Why did Kremlin leaders decide to invade afghanistan

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No such programme is elaborated in the PO article.

What determined the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the crumbling of the pro-Russian government and the disintegration of its armed forces.

The actions of the Red Army were therefore a defensive act on the part of the USSR not only in relation to southern borders, but to the whole of the region of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East.

In this region, the crumbling of pro-imperialist regimes and the inadequacies of nationalist governments have created an unstable context in which all kinds of strategic manoeuvres on the part of the imperialists are interwoven.

In this context the civil war in Afghanistan manifests the international class struggle and the conflict between capitalist reaction and the workers states.

Trotskyists are not neutral in this battle and we place ourselves in the camp of the unconditional defence of the USSR from the imperialists.

This position in no way implies support or justification for the bloody policies of the bureaucracy in Afghanistan and its total scorn for the national sentiments of the masses.

Intervening against the will of the exploited Afghans, the bureaucracy holds the main responsibility for the growth of reactionary resistance against the Soviet military invasion.

While raising this charge publicly, we Trotskyists refuse to participate in the imperialist campaign of condemning the invasion.

The crumbling of the nationalist The military coup of April 1978 which led to the PDPA and to a fraction of the army taking power with the backing of the Soviet bureaucracy was a reaction against the right wing and repressive turn imposed by the previous Daoud regime.

This turn was impelled by the Shah of Persia and the military government of Pakistan which formed the basis for imperialist domination in the region.

The coup coincided with the beginnings of the mass mobilisations in Iran which turned into the revolutionary uprising which led to the dismantling of the regime led by the Pahlavi emperor.

Although the government was based on Afghan Stalinism, the regime would have to be characterised as nationalist and petit bourgeois because it remained in the framework of the bourgeois state.

There was a purge of most of the high functionaries linked with Daoud but the middle and lower ranks of the administration remained untouched.

The Communist Party was in government not by the revolutionary action of the masses but as a result of a military plot.

Stalinism sought to save itself the process of revolution and execute it administratively without taking account of the evolution of the masses. Brezhner embraces Taraki What is more, the Communist Party is a small organisation with scant roots among the peasantry which forms the overwhelming majority of the population.

It lacks a revolutionary programme for agriculture and raises no democratic banner for the national minorities.

Under these conditions attempts to put into practice social that to say, dictated by the state.

The PDPA government adopted a series of progressive measures which attempted system.

Debts owed by the poor peasantry were cancelled (these were particularly severe after the 1971-72 droughts); landholding was limited to between six and 60 hectares depending on the level of irrigation; confiscation and • • distribution anything over this without compensation was legislated; buying and selling of land was foIbidden and measures were taken against discrimination of women (the veil was abolished and dowries were reduced).

But from this starting point phrase Marx, to suffer alpara- Afghanistan began, evils of revolution without gaining in revolutionary strengthbecause reaction was provoked without mobilising the exploited.

The Afghan peasantry did not respond to the initiatives of the nationalist government because it doubted its capacity to carry them out.

The CP and the military dictated from above measures which affected the power of landowners and the semi-feudal agricultural relations, but they were incapable of breaking the religious influence and the paternalism of the landowners over the peasantry.

Furthermore, the PDPA did not want to pursue the logic of the agrarian revolution and, in a desert-type country which has only 5% of irrigated land, refused to nationalise either the water and seed supplies in the hands of the tribal chiefs, the credit system. Right wing rebels Without such measures, parcels of land are worthless and maintain the dependence of the peasants on the feudal landowners.

Before the 'impasse' created by the opposition of the tribal chiefs, the inconsequence of the measures themselves and the apathy of the exploited, the PDPA resorted to the totalitarianism and terror of the regime which created the conditions for its collapse.

The character of the inyasion.

The invasion of the Russian troops responded to the civil war in Afghanistan being fought by the guerrillas directed by the feudal landowners whose objective was to break the process of social transformation.

Moreover, the Afghan war was the local expression of an international conflict between the bureaucracy and imperialism for control of a strategically vital region.

Since English imperialism attempted to impose its presence on the Russian Gulf region in the last century, the need for the Yankies to dominate this region is now even more vital, with its oil fields, its borders with the USSR and its proximity to revolutionary Iran.

This is why imperialism started its crusade against the Soviet invasion, started its boycott of food supplies and of the Olympics and the breaking of commercial contracts.

However, the essence of Yankie reaction is to prepare a chauvinist climate within the USA while militarising the Indian Ocean and swiftly establishing military bases in Kenya, Oman and Somalia.

The Soviet invasion means the rejection of the principal of national self-determination. However, this is not in itself the main question but rather its relation to the class struggle worldwide.

Self determination would mean the victory of imperialism, and from there national oppression.

Its defeat, on the other hand, will extend the area of the world revolution and to this extent helps the struggle for real national liberation.

The politics of the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy.

The Russian bureaucracy did not decide to invade Afghanis tan in defence of the workers' state but precisely and consciously to preserve its caste interests.

From here flow the methods of their intervention which crush the most basic democratic aspirations of the masses and are directed towards smashing any independent movement and have the clear objective of discouraging the exploited from coming together and organising.

The result of this is to provoke the demoralisation of the proletariat the Persian Gulf and CaS, Howards the macpentence of towards independence workers with respect to islam in Iran, reinforcing the yoke of the over Afghan an sum, by its methods, at action conceived in defence of the USSR isolates it from the world proletarat ana increases its vulnerability-but that is the politics of the bureaucracy.

The only true method for the defence of the workers states precisely because of this, is international revolution.

Instead of explaining the revolutionary character of the struggle in that area, the bureau cracy has invented a legalistic piece of pap to justify its interIt mocks the world proletariat in order to strangle ans manifestation of internationalism.

At present in Afghanistan its role is conservative and its only function is to ensure military order the country. Russian troops have not only not called for revolutionary insurrection but they have dis. associated their presence in the country from the struggles of the exploited in the Persian Gulf.

With authoritarian .. and repressive measures they scorn the will of the masses and step on their democratic aspirations. In this way the bureaucracy make communism appear as opposed to national aspirations -which is what holds the masses to Islam.

The bureaucracy consciously refuses to encourage a revolutionary factor of the first order in that region: the national struggles of the Baluchis and the Pushtans, who are found in an important area which stretches over Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.

In 1973, the governments of the two latter countries unleashed a war against the Baluchis which cost more than 15,000 lives in their struggle for self determination.

Now the Kremlin bureaucracy and imperialism are plotting to place troops on the border supposedly to guarantee the neutrality of Afghanistan but in reality to drown the struggle of 15 million souls for their self-determination-a struggle which would bring an end to fascism in Pakistan and open the way for a free federaPersian Geoples throughout the Because of its politics, the bureaucracy is raising a wall between the USSR and the Muslim masses.

Declaring that their actions are directed towards the defence of the USSR, the hierarchy is really surrendering the oppressed of the Persian Gulf to the tribal chiefs and the intrigues of imperialism and in this way, instead of strengthening the •social basis of the workers' states they undermine it.

There are no substitutes for revoluționary methods to defend revolutionary gains against imperialism. As Trotskyists we do not condemn the invasion of Afghanistan by Russian troops (to do so would be pro-imperialist) but we do condemn its methods because they represent irreparable damage to the struggle for the survival of the workers' states.

Downed Soviet helicopter

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emerged in an alliance with the army, and because its politics