November 2021

By Pat Turnbull

In 2011 there was a remarkable exhibition at the British Museum. It was called Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World. It could be said that it is Afghanistan’s curse to be at the crossroads of the modern world.

The highlight of the exhibition was the treasure of Tillya Tepe. Over 20,000 gold, silver and ivory artefacts were found in November 1978 in nomadic graves from the first century AD by a joint Soviet/Afghan archaeological team led by Viktor Sarianidi. This renowned Soviet archaeologist had been born in 1929 in Tashkent in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic to a father who, as he said, ‘looking for a more meaningful life, had immigrated from a village in Greece’. These wonderful gold and jewelled objects, exquisitely crafted, fused elements from many different cultures. The finds were brought to the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. To guard them from theft or destruction by terrorists, in 1988, they were moved to the Central Bank vaults in the presidential palace. [1] This act, which saved the treasure of Tillya Tepe, was ordered by the last president of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), Mohammad Najibullah. Eight years later he would be seized from the United Nations compound in Kabul in 1992, where he had sought sanctuary after his government fell. Subsequently he was mutilated and killed by the Taliban, which had occupied the city.

Afghanistan is a landlocked country, bordered by Pakistan to the east and south, Iran to the west, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to the north, and Tajikistan and China to the north-east. It has an ancient history - two of the earliest urban civilizations were found there, in the Amu Darya valley in Central As in the north, and the Indus valley in the south. It was occupied by many empires and was on the Silk Road - the trade route which connected the East and West from ancient times. However, it was never part of the British Empire, for Britain fought and lost three Anglo-Afghan wars – 1838-1842, 1878-1880, and from May 3 to June 3 1919. Following the Second Anglo-Afghan War Britain succeeded in making Afghanistan a British protectorate, but after the third they had to sign a peace treaty recognising the country’s independence.

SOVIET SUPPORT 

The Soviet Union had a long connection with Afghanistan. On March 27 1919 it was the first country in the world to recognise Afghanistan as independent and sovereign. In 1920, Soviet Russia, a young state itself and short of everything, agreed to grant Afghanistan gratis a million gold roubles, several aircraft, and 5,000 rifles with ammunition, and helped Afghanistan to build a gunpowder plant and an aviation school. Agreement was also reached on sending technical and other Soviet specialists to Afghanistan. The treaty between the two countries signed and ratified in 1921 was one of the first documents in history which set out relations between a great power and a small state based on equality and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, on friendship and mutual respect. Britain did everything it could to bribe and force Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to break relations, including the ‘Curzon ultimatum’ of May 1923 demanding Soviet diplomatic personnel withdraw from Afghanistan, which was categorically rejected. Britain organised tribal uprisings, including one in 1928 led by British intelligence agent, Colonel T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). After World War II the United States took over from Britain as the dominant power. It saw Afghanistan as a future bridgehead to attack the Soviet Union and tried to impose economic ‘aid’ on Afghanistan to curtail economic links with the Soviet Union. When in 1955, prompted by the US and Britain, Pakistan deprived Afghanistan of the right to send goods through its territory, the Soviets signed an agreement so that the goods could be sent duty free to third countries via the Soviet Union. In the 1960s and 1970s, the US continued to put pressure on Afghanistan to abandon its policy of neutrality and non-alignment. [2]

Meanwhile the Soviet Union continued to contribute to Afghanistan’s economic development. In the 1960s dams were built to provide electricity to towns and cities, and water to irrigate farmland, with construction financed and supervised by the Soviets. The Salang Tunnel, 2.6 km long, connects Kabul to northern Afghanistan. It opened in 1964, and cut travel time for journeys by almost 62 hours. Prefabricated blocks of flats were built in Kabul in the 1960s and 1980s. Kabul Polytechnical University, established in 1963, was a gift from the people of the Soviet Union to the people of Afghanistan. [3]     

The 30 million citizens of the Soviet Central Asian republics across the border achieved a degree of material, cultural and scientific advancement far superior to that of any Islamic country in the world, and Afghanistan remained mired in feudalism, tribalism and poverty. 95% of the people were illiterate. Average life expectancy was 25-30 years. Three quarters of the land was owned by landlords and mullahs who were only three per cent of the rural population. Peasants lost their land because they were unable to pay 25% interest on debts that went back to fathers and grandfathers. They became sharecroppers, with the landlord or mullah taking between two-thirds and four-fifths of the crop, depending on how fertile the land was. The sharecropper was left with barely enough to feed his family. [4] Things remained like this despite intermittent efforts by various governments.

