15.11.2001

Fight reaction on all fronts

There is no reason to mourn the flight of Taliban forces from Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Baghlan and Kabul. Nor by the same measure is there any reason to celebrate the lightening victories of the Northern Alliance. Reaction has conquered reaction. It is as if the National Front usurped the British National Party.

The only thing revolutionary socialists and communists welcome about recent events in Afghanistan is that the disintegration of the Taliban theocracy might open up a space for freedom and democratic politics from below.

After five terrible years there is in Kabul an end to the ban on playing music, kite-flying and clean-shaven faces; an end to the persecution of Shi?ites, Jews and Hazars; an end to the domestic imprisonment of the whole female sex. All that is good news. So are reports that in Herat it was the population of the city that drove out the Taliban, not Northern Alliance warlords, who have a long record of murderous petty rivalries.

What is going on today in Afghanistan is essentially a continuation of the 20-year civil war fought by the armies of counterrevolution - except that for the last 10 years the war has been conducted within the counterrevolution itself.

Counterrevolution is always and can only but be the product of revolution that either has failed or which for one reason or another stops short. Afghanistan?s April 27 1978 revolution is no exception. In many respects the Afghan revolution programmatically resembled the revolutions carried out in China under Sun Yat-sen and in Egypt under Abdul Nasser. But here national democratic measures combined with an aim of establishing a ?workers? state? based on the Soviet model of bureaucratic socialism. Under different, more benign, historical circumstances Afghanistan would have settled into becoming another Mongolia.

Afghanistan?s revolution was no mere military coup - a conspiracy hatched within the state machine and which alters things only at the top of society. Any such suggestion is a calumny and is easily disproved by the basic facts.

Within the cities and towns there existed active and widespread support for a revolution which resulted from profound political and socio-economic developments dating back to at least the mid-1960s and the failures of the Zahir Shah monarchy to carry through the modernisation of the country.

The UN credited Afghanistan with being one of the poorest 20 countries in the world. Capitalist - or any kind of industrial - development barely existed. Nor did healthcare or education. Over 90% of the population were illiterate. Agriculture remained woefully primitive and rural society viciously unequal. Forty percent of the irrigated land was in the hands of 4% of the population. Employing 85% of the workforce, it accounted for only 5.9% of total output. The educated middle classes found promotion in the state administration and the army blocked by the privileged aristocratic and bureaucratic elite. Thousands were jobless. Nevertheless the economic development that took place, in particular since World War II, created a small but politically conscious working class around which much wider forces could be rallied. One concession after another had to be made by the ancien r?gime in order to put off revolution till the point where in desperation it turned to the methods of naked counterrevolution.

The April revolution was directly precipitated by the state assassination of Mir Akbar Khyber, a university professor and former editor of the paper Parcham. He was popular with both factions of the People?s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and his death provoked ?massive demonstrations? (B Szajkowski The establishment of Marxist regimes London 1982, p125). The size and militancy of Khyber?s funeral alarmed the - royal republican - Daud government and triggered the high risk decision to arrest leading members of the PDPA.

Before he was seized, however, Hafizullah Amin - who was responsible for the party?s illegal work in the army - managed to issue instructions for an uprising. ?As crowds gathered? in the Kabul?s central park ?in protest against the imprisonment of PDPA leaders?, Mig 21s struck the presidential palace and tanks moved into the city (ibid). After some fierce fighting the Daud regime was swept away amid widespread rejoicing.

The newly installed PDPA government - overwhelmingly civilian - enacted far-going reforms. Usury was abolished in the villages - debt crippled the peasantry. Rigorous ceilings on private land ownership, along with the encouragement of cooperatives and offers of cheap credits, fertilisers, seeds and agricultural implements, were intended to free ?millions of toiling peasants from the yoke of exploitation? (quoted in B Sen Gupta Afghanistan London 1986, p50). The government envisaged land confiscation and redistribution, not collectivisation.

Equal rights between men and women were announced with much fanfare. Another decree banned forced marriages and set limits on dowry and marriage expenses. An adult literacy campaign was put in place - directed especially at women in the countryside. Higher education was encouraged - women came to occupy over 50% of places in Kabul university.

The country?s numerous nationalities were from now on to be treated with strict equality, declared the PDPA government. Oppressed language groups heard their mother tongue on Kabul Radio for the first time. Pushtan domination, officially ended. Constitutionally the country became a multinational state. A secular state too. Islam was not subjected to any attacks, but the state promised neither to promote nor interfere with any religion.

Never before in Afghan history ?had there been such a ruthless attempt to push through so many basic reforms?, says the Indian academic, Bhabani Sen Gupta (ibid p55). In other words it is vital not to confuse the form first taken by the April revolution with its content. What began as an action by a section of the armed forces had, as revealed by subsequent events, a radical social content.

But the PDPA lacked roots in the countryside where the mass of the population lived. The cadre were urban in social background and its MPs had always been elected by the workers and semi-proletarianised poor of the cities. Nor did the revolution in Kabul coincide with an agrarian revolution amongst the peasantry. Land reforms - the key to the revolution - were therefore to all intents and purposes bureaucratic and introduced from above. The revolution and its reforms managed to enrage all elements within the old ruling bloc, but without launching a counterbalancing peasant movement below. A fatal weakness.

