Ajit Roy

A search for the central issues and basic forces behind the Afghanistan drama

With the first chapter of the US war against the Talibans seemingly drawing to a close and the flow of written and spoken words on this episode gaining proportions of a veritable deluge, the understanding of these apparently world shaking events, however, has not gone beyond their phenomenal levels.

In other words, the central issues and basic forces behind the interplay of the ongoing global currents and cross-currents seem to have generally escaped the public attention and understanding. Hence, the tasks that face humanity for achieving a full and proper resolution of the basic crises, whose surface reflections have so far gripped the global attention, remain really unattended to.

Comparable to he Cuban missile crisis

Indeed, the gravity of the present crisis cannot be under-estimated by any means. The first major war, as candidly designated by its initiator George Bush, in the present century, accompanied already by minor bacteriological-chemical skirmishes with nuclear threats at some future critical point, the recent events are comparable to only the Soviet-US confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis some 60 years ago. This importance of the events is amply reflected in the volume of reflections on them, though regrettably not in their depth.

Many of the startling features and their impacts on world developments have already become quite commonplace and need little elaboration. It may suffice only to briefly mention them in the interest of delving deeper into the related phenomena. Specifically:

i. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon in Washington and the frustrated attempt on the White House-Capitol complex on 11 September 2001 were a shattering and unprecedented experience for the American nation – the rulers and the ruled alike – humiliating and humbling for the supreme warlord of the Globalised global order.

ii. A great irony of History that the Taliban, a creation of its own with the collaboration of camp-followers like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, has been engaging the USA with unflinching audacity.

iii. Caught in the pincer grip of the geo-political compulsions reinforced by its US patron on the one hand, and its obligations to Islamist fundamentalists, in Afghanistan as well as within the country, nurtured by the late Zia-ul Haq and willy nilly encouraged by all subsequent rulers, the present chief of the Pakistani junta, General Pervez Musharraf, is today engaged in a dangerous tight rope walking. He is unable to turn down the direct demands and refuse the inducements of the country's US patron to join more or less actively in the anti-Taliban military operations on the one hand, he is on the other hand mortally afraid of igniting the explosive anger of large masses of indoctrinated populations, particularly of the North Western Frontier Province, Baluchistan and Sind, which may lead to his overthrow.

iv. There is a similar, if somewhat less acute, dilemma facing Pakistan’s neighbouring countries like India, Iran, Central Asian republics, and so on as also the imperialist critics of Musharaff’s usurpation of power by a coup in Pakistan. In the present balance of forces, any weakening of the present military regime and its Supremo at Islamabad caused by any action on their part can only strengthen the more inimical Islamist fundamentalist forces.

v. Pakistani rulers’ critical dilemma is shared by many of the rulers/ruling classes of the Arabian countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates (UAE). To combat its anti-Islamist image as also for other political-military reasons, the USA has to ensure the association of these states in its anti-Taliban crusade. At the same time, the growing anger of the subjects of these Muslim states over the devastation and humiliation of the accredited vanguard of what has emerged as the `Islamist International’ – that is, the Talibans and their ideological-political prophet Osama bin Laden – may at some point threaten the security, stability and even the existence of the rule of these US collaborators over their own countries

vi. While the US President George W Bush has singled out Osama bin Laden as the villain of the piece and wagered for his head – `dead or alive’ – the world knows that the Bush and Laden families were for two generations tied up in business collaborations – including some in Arab oil – and that the US partners, father and son, had on more occasions than one shielded their Arab partners, from the attention of the US security agencies.

vii. Though George Bush and Vladimir Putin have now joined hands in an anti-Laden-anti-Taliban coalition, it is also wellknown to all students of contemporary history that conflicts and contradictions between Moscow and Washington in the Afghanistan region arose decades ago precisely over the question of control over the huge – perhaps second only to the Saudi-oil reserves in the Caspian Sea area.

viii. While a large part of the nationalist/hindu opinion in India is inclined to view the indiscriminate pounding of the Afghan cities and population centres by the US bombers and missiles as just retributions for the dastardly terrorist acts on 11 September 2001, the Lefts, if a prominent spokesperson of theirs is to be taken as a representative specimen, are more inclined to view the terrorist acts of 11 September as an expression of legitimate anti-imperialist indignation.

ix. If, however, the fundamental question cannot be evaded: which side you are on – the Taliban or the anti-Taliban – the tentative answer has to be: the anti-taliban side. If one has to choose between the two anathemas, one has to choose the latter, only because all abominations, atrocities, cynicism, hypocrisies, indeed, anti-human crimes notwithstanding, there is still a large area of democratic space in the USA and the coalition of countries it leads, for dissent, protests, mass actions and mobilisations. On the Taliban side, on the other hand, there are only brutal tortures, foul murders and blanket suppression of human rights and freedoms.

