revolution led
by the Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)
against feudalism and imperialism.
Not that long ago, the bourgeoisie could still feel pride in
their revolutionary history. They continued to celebrate the
1789 French Revolution and many other great victories in the
struggle against feudal oppression.
They even spoke approvingly of the 1917 overthrow of the
czarist autocracy in Russia. The problem, they said, was that
the Bolsheviks had spoiled that struggle for democracy by going
too far.
But capitalism in this rotten age of U.S. imperialist
conquest of the globe has degenerated so far from its
revolutionary roots that it is now, to borrow a phrase from
Henry Kissinger, to the right of the czar. And it is
celebrating the return of absolute feudal rule in
Afghanistan.
The powerful media engines, their reach multiplied by the
most modern technologies, are presenting the world with instant
photographic images of a lynching--that's all it was--of the
few progressives left in Kabul. .
To make the deed more palatable, the media use adjectives
like "butcher" to describe former President Najibullah and his
aides. Dragged out of the United Nations compound where they
had sought asylum for the last four years, they were beaten to
death and then left hanging for all to see.
But among themselves, foreign-policy experts for the U.S.
establishment know that the Afghani progressives' real crime
was that they tried to carry out a social transformation in
their country in the direction of socialism.
What authority bears witness to this? None other than the
U.S. Department of the Army itself.
The Pentagon puts out what it calls country study books on
almost every country in the world. They are updated every few
years. These books contain basic information for the use of
U.S. personnel traveling or working abroad. There's nothing
classified in them. They're available in most libraries.
"Afghanistan--a Country Study" for 1986 has of course the
anti-communist line expected of a Pentagon publication. But it
also contains much useful information about the changes
instituted by the Afghani Revolution of 1978.
Freeing women and peasants
Before the revolution, 5 percent of Afghanistan's rural
landowners owned more than 45 percent of the arable land. A
third of the rural people were landless laborers, sharecroppers
or tenants.
Debts to the landlords and to money lenders "were a regular
feature of rural life," says the U.S. Army report. An indebted
farmer turned over half his crop each year to the money
lender.
"When the PDPA took power, it quickly moved to remove both
landownership inequalities and usury," says the Pentagon
report. Decree number six of the revolution canceled mortgage
debts of agricultural laborers, tenants and small
landowners.
The revolutionary regime set up extensive literacy programs,
especially for women. It printed textbooks in many
languages--Dari, Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic and Baluchi. "The
government trained many more teachers, built additional schools
and kindergartens, and instituted nurseries for orphans," says
the country study.
Before the revolution, female illiteracy had been 96.3
percent in Afghanistan. Rural illiteracy of both sexes was 90.5
percent.
By 1985, despite a counter-revolutionary war financed by the
CIA, there had been an 80-percent increase in hospital beds.
The government initiated mobile medical units and brigades of
women and young people to go to the undeveloped countryside and
provide medical services to the peasants for the first
time.
Among the very first decrees of the revolutionary regime
were to prohibit bride-price and give women freedom of choice
in marriage. "Historically," said the U.S. manual, "gender
roles and women's status have been tied to property relations.
Women and children tend to be assimilated into the concept of
property and to belong to a male."
Also: "A bride who did not exhibit signs of virginity on the
wedding night could be murdered by her father and/or
brothers."
The revolution was challenging all this.
Young women in the cities, where the new government's
authority was strong, could tear off the veil, freely go out in
public, attend school and get a job. They were organized in the
Democratic Women's Organization of Afghanistan, founded in 1965
by Dr. Anahita Ratebzada.
Ratebzada's companion, Babrak Karmal, was one of the young
revolutionaries who had formed the People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan in that same year and would later become president
of the country.
Repression and revolution
A revolution was literally thrust upon this young party in
1978. The reactionary government of Mohammad Daoud, which was
close to both the shah of Iran and the United States, arrested
almost the entire leadership of the PDPA on April 26, 1978.
There had been a huge funeral procession just a week earlier
for a murdered member of the party, and the progressive masses
in Kabul saw the new arrests as an attempt to annihilate the
party just as the military junta had done to the workers'
parties in Chile in 1973.
An uprising by the lower ranks of the military freed the
popular party leader, Nur Mohammad Taraki--the soldiers
actually broke down his prison walls with a tank. Within a day,
Daoud was overthrown and a revolutionary government proclaimed,
headed by Taraki.
This uprising of the soldiers and the city masses, many of
them low-paid civil servants in a country with very little
industry, was every bit as glorious as earlier revolutions
against feudal tyranny in Europe. It held the promise of
breaking down the old traditions based on oppression and
fear.
The leaders of the PDPA were educated, although some, like
Taraki, came from very poor families. But they had been to
Kabul University, some had studied abroad, and they yearned to
bring enlightenment and material progress to Afghanistan.
Had all this happened 150 years ago, the feudals would have
been overthrown and Afghanistan welcomed into the fold of
progressive bourgeois nations. But that was before the age of
imperialism, and especially before the era of proletarian
revolutions and the Cold War.
The U.S. CIA began building a mercenary army, recruiting
feudal warlords and their servants for a "holy war" against the
communists, who had liberated "their" women and "their"
peasants. Washington spent billions of dollars every year on
the war.
The only country in the area ready to help the Afghani
Revolution was the Soviet Union. The USSR intervened
militarily. But it could not defeat this well-armed
counter-revolutionary force.
Every battle was a test not only of Soviet military might
but of the political resolve of its leaders. They finally
withdrew the troops in 1989 as the shift to the right within
the USSR became critical.
The war in Afghanistan began some 18 years ago. It continued
long after the last progressive government in Kabul fell in
1992. The recent stage has been an orgy of destruction as rival
reactionary groups fought for control of the capital, now
mostly destroyed.
More than 2 million Afghanis have been killed in this
struggle, and millions more made refugees. Now half the
remaining population--the women--have been returned to the
status of property without a single human right. A poor man
unable to pay his debts can have his hand cut off for
theft.
The schools and clinics built by the revolution are in
ruins. The Taleban--a fundamentalist group supported by
Pakistan that was trained and armed by the U.S. CIA--has taken
the capital and is pursuing the war northward, toward the
border with what were the Central Asian Soviet republics.
This is the hideous face of counter-revolution. Afghanistan
has been dragged back more than 100 years. But it was the most
modern weapons and communications systems, made in the USA,
that killed the progressive dream of a generation of Afghani
social revolutionaries.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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