Many peasants felt themselves compelled to return ?their new land? because the village headmen, or khans, still controlled the ?irrigation systems? (G Chaliand Report from Afghanistan Harmondsworth 1982, p37). Indeed the fact that the country?s 300,000-strong clergy, the harkim, held largish estates ensured that once the reforms began to be implemented, in October 1978, they took a leading role in organising armed risings alongside the village headmen and elders. Counterrevolution - royalist, merchant, tribal and rural- became through that vital ideological mediation a jihad.

The Soviet intervention of December 1979 saved the revolution in Afghanistan for a time - but in a thoroughly counterrevolutionary way. Amin and 97 other leaders of the PDPA were butchered. Ridiculously they were charged with being CIA agents - a slander mindlessly repeated by the ?official communist? press in Britain, including the Morning Star. Already isolated, from now on the revolution endlessly retreated till its final demise in 1992.

The overthrow of the PDPA government - now led by Najibullah - marked the triumph of the countryside over the city. The ideas of 20th century progress were buried. The values of obscurantist mullahs, traditional village headmen and gun-toting banditry replaced those of national equality, women?s liberation and secularism. In the attempt to undermine the ?evil empire? - by turning Afghanistan into the Soviet Union?s Vietnam - the US poured in sophisticated arms and huge amounts of money. That the PDPA government survived till 1992 - after the Soviet Union?s withdrawal and collapse - testifies to a residual, but nonetheless real, base of popular support.

Having fed the mujehadin counterrevolution, the US inadvertently promoted heroin, fragmentation, the Taliban and al Qa?eda. The US had little interest in the post-PDPA Afghanistan. It was content to leave the ruined country to its awful fate. The counterrevolution continued unchallenged and unchecked.

Ethnic divisions between Pashtun, Uzbeks, Tajiks, etc, within the counterrevolution have been overlaid by religion, the rival interests of outside powers and the various ideologies of pan-islam and fake anti-imperialism. The Taliban are not only mainly Pashtun, but militantly Sunni. Where Pakistan guided, supplied and jealously protected the Taliban, in their turn Iran and India backed the Northern Alliance.

The US only woke again to the situation in Afghanistan after bin Laden and his al Qa?eda terrorist network murderously struck at their Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies. Tomahawk missiles rained down on Afghanistan in punishment. September 11 and the spectacular attacks on New York and Washington were the final straw. Pakistan found itself compelled to drop its Afghan clients. The Northern Alliance suddenly got the backing of the world?s sole surviving superpower.

Notions that the US has strategic designs to colonise Afghanistan in order to extract raw materials or lay a Caspian Sea oil pipeline owe more to conspiracy theory than Marxist theory. US-UK imperialism seeks stability, not Afghan markets or exploitable labour. The present war is costing the US some ?700 million a month. Once ground forces are introduced in any number that will soar. Such outlays can never be recovered through an impoverished Afghanistan. Tribute will though be exacted from ?pacifist? countries such Japan and Germany and the oil-rich Gulf states.

As to the pipeline theory, the theory that the real intentions of the US lie not in crushing the Taliban and getting hold of bin Laden but securing a land route for oil from the Caspian sea, it is worth noting that at the moment - not least due to September 11 - relations between Iran and the west have undergone a definite rapprochement. Iran, of course can supply a more direct route to the sea for US oil companies and already possesses a well established pipeline network.

George W Bush and Tony Blair have actually been forced to make up their Afghan policy on the hoof. Either way, their aims are primarily political, not economic. Events - not least the capture of Kabul by the Northern Alliance - have sped ahead of them. Plans for a post-Taliban government under the former king Zahir Shah have so far come to nought. And despite the military successes - the Tomahawk missiles, special forces raids and the B52 bombing - there can be no doubt that in terms of the propaganda war the US-UK-led coalition has been losing. Pakistan is the weak link and is threatened from within by its own islamic fundamentalists. With the failure of nationalist and leftist secularism, the same monster has raised its head across the Arab and muslim world.

Bin Laden and the Taliban have found themselves lauded as heroes by disorientated sections of the world?s muslim population. And not only in Cairo and Quetta, but in Oldham and Bradford. And then there are the leftist groups and sects - the SWP, Workers Power, etc, which in the name of anti-imperialism, and imperialism?s enemy is my friend, offer what they openly or covertly describe as not political, but military support.

As we have repeatedly argued, the division is entirely spurious. Along with the 19th century Prussian soldier-philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, Marxists define war and peace not as opposites, but two sides of the same coin: ?War is the continuation of politics by other (violent) means? (see On war Harmondsworth 1976).

Surely giving the Taliban military support is to give political support?          

Note: The comrades of the SWP, Workers Power, etc, have no tanks, no missiles. Nor have SWP or Workers Power militants signed up as volunteers - unlike some fanatical British-Asian fundamentalists. Hence they cannot, even if they want to, offer the Taliban, actual military ?support?. Their main weapon is the power of words. That is actually what they put at the service of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, though they insist for their own reasons on calling it ?military support?.

Lenin was certainly right in his 1920 draft thesis on the colonial question when he insisted that communists must ?combat pan-islamism? and fake anti-imperialist movements which actually ?strengthen the position of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc? (VI Lenin CW Vol 31, Moscow 1977, p149).

It is right that we here in Britain fight for the biggest, most effective anti-war movement and the defeat of the Blair government. But that must be inflicted by the working class in Britain, not the Taliban in Afghanistan. We - along with all Afghan progressives, democrats and revolutionaries - equally want to see the defeat of the Taliban - not by US-UK imperialism, but through the rising of the popular classes of that country.

James Marshall