PROGRESSIVE GOVERNMENT UNDER ATTACK

In 1965 the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a national progressive party was formed as was the Democratic Organisation of Afghan Women whose aims were to eliminate illiteracy among women, and ban forced marriages and feudal dowries. In 1973 a coup by militia officers belonging to the PDPA replaced King Mohammad Saher with Muhammad Daud. But he failed to carry out the promised reforms and ended up arresting almost the whole party leadership. In response a military uprising took place on 27 April 1978 - the beginning of the April Revolution. The military freed the leaders of the PDPA and delegated the management of the state to them. The revolutionary government began to implement reform measures. Decree No 7 of 17 October 1978 was on regulation of divorce matters; Decree No 8 of 28 November was on land reform. In half a year about 1.5 million people learned to read and write for which Afghanistan received a prize from UNESCO. But this progressive government was immediately beset by terrorist violence and the threat of actual invasion. By the end of 1979 the Afghan government had been forced to ask the Soviet Union for military assistance 21 times. These requests were based on Article 4 of the Afghan-Soviet Friendship Treaty of 5 December 1978 and on Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Soviet military engagement began on 27 December 1979 with the intention to withdraw as soon as Afghanistan’s security position stabilised. [5]

While the US and Pakistan were the leading players in the armed interventions in Afghanistan, other countries were also involved: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UK among them. There were powerful signs that, as far as the imperialist world went, the period of détente was at an end. It may be useful when considering this to briefly put the events in their world political context.

Timeline of world events 1975 – 1979 ·         1975 the Vietnamese finally drove the United States invasion forces out of their country. ·         17 September 1978 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords, following ten days of secret negotiations at Camp David, US President Carter’s country retreat. ·         3 November 1978 the Soviet Union and Vietnam signed a 25-year mutual defence treaty. ·         25 December 1978 Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia and by 7 January had reached Phnom Penh. ·         29 January to 4 February 1979 Chinese vice premier Deng Xiaoping visited the USA after overtures from US National Security Assistant Zbigniew Brzezinski. He and US President Carter signed agreements, among others, to re-establish consular relations. ·         February 1979 the Iranian revolution swept away the Shah depriving the US of a key base in the region. ·         17 February 1979 China invaded Vietnam to then withdraw in March. ·         May 1978 NATO approved automatic growth of military budgets of NATO member countries to the end of the century. The United States accelerated long-term armament programmes, set up new military bases far from the US, including in the Middle East and Indian Ocean area, and formed so-called ‘quick response’ forces. The SALT-2 Treaty on strategic arms limitation was signed but not ratified by the US. ·         December 1979 the US forced on its NATO allies a decision to deploy new medium-range missile weapons in several West European countries.

The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan never had the opportunity to build a decent life for the Afghan people without the violent assaults of internal and external enemies. Immediately after the 1978 April Revolution, about 35,000 radical Islamists from 40 countries were restructured into powerful, armed organisations in the ‘refugee camps’ in Pakistan, and these mujahideen as they were known at the time, were unleashed on Afghanistan, under the direction of the CIA and its Pakistani brother organisation the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).  [5] On July 3, 1979, US President Carter authorised a $500 million covert action programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government, code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone. Thus the USA through the CIA was actively involved in the affairs of Afghanistan long before the Soviet military intervention. In ten years or so, half a million to a million Afghan civilians, 90,000 mujahideen, 18,000 Afghan government troops and 14,500 Soviet soldiers were to die. The CIA recruited Wahhabi missionaries from Saudi Arabia to go to Pakistan and later to Afghanistan to set up Islamic fundamentalist religious schools, madrasas. The CIA and their agents recruited or forced young Afghans to go to these schools, where they became brainwashed religious fanatics. The word Taliban means students in an Islamic school. During the 1980s the number of madrasas increased to some 40,000, as part of CIA covert psychological operations. In 1989, the year Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire, founded Al Qaeda from terrorists involved in the war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s. [4]    

In December 1984 Soviet magazine Sputnik reported how US President Reagan’s ‘brave fighters for freedom’ had, during their raids, destroyed and burned down 50% of all schools in the DRA, the greater part of its hospitals, three-quarters of its communication lines and one-fifth of its state motor transport. Many industrial enterprises and electric power stations were damaged. The terrorists were brutal; they cut off hands, ears, noses, disembowelled their victims, and flayed them alive.

FACT FINDING VISIT 

In June 1982 a British fact-finding group of two MPs, two trade union leaders and the secretary of anti-imperialist solidarity organisation Liberation were witness to the efforts being made by the progressive Afghan government, and reported their experiences in a pamphlet called Darkness to Light. [6] As one of their hosts said, ‘We are trying to transform a Middle Ages life to modern times.’  To guard against the terrorists, every school, orphanage, factory, housing estate and museum was guarded by Afghan volunteers, often very young. The following were among the group’s other findings:

The DRA had set a legal minimum wage and limits to working time. In two years salaries had increased by 50%. The first Congress of the Trade Unions of the DRA had convened in March 1981, attended by 500 delegates, trade unions being legal for the first time. There were now 160,000 trade union members in a total labour force of 3 million, including 2 million peasants. More than 300 libraries were run by trade union organisations, and literacy courses were run by the trade union movement, along with those run by the Ministry of Education. More than 10,000 workers had been sent to socialist countries for education.

