05.12.2002
Afghanistan and Owen MacThomas - part 2
Owen MacThomas - the nom du plume of the Sean Matgamna-Martin Thomas duumvirate in the Alliance for Workers' Liberty - has made much - too much - of our designation of the April 1978 revolution in Afghanistan as a revolution. This designation is used demagogically by the AWL duumvirate as yet another damning piece of evidence which goes to prove the CPGB's continuing "Stalinist" world outlook. So where authentic Marxism seeks out the truth, the AWL tries to gain factional advantage and cohere its own ranks by manufacturing a system of falsification and outright lies. For Owen MacThomas the overthrow of Mohammed Daoud's - republican-royal - regime by the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan was a "Stalinist military coup" which brought upon the heads of the masses nothing but decades of terrible suffering. Exactly the same message pushed by the White House, CIA, BBC, Hollywood action films, The Sun and the whole well oiled imperialist propaganda machine. Presumably in 1978 the AWL duumvirate looked upon the fractious mujahedin groups as heroic resistance fighters as they began to impose their counterrevolutionary grip over the countryside and ruthlessly hunt down "infidels and communists". Certainly after the full-scale Soviet intervention in December 1979 Socialist Organiser - precursor of the AWL - proudly sided with the mujahedin against Soviet "expansionism" and its "puppet" government in Kabul in a sad parody of the paid persuaders of the bourgeoisie. Given their pedantic and high-minded Eurocentric antipathy towards the April 1978 revolution and forthright promotion of the US-Saudi-funded mujahedin, it is rather incongruous that the AWL decided to patronise the PDPA government with their support after Mikhail Gorbachev ordered the humiliating withdrawal of Soviet armed forces in 1988 (completed in the spring of 1989). Here is a paradoxical circle of their own making that they must square. After all Sean Matgamna says that you cannot at the same time be a democrat and "support the Afghan Stalinist coup of 1978", let alone "describe it as a real revolution!" "Something is seriously wrong here," he insists. "These things just don't go together" ('Critical notes on the CPGB/WW', www.workersliberty.org.uk/files/tour_de_cpgb). Everything develops according to its own logic and from itself. That is ABC for any materialist. So was the 1989 PDPA regime of Mohammed Najibullah a direct, albeit degenerate, continuation of the April 1978 revolution? The only honest answer must be 'yes'. Communists - real communists, that is - supported the PDPA under Najibullah on the basis that in some way, no matter how ham-fistedly and contradictorily, it stood for and defended certain key social gains and progressive principles. By that very same measure we supported the original PDPA regime of Noor Mohammed Tarakki, ushered in by the April 1978 revolution. Leonid Brezhnev's panic-stricken decision in December 1979 to order a massive airlift of Soviet troops into Afghanistan and the subsequent decision by the US administration - first under Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan - to turn the country into a sacrificial pawn in their second cold war against the Soviet Union did not dictate nor cloud our judgement. What the fountainhead of Matshachtmanism says about Afghanistan post-1988 shows him to be politically inconsistent. While an inflated ego has him making a unique contribution to 'third camp' Marxism, the plain fact of the matter is that comrade Matgamna was pathologically Sovietophobic in the 1980s. Even in the absence of the Soviet Union this affliction still manifests itself in a worrying softness towards the 'first camp' - note his stance on Zionism, the IRA's guerrilla war against Britain and involuntary unity in Bosnia, etc. As was the case with his mentor, the ever-present danger exists of an eventual symphysis or annexation by the other side. Tragically Max Shachtman finished his life as a revolutionary backing the CIA-directed Bay of Pigs landing by Miami-based Cuban contras in 1961. Publicly and privately we have debated this question with the AWL on countless occasions. Undaunted by this easily verifiable fact, Sean Matgamna moans in his shambolic 'Critical notes' that the CPGB continues "to refuse to discuss Afghanistan and Russia's colonial war with us". But then the AWL duumvirate are in the midst of a no-holds-barred anti-unity offensive. Admittedly most of those CPGB-AWL exchanges on Afghanistan have resembled a dialogue with the deaf. No matter what we say, the AWL replies by attacking a completely caricatured CPGB position and trotting out ritualised, almost pantomime, condemnations. That is why the CPGB had urged that relations between the two organisations would be better advanced through a concrete examination of the ways and means of launching a joint Socialist Alliance paper rather than endlessly going over old, infertile, ground. As the reader knows, the AWL has used the most pathetic excuses in order to sabotage that particular unity project. So what about Afghanistan? Fantastically the AWL says that by designating the April 1978 revolution a revolution and not a mere coup we equate it with the October revolution of 1917. Martin