Critical Review of Our Line on Afghanistan

I am going to deal with the beginnings of Cold War II, particularly in relation to Afghanistan, and the political problems our tendency had. Cold War II represented a fundamental shift from the 1960s and most of the ’70s. In the earlier period, the imperialists were on the defensive: they lost Cuba and then much of Southeast Asia in the Vietnam War. But by the late 1970s, they had regrouped, with Carter launching his anti-Soviet “human rights” crusade. Reagan massively escalated military expenditure and went on the offensive against the USSR.

During the Reagan years, our International Secretariat was heavily focused on holding the line against the anti-Soviet war drive. This was urgently necessary, but our “defense” increasingly became an all-purpose substitute for tracing a revolutionary road for the working class in particular conflicts and particular countries like Afghanistan. Over time, almost everything got reduced to military defense of the USSR against imperialism. In the process, the equally crucial component of a genuine defense—proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy—was increasingly jettisoned.

Afghanistan

Key to addressing the situation in Afghanistan is an understanding of permanent revolution as it applies to countries of belated capitalist development. The motor forces for revolution here are democratic questions—national liberation, agrarian revolution and women’s liberation. But this we rejected. Instead, we claimed that since Afghanistan had only a tiny proletariat, there were no forces within the country that could lead to a social transformation. So, this had to come from the outside; in this case, we preached that through an objective process, a prolonged military occupation by the Soviet army—the army of a degenerated workers state—a social transformation would be carried through. This could only amount to political support to the Stalinist state apparatus and bureaucracy.

It is necessary to counterpose the methods of Lenin and the early Communist International to our methods. See in particular the section of our Eighth International Conference document on permanent revolution titled “In Defense of the Second and Fourth Comintern Congresses” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 68, September 2023). Lenin, dealing with the most underdeveloped countries in the East, concluded “There is practically no industrial proletariat in these countries. Nevertheless, we have assumed, we must assume, the role of leader even there” (Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” 1920).

At the Second CI Congress, Lenin argued, concerning countries where pre-capitalist conditions prevail, that it was the unconditional duty of the communist parties “to conduct propaganda in favor of the peasants’ soviets or of working people’s soviets. This includes backward and colonial countries.” He explicitly stated that with the assistance of the soviet governments “it will be a mistake to assume that the backward peoples must inevitably go through the capitalist stage of development” and that “the backward countries, aided by the proletariat of the advanced countries, can go over to the soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage” (reprinted from John Riddell, ed., Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Volume One [1991]).

This was not only the theory of the Bolsheviks, but also what they did in practice—and I will give an example a little later. But here I just want to state what I think our revolutionary strategy should have been in Afghanistan, which is a combination of peasant revolution, carried out in alliance with the Soviet soldiers in the country, that is, the soldiers organized in their own committees, or soviets, independent of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This would also have been a motor force for political revolution in the USSR. Many of these soldiers were from Soviet Central Asia and were conscious that what they were encountering in Afghanistan was very similar to the conditions their grandparents endured prior to the victorious October Revolution.

Now, obviously this is quite counterposed to our line, which claimed that permanent revolution didn’t apply to countries with a small proletariat. In particular, we had a whole discussion that concluded that permanent revolution didn’t apply to Afghanistan, which you can find in an internal bulletin. This wasn’t Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution at all. He wrote that the program of permanent revolution “eliminates the question of countries that are ‘mature’ or ‘immature’ for socialism in the spirit of that pedantic, lifeless classification given by the present programme of the Comintern” (“What Is the Permanent Revolution?”). Indeed, this was a central polemic with the Stalinists, who alibied their betrayal in China by claiming the country was too economically backward for proletarian revolution. So, the position we had was not Trotskyist; it was Stalinist.

Now, I want to briefly comment on the slogan “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” It can mean different things. On the one hand, I don’t think we should second-guess whether the Soviets should have intervened in Afghanistan. They were responding to massive Cold War provocations there and elsewhere, and obviously we very strongly took a military side with the Soviet Red Army against the mujahedin and their imperialist backers.

However, it’s necessary to look at the politics we attributed to this slogan: revolution had to come from the outside. The overwhelming peasant majority was dismissed as hopelessly backward and totally captive to Islamic reaction. We sneered: “Forget proletarian revolution—Afghanistan could not even sustain the kind of widespread peasant revolt experienced in medieval France, Russia and China” (WV No. 471, 17 February 1989). Although on occasion we acknowledged that the Soviets might withdraw their troops, we said that “more likely is the Soviet army’s prolonged occupation of Afghanistan and with it the possibility of its transformation along the lines of Soviet Central Asia or Mongolia” (Spartacist No. 29, Summer 1980). Thus, the best possible outcome, according to us, was a deformed workers state. But even that projection was fatuous, to boot.

