Invading Afghanistan

Dave Mather

Despite U.S. military and political hegemony, the Afghan ruling class is likely to see its power challenged

The American intervention in Afghanistan and the rapid collapse of the Taliban has introduced a western military presence into central Asia which has unforeseen consequences for its peoples.

For the Afghans the American invasion is the latest in a series of foreign interventions that can be traced back to the role of the British in the foundation and consolidation of the Afghan state.

Afghans, however, have not been the passive victims of foreign designs. Not only do they have a long tradition of resistance to foreign invaders, but also foreign influence and intervention have often been appropriated and used by some groups in order to consolidate their power within a divided country, with effects that have usually rebounded on the foreign power. The debacle of Pakistan's strategy of promoting the Taliban as a protégé with which to transform Afghanistan into its satellite is the latest example of such a reversal and, perhaps, not the last one.

“Its all the fault of the British” (Persian Proverb)

Although Afghanistan was never colonised, the state was the product of the contention and collusion between the British and the Russians, in the "great game" of colonial rivalry which was played out between them throughout the nineteenth century.

When the British first arrived in Afghanistan they recognised, behind the pomp of the court, the signs of a tribal empire in disintegration, decline and decay. Economically Afghanistan had nothing to offer Britain in terms of agricultural or mineral wealth. Rather its significance lay in its strategic position as a buffer between India, the jewel of the British empire, and the southward expansion of Russia.

Unable to dominate the country militarily, Britain demarcated Afghanistan's borders with Persia and India and defined Afghanistan as a buffer state standing between the limits of the British and Russian empires. These so-called “scientific frontiers” were based on purely strategic considerations and corresponded to no known historical or ethnic frontiers. Afghanistan's complex ethnic mix is a product of the way its borders were drawn up.

Even if many of the peoples did not even consider themselves as Afghans, they did begin to develop a common identity as a consequence of decades of armed conflict with the British, notably in two Anglo-Afghan wars. In the 1840s they gave the British army its bloodiest defeat of the century.

From this history of resistance and war has emerged the reputation of Afghanistan as land of rebellion in opposition to foreign invaders and the centralised power of the state. This is not a class resistance. Exploitation (rents and labour services due to landowners who control the supply of water and animals), as well as the debts of the sharecroppers, may be harsher than on the plains. Such rebellions are incapable of founding an alternative society. But the legacy of peasant resistance was the basis of the opposition to the PDPA's "revolution from above" and to the Soviet invasion.

The feudal legacy

From 1929 to 1978 members of the Musahiban family ruled Afghanistan. In the 1920s an “enlightened despot” King Amanullah attempted to modernise the country from above, following the examples of Attaturk in Turkey and Reza Shah in Iran. He proposed a plethora of political, social and economic reforms to extend education and literacy to the whole population, give equal rights to women, introduce land reforms, democratise the political system and separate the state from religion. He was overthrown by an uprising of tribal leaders supported by the British.

Afghanistan under the Musahiban family remained one of the poorest countries in the world. From its inception it relied on the support of the Pashtun land-owning aristocracy and the harsh exploitation of the peasantry. State taxes on the landowners were abolished. In order to raise revenue, needed especially for the armed forces, the state taxed merchants and foreign trade. After the war it sought foreign loans and aid from the USA and, when the USA seemed to lose interest, from the USSR. Almost half the country's finances came from foreign aid. It sought to Pashtunise the state administration by appointing Pashtuns to key positions. It gave government contracts to Pashtuns and targeted development aid to Pashtun areas. Despite the state's modernising rhetoric, industrialisation was minimal: in the 1960s the industrial workforce numbered less than 50,000 people.

The present king, who has recently been brought back to Afghanistan by the Americans, came to the throne as a teenager in 1933. His reign ended ignominiously in 1973 when he fled to Italy "for medical treatment" as famine ravaged the country and officials and merchants grew rich from selling foreign food aid on the black market. While in Italy he learned that his cousin Daoud had taken power in a bloodless military coup and that the monarchy had been abolished.

The PDPA

The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan was formed in 1965. No communist party had been formed in Afghanistan following the 1917 Russian revolution, unlike in other Asian countries. Internally Afghanistan had no radical workers or peasants movement or tradition of Marxism. In the 1920s the Soviet Union seemed content to support Amanullah. For Stalin in 1924:

“The struggle of the Emir of Afghanistan for the independence of Afghanistan is an objectively revolutionary struggle, in spite of the monarchistic cast of the views of the Emir and his associates since it weakens, disunites and undermines imperialism.”

The immediate goals of the PDPA were to overthrow the "economic and political hegemony of the feudal class" through a "national democratic revolution" following a "non-capitalist path", echoing the language of pro-Soviet parties throughout the Third World. But soon a split in the Central Committee led to the formation of two completely separate organisations, Khalq (the Masses) led by its general secretary Nur Muhammad Taraki and by Hafizullah Amin, and Parcham (Flag) led by Babrak Karmal.