The Afghanistan Youth Organisation had over 80,000 members and Tribal Council had also been set up to deal with tribal problems. There were 30,000 Young Pioneers, and the group of British visitors visited the Pioneer Palace in Kabul, where young people could take up activities in art and music, and use the library. On the walls there were photographs of 40 to 50 young people and children who had been murdered because they were Pioneers.

Hospitals, primary health centres and sub-health centres had been established. The Institute of Medicine had been set up following the April Revolution, and advisers from the Soviet Union were helping to train Afghan doctors. The Soviet Union was also providing printing presses to print medical publications and books in the languages of Afghanistan.

The group also attended a land distribution ceremony where 500 people were there to watch 50 people get land for the first time in their lives. On September 1 1978, all debts to landlords were abolished and a major land reform was underway, where everyone would have equal amounts of land. It goes without saying that the former landlords were not overjoyed; many left for voluntary exile, and some joined the ranks of the armed terrorists.

The rents on recently constructed two-bed flats were 10% of wages, and on three-bed flats 15%. The group visited the Jangalak Engineering Factory, which had been established with the help of the Soviet Union 22 years previously. It had 900 workers and 150 apprentices, and produced pumps, engineering products, truck and coach bodies, and repaired lorries.

The group went to the Central Club of the Democratic Organisation of Afghan Women in Kabul. The club had been founded in November 1981. Its main task was organising the professional training of women. There were courses in literacy, sewing, knitting and needlework, for which Afghanistan was famed. There were similar clubs in ten of the 29 provinces. Working women now had maternity rights and child marriage and feudal dowry payments were banned. But the forces of progress had to tread carefully. In 1979 Hafizullah Amin had seized power and under his brief rule women who had been found in literacy classes with men had been killed by their husbands. (Amin is believed to have been a CIA agent within the PDPA leadership and was quickly overthrown.) But the DRA achieved progress: in 1990 Kabul University had 10,000 students, 60 per cent of them women and by 1991 there were 577 primary schools with 628,000 children enrolled, of whom 212,000 were girls. [4]

REACTIONARY TAKEOVER 

The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan came to an end on 27 April 1992, when the Afghan leaders finally capitulated and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was established. By then the Soviet Union was no more - it had dissolved in December 1991 - and there were no more supportive socialist countries in Eastern Europe. After the withdrawal of Soviet troops the DRA had had to survive alone, while its enemies continued to be heavily funded by the imperialist camp. However, following the end of the DRA, the war continued, more brutally than before, as various factions fought for power. Big cities, including Kabul, were laid waste.  Education provision was destroyed and finally, on 27 September 1996, the Taliban conquered Kabul. [5]

Everyone in Britain who considers the history of Afghanistan, and particularly of British involvement, will echo the words of Dr Matin Baraki, from Afghanistan but now living in Germany, when he says of the current situation: ‘Peace…that is the most important thing that the absolute majority of Afghans want…The five principles of international law must be respected on the Hindu Kush. One of these principles is: “No interference in the internal affairs of others.” Afghanistan must finally have rest and the people of this battered land must decide their fate themselves. It will not be a democratic and progressive Afghanistan, but that is the business of the people on the Hindu Kush.’ [7]

 

(1) Afghanistan, Crossroads of the Ancient World, ed. Fredrik Hiebert and Pierre Cambon, The British Museum Press, 2011

(2) The Truth about Afghanistan – Documents, Facts, Eyewitness Reports, compiled by Y. Volkov, K. Gevorkyan, I. Mikhailenko, A. Polonsky and V. Svetozarov, Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1980

(3) Five Soviet infrastructure projects that survived the Afghan Wars, Ajay Kamalakaran, Russia Beyond the Headlines, 18 August 2016

(4) Afghanistan: Before and After US Intervention, Professor John Ryan, Global Research, 26 September 2021

(5)  Afghanistan and the USA, Dr Matin Baraki, Open Democracy, 5 June 2019

(6) Afghanistan – Darkness to Light, A Liberation Pamphlet, 1982

(7) Epochale Niederlage des Imperialismus am Hindukusch, Dr Matin Baraki, RotFuchs, October 2021

 

The Salang Pass tunnel pic by Scott L. Sorensen / mawg64

The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan never had the opportunity to build a decent life for the Afghan people without the violent assaults of internal and external enemies. Immediately after the 1978 April Revolution, about 35,000 radical Islamists from 40 countries were restructured into powerful, armed organisations in the ‘refugee camps’ in Pakistan, and these mujahideen as they were known at the time, were unleashed on Afghanistan, under the direction of the CIA and its Pakistani brother organisation the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

View of Kabul Photo by Olgamielnikiewick