Thomas writes - I presume with a straight face - that on such a basis the CPGB believes that the 20th century witnessed only two revolutions. Daft? Yes. Dishonest? In all probability. Such an absurd notion that Afghanistan and the April 1978 revolution is on a par with Russia and October 1917 is as easy to knock down as it is to mock. And, of course, the AWL proceeds to do just that. The problem is that our actual position is far removed from the AWL's caricature. But, no matter how many times we try and explain, the AWL appears incapable of listening and therefore meaningfully engaging. Obviously a straw man suits the purpose of the AWL duumvirate better than one made of flesh and blood who is capable of hitting back. The CPGB's Provisional Central Committee and before it The Leninist faction of the CPGB has always taken it as axiomatic that, when it comes to backward countries in the muslim world, we oppose reactionary anti-imperialisms which in actual fact promote the interests of traditional landowners, village warlords and would-be theocrats. 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). The mujahedin groups of the 1980s fit into this category like a glove, as do the Taliban in the 1990s. Comrade Matgamna has no love for the Taliban and was right, like us, to lambaste the Socialist Workers Party's miserable Taliban apologetics when they first defied and then fought against the full might of the US armed forces in 2001. But, he maintains, a parallel can be drawn between his "support" for the "peoples of Afghanistan, led by various mujahedin groups", against Russian "colonial conquest" and the Communist International's support of Afghanistan against "British invasion in 1919" (he also cites the so-called Fourth International's support for "very backward feudal Ethiopia against Italian invasion in 1935 - but we can leave aside that old chestnut). According to comrade Matgamna, the difference between the USSR and the USA was that the former wanted to conquer Afghanistan, while the latter did not. Leave that aside, what of his parallel between the Soviet Union's attempted "colonial conquest" in the 1980s and British imperialism in 1919? Frankly the alleged parallel completely backfires. In 1919 the Soviet government expressed its solidarity with what the respected historian, EH Carr, calls the "young and would-be progressive amir", Amanullah Khan. He came to the throne as a "result of a palace revolution" and had then "denounced" the onerous treaty obligations imposed upon him by the British empire. What followed was known as the 'third Afghan war'. This, the Afghan "national movement" headed by Amanullah, was "comparable" to, though more primitive than, the Persian revolution of 1906 and the 'Young Turk' revolution of 1908 and owed its "inspiration" to the Bolshevik revolution in the same "indirect way" in which those movements had owed it to the 1905 Russian revolution (EH Carr The Bolshevik revolution Vol 3, Harmondsworth 1977, p239). In 1919 the Communist International supported a crowned revolutionary who advocated and put into practice a raft of progressive measures - in 1925 Amanullah "first began to introduce a civil legal code" which partially eclipsed the "deeply rooted" sharia law in terms of legal process (A Rashid Taliban London 2001, p83). In the 1980s comrade Matgamna supported forces whom he readily admits "were on almost all issues ultra-reactionary" ('Critical notes'). No prizes for spotting the difference. Comrade Matgamna's willingness to back mujahedin forces who "were on almost all issues ultra-reactionary" stems entirely from his inability and unwillingness to admit that in April 1978 the PDPA carried out a revolution and that what Soviet forces did in December 1979 was not so much an invasion designed to colonise the country and grab its raw materials: rather a blundering, conservative intervention in what was an ongoing civil war. In the aftermath of Vietnam comrade Matgamna reckons that the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of imperial expansion - besides Afghanistan, other colonial gains are supposed to include Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, South Yemen, Ethiopia and Nicaragua. Again and again we find him repeating almost unquestioningly the propaganda line pushed by the CIA in the 1980s. He darkly suggests that "maybe" the KGB triggered the April revolution (Workers' Liberty Vol 2, No2, nd, p45). This despite all the generally accepted evidence that the uprising took the Soviet Union by surprise and was not to its liking. Yet in none of the cases cited above did the Soviet Union initiate what was in my opinion the progressive and supportable overthrow of the old regime: ie, Portuguese and British empire colonialism, the Somoza and Haile Selassie regimes. True, petty bourgeois-led movements such as the Socialist Party of Yemen, the Sandinistas, Frelimo, the MPLA and the Derg were ideologically inclined towards the Soviet camp. However, they were the product of internal struggles and developments and exercised varying degrees of real independence. Brezhnev did not send the Soviet army into Afghanistan in order to extend the imperium, as claimed by the CIA and other cold war warriors. The move was defensive. In his report to the 