Initially the differences between the two were hard to detect since from their statements both seemed committed to the same strategy and tactics. In general Parcham was more reformist in its approach, wanting to work with the "progressive wing" of the ruling class, while Khalq was more "insurrectionist". Dubbed the "royal communist party" after it declared that the Zahir Shah was the "most progressive king in Asia", Parcham also had a reputation for being slavishly pro-Soviet. The Khalqis liked to pose as more “leftist” and more independent of the Soviet Union, but their road to socialism depended not on the exploited masses but on the armed forces:

“Our great leader hit upon the truth that due to the fact that in developing nations the working class has not yet developed as a political force, there is another force which can overturn the feudal and oppressive government, and in Afghanistan that force was the army.”

Faced with a minuscule working class and an indifferent peasantry Khalq and Parcham recruited mostly among students, teachers, civil servants etc. They also recruited heavily among the armed forces, which were Soviet trained, many within the Soviet Union itself. In general their supporters were less interested in socialism or classlessness than in modernisation and the overcoming of backwardness. The main obstacle to achieving these objectives was not only the backwardness of the regime, but also the backwardness and the ignorance of the people. The attraction of the Soviet Union lay in its state control of the economy, the power of the state bureaucracy and the leading role of the intellectual-bureaucrats within it.

In the short term it was Parcham which flourished. Parchami officers had been heavily involved in Daoud's 1973 coup, and Parcham was rewarded with posts in the ministries. But in the 1970s Daoud publicly moved away from the Soviet Union. He established closer relations with the Shah of Iran. Top Parchamis started to lose their positions in the government and the armed forces. The Soviet Union probably saw him as another third world dictator who was slipping from their grasp, just as Saddam Hussein had done in Iraq or Sadat in Egypt. But by this time Khalq had three times as many supporters as Parcham and was clearly a more attractive proposition to the Russians. Already its officers in the armed forces were preparing a coup to get rid of Daoud. On the 27th April 1978 they seized power. This was the "Great Saur [April] Revolution".

The Islamists

The Islamist movement had its origins in the 1950s in the Faculty of Theology at Kabul University, influenced by the ideas of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood In the 1960s students organised clandestine discussion cells, and began to preach sermons and build mosques. They denounced both westernisation (alcohol, un-Islamic dress for women etc) and the government's ties to the Soviet Union. They protested against the influence of Marxism among other students, and physically attacked leftist demonstrations.

The Islamists were vehemently opposed to cultural westernisation, but were in favour of the appropriation of western science and technology. They saw Islam as a political ideology and advocated Islamic government as the key to Islamicising society. In this sense they represented a departure from more traditionalist Islam, which sought to Islamicise society without necessarily wanting, or even expecting, an Islamic state. Rather than a reaction against the modernisation of Muslim societies, Islamism was a product of it.

So in Afghanistan Islamism was a student phenomenon in an overwhelmingly rural society. None of its militants came from the ruling class. They came from provincial backgrounds, but were educated in state schools, not traditional schools. Most of their student recruits were drawn from technical or engineering faculties or teacher training colleges, not theology faculties. They recruited women and were in favour of secondary and higher education for girls (which brought them into conflict with traditionalists and, later, with the Taliban) even if girls had to be segregated and veiled. They accused the ulema of being the allies and apologists of the regime. They denounced the monarchy and the government for being "corrupt" and "illegitimate". They rejected secular Afghan nationalism, particularly the demand for a reunified Pashtunistan, which made them very attractive to the Pakistani government.

To the Islamists class struggle was an alien concept imported from abroad. Their economic programme, such as it was, remained an abstract combination of Islamic banking, the defence of private property and the profit motive (sometimes accompanied by some nationalisations), and social justice for the poor.

In the early 1970s the Islamists decided to start working outside the university and the colleges. Imitating the communists, they began to infiltrate the state apparatuses, particularly education and defence. And they started to take their version of Islam to the peasantry, over the heads of traditional rural religious leaders. For this they began to suffer state repression, which greatly increased after Daoud's 1973 coup. In response, in July 1975, with Pakistani support, they tried to organise armed uprisings in the countryside. These completely failed due to lack of support. “Islamism from above” attracted no more support amongst the peasantry than “socialism from above” was to do. Those leaders and militants who managed to escape jail or death were forced into exile in Pakistan.