Hidden Meaning

The most significant aspect of the global view of the Afghanistan drama is that what appears as its most striking feature, in reality serves to hide its essential historical meaning. Specifically, the bin Laden phenomenon and the ongoing Afghan war are today very widely seen as the global conflict between an international coalition and the tribal-medieval phenomenon of the Taliban conglomeration. The international coalition includes the leading world powers, viz, the USA, the UK, France, Germany and Japan, supported with qualifications by Russia and China with the humble campfollower India, trying to edge in from the fringe. It also embraces some unwilling associates from Afghanistan's bordering states like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE.

The Talibans, for their part, were supported by large masses of Muslim populations spread over half the globe, from the Philippines, through Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan and the Arab countries upto Algeria on the Mediterranean coast and also enjoy large backing of the sprinklings of the Muslim populations in the Western countries.
Although within Afghanistan, the Talibans were fighting the Muslim Northern Alliance, supported by the governments of the Muslim Central Asian states, the fact stands out that a huge international conglomeration of Muslim population, roughly constituting about 20 p.c. of humanity, is confronted by a coalition of forces embracing Christians of various denominations, Jews, Buddhists, Confucians, communist-atheists and Hindus – that is, seemingly a combined war on Islam, a version of crusades. This has given rise to the talk of civilisational confrontation, touted by some leading Western ideologues.

Related to the collapse of the Soviet Union

A very resonant feature of the present scene is that while the Marxist conception of proletarian internationalism has suffered an eclipse (although worldwide solidarity and protest movements are surfacing again), the call for an Islamist internationalist front is getting wide echo. Indeed, volunteers from different countries fighting in the ranks of the Talibans appears as a weak replica of the Communist sponsored historic International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War in the thirties.
Up to this point there may be a broad agreement and public opinion will immediately relate this to the collapse of the Soviet Union and all that accompanied and followed it. But a most important fact is overlooked in this context: that it was the Soviet armed intervention in Afghanistan and its consequences including the atrocities committed by the Soviet proteges and Soviet forces are the fundamental reason behind the contemporary tragic development. In other words, contrary to popular perception the seeds of the present confrontation were sowed a decade before the fall of the Soviet Union – at a time when it was undoubtedly a fomidable super power.

This, however, is not to deny that the Saur Revolution of 1978 and the successive Afghan regimes, aided by the Soviet Union, initiated a number of democratic social, economic and political reforms in conformity with the best interests of the Afghan people. But from the very beginning, the whole process was vitiated by a number of basic weaknesses, faults, failures, shortsightedness and so on, most of them objectively arising from the historical circumstance. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and its Soviet advisors and guides faltered almost absentmindedly from one wrong step to another, with never taking fully into consideration the objective and subjective realities of the moment, till the ultimate disaster.

Liberation of a people has to be won by themselves

There was no doubt that the US, Pakistani and Saudi Arabian rulers were all the time conspiring against the new Afghan regime and helping the rebels with money, arms and military training. But there was no evidence of any foreign troops operating with the rebels inside the country. The Soviet Union had also been doing the same and helping the revolutionary regime on a massive scale and openly. By landing on a large scale Soviet armed forces into the country, the Soviet Union had upped the ante and created a new situation.

Immediately after the entry of the Soviet armed forces into Afghanistan at 1979-end, we wrote an editorial in The Marxist Review (January-February 1980):… the Soviet Union has landed herself in the present mess almost absentmindedly, so to say. Without ever trying to assess seriously the Afghan developments in terms of the correlation of social forces, she has become more and more deeply involved in Afghan internal politics with the country’s progress from one palace coup to another. As each engineer of a coup has been physically eliminated by the leader of the succeeding one, the Soviet Union has automatically transferred her friendship to the successor to the throne in Kabul by committing a growingly larger measure of economic, diplomatic and military support, forgetting in the process the fundamental Marxist tenet that the real liberation of a people can neither come as a gift from the leaders of a palace coup, nor can it be exported in Soviet tanks and armoured cars – it has to be won by the people for themselves through hard struggles and harder sacrifices.

We also warned that the ill-conceived Soviet action will help the world capitalists to divert the attention of the toiling people from the fast maturing social crisis that is engulfing the capitalist world today.
We further warned that the Soviet Union “is going to be bogged down in something like a war of attrition against large segments of Afghan people who are and will be inflamed by religious and nationalistic demagogy and armed and financed by the US and other reactionary forces, including the oil-rich sheikhdoms with, unfortunately, full and unabashed connivance of China. Further that the Soviet Union will antagonise the Third World countries and the anti-Nato peace forces in the West.

Widespread atrocities on the civilian population

Three months later in the May issue, responding to a critic, The Marxist Review wrote: “We certainly have grave doubts if the initial handicap of the lack of significant mass bases, a handicap that is going to be much more severe with the premium that nationalist/Islamic demagogy will derive from the presence and actions of foreign troops from an aethist power, will allow the neat scheme … for gaining mass support through land and other reforms to succeed.”
In our September 1980 issue, we reprinted a long interview given by Feroz Ahmed, a wellknown Pakistani Marxist and editor of Pakistan Forum, who had intimate knowledge of the Afghan situation, gained from his visits to that country and close encounters with the leaders of the APDR, which corroborated all our basic conclusions.