Chronology

In 1965, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was founded. The PDPA’s leaders, like Noor Mohammed Taraki, were recruited to the Kremlin version of Marxism-Leninism. However, as one writer explained, “According to the official Soviet line, it is not possible for underdeveloped Third World countries to bring about a socialist revolution because they lack an industrial labour class. Such states are, therefore, advised to work towards a socialist revolution through the formation of a ‘nationalist government,’ organized by a ‘united nationalist front’ which can lead them through the ‘national democratic phase’” (Raja Anwar, The Tragedy of Afghanistan).

Accordingly, the PDPA program stated: “The political pillars of the national government of Afghanistan would consist of a united national front representing all the progressive, democratic and nationalistic forces, that is workers, farmers, enlightened and progressive intellectuals, craftsmen, the petit bourgeoisie and national capitalists”; in other words, a popular front. Note that while the conclusion drawn by the PDPA was different from ours, the political premise was the same—absence of a viable working class ruled out a socialist transformation from within.

The social base of the PDPA was not only the modernizing intelligentsia and students, but also army officers. Many of these had been educated and trained in the Soviet Union. But the PDPA lacked any base among the toiling peasantry. The party was divided into two factions—Khalq and Parcham. Although there were no fundamental political differences between these groups, they engaged in bloody factional warfare with each other, including assassinations and arrests depending on who held the upper hand.

In the post-World War II period, there was considerable jockeying by the U.S. and the USSR for influence in Afghanistan. By the mid 1970s, the situation was tilting toward the Western imperialists. The Parcham faction, which was represented in the government of Muhammad Daoud (leader of the 1973 coup that overthrew the monarchy), was purged. The Shah of Iran, Washington’s man in Central Asia, undertook to provide a massive program of foreign aid in order to curry influence with Daoud. Alarmed, the PDPA seized power in April 1978. This was not a popular insurrection—the PDPA lacked any popular forces—but rather a military coup.

In the summer of that year, the PDPA government, then headed by Khalq, initiated a series of reforms. The first item was agrarian reform. If ever a country cried out for agrarian revolution, it was Afghanistan. There was massive inequality in the countryside: only 5 percent of landowners held 45 percent of all cultivable land, while 83 percent of the poorest peasants held only 35 percent of the land. The land of the majority of poor peasants was heavily mortgaged; interest rates were commonly 50 percent a year, which meant in practice that the peasants could never get out of debt. The PDPA land reform stipulated that for small landowners, mortgages would be considered paid off after five years. In addition, the PDPA decree regarding marriage declared child marriages illegal and set a maximum limit on the “bride price” and on money payable to the wife in case of dissolution of the contract. Education was supposed to become universal, for all female as well as male children.

These reforms failed. The reason was not that they were too radical. The PDPA took no measures against the ruling elite of khans, landowners and moneylenders or the substantial caste of Islamic priests (the mullahs). The landowners withheld seeds from the poorer peasants, and the banks refused to advance loans. The PDPA government did not provide alternative sources of credit. More generally, it tried to implement reforms by bureaucratic decree, taking no steps to mobilize the toiling masses as a social force against the landlords and tribal chiefs. The agrarian reform was a failure. The peasants turned their backs on the PDPA because they did not perceive that the government was acting in their material interests.

In this situation, it was easy for the Islamic reactionaries to whip up a massive backlash against the government, targeting in particular the reforms for women and girls and playing on the conservative religious feelings of the peasantry. The reforms that were applicable to women and the family changed nothing in the countryside, benefiting only a small layer of better-off urbanized women. (For an account of how the Bolsheviks carried out work in a comparable situation in Central Asia, see “Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East,” Women and Revolution No. 12, Summer 1976.)

In order to bring stability, the Soviets intervened militarily in December 1979. In the course of this intervention, the Khalq leader, Habizullah Amin, was killed and the Parcham faction—whom the Soviets preferred because they regarded it as more moderate—was put in power. The Soviets, in fact, sought to cut back and limit the social reforms. In 1981, the agrarian reform was restricted: exceptions were made for army officers and tribal leaders who supported the government. Refugees who had fled the country for Pakistan and elsewhere to escape the government decrees were promised their land back if they returned. In 1986, the PDPA leader Babrak Karmal was forced out and replaced by Najibullah. The Soviets strong-armed the PDPA into calling for a government of national reconciliation, which, incredibly, was supposed to include the mujahedin. Under Najibullah, female education was made voluntary.

