Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/afghan0927.php 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. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy
and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not
allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY
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