Afghanistan and the Lessons of Soviet Intervention

[IndianaGreen]

Afghanistan and the Lessons of Soviet Intervention

By Norman Markowitz

The Obama administration, as it seeks to withdraw from Iraq, finds itself in a far more difficult and complicated situation in Afghanistan. In February, the National Security Archive, a Washington-based institute that uncovers classified documents from the Cold War era, released a collection of fascinating documents from Soviet sources in the Gorbachev era. These primary source documents concern the Gorbachev leadership’s attempts to extricate the USSR from its years-long military intervention in Afghanistan. From these documents, we might glean some important historical lessons about military intervention in Central Asia and look for alternatives to the Obama administration's plan to increase troop numbers there.

While I do not share the sympathetic portrayal of the “reformers” in the Gorbachev leadership of the USSR put forward by the analysts at the National Security Archive, particularly Gorbachev’s naïve, or worse, effort to cooperate with the Reagan administration and the Pakistani dictatorship, the documents could be a valuable source of information on the region for the Obama administration, as it seeks to learn from the past in order not to repeat the errors of the past.

Background

First, let us look from the US bloc side at how we arrived at the present situation 30 years after Zbigniew Brzezinski successfully convinced Jimmy Carter to throw US support to the right-wing Muslim guerrillas fighting a Communist-led government in Afghanistan. Brzezinski correctly argued that US intervention there could provoke the Soviets to fall into what he called “the Afghan trap,” a political military quagmire that could be “their Vietnam.”

Out of that policy, greatly expanded by the Reagan administration, came the victory of corrupt regional warlords and ultra-right religionists who formed the so-called mujahideen, the latter favored especially by the Pakistani regime. In 1988, under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, who had previously led the Saudi Arabian contingent of the tens of thousands of foreign Muslim “holy warriors," Al Qaeda, or “the base," was founded and joined the mujahideen.

Backed and funded by the US, this ultra-right group strove to fight to “purify” the Muslim world of all secular forces and regimes, drive out all “foreign” influences and establish an idealized multinational theocratic state founded on a distorted view of early Islam and governed by a fundamentalist interpretation of religious law.

Al Qaeda, along with the other US-backed groups and warlords that formed the mujahideen, literally drowned the Afghan revolution in blood at the beginning of the 1990s. Afghanistan's Communists, who had struggled since the late 1970s to achieve a social revolution based on land reform, secular government, education and gender equality, faced relentless terror and murder. Unfortunately, their seizure of power by force, subsequent internecine violence, and a general failure by the Communists to build popular support for a broad democratic and social justice program hurt their cause.

With the support of Pakistan, the Taliban, those sections of the guerrilla movement led by fundamentalist religious students, won out over the warlords and established a regime based on clerical dictatorship, which even the Iranian clerical regime would call "medieval."

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/8326/