Imperialist alarn as Afghan coup consolidates

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Afghanistan has been in the news since the left-wing army revolution' in April.

Demonstrations in Kabul culminated in the army coup of April 27 that toppled President Muhammad Daud. .

It installed a government under. Muhammad Nour Taraki, run in effect by his small Communist Party.

Since then the British press has emitted periodic noises of alarm that the country is being 'taken over' by the Soviet Union and/or succumbing to Communist What is the background to this situation?

Afghanistan is one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world.

Virtual chattels

It is larger than France but with a population of only about 16 millions.

Almost 90% of Afghans are peasants (i.e. nomads), though much of the land is owned by a feudal aristocracy.

Less • than a quarter of land is used, since much of eastern Afghanistan formed of the Himalayas.

Average annual income is not much over $100 per person.

Almost half those born die in childhood.

Women remain virtual chattels. Fewer than 10% of people can read or write. • In the villages the hold of Moslem priests has been virtually unchallenged; it weighs far more heavily than the power of the central government.

Localised

'Afghanistan's structure remains as been for centuries. What Troops in Kabul economic advance there is is extremely localised Kabul sutters traffic jams morning and evening but outside the capital there are only a handful of proper roads.

remains greatly divided there are over 30 mutuall • incomprehensible living la iguages.' Taraki This very backward country is set at a strategie crossroads, with over 1,000 miles of northern frontier with the USSR, a similar length with Pakistan, a major border with Iran and a tongue of mountainous territory reaching out to touch China:

Poverty stricken Under these conditions, politics in Afghanistanincluding the relations of class forces within it-are necessarily shaped by the pressures of much greater powers-military, political and economic.

This is inevitable for a country in such a position, so poverty-stricken that its national income ($2 billion a year) is approximately what the US spends on dry food.

Afghanistan has been a 'buffer state' at least since the early 19th century, when her territories and peoples became tennis balls in the 'great game' between Tsarist Russia and the British empire in India.

In the period after World War II the Soviet Union has devoted great effort and resources (since about 1954) to influencing Afghanistan. :

'Neutrality' She serves as a counter to the attempts by US and British imperialism to militarily encircle the USSR's south-west flank-originally through the Baghdad Pact treaties of 1954-55, following the CIA's overthrow of Mossadegh's nationalist regime in Iran.

The Soviet Union was then threatened by a ring of US bases in Turkey. Iran. Iraq (until the 1958 revolution) and Pakistan.

Afghanistan's pro-Soviet 'neutrality, sealed by Kruschev and Bulganin's ceremonial visit in December 1955, was the break in this chain.

"'There is no doubt" Kruschev recalled, "that if the Alghans hadn't become our friends, the Americans would have managed to ingratiate themselves with their 'humanitarian aid' as they call it.

The amount of money we spent on gratuitous assistance to Afghanistan is a drop in the ocean compared to the price we would have had to pay to counter the threat of an American military base on Afghan territory"

Kruscher Remembers Since then, the USSR has been the main provider of aid-especially with roadbuilding and the exploitation of natural gas in the northérn border area.

And, even before the coup this year, the USSR provided 90% of equipIcill and lallillg and thousands of 'advisers'. , for the armed forces. (Up to 1956, Alghanistan's "air force' consisted of a dozen biplanes of World War I vintage!)

Throughout more than twenty years of close and generous peaceful coexistence' , however, the Soviet leadership never tried to do other than use Afghanistan as a 'buffer state'.

Effectively illegal

They never gave any real support to movements against the religious despotism that ruled the country.

The Communist Party, RUM.

MEDITERRANEAN SEA İSYRIA LIBYA NIGER CHAD ma.r for example, remained effectively illegal while the Soviet Union cultivated ultra-friendly relations both with King Mohammad Zahir and, after he was overthrown in 1973, with his cousin, President Daud.

The Soviet Union's involvement with Afghanistan-and the reactionary impact of Stalinism on Soviet policy-go back to the earliest days.

The first Soviet leader to organise military aid to help Afghanistan resist British imperialism (Leon Trotsky in 1919) did so as part of the Bolsheviks' general drive to help the Moslem masses of Asia and the Near East emancipate themselves.

