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Ideology and Electricity: The Soviet Experience in 
Afghanistan
Christian Parenti
April 17, 2012
This article appeared in the May 7, 2012 edition of The Nation.
http://www.thenation.com/article/167440/ideology-and-electricity-soviet-experience-afghanistan

Afgantsy
The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89.
By Rodric Braithwaite.

Ghosts of Afghanistan
The Haunted Battleground.
By Jonathan Steele.

A Long Goodbye
The Soviet Withdrawal From Afghanistan.
By Artemy M. Kalinovsky.

In the teahouses and street stalls of Kabul, one
sometimes sees the portrait of a stern, round-faced man
with dark hair and a mustache. It is the visage of
Muhammad Najibullah, the last president of communist
Afghanistan. Najibullah joined the People's Democratic
Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in the late 1960s, ran
Afghanistan's highly organized secret police, the KHAD,
and then became the country's president in 1986. After
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Najibullah hung
on to power for another three years. Taliban fighters
eventually killed him in 1996.

On occasions when I have asked Afghans in Kabul about
the Najibullah posters and postcards, their replies have
ranged from "He was a strong president-we had a strong
army then" to "Everything worked well and Kabul was
clean." One teahouse proprietor, using the familiar form
of the name, stated simply that "Najib fought Pakistan."
In other words, he is remembered not so much as a
socialist-a vague term for many in Afghanistan-but as a
modernizer and a patriot.

To understand Najibullah's status as a minor icon, it
helps to know about the Soviet experience in
Afghanistan-the strategy and tactics, the terror and
suffering, and the ideals and goals that motivated the
Afghan communists and their Soviet allies. One authority
on the subject is Rodric Braithwaite, a veteran of cold
war-era diplomacy who served as the British ambassador
in Moscow during the Soviet Union's collapse and has
recently published an excellent and sympathetic account
of the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
Afgantsy, which takes its title from the Russian
nickname for Afghan war vets, is a sober and balanced
antidote to the propaganda and deception that
Braithwaite necessarily traded in as a British diplomat
posted to the USSR. This is a point he acknowledges
obliquely in the book but has touched on more directly
in interviews. While writing Afgantsy Braithwaite had
considerable access to government archives in Russia and
key players from the Soviet-Afghan war, and traveled to
Kabul to dig even further.

Addressing much of the same history is Ghosts of
Afghanistan by Jonathan Steele, a longtime Guardian
correspondent. Steele has visited Afghanistan numerous
times over the past thirty years, reporting on the
Soviet intervention, the Najibullah era, mujahedeen
misrule, civil war, the rise of the Taliban and the
American occupation. Like Braithwaite, Steele is fluent
in Russian; he was also part of the Guardian team that
edited the WikiLeaks cables. His understanding of
Afghanistan is nuanced and comprehensive, blending a
journalistic eye for detail and context with a scholarly
long view. Steele's account of the Taliban phenomenon
and the current moment is solid, but his book is most
impressive when analyzing the forgotten history of
Afghan communism and the Soviet occupation.

* * *

The Soviets fought Muslim rebels in their Central Asian
borderlands during the civil war of the early 1920s and
again in the early 1930s, when they finally managed to
crush these so-called basmaci (bandits) with the help of
the Royal Afghan Army. Thus stability in Afghanistan was
seen as the key to security in Soviet Central Asia. From
the early 1950s onward, Afghanistan was one of the top
four recipients of Soviet aid. Moscow sent engineers to
Afghanistan and invited thousands of Afghan students,
technicians and military officers to Russia for
training.

By the late 1950s, the United States had also started
investing in Afghanistan, sparking an aid-driven
competition between the superpowers. The Helmand Valley
Authority, a mini-TVA set up to dam the Helmand River
and provide hydroelectricity and irrigation for southern
desert regions, was an American effort. The Salang Pass
Tunnel, one of the highest tunnels in the world, which
links northern and southern Afghanistan, was a Russian
project. Both superpowers built parts of the highway
system. The infrastructure of the Kabul airport was
Russian-built; its electronics, communications and radar
were American imports. Perhaps counterintuitively, some
military officers who trained in the USSR ended up as
early leaders of the mujahedeen: one was Ishmail Khan,
who started a rebellion in Herat in 1979. Some of the
US-trained intellectuals became communists and
government officials, such as Prime Minister Hafizullah
Amin.