Contrary to our projection that a prolonged military occupation would likely lead to the cohering of some kind of deformed workers state, the Soviets made clear their preference to leave. As early as May 1980, Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev stated that on condition that the West, as well as Pakistan and Iran, ceased aiding the mujahedin, the question of the Red Army’s withdrawal could be resolved.

At the time, we had a close sympathizer in India, who wrote to us. While comrade Roy agreed with our military defense of the Red Army, he was disturbed by our largely uncritical attitude toward the Soviet intervention. He noted the conciliatory attitude of the Soviets toward the mullahs. He didn’t buy our line that the Soviet occupation would lead to a social transformation. Rather, he asserted that “all indications that what the future has in store for the Russians is a new Finland [where Soviet troops withdrew after World War II] at best” and not some kind of workers state. He was right. I should add that his criticisms were never put into an internal bulletin.

National Liberation

We repeatedly denied that Afghanistan had the right of national sovereignty or national self-determination. We intoned that Afghanistan was not a nation but a “feudal-derived state comprising a mosaic of nationalities, ethnic and tribal groupings” (“Afghanistan and the Left: The Russian Question Point Blank,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 29, Summer 1980). That Afghanistan is not an ethnically homogeneous nation hardly makes it unique. What about South Africa or India or Pakistan or any semicolonial country, where to suit their own interests the imperialists determined the borders and deliberately inhibited nation-building? As regards Afghanistan and the desire for national sovereignty, what about the fierce wars fought to repel occupations by the Russians and the British Empire in the 19th century or the defeat of the two-decade U.S. occupation more recently?

I am not arguing that it is wrong in principle for a workers state to intervene outside its borders, and obviously I am not calling into question our siding with the Red Army in the war in Afghanistan. However, when such interventions are done, they must be carried out with scrupulous regard for the national sensibilities of the oppressed people. Such an army of intervention must seek to win a base of social support in the local toiling people, so that it is not viewed as an enemy occupying force, as the Soviet army was largely viewed in the Afghan countryside. Our derisive comments denying national sovereignty to the Afghan peoples totally disregarded this responsibility. We never seriously addressed the Great Russian chauvinism of the Soviet bureaucracy, as manifested from the time Lenin intervened against Stalin over Georgia to the national oppression of the Polish and other East European deformed workers states by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Now in Spartacist No. 29 (Summer 1980) we had an article titled “The Bolsheviks and the ‘Export of Revolution’.” It was intended as a polemic with a Maoist who accused us of having the line of Tukhachevsky, a Soviet general who advocated that Red Army interventions abroad could substitute for indigenous social revolutions. The article makes a number of correct arguments against such a perspective. It quotes Trotsky that intervention from the outside can speed up the revolutionary process but not substitute for it: “In the monumental class struggle which is today on the rise, the role of military intervention from without must have only an attendant, assisting, auxiliary function.” This is all well and good. But the problem is that our line on Afghanistan was the total opposite of what Trotsky was saying!

In 1989, we sent a reporter to Afghanistan who had an interview with a PDPA spokesman. We advised the PDPA cadre to read Plekhanov, who broke from Russian populism (the Narodniks) to become a Marxist at a time when Russia was beginning to industrialize. Our point was that the PDPA, like Plekhanov, should seek to orient to the workers. But this begged the essential question: What was to be done now? The implicit answer was to wait passively until a significant proletariat appeared in Afghanistan.

It is notable that we did not propose reading Trotsky on permanent revolution, or Lenin. This is not how the Bolsheviks dealt with comparable situations. One example was in November 1921 when representatives of the newly formed Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party asked Lenin’s advice over what to do. Mongolia was a very backward country economically, populated largely by herdsmen (arats). Lenin did not tell the Mongolian revolutionaries to come back when they had a proletariat. Instead, Lenin elaborated on the idea that it was possible and necessary for the Mongolian People’s Republic “to follow a non-capitalist path of development” and pointed to how the work of the People’s Revolutionary Party and the government “would result in a growth of the number of co-operatives, in the introduction of new forms of economic activity and national culture, and would rally the arats behind the Party and the Government in the interests of the country’s economic and cultural development” (“Talk with a Delegation of the Mongolian People’s Republic,” 5 November 1921).

In practice, what was set up was an alliance between the Mongolian revolutionaries and the Red Army, which helped clear the area of the Japanese imperialists and White generals. This led to a successful social transformation of Outer Mongolia. It also serves as a model for what could have been achieved in Afghanistan, an alliance of peasant revolutionaries and Soviet soldiers committees, to push forward social revolution in Afghanistan and proletarian political revolution in the USSR.