26th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Brezhnev complains that western imperialism had launched an "undeclared war" against the Afghan revolution. He adds that this "also created a direct threat to the security of our southern frontier", which "compelled" the Soviet Union to "render the military aid asked for by that friendly country" (LI Brezhnev Report of the central committee Moscow 1981, p22). At the time Hillel Ticktin was also of the considered opinion that the Soviet Union acted in Afghanistan to stave off the "danger of breaking up" (Critique No12, autumn-winter 1979-80, p25). With the ousting of the shah and the imams' counterrevolution in Iran, the restless southern republics in the Soviet Union could, if things went badly, go the same way. How did we retrospectively weigh up Brezhnev's move? In 1988 Jack Conrad wrote of the Soviet Union behaving as a "great power bully". Its action "hardly strengthened the confidence of, and support for, the revolution". Soviet aid was vital if the revolution "was to survive". Yet, in saving the revolution, it extinguished the revolution. We were against any offloading or trading of revolutions such as Afghanistan and Nicaragua in order to appease imperialism. In Afghanistan that could "only" mean the "collapse of the government in Kabul, the reverse of the gains of the April 1978 revolution (not least the ending of the enslavement of women) and the wholesale massacre of the PDPA's membership" (J Conrad From October to August London 1992, pp123-24). An admittedly common premonition - what comrade Matgamna calls the majority of "orthodox" Trotskyite groups shared the same anxieties (Workers' Liberty Vol 2, No2, nd, p86). Over a decade later we again wrote that Soviet aid "saved the revolution in Afghanistan for a time - but in a thoroughly counterrevolutionary way". Hafizullah Amin - the effective organiser of the April 1978 revolution - and 97 other leaders of Khalq wing of the PDPA were summarily butchered. Ridiculously after their deaths they were charged with being CIA agents - a slander mindlessly repeated by the 'official communist' press in Britain, including the Morning Star. Already surrounded by a reactionary Vendée in the countryside, from then on the revolution "endlessly retreated" till its final demise in 1992 (Weekly Worker November 15 2001). Revolution produced and met its counterrevolutionary nemesis. Only by grasping that elementary proposition can one get correct programmatic bearings and understand why the Najibullah regime could survive the withdrawal of Soviet forces for three yeas and was then replaced by a chilling barbarism which culminated in the 1996-2001 rule of the Taliban. 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, yes, this Afghan revolution echoed the Persian revolution of 1906 and the 'Young Turk' revolution of 1908. However, it owed its "inspiration" not to the 1917 October Revolution, but directly to the post-1928 Soviet Union. The PDPA sought therefore to follow a path already trodden by Yugoslavia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, etc. In other words an Afghan version of Soviet bureaucratic socialism. Under different, more benign, historical circumstances Afghanistan would have settled into becoming another Mongolia. But the Soviet Union was already living on borrowed time. As a freak society, an ectopic social formation, it had already reached its close. The Afghan 1978 revolution was carried out from above. Of that there can be no doubt. But that can also be said of many revolutions in the 20th century. Eg, Egypt and Gamal Abdel Nasser's free officers' movement of July 1952, which forced king Farouk to abdicate, and Abdul Kassem's overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in July 1958. Even comrade Matgamna grudgingly admits that the Afghan revolution was a "political revolution" (Workers' Liberty Vol 2, No2, nd, p47 - no inverted commas in original). Yet the 1978 revolution was not led by a small military group or clique. Nor was it the final, decisive blow delivered by a party-army along the lines of Mao Zedong's Communist Party of China-Peoples Liberation Army or Ho Chi Minh's Communist Party of Indo-China-Vietminh. The PDPA was a predominantly civilian party that illegally organised secret cells inside the armed forces of the existing state, which it then managed to decisively split. So was Afghanistan's revolution a mere coup - a conspiracy hatched within the state machine, lacking any popular support or sympathy and only altering things at the top of society? Lenin lessons Lenin's discussion of the 1916 Irish rebellion - under the military command of James Connolly but politically dominated by petty bourgeois romantic nationalists - is instructive here. The Sean Matgamnas and Martin Thomases of his day, the leftist pedants and doctrinaires, dismissed the rising as the swan song of Irish nationalism and nothing more than a "putsch" - ie, the German word for a coup - which "had not much social backing". Enraged, Lenin warned them against "treating the national movements of small nations with disdain" (VI Lenin CW Vol 22, Moscow 1977, p355). It was not only Karl Radek and Leon Trotsky who looked down their noses at the Dublin uprising, but representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Lenin