The communist coup d'état of 1978 was the indirect
result of an earlier coup that had been triggered by a
famine. Starting in 1969, Afghanistan suffered several
years of horrible drought and hunger. In 1973, as people
starved to death in central Afghanistan's Ghor province,
Gen. Muhammad Daoud led a coup against his cousin King
Mohammed Zahir Shah, abolishing the monarchy and
creating a republican government with himself as
president. The king had marginalized the once powerful
Daoud and then did nothing to address the famine. Once
in power, Daoud pursued what was then a standard set of
economic policies, using state planning and investment
to build up private industry and internal markets. He
handled his political enemies-the mutually antagonistic
Islamists and communists-with a mix of repression and
co-optation. But growing repression drove Islamists like
the Tajik Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Pashtun Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar to armed exile in Pakistan.

Repression also triggered the bloody communist coup of
1978. It was, Steele notes, "a hastily improvised
affair" brought on by the assassination of a well-liked
and senior party official named Mir Akbar Khyber. A
massive protest by PDPA supporters led to a police
roundup. Fearing wholesale liquidation, communist
officers in the military attacked the presidential
palace, murdered Daoud and seized power.

Soviet officials, including those with the KGB station
in Kabul, seem to have been caught off guard and were
"distinctly uneasy about what had happened," writes
Braithwaite. In their view, Afghanistan was not ready
for socialism, nor was the PDPA prepared to govern.
Crucially, the PDPA was composed of two bitterly opposed
factions. The larger, more impatiently radical one, the
Khalq (meaning "nation"), had staged the coup. It drew
support from the Pashtun-speaking population that had
recently moved to the cities in search of jobs and
education. The smaller, more moderate faction, the
Parcham (meaning "banner"), was based in the more
established, Dari-speaking urban middle classes.

Early Khalq rule was bloody. Forty of Daoud's generals
and political allies, including two former prime
ministers, were summarily executed. Among the others
killed, jailed or disappeared were Islamists, Maoists
and even PDPA members from the Parcham wing. As the
violence mounted, the Soviets grew increasingly worried.
The Khalq government did, however, promulgate a series
of progressive laws and programs that outlawed child
marriage, lowered the dowry price, canceled rural
mortgages, launched literacy campaigns for men and women
(though each group was educated separately) and
instituted land reform. However well intended, many of
these efforts were poorly managed, and a backlash
quickly ensued.

One old communist official, Saleh Muhammad Zeary, whom
Steele tracked down to a humble tower block near
London's Heathrow Airport, explained the resistance this
way: "Peasants were happy at first, but when they heard
we were communists, they changed. The whole world was
against us. They said we don't believe in Islam, and
they weren't wrong. They could see we didn't pray. We
liberated women from having to pay dowry, and they said
we believed in free love." Zeary stayed in Kabul until
the mujahedeen came to power in 1992. When these
soldiers of God murdered his wife and two of his
children, he finally fled. Another London-based former
PDPA official told Steele: "In power [party leaders]
wanted to eradicate literacy within five years. It was
ridiculous. The land reforms were unpopular. They were
promulgating these so-called revolutionary decrees which
they wanted to implement by force. Society wasn't ready.
People hadn't been consulted." Steele notes that these
old PDPA veterans, despite years of access to large sums
of public money, showed no signs of having stolen much
of it, if any.

The hastily devised PDPA reforms were a casualty of an
old rural-urban divide in Afghan society. The educated
young urban idealists did not understand the rural world
they sought to remake, and the world of the mud-walled
villages did not understand urban officialdom. That the
social and cultural dimensions of the reforms threatened
the privileges of the traditional mullahs, maliks
(village leaders) and large landowners is hardly
surprising. What can be confusing is that the
economically progressive aspects of the program were
also widely rejected by the deeply religious peasantry.
Afghanistan, though poor and unequal, was not marked by
the extreme land inequality typical of pre-revolutionary
Mexico or China. As Steele explains, peasants were in
many ways "linked to their landlord by ties of religion,
clan and family and were unready to flout his
authority." Rural society, always somewhat autonomous
from Kabul, and feeling threatened at the root by
reforms, turned increasingly to armed resistance,
linking up with the Islamist parties that had decamped
to Pakistan during Daoud's repression.

Exacerbating the situation for the PDPA were certain
technical mistakes. In their haste the urban communists
of Kabul redistributed land but not water rights, a
blunder that revealed their ignorance of local
agriculture. They abolished the oppressive system of
bazaar-based money lending but did not establish an
alternative credit program to aid cash-poor farmers in
planting. (Raja Anwar's The Tragedy of Afghanistan is
another valuable source on the revolution's reforms and
missteps.) For their part, the Soviets repeatedly
advised Kabul to abandon or delay the more radical
reforms.