On top of the virtual aggression of Afghanistan it was alleged, that the Soviet Forces had been resorting to widespread atrocities on the non-combatant, civilian population of the country. The allegation of aggression was confirmed by the People’s Permanent Tribunal (PPT) Rome-based, successor to the Bertrand Russel Tribunal.
As a founding member of the PPT, the present writer attended its two sessions on Afghanistan, held in Stockholm on 1-3 May 1981 and in Paris a year later. The Stockholm session said in its verdict that “The Tribunal denounces before the world public opinion the violation of the inalienable right of the Afghan people to self-determination through and beyond the violation of the right of the Afghan state which at present (is) represented by a government which has become an instrument of aggression against its own people”.

Unethical and brutal conduct of the Soviet regime

The PPT observed in its judgement on the urgings of four of its 14 members that it needed more convincing proofs about the allegations of Soviet atrocities on the civil population and other war crimes, and therefore, decided to send a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan. It also decided to hold a second session after it got the report. At this session it tentatively observed that “the Tribunal has received some indications and even the beginnings of proofs of repeated violations of the laws of war”.
Besides allegations of the executions of prisoners of war, use of poison gas and so on, a major complaint was about widespread scatterings of land-mines and anti-personnel bombs in plastic coverings in the shape of toys. These were alleged to have injured many innocent villagers, including small children. These plastic coverings with clear cyrillic markings were exhibited to the Tribunal members. Indeed, the cyrillic markings made this writer suspicious about the authenticity of their Soviet origin.

When he put this question to the expert from the Swedish Ministry of Defence, Commodore I Wulff, the witness concurred with this writer that the normal practice would be to remove the identification marks.
But subsequently, it has been confirmed beyond doubt that the Soviet agencies had really scattered hundreds of thousands of landmines and these devices in Afghanistan and innumerable such devices still lie embedded in Afghan soil.
They continue to regularly injure Afghan people. This shows the brazenness of the power-drunk Soviet rulers of the time and their total unconcern about world opinion.

This bitter experience of the unethical and brutal conduct of the Soviet regime, first invading a friendly country, then underwriting the rule of its utterly rotten, faction-ridden power-hungry clannish cliques of the local party committing brutal atrocities on one another and on imposing a terror regime on the people and finally the Soviet armed forces themselves letting loose unconcealed brutalities on the Afghan people at large – all this finally made the Afghan people turn their back in hatred and contempt to the `ideology’ of anti-imperialism and socialism associated with the Soviet Union and the Marxist Lefts. In their search for an alternative source of ideational inspiration, they finally came to cling more ardently to their traditional Islamic religiosity.

So, Enter Osama bin Laden

This is not an occasion to go into the role of religion in general or Islam in particular in the West Asian-Middle Eastern regions. That for historical reasons, Islam was a powerful force is unquestionable. But, earlier, the Lefts, headed by the Marxists, had roles of varying importance in the Muslim countries in different regions. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, the communists were the predominant force. In the Southern Mindanao, the dominant MNLF was close to the Communist Party of the Philippines. Even in Iran as Khomeini was establishing his firm grip on the struggle against the Shah, the Marxist Tudeh Party was an ally of sorts.

Following the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan all this changed rapidly. Islam became the only source of solace. The Soviet Union and the Marxists, so long regarded as a liberationist, anti-imperialist force, became indistinguishable from the oppressive imperialists.
Moreover, the upsurge of nationalist-chauvinist emotions eclipsed the slowly developing social awareness and delivered the mass of the people bound hand and foot into the arms of obscurantist-fanatics.

Hence, bin Laden and the Talibans may be defeated and punished and dispersed in this round, but this will neither liberate the Afghan people, nor end the threat of global terror. The Northern Alliance or any other combination that may be groomed for ruling over Kabul will be just another set of unscrupulous greedy warlords, repeating the unending tragedy of the Afghan people with slight variations.
The inflamed and indoctrinated Islamists, to some extent welded into an international phenomenon, but tragically, not endowed with the consciousness and capacity to build up a people’s liberationist movement or formation, has nothing but another charismatic charlatan and terrorism to fall back upon in their fight against the perceived enemies.

Hopeful signs learning from the Taliban episodes

No matter how strict the vigilance, how strong the policing, it cannot operate permanently at the highest level of alertness. Hence, sooner or later, some dedicated fanatics singly or in combination can manage to blow themselves along with a mass of innocent people!
Humanity’s only escape from this bleak prospect lies in the twin practice: denunciation of and dissociation from the black Brezhnev episode of the Soviet history and painstakingly, if slowly, build up a broad people’s liberation front in the Muslim countries as well as the world over.
There are, however, many hopeful signs that learning from the Taliban episodes, sections of devoted Islamic circles are moving towards broadly democratic humanitarian interpretations of Islam. They will be valuable allies in this worldwide front of libration.

AJIT ROY

Tillbaka till SYDASIEN/Monsun nr 4/01