FRFI 166 April / May 2002
The 1978 Afghan Revolution was a genuine seizure of power by the oppressed from the exploiters. With few exceptions, the Left in the imperialist countries slandered the revolution as a coup d’état. Recently Clare Fermont of the SWP went as far as to say revolution in Afghanistan was impossible: ‘the lack of economic development meant there was no social basis for a “social democratic” movement, let alone a socialist one.’ (Socialist Review, October 2001).
Afghan society
Prior to 1978, the economy was based on poor and landless peasants and nomadic herders supplementing farming or herding with handicrafts. The Khans (tribal chiefs) held power based on land and water ownership. Mullahs influenced secular and religious matters and controlled considerable wealth. Women and subjugated peoples faced brutal oppression.
In 1975, average per capita income of the population of 17 million was $150. Of 35 million acres of potential arable land, only five million were irrigated for farming. 50% of this land was owned by 5% of the population. 72% of the people were landless peasants, poor peasants and herders, 14% were urban.
Capitalists had little significance. In the countryside the Pashtun royalty, the Khans, some Mullahs and some non-Pashtun landowners dominated. There were 250,000 Mullahs in Afghanistan! In towns, merchants and high-level government officials formed an elite linked to the landowners.
The social forces for revolution were evident. 70% of the population needed land and water. The national minorities, 55% of the population, needed freedom and equality; half the population, women, needed emancipation.
Even the comparatively minute working class announced its political existence with over 20 strikes in April-June 1968. The first week of June saw a general strike. This wave of strikes continued into the 1970s.
Fermont’s statement is a reflection of the Western chauvinism of her organisation. Far from being impossible, a successful revolution had been accomplished north of Afghanistan, with a similar society in 1917: the Tashkent Soviet. The SWP claims to be Leninist. Lenin said ‘We are in a position to inspire in the masses an urge for independent political thinking and independent political action, even where a proletariat is practically non-existent.’ (Collected Works vol 31 pp242-243).
No country, not even Afghanistan, is too backward for communists to provide revolutionary leadership.
From Amanullah to Daud: 1919-1978
In 1919, inspired by the Russian Revolution, the young Afghan national movement came to power under the leadership of King Amanullah, winning partial independence from Britain and establishing friendly relations with the Soviet Union.
Amanullah reformed the education and legal system and tried to improve the status of women. His reforms were too radical for the Khans and the Mullahs, but not revolutionary enough to rouse the masses. He was ousted in 1929.
After World War Two, Iran and Pakistan became protegés of the US. Afghanistan went to the Soviet Union for aid and trade. The US thought it could count on the reactionary Khans, a little aid and the reticence of the Soviet leadership to keep Afghanistan neutral.
During the 1960s and early 1970s the urban middle class and working class became hostile to the king, Zahir Shah. In the countryside, modest capitalist development deepened poverty. The last straw was the corrupt handling of aid to famine victims that killed half a million people between 1969 and 1972. Zahir refused to open the granaries and silos and watched people starve. The present leader of the interim government, Hamid Karzai, admires this corrupt gangster.
In 1973, Zahir’s cousin Daud, representing capitalists and would-be capitalists led a coup and overthrew the monarchy. His primary role was to prevent a revolutionary explosion so he promised reforms.
The coup was supported by a section of the Afghani Left. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) split into two factions in 1967, partly over coalitions with figures like Daud. The radical Khalq (the people or masses) faction, led by Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, rejected such coalitions. The Parcham (Flag) faction, led by Babrak Karmal, favoured such coalitions. Parcham entered Daud’s government. Daud did not implement reforms and dumped Parcham. He turned towards US imperialism via the Shah of Iran.
The PDPA takes power
In 1977 Khalq and Parcham factions reunited, except for in the army. Since 1967, Amin had been organising revolutionary military cadres. Under cover of military exercises Khalq practised for insurrection.
On 17 April 1978, trade union leader Ahbar Haybar was assassinated by government agents. His funeral was a mass demonstration led by workers and students. On 26 April, Daud arrested Taraki, Amin and Karmal after militant graveside speeches. Amin got word to his soldiers via one of his children. The army split and after ten hours fighting the PDPA took power the following day. The masses celebrated in the streets.
This wasn’t a coup: a coup is an action that leaves a small clique in power and doesn’t involve the masses. The PDPA government abolished peasant debts and proclaimed women’s equality. It redistributed land and adopted a policy of friendliness towards the Soviet Union.
Afghanistan took a giant leap forward. Before the revolution, there were five kindergartens in Kabul, none elsewhere. The PDPA built 400! One thousand male and female doctors graduated annually – the same number as in the entire 50 years of Zahir and Daud! They built health centres and hospitals. They opened schools, enabling little girls to go to school for the first time.
The PDPA freed women to remove the veil, to work and go to university. It lowered the bride price to £3 enraging the Mullahs and Khans, who saw this threatening their power and wealth, and who led a counter-revolutionary war in the countryside.
Counter-revolutionaries (Mujahedin) attacked the symbols of the revolution and women’s emancipation: kindergartens, schools, health clinics and hospitals. Over 360 hospitals and health clinics were damaged or destroyed.
In December 1979, the Soviet army came to assist the PDPA with 80,000 troops from Muslim areas in the Soviet Union. These troops were welcomed by the revolutionary masses. The CIA, using bases in Pakistan, armed and trained the Mujahedin, supplying them with over $10 billion of arms.
Almost every Left organisation in the imperialist countries sided with the misogynist reactionaries and imperialism. At a November 2001 meeting at the LSE, Tony Benn boasted how he had led a 1980 delegation of 39 Labour MPs to the Soviet Embassy in London protesting against the intervention. Benn, having lost his seat in Parliament, was touting for a safe Labour constituency. Leading SWP member journalist, Paul Foot, attacked Margaret Thatcher, from the right, in the Daily Mirror, for allowing British beef to be exported to the Soviet army: ‘We are putting beef into Russia’s invasion’. This created an anti-communist backlash and a parliamentary frenzy, calling for a total blockade of the Soviet Union.
Prior to taking sides in a conflict, revolutionaries look at who is fighting and why – not who fired the first shot. Lenin quoted Clausewitz that war is a continuation of policy by another means. PDPA policy, backed by the Soviets, was women’s liberation and education. The Mujahedin policy, backed by imperialism, was the hideous oppression of women.
Benn, Foot and most of the Left have the enslavement of Afghani women and the blood of revolutionaries, doctors and teachers and Soviet soldiers on their hands.
The war continued and in 1988/89 the Soviet army withdrew. The PDPA held on for another three years. It ended in a gory bloodbath, with PDPA members hung from lamp posts after being sexually mutilated, women, including pregnant women, having their throats slit for being unveiled. Kabul, virtually untouched by the war, was later reduced to rubble, 25,000 citizens killed by rival Mujahedin factions.
If it had developed, the Afghan revolution would have been a step forward for humanity and inspiration to the oppressed in Iran and Pakistan. It was the duty of the Left to show solidarity with it. Instead, they betrayed it.
Jimmy German