The communists were not the first Afghan modernizers to
face a rural backlash. The so-called Red Prince,
Amanullah Khan, who ejected the British in 1919, was
dethroned ten years later by a tribal rebellion that
opposed his Turkish-inspired modernization efforts. He
had imposed a modicum of land reform, given women the
vote and started educating girls. Rural elites would
accept good roads, but not the taxes to pay for them;
the rural masses would accept agricultural improvements
and education, but not an assault on patriarchy. Fifty
years later, the PDPA faced the same sort of religious
rebellion, and to quell it communist officials began
making displays of public piety, praying and traveling
to mosques. But it was too little, too late. The crisis
boiled over in March 1979 with an all-out military
mutiny led by Islamist officers in Herat, a major city
on the Iranian border. No doubt the will to rebel among
religious officers was stoked by events next door: the
Shah had fled Iran, and Khomeini had returned to Tehran
only a month earlier.

Braithwaite's research indicates that the uprising and
the Afghan military's suppression of it, which was aided
by Soviet pilots, were not as bloody as is often
rumored: "Although the Western press and some Western
historians continue to maintain that up to one hundred
Soviet citizens were massacred, the total number of
Soviet casualties in Herat seems to have been no more
than three." Nor was the city carpet-bombed resulting in
thousands of casualties.

After Herat, other garrisons mutinied, and the Soviets,
along with sending more advisers to Afghanistan, began
making contingency plans for the full-scale commitment
of ground forces. By that summer the United States had
started channeling money and arms to mujahedeen rebels
staging assaults on government forces and public
infrastructure from Pakistan. Meanwhile, the conflict
within the PDPA worsened, with ideological and personal
differences triggering Khalq-Parcham clashes and even
bouts of Khalq-Khalq violence. In September 1979
President Noor Muhammad Taraki was tied to a bed and
smothered with a pillow: the order for the assassination
came from his rival and fellow Khalq, Prime Minister
Hafizullah Amin. The Soviet leadership saw Taraki as the
more flexible of the two, and his murder outraged them.
Paranoia at the Kremlin was also running high. During
the 1960s Amin had studied for a PhD at Columbia
University, where he was head of the Afghan student
union and was rumored to be in league with the CIA.
Steele notes that Amin was on record as having admitted
to taking money from the agency before the revolution.
Braithwaite reports that even US Ambassador Adolph Dubs,
after several meetings with Amin, asked the CIA if he
was a contact. Most likely, Amin was treading the path
familiar to all Afghan leaders: managing a buffer state
and navigating between great powers.

* * *

During the crisis year of 1979, the Afghan communist
government made thirteen requests for Soviet military
intervention. Moscow, in turn, gave all the correct
reasons for not deploying ground troops. "We have
carefully studied all aspects of this action and come to
the conclusion that if our troops were introduced, the
situation in your country would not only not improve but
would worsen," explained one Soviet official. But the
Taraki murder seems to have changed Soviet thinking.

The 40th Army was dispatched south, and when it finally
arrived in force in Afghanistan in late December 1979,
its mission was not to assist Amin but to assassinate
him. Soviet Special Forces attacked the presidential
palace, and in a long, bloody room-to-room gun battle
they finally cornered and killed the president. The
replacement leader picked by the Soviets was Babrak
Karmal from the PDPA's moderate Parcham wing. But Karmal
was temperamental, erratic and paranoid, and heavy
drinking only compounded his incompetence. (If Karmal
sounds similar to Hamid Karzai, who is rumored to use
narcotics, well, it is just one of many parallels the
reader will find in Braithwaite's book.) At first both
Moscow and Washington thought the intervention would
last a mere six months, and the Afghan population, or at
least its urbanized portion, welcomed the Russians and
the end of Amin's lunacy.

Along with soldiers, the Soviets sent a wave of
idealistic civilian advisers and technicians. But Karmal
proved to be incapable of winning the allegiance of
rural Muslims, so the capacity of the Afghan state
remained limited. To make matters worse, since July 1979
the United States had been arming the seven parties of
the mujahedeen. The considerable covert military
assistance provided by the United States was initiated
by the CIA, generously funded by the Saudi government
and jealously managed by Pakistan's increasingly
powerful Inter-Services Intelligence. Before long, the
Russians were bogged down in a war that would take nine
years to terminate.