urged these comrades to open their eyes to the shocking "accidental" coincidence of opinion - Owen MacThomas, take note. What of the term 'putsch' - or 'coup' to use French-English? For Lenin the term "may be employed only when the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators or stupid maniacs, and has aroused no sympathy among the masses". The Irish national liberation movement did not come out of thin air. It had manifested itself in street fighting conducted by the petty bourgeoisie and a section of the working class after "a long period" of mass agitation, demonstrations, suppression of newspapers, etc. Hence for Lenin anyone who calls the Dublin uprising a "putsch" is either a "hardened reactionary" or a "doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon" (ibid). Lenin famously rounded upon his leftist doctrinaires as follows: "To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outburst by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletariat and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by landowners, the church and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc - to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution .... Whoever expects a 'pure' social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is" (ibid pp355-56). There will be localised general strikes and risings, army mutinies, premature and isolated revolutionary movements, etc. Of course, the petty bourgeoisie and non-socialist masses inevitably bring with them all "their prejudices, their reactionary fantasises, their weaknesses and errors". But the task of the advanced section of the working class, the Marxists, the communists, is not to belittle their efforts: rather to critically defend them, to side with them and to increase efforts to lead them. Poor Afghanistan The conditions which produced the 1978 revolution in Afghanistan date 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. Neither healthcare nor education existed for the mass of the population. Over 90% were illiterate. Afghanistan was an example of the Asiatic mode of production with a tincture of industrial capitalism sponsored from above by a weak state. Actually capitalist - or any kind of industrial - development barely existed. Before the revolution there were only some 100,000 workers in what could be called modern industry. Another 300,000 laboured in small-scale workshops and artisanal enterprises. However, the overwhelming majority of the population lived in the countryside. Agriculture remained woefully primitive and rural society viciously unequal. Forty percent of the irrigated land was in the hands of four percent of the population. Employing 85% of the workforce, it accounted for only 5.9% of total output. Nevertheless, economic and educational development took place, in particular after World War II. Factories were established and schools promoted, including a much expanded Kabul university. This created an alienated urban intelligentsia and a small but militant working class, around which wider forces could be rallied Between 1953 and 1963 Afghanistan suffered under the heavy heel of oppression. Yet discontent could not be contained indefinitely using these methods and in the mid-1960s the monarchy was forced to grant one concession after another. In 1964 some limited democratic rights were officially recognised and an electoral system was introduced. In the countryside the traditional rulers could often fix the ballot and pressurise opposition candidates into standing down. That was even true for the smaller towns and some of the cities. The exception was Kabul, the capital. Here alone there was something approaching political liberty. In these promising conditions the PDPA was founded - in 1965 - under the overall leadership of Tarakki. The party gained four MPs in the elections of that year. Mass demonstrations were called by the PDPA to mark their triumphant entry into parliament - the government killed three of the demonstrators. In the annals of the PDPA this was a highly symbolic event and was marked every year thereafter by rallies and meetings. The SWP's Jonathan Neale describes the PDPA communists as "brave men and women" who were the "flower of their generation" (International Socialism No93, December 2001, p34). He recalls how as a research student in 1971 he stood on a street in Lashkargah, in the south, and watched a demonstration of pro-communist school students. They called for the death of the hated landlords, a modern developed economy and an end to corruption. Yet, while the PDPA could build support in village schools, the khans and landlords would frighten the poor peasants, the sharecroppers, who might be tempted to join the communists. They were godless and anti-muslim. Failing that, anyone who dared promote the politics of the PDPA in the countryside "could easily die for speaking out of turn" (ibid). It is therefore quite remarkable that one of the PDPA's leaders, Babrak Kamal, managed to get himself elected as the MP for a rural constituency. The PDPA was deeply divided factionally between the right wing around Kamal and the left wing around Tarakki and Amin. In 1966 the PDPA issued the first edition of its paper Khalq (masses). After six issues the government