Here past differences in the movement resulted in a split and the formation of two separate organisations. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was a student activist who had been one of those most in favour of the unsuccessful armed actions. He formed the Hezb-i Islami (Party of Islam). Strong among Pashtuns it was to become a dominant force in the resistance and Hekmatyar was to become Afghanistan's most notorious warlord. The more "moderate" Burhanuddin Rabbani, the future president of Afghanistan and leader of the Northern Alliance, kept the name of Jamiat-I Islami (Islamic Society) and attracted mostly Persian speaking non-Pashtun supporters.

Maoists

Afghan Maoists correctly opposed the 1978 PDPA coup as a sham revolution and denounced the Russian invasion as an imperialist action. In the 1960s they had frequently clashed violently with the Islamists. A distinctive feature of Afghan Maoists was their hostility to Pashtun nationalism and Pashtun domination. Since many of Kabul's workers were Tajiks and Hazaras, the Maoists found it easier to work among them than did the PDPA or the Islamists. In the 1970s they tried to work among the peasantry, but with little success.

Their numbers were decimated by the pro-Moscow regimes after 1978. The Islamists killed most of those who escaped to the countryside. Most of the Maoist organisations seem to have been destroyed by the early 1980s. Some supporters, for example those of RAWA (the Revolutionary Organisation of Women of Afghanistan) and those of the ALO (Afghan Labour Revolutionary Organisation) managed to survive inside the country or in the refugee camps in Pakistan.

The Soviet Invasion

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in order to rescue a PDPA regime which was on the verge of collapse, confronted by countrywide uprisings and with an army rapidly disintegrating from desertions. It began by killing Hafizullah Amin and most of the Khalqi leadership and brought back Karmal, who had been exiled by Khalq, and installed him into power. By the time the last Soviet soldier had left the country a decade later, an estimated one million Afghans had lost their lives, the vast majority of them civilians killed as their villages were bombed in the Russians' scorched earth policy. Five million refugees fled to Pakistan or Iran, and two million more became refugees inside the country.

When Soviet troops finally left in February 1989 the Soviet Union had suffered its first military defeat since the second world war. Its humiliation undoubtedly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet state itself. Its defeat was a victory for the people of an overwhelmingly rural society who had fought the might of a superpower to a standstill. But it was also a victory for the USA, which had spent billions financing the resistance, in the cold war. And finally it was a victory for the forces of Islamism internationally, who had also helped financed the resistance and had organised support for it.

Little more than a decade later Afghanistan had been taken over by the Taliban, a movement whose ideals seemed far removed from the professed "modernism" of the Islamists, following a murderous ethnic civil war. The alliance between the Arab leaders and the young Jihadists had collapsed following Sadam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. And America was at war with the very Islamic forces it had helped to mobilise and sustain.

Rural uprisings

Politically one of the main effects of the Russian invasion was to permit the Islamist groups to return from exile in Pakistan and assume the leadership of the resistance. In the course of the Soviet occupation the foreign backed exiled Afghan Islamist groups, although they were bitterly divided among themselves, took over the leadership of the resistance from local traditional leaders.

After the 1978 coup there was no sudden uprising against the new government. The first armed clashes were local responses to the arrival of party members into the villages. Backed with armed force they had come to impose land reforms, to set up schools, or to arrest suspected Daoud loyalists. The party had no history of doing any political work among the peasantry. Rural reform policies it implemented (land redistribution, the abolition of the peasant debts, the abolition of brideprice in marriage, compulsory education), were seen by the peasants as an outside intervention whose effect would be to undermine traditional social structures by strengthening the power of the state.

So the first uprisings were a defence of the local qawm (village community, ethnic or tribal solidarity group) against the armed intervention of the state. The fighting followed the traditional pattern of tribal warfare. After clashing with the party militants, the peasant mojahedin might attack a local government post. But once the territory of the local qawm was liberated the fighting tended to stop.

But the government responded with reprisals: arrests, torture and killings became common and the fighting intensified. The uprisings began in non-Pashtun areas such as Nuristan and among the Hazaras, areas which had come under state control within the last century, against a regime which was seen as being dominated exclusively by Pashtuns. Then they spread to Tajik and Persian speaking areas in the north. Later in 1979 that revolts spread to the tribal Pashtun areas.

The revolts, of course, served to protect the interests of the landowners. But the leaders were local figures, often mullahs, who operated within the popular tradition of a defensive jihad against infidel intruders. Landowners and khans were not very active. Many had fled, while others preferred stability and compromise to jihad. The armed groups used ancient or captured weapons, and they and their commanders relied on the local community for material support, sometimes supplemented by smuggling or taxing of transport on the roads. But government reprisals and continued fighting demanded more money and arms. This forced local commanders to look to the parties established in exile in Pakistan and their foreign funds.

The Islamist parties

In order to manage the influx of refugees that began to flood in from Afghanistan, the Pakistanis turned to the Islamist parties, which had been forced into exile in the 1970s. They soon became the main recipients of money that started to flow in from abroad. In order to get guns and assistance local commanders were forced to ally themselves with one of these parties. With Pakistani assistance Hezb and Jamiat quickly assumed the leadership among the exile groups.