* * *

Many Soviet troops believed deeply in their
"international duty," just as American military
volunteers today often see their war in Afghanistan as
helping a backward country and confronting a genuine
terrorist threat. And like their American counterparts
today, the rank-and-file Soviet troops in Afghanistan
tended to have working-class and rural or small-town
roots. Men (and some women) from the professional
classes and party-connected families in the big cities
of western Russia were scattered among the air force,
KGB and medical units, but were rarely found among the
conscripts waiting to get shot while running supply
convoys or dug in along barren ridgelines. The bulk of
the fighting was done by country boys and the sons of
small factory towns.

The 40th Army's real goal was to win hearts and minds.
But it was not to be. When Soviet and Afghan government
ground forces were pinned down, air support and
artillery were called in, and if the mujahedeen were
firing from inside villages, those villages were bombed
and destroyed. Braithwaite dismisses all the old cold
war canards about the Russians setting out booby-trapped
toys or using chemical weapons. Contrary to the Western
press reports of the 1980s, Soviet brutality toward
civilians was not the intent of policy but its
predictable and inexcusable side effect. But the
irrationality and contradictions of counterinsurgency
ran even deeper. The Soviets tried hundreds of their
soldiers for crimes ranging from rape and murder to drug
use, petty theft and bullying (a persistent problem in
the Russian Army, from czarist times to today). Yet they
could not or would not rein in the abuses committed by
the KHAD: some 8,000 Afghans were executed by the PDPA
government and many thousands more jailed and abused.

According to Braithwaite, Afghans generally rate the
Russians as better soldiers than the Americans, if for
no other reason than they were less cautious, less
armor-clad and in many ways culturally closer to the
Central Asian peasant ways of the Afghans. Of those
Afgantsy who made it home, some adjusted well enough,
but others, haunted, battled drug addiction and
alcoholism, and the physically maimed became mired in
endless fights with vast medical bureaucracies. The vets
also found many citizens on the home front increasingly
bored by news from a seemingly pointless war.

By the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Soviet
leadership was increasingly committed to withdrawing
from Afghanistan. A quiet but large and persistent
antiwar letter-writing campaign by soldiers' families,
veterans and even some active officers had helped push
Moscow toward this inevitable conclusion. Perestroika
and glasnost were in the air, and in Afghanistan the
newly appointed Najibullah was moving increasingly from
Marxism-Leninism to something more like pragmatic
nationalism. In 1988 Najibullah changed the PDPA's name
to Watan, or Homeland, and by the end of his tenure, he
even considered offering the position of defense
minister to the mujahedeen commander Ahmed Shah Massoud.

These moves, beginning with Karmal's departure and
Najibullah's rise, were all part of a formal policy
called National Reconciliation. A very good account of
the diplomatic aspects of these last attempts at
stabilization is offered by Artemy Kalinovsky in A Long
Goodbye. "From 1985 to 1987," Kalinovsky notes,
"Moscow's Afghan policy was defined by an effort to end
the war without sustaining a defeat.. Gorbachev was
almost as concerned as his predecessors about the damage
a hasty Soviet withdrawal might do to Soviet prestige,
particularly among his Third World partners. Yet
Gorbachev was also committed to ending the war, and for
the most part had the support of his Politburo to do so.
This meant looking for new approaches to developing a
viable regime in Kabul that could outlast the presence
of Soviet troops."

To work, National Reconciliation required cooperation
from the United States, the primary patron of the
mujahedeen. Kalinovsky devotes a whole chapter to US-
Soviet negotiations over Afghanistan. Unfortunately for
Afghanistan and the Soviets, the Reagan administration
was divided between "bleeders" and "dealers." Secretary
of State George Shultz was, at one point, a central
"dealer" and argued for meeting the Soviets halfway: if
the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan, the United
States should, the dealers believed, cut off aid to the
mujahedeen. On the other hand, the bleeders, heavily
represented in the CIA and the Congressional "Afghan
lobby," were out for more blood and insisted that aid to
the mujahedeen would end only when all aid to the
Najibullah government stopped. In the end, the bleeders
won. Viewed from Moscow and Kabul, the Reagan
administration's position was "completely
uncooperative."