issued a ban. In contrast, when Kamal published his paper, Parcham (flag), as a legal organ, it was allowed to continue without let or hindrance. Whereas Khalq opposed and criticised the monarchy, Parcham was supportive. The monarchy pursued a policy of close friendship with the Soviet Union and willingly accepted aid and grants from Moscow, just as it did aid and grants from Washington. Between 1964 and 1973 the growing mood of anger gave birth to organised movements amongst the workers, students and peasants. In 1965 there were student boycotts of classes and strikes in the mining and electrical industries. Even comrade Matgamna concedes that in 1971-72 "the PDPA led a wave of strikes" (Workers' Liberty Vol 2, No2, nd, p42). In Paghman a peasant movement began to demand land redistribution. All in all, many thousands were arrested and scores killed, but that only added to popular clamour for change. As a consequence unrest began to manifest itself in the army. Things came to a head in 1973. There were, admits comrade Matgamna, "conditions for revolution" in "urban Afghanistan" (Workers' Liberty Vol 2, No2, nd, p42 - my emphasis). He is correct. The rulers could not rule in the old way and the ruled in the cities, especially Kabul, refused to be ruled in the old way. The only way out for the ruling class was a pre-emptive army coup led by Daoud - former prime minister and a member of the royal family. Daoud came to power against the regime in order to save the regime with the active help of the Parcham wing of the PDPA. Reward duly came with a range of ministerial portfolios. Nevertheless, though Daoud offered a trickle of worthy promises, they did not resolve the underlying discontent and social malaise afficting Afghan society. Daoud pledged to reform agriculture and redistribute land. Nothing happened. Indeed he quickly turned to the oppressive measures witnessed under the monarchy. Strikes were banned and progressives and revolutionaries gunned down. Parcham was eased aside and, much to the chagrin of not only the PDPA but wide layers within the intelligentsia and lower elements of state bureaucracy, he began to distance himself from the Soviet Union. Conditions for a revolution began to mature once again. Khalq significantly outgrew Parcham in terms of membership. The ratio was in all probability five to one in favour of Khalq. Nevertheless, when the party was formally reunited in July 1977, there was a 50-50 division of the central committee. Hard membership figures are impossible to come by. True to form, comrade Matgamna writes of an 8,000 total for both factions as the "highest PDPA claim", but guesses that "the real figure" before the revolution "may have been half of that" (Workers' Liberty Vol 2, No2, nd, p49). This is not right. I make no pretence to know what exactly the membership of the semi-legal PDPA was. Nonetheless in World Marxist Review - a thoroughly turgid journal of what was then the 'official' world communist movement - we find an article by a certain comrade Zeray. Here the PDPA reports as follows: "We have worked actively amongst the people for 13-14 years, we have led the popular movement. Before the revolution our party was a significant force with 50,000 members and close sympathisers and this frightened the regime" (World Marxist Review January 1979, p76). The spark for the April revolution came with the state assassination of Mir Akbar Khyber, a university professor and former editor of the paper Parcham. Comrade Matgamna, taking his cue from the CIA, blames the killing upon the Khalq wing. Others claim he was popular with both factions. Either way, his death did not lead to factional war but "massive demonstrations" against the government (B Szajkowski The establishment of Marxist regimes London 1982, p125). Perhaps the masses knew more about the Afghan government than comrade Matgamna. In terms of Kabul's political life the demonstration was huge. Some sources write of 50,000, others of 15,000. Comrade Matgamna a much more modest 10,000. The size and militancy of Khyber's funeral alarmed the - royal-republican - Daoud government and triggered the high-risk decision to arrest leading members of the PDPA. At midnight on April 25 1978 Tarakki and Karmal were lifted by the police. However, before he was seized, 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, especially in Jelalabad, the Daoud regime was swept away amid widespread rejoicing. Comrade Matgamna writes improbably of mayhem and 10,000 deaths. Film footage shown on the BBC tells of a less bloody scenario - the common people of Kabul, on foot and horse, taking to the streets and a sea of red flags. Undoubtedly the PDPA's overthrow of the Daoud regime was carried out using alternative hierarchical lines of command in the army and airforce. PDPA officers were given orders by PDPA cadres and then themselves gave orders to the conscripts under them. The revolution was therefore an uprising organised by a mainly civilian 'official communist' party which had aligned to itself a section of the officer corps and enjoyed the sympathy of the politically advanced masses in the cities, above all Kabul. Does that mean we should dismissively classify the April 1978 revolution as a "coup"? That is what the imperialist bourgeoisie