[Peace-discuss] Afghan history by Michael Parenti

[Brussel Morton K.]

Michael Parenti was for a time at the University of Illinois, a real  
rabble rouser who had to go.
--mkb

Afghanistan, Another Untold Story

November, 28 2008 By Parenti, Michael
Michael Parenti's ZSpace Page


Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in  
Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might  
do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the role  
played by the United States.

Less than a month after the 11 September  2001 attacks on the World  
Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial  
assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin  
Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years  
earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet  
"invasion" of that country. Even some leading progressive writers,  
who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated  
the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as "a  
good thing." The actual story is not such a good thing.

Some Real History

Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained  
unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big  
landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In  
the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form  
the People's Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed,  
but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic,  
corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a  
massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after  
the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.

The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new  
government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and  
novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic  
forces came into office. "It was a totally indigenous happening. Not  
even the CIA blamed the USSR for it," writes John Ryan, a retired  
professor  at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an  
agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.

The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up  
a minimum wage,  a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and  
programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care,  
housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were  
started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.

The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to  
emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided  
public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.  A  
report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that  
"Kabul was once a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to  
the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at  
the city's university. Afghan women held government jobs--in the  
1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove  
cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university  
students were women."

The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium  
poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent  
of the opium needed for the world's heroin supply. The government  
also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a  
major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a "genuinely  
popular government and people looked forward to the future with great  
hope."

But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal  
landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their  
holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed  
the government's dedication to gender equality and the education of  
women and children.

Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the  
Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national  
security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to  
power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a  
large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted  
feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium  
traffickers.

A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin,  
believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several  
years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979,  
Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted  
the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki  
supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic  
state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants  
including elements within the military.

It should be noted that all this happened before  the Soviet military  
intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly  
admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the  
Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to  
subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal  
attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in  
rural areas.

In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to  
send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic  
guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed,  
and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid  
for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health.  
Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and  
politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul  
before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.

Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style

The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to  
transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to  
expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the  
United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war  
in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and  
trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries  
including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan  
itself.  Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire  
right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.

After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country  
in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist  
government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure.  
Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another  
three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.

Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among  
themselves.  They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian  
populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped  
thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In  
2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual  
assault as "a method of intimidating vanquished populations and  
rewarding soldiers.'"

Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources  
of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The  
Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of  
heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's  
arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest  
producer of heroin in the world.

Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now  
took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to  
Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks  
in Allah's name against the purveyors of secular "corruption."

In Afghanistan itself,  by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam  
called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the  
CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan--- 
fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many  
tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.

The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that  
was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were  
executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery  
had the offending hand sliced off.  The Taliban condemned forms of  
"immorality" that included premarital sex, adultery, and  
homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries,  
literature, secular education, and much scientific research.

The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even  
stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul  
clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had  
to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including  
their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and  
severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an  
abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely  
whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from  
social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all  
levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home.  
Women who were deemed "immoral" were stoned to death or buried alive.

None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got  
along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US  
government was paying the entire annual salary of every single  
Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President  
George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing  
campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban's oppression of  
women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown  
feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses  
committed against Afghan women.

If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they  
did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings  
that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban  
authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout  
the areas under their control, an effort judged by the  United  
Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly  
totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western- 
selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001,  
opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.

The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of  
Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth  
bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who  
continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.

The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas

While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other  
compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into  
Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas  
reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991)  
reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence  
in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in  
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution  
of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an  
aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.

US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new  
reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from  
the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian  
pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf.  
Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of  
alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the  
Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.

The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed  
Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive  
negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime  
remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a  
competing bid for the pipeline. Bush's war against the Taliban  
rekindled UNOCAL's hopes for getting a major piece of the action.

Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations  
ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of  
states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged  
presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government.   
Such a "rogue state" designation would have made it impossible for a  
US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a  
pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.

In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had  
made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant  
regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia.  
The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public  
opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.

One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left  
the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, "there would have  
been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that  
destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11  
tragedy." But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave  
unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the  
social capital around collective public needs rather than private  
accumulation.

US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US  
intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua,  
Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing  
egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an  
economically reformist government. In all these instances, the  
intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the  
economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.

The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country,  
continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade  
against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to  
other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order,  
gaining profitable control of the last vast untapped reserve of the  
earth's dwindling fossil fuel resources, and planting US bases and US  
military power into still another region of the world.

In the face of all this Obama's call for "change" rings hollow.


Michael Parenti's recent books are Contrary Notions: The Michael  
Parenti Reader and the forthcoming God and His Demons. For further  
information, visit www.michaelparenti.org.

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