In February 1989 the last Soviet tank finally crossed
the Friendship Bridge north over the Amu Darya River.
But Moscow continued to supply Najibullah, and the
Afghan government defied everyone's expectations. In
March 1989 Afghan troops, now fighting alone, turned
back a massive mujahedeen siege of Jalalabad, in eastern
Nangarhar, not far from the Pakistan border. Had the
insurgents taken that city, Kabul would have been their
next target. Thereafter the mujahedeen's seven parties
remained fragmented and strategically incoherent despite
their superb battlefield tactics.

Braithwaite reports that Eduard Shevardnadze-not wanting
to be the first Soviet foreign minister to preside over
a defeat-was Najibullah's greatest champion, insisting
that with a steady flow of fuel and weapons the Afghans
could fight on indefinitely. Indeed, Najibullah held on
for three more years. But when Yeltsin pushed aside
Gorbachev and the USSR unraveled, Afghanistan's lifeline
was cut.

The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan did not lead to the
collapse of the USSR, as is often supposed. It was the
other way around. As The Economist recently explained,
"The Soviet system collapsed when top officials decided
to `monetise' their privileges and turn them into
property." Once that happened and Yeltsin took power,
the Najibullah regime collapsed. Braithwaite reports
that Yeltsin, while still merely head of Russia, and
before the fall of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, had
opened secret channels to the mujahedeen. As soon as
Russian supplies were cut off, one of Najibullah's key
generals, Rashid Dostum, defected to the rebels. In
April 1992 Najibullah was finally overthrown. Various
bands of holy warriors and ethno-nationalist fanatics
descended on Kabul. After a very short experiment in
joint governance, the factions turned to fighting among
themselves while the last of the PDPA fled the country
or went underground.

Najibullah tried to escape, but Dostum's men blocked him
from reaching the airport. Over the next four years
Kabul descended into barbarism, with the warring
mujahedeen factions bringing actual and metaphorical
darkness: streetlights and the power lines for electric
buses were looted; public services ceased; factional
fighting leveled half the city; and an estimated 100,000
people, most of them civilians, were killed. All the
while Najibullah remained holed up in a United Nations
compound. When the Taliban finally took the city in
1996, they grabbed the ex-president, beat, tortured and
castrated him, and then shot him to death. His corpse
was dragged through the streets and hung from a
lamppost.

These days, NATO forces occupy Afghanistan, yet a few
pictures of Najibullah still hang in Kabul. Why? Then as
now, the war in Afghanistan was not simply between
invaders and Afghans. It was also a conflict between
Afghans: between the populations in the cities
supporting modernization, even forced modernization, and
those in the countryside violently opposed to any social
change. And each force has been allied with powerful
outside backers. During the cold war the Soviets
supported Kabul, while the United States and Pakistan
supported the rebels. Today, for an array of perverse
reasons, the United States supports the aspiring state
builders in Kabul (many of whom are the very same people
who served with Najibullah), while Pakistan, America's
nominal ally and well-funded vassal, still supports the
religious and traditionalist rebels.

There is a class of urban Afghans for whom the core
political question has always been: Does that ideology
come with electricity? These are people who have sought
to extend the writ of Kabul over the countryside, and
ever since the 1920s they have faced violent opposition.
Once their vehicle was constitutional monarchy. Then it
was a presidential republic, then Soviet-style
socialism, and then Najibullah's last-ditch nationalism.
Now it is the deeply flawed experiment in liberal
democracy imposed by NATO. Not surprisingly, former
communists are still modernizers and can be found
throughout the more competent portions of what is
nominally known as the Afghan government.

One such technocrat is Muhammad Hanif Atmar. From 2002
to 2010 the highly respected Atmar held a succession of
ministerial portfolios in the Karzai government, from
rural development to education and finally the interior
ministry. In his youth Atmar was a member of the KHAD
Special Forces (like the KGB, the Afghan secret police
had a military wing). He lost one of his legs defending
Jalalabad against the mujahedeen siege. When the
Najibullah government fell, he went to study in Britain.
After the US invasion, he returned to Kabul and soon
earned a reputation as a competent and honest manager,
"someone the West could work with." The National
Directorate of Security, the successor agency to the
KHAD, is today so heavily populated by the former
Parcham cadre that many people simply call it the KHAD.
Another of these ex-PDPA technocrats is Zahir Tanin.
Currently Afghanistan's permanent representative to the
United Nations, in the 1980s he was on the PDPA's
central committee.

That, in short, is why they still hang pictures of Najib
in Kabul-because, for all the man's faults, his
worldview came with electricity. But alas, electricity
cannot be delivered by war.

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