For the Islamists what was principally at stake was not a national liberation struggle but a struggle for Islam, for the umma: "The present jihad is not for the watan [homeland], but for Islam - the watan is only khak [dust]." (Afghan Islamist)

Those not subscribing to this objective were excluded from the movement. Pakistan refused to recognise the Pashtun secular nationalists of Afghan Millat. The Maoists were themselves attacked by Islamist groups within Afghanistan. Dissident Khalqis, despite having contacts with the resistance, were not encouraged to join it. The royalists and supporters of the establishment were marginalised despite their widespread support among the refugees. Pakistan refused to allow members of the royal family onto its territory. Attempts to establish a loya jirga dominated by traditionalists were undermined by internal divisions but also by Pakistani hostility. Pakistan recognised seven Sunni exile groups to whom it distributed cash and arms from American and Saudi money and to whom all field commanders had to affiliate in order to get aid. Three of them were traditionalists or "moderates" who favoured a return to the pre-Daoud status quo, which usually included a return of the king. Four of them were "fundamentalist" or "Islamist". They did not want the re-establishment of the monarchy but an Islamic state. The Islamist groups - especially Hekmatyar's Hezb - got the lion’s share of the money. As a direct result, the fortunes of the royalist and traditionalist groups in Afghanistan declined and the Islamists became stronger.

The foreign Jihadists who came to fight with the mujahedin allied themselves to the Islamists. The initiative to use non-Afghan volunteers came not from the Afghans themselves but was "a joint venture between the Saudis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the [Pakistani Islamist] Jamaat- e- Islami, put together by the ISI" (Olivier Roy), and enthusiastically supported by the CIA. Some 35,000 foreign Jihadists would fight alongside the mujahedin, mostly after the departure of the Soviet troops, and many more came to study and actively support them. Osama bin Laden was the main Saudi organiser in Peshawar.

Foreign friends

The Afghan war was a war by proxy between the superpowers. By the early 1980s between 100,000 and 150,000 Soviet troops were stationed in Afghanistan, far outnumbering the Afghan army, which never amounted to much more than 30,000. Thousands of Soviet political and military advisers ran the government and the army, sometimes assisted by Iranian Tudeh party members. By the early 1980s the war was costing the Soviet Union an estimated $5 billion a year. US support for the mujahedin rose dramatically from $30m per year to a peak of $600 million dollars a year in the mid 80s, which the Saudis doubled.

Soviet aid to Afghanistan flowed directly to the party and the state. American aid was more indirect. One the one hand the distribution of American financial aid was sub-contracted to Pakistan. On the other hand Saudi Arabia agreed to match US aid dollar for dollar, had its own networks of distribution and organised the sending of foreign volunteers. Both of these regimes had their own agendas, which were to impact on Afghanistan, and the beneficiaries of both were the Pashtun Islamists.

From the beginning of the war Pakistan saw an opportunity to establish a friendly government in Afghanistan which would help to resolve the Pashtunistan issue, and which would give it "strategic depth" in its conflict with India. It was unsympathetic to the royalists or secular Pashtun nationalists because of their past support for a united Pashtunistan within Afghanistan. It distributed money between seven groups because it didn't want a united movement within its borders, on the model of Arafat's P.L.O. The ISI (Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence) saw to it that Hekmatyar's predominantly Pashtun Hezb got the most money and support.

Saudi Arabia seized on the Afghan issue as a means of re-asserting its leadership in the Islamic world following the Iranian revolution of 1979, and of directing the militancy of the young Islamists against the Soviet Union rather than the USA. The containment of Iranian influence was also, of course, a major US objective. Saudi money especially went to small groups in Afghanistan that shared their anti-Shia Wahhabi doctrines. But money also went to Hekmatyar's group because of its sectarianism towards the non-Sunni groups. The Saudis also funded refugee schools and madrasas (religious schools) in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was from these that the Taliban were to emerge.

In the event Iran isolated itself from the Afghan mujahedin. It provided support exclusively to the Shia groups, and even formed its own loyal organisations when dissatisfied with the existing ones.

Civil war

The Soviet Union began to lose the war when the mujahedin started to receive US stinger missiles and got control of the skies, but also when commanders such as Ahmad Shah Massoud began to move from traditional patterns of localised war to mobile guerrilla warfare. Nevertheless when the Soviet troops left Afghanistan the mujahedin had yet to capture a major town or city. These were still in the hands of Najibullah and his supporters in the Watan (Homeland) Party, as the PDPA had been re-named in a new spirit of national reconciliation, and were still being supplied by the Russians.

Despite the fact that the