But by 1928, with the advance of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, the Afghan King Amanullah was the first monarch to be received on a state visit to Moscow.

'Progressive monarch' Fifty years almost to the day before the coup in April this year Pravda (already transformed into Stalin's obedient mouthpiece) welcomed him as one of the most progressive monarchs in the East' as he arrived from his grand tour of western European capitals.

Amanullah did have a policy of modernisation and mild reforms.

But in 1929 he was overthrown by a British-backed tribal-religious revolt (though not before rescinding his reforms in the attamnt to stair in alrempt to stay l power).

Thereafter relations with the Soviet Union were cool until the 1950s.

In the last few years, however, quite new pressures have come bear. BLACK SEA CASPIAN (BUL ES, DE GREECE TURKEY IRAQ IRAN ‹ STAN?

EGYPT SAUDI ARABIA SUDAN Since the mid-1960s, there have been sporadic strikes and demonstrations by students and small groups of workers, mainly in Kabul. • New importance And the Indian Ocean has taken a new importance in the international military balance, with the USSR getting Aritary facities in east Africa, and the US building new bases in the Indian Ocean and attempting to reconstruct a Pakistan - Iranian military axis.

The Soviet Union has for years supported the Afghan claim to Pushtunistan: a state to unite the Pushtus in Afghanistan (the biggest nationality in the country) with those in eastern Pakistan, and give landlocked Afghanistan (and thereby the USSR) a corridor to the Indian Ocean.

• Pakistan and the US, of course, oppose the scheme.

Before he was ousted President Daud conducted close talks with the Palestinian government (both President Bhutto and, after he fell, military dictator Zia) on the Pushtünistan claim.

This may well have caused Moscow to think they needed in Afghanistan a more energetic counterweight to American power.

In any event, the armyCommunist Party coup in April got the full support of the USSR, and caused the ur actions to sink their divisions.

Thus when papers such as the Daily Telegraph inform their Tory readers that Afghanistan is 'going Communist' because it is JAFGHANT INDIA ARABIAN BAY OF. SEA BENGAL infested with thousands of Soviet advisers, they are not pointing to anything new.

Soviet influence has been strong for years. From the British press such alarm is ironic: for well over a hundred years British imperialism unsuccessfully tried to 'pacify' Afghanistan for use against Russia.

The ignominious retreat from Kabul' (1842) stands as a monument tọ British military incompetence, dressed up as public-school heroism.

What the alarmist reports in the western press very probably do signal is the desire of the US and Britain to torpedo the Taraki government and recover some influence (if not a client state) in Afghanistan.

Parallel

They will be prepared to mobilise the most backward and feudal elements of society to do this.

Not only do they wish to retrieve their strategic positions; they are also worried at the possibility of a revolutionary impact on the working masses of the neighbouring states.

The Taraki government has promised land reform at the exact same moment as the Shah's dictatorship in next-door Iran is being shaken by mass opposition.

Neither the Soviet Union nor the Afghanistan government have a policy to 'sovietise' the country.

But they cannot leave it as it is.

There is a parallel with earlier events in Tibet, the even more backward country at the other end of the Himalayas, during the 1950s.

The Chinese workers' state reclaimed Tibet in 1950 (as an 'autonomous' region) but for over eight years. Peking Stalinism peacefully coexisted with the serf-owning tyranny of the Dalai Lama and his Buddhist aristocracy.

Strong pressure Only when the CIA sponsored an 'independence' revolt against their authority, in 1959, did the Chinese Stalinists destroy the old order and imposefor example-any significant land reforms.

Tibet has . now. been 'structurally assimilated' to the Chinese Stalinist state.

Although Afghanistan; of course, iviet ally part of Union pressure for Moscow to bring it under firmer and more direct control is real and strong.

'But in doing so the Stalinists and their allies in the state machine are fearful of arousing the masses.

The unleashing of real struggles-on the land and for national rights-would release forces they could not easily bring under control or use as a bargaining counter with imperial1sm.

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