say, a line repeated by many on the left in Britain and elsewhere. A coup d'etat, a blow against the state, by definition involves a plot against the existing state in isolation from any section of the masses. It originates within the state: eg, military or palace coups. Examples from European history would be Louis Bonaparte and Otto von Bismarck. They elevated themselves into dictators by relying upon "organised state power", not the "unorganised, elemental, power of the popular masses" (F Engels CW Vol 26, Moscow 1990, p479). In 1978 there existed a revolutionary situation in the urban centres. The old regime was turning to assassinations, arrests and bannings. The masses for their part were mobilised and demanding radical change. Under such circumstances revolution is a matter of art and while the form of an uprising can be that of a coup - like the October Revolution of 1917 and the storming of the Winter Palace by red guards and pro-Bolshevik army units - the key question is social content. 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 majority of the population lived. The cadre were urban in social background and PDPA support rested upon the Soviet-trained army officers, the radicalised lower elements of the state bureaucracy and the 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, like many of the decrees of the 1871 Paris Commune, largely remained on paper. Despite that, 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. Often 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). Passages in the Koran forbidding the theft of another's property might also have proved to be a material factor. Indeed the fact that the country's 300,000-strong clergy, the harkim, held largish estates ensured that, once attempts to implement the reforms began, 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 PDPA responded with arrests and torture. That only multiplied their enemies and supplied fresh recruits to the mujahedin groups. When the PDPA was physically driven out of the villages, it fell back on the methods employed by the old royalist governments - artillery and air strikes. As Jonathan Neale emphasises, it is "not possible to wage class war by bombing a village". Bombs hit rich and poor alike and unite them. Hence in one area after another the PDPA "found themselves fighting the people they had meant to free" (International Socialism No93, December 2001, p34). The fragile unity of the PDPA began to unravel. The Parcham wing urged a policy of compromise and bringing back people from the defeated Daoud regime. The Khalq wing responded by turning on the Parchamis and imprisoning or exiling its leaders. In the end even Khalq suffered ruinous internal divisions. Tarakki - having been convinced by the Soviet Union to dump Amin and switch to compromise - was killed in a shootout. Amin took command. As we have said, the Soviet intervention of December 1979 saved the revolution, but in a thoroughly counterrevolutionary way. The results were disastrous. Not only was the policy of bombing and terrorising the villages continued, but it was massively increased. Though Amin had repeatedly requested increased Soviet aid, he would not have expected to be its first victim when it eventually came. Soviet forces executed him and most of his fellow central committee members and installed Kamal as a pliant satrap. In disgust many Khalkis deserted and joined the mujahedin groups or went into exile. What was a civil war now became intertwined with a war against foreign domination. Opposition grew and Afghanistan spiralled down into a horror which saw perhaps a million deaths and countless maimings. The countryside haemorrhaged of people and vast numbers flooded into Kabul or fled to the swollen refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. The US saw its chance to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's Vietnam. Weapons and money poured into the country. In 1986 the shoulder-launched Stinger missiles wrought havoc with Soviet aeroplanes and helicopters. Hundreds were shot out of the skies. The decrepit Soviet Union could not afford the political or economic costs of staying in Afghanistan. In 1988 Gorbachev decided upon a withdrawal. 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. That the PDPA government survived till 1992 - after the Soviet Union's collapse - testifies to a residual, but nonetheless real, base of popular support. Workers Power - which still characterises the 1978 revolution as a "coup", nevertheless owns up that "the PDPA demonstrated that it did have a serious base in Afghanistan" (September 30 1992). Ditto Socialist Organiser - the forerunner of the AWL's Solidarity - "The fact that the Afghan regime the Russians left behind them did not collapse for over three years indicates that it was not only a creature of the Russians" (April 23 1992). Having fed the mujahedin counterrevolution, the US inadvertently promoted heroin, fragmentation, the Taliban and al Qa'eda. The US had little interest in post-PDPA Afghanistan. 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. September 11 and the spectacular attacks on New York and Washington were the final straw. After that the days of the Taliban were numbered. Jack Conrad * Leeds, lies and Owen MacThomas - part 1
Worker