First Published: The Call, Vol. 9, No. 10, March 10, 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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How is it that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan has managed to find a few defenders in the U.S. left and progressive movements?
The Karmal regime is plagued with utter isolation, factional intrigue and assassinations. Thousands of demonstrators in Kabul chant “Death to Social-imperialism” and are answered with a hail of bullets from Soviet helicopter gunships. Hundreds of protesters are machine-gunned to death in Nazi-style “reprisal” executions. Half or more of the army defects to the rebels. Shopkeepers wage a mass strike for weeks, while growing peasant armies continue guerrilla war in the countryside.
All this and more has served to expose Soviet expansionism among progressive people everywhere. Yet here in the U.S., a small group of centrists claiming to be “anti-revisionist” and “Marxist-Leninist,” the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC), has decided to assert that the Afghan blood being spilled by the Soviets “coincides with the interests of proletarian internationalism” and “must be supported.”
PWOC’s views on Afghanistan are familiar to readers of the pro-Moscow press. According to a lengthy article in the February issue of The Organizer, PWOC’s newspaper, a “democratic and anti-imperialist revolution” took place there in 1978, “Mistakes” were made by the government which alienated the people, however, and the “revolutionary” government was on the verge of being overthrown by “pro-imperialist counter-revolutionaries.” Finally, faced with the prospect of a “hostile” regime on its border, the Soviets intervened to “protect a vital strategic interest” and to deny U.S. imperialism “a victory in a strategic part of the world.”
This is nothing but a string of lies. PWOC’s own article, for instance, describes the “narrow social base” of the Afghan PDP’s seizure of power in 1978, pointing out that the leading role was played by “students, intellectuals and disaffected soldiers.” PWOC adds that “the PDP’s membership was largely limited to these forces and amounted to no more than several thousand activists” and that “by the end of the year there were several thousand Soviet military and civilian advisers and technicians in Afghanistan.”
Now, when a relative handful of soldiers and intellectuals without a significant base of support among the masses seizes power, most reasonable people call the event a coup d’etat, and not a social revolution. And when such a coup quickly has thousands of Soviet troops backing it up, most reasonable people would call it a “Soviet-backed coup” and would blush to claim, as PWOC does, that there is not “a single shred of evidence to document the charge of Soviet involvement in the April events.”
This raises an interesting question. If PWOC thinks Afghan coups constitute “revolution,” how do they expect to win U.S. workers to such an idea? Does it really believe people will support “revolution” that is made without the participation of the masses, against their wishes and propped up by foreign troops?
But to return to PWOC’s article, apparently there are some elements of the Soviet line that are so discredited that even PWOC has to take exception. For example, they state that Soviet allegations of large-scale U.S. and Chinese intervention are “grossly exaggerated,” and admit that “it is the home grown strength of the counter-revolution which constitutes the main threat to the PDP regime.”
PWOC also doesn’t play games about who invited the Soviets in, admitting that the Soviet intervention violated the national sovereignty of Afghanistan.
Given these admissions, all PWOC can do to justify the Soviet move is to come out with a defense of the USSR’s right to intervene in Afghanistan, regardless of the will of the Afghan people or government.
As PWOC puts it: “The principle of national sovereignty is not absolute. It is subordinate to the overall interests of proletarian internationalism. In the instance of Afghanistan, we think that the interests of the world anti-imperialist struggle override the principle of non-interference in a fraternal country’s affairs.”
This raises another interesting question Who decides when a nation’s sovereignty is to be “subordinated”? And under what conditions? Should revisionists and great power chauvinists decide? Those, after all, are the terms PWOC applies to the Soviet ruling clique.
And as for the conditions, does PWOC really believe that any likely government in Afghanistan is going to invade the Soviet Union or that the threat of such an attack by U.S. troops through Afghan territory is imminent? But these conditions do not exist today. Even the rebels want a nonaligned Afghanistan and peaceful state-to-state relations with the USSR. In fact, the concrete conditions show that it is the Soviet Union’ self-serving view of its own unlimited sovereignty that needs to be “limited,” and not that of the third world countries.
PWOC logic is the logic of imperialist superpowers, not Marxist-Leninists. There are dozens of countries bordering the Soviet Union. If the people in them install governments that do not want to be Soviet stooges does that mean the Soviets have the right to invade? Or take the fact that the CIA intriguing in every country in the world. Does that mean, therefore, that the Soviets have the right to invade or limit the sovereignty of a these countries also? Or conversely, does KGB activity give the U.S. the right to invade?
This superpower logic is why the United Nations by a vote of 104 to 18 condemned the Soviet action. This is why 36 Islamic countries followed suit, with third world countries which had never openly criticized the USSR joining in to condemn the invasion. Unlike PWOC, the peoples of the third and second world do not want to give the Soviet Union a blank check for aggression anywhere in the world, citing “proletarian internationalism” as their justification. They don’t believe that their countries should be invaded for changes in their economic systems or the political views of their governments in order to “protect the strategic interests” of the Soviet Union.
As for PWOC’s claim that the Afghan “revolution” had to be defended at all costs, where is its proof of the “democratic and anti-imperialist” character of the Taraki and Amin governments? While PWOC cites a litany of government “programs” and “intentions,” by its own admission “villages believed to be focal points of counter-revolution were bombed and strafed, and crops destroyed,” and . . . “wholesale repressions were carried out in the urban areas as well.” Because the government did not enable the peasants to plant their crops, PWOC admits, “. . . crops went unplanted and many went hungry.” Even within the pro-Moscow party, PWOC states, there were mass arrests and executions.
Every repressive regime tries to cloak its true character with progressive rhetoric. One of the latest and best examples of this is the shah of Iran, who launched massive attacks on the peasantry in the name of “land reform” and attacked the people’s culture and religion in the name of “modernization.” Perhaps we should accept the absurdity that the shah, too, was a revolutionary figure who had good intentions, but made “mistakes” and employed “bureaucratic and commandist” methods!
As for the Afghan guerrillas, PWOC characterizes them as the ”landlords, the khans, and tribal chieftans, the money lenders, elements of the Moslem clergy, the deposed bureaucrats of the old regime, those with ties to foreign capital. . . .”
But this is just a not-so-clever distortion. It is true that many of these elements are active in the guerrilla struggle. But so are the vast majority of peasants, urban intellectuals, small traders, and even significant elements of the army, which have defected to the rebel side. All this goes to show not the counterrevolutionary nature of the opposition, but rather the broad nature of the national unity against the Soviet Union and its puppets. They are ideologically diverse—some are Islamic fundamentalists, others are revolutionary nationalists and even Marxist-Leninists—but it should be up to the Afghan people, not the USSR or PWOC, to decide who they follow and what course their struggle takes.
PWOC makes a lot out of the “high hopes” the U.S. media have expressed for a pro-Western regime if the guerrillas win. But clearly it is the Soviet troops on Afghan soil, not the U.S.’s hopes and machinations which stand as the greatest threat to the people’s right to choose their own government.
All this is not to deny the imperialist intentions of the U.S. in this whole affair. The U.S. government is a monument to hypocrisy with its condemnations of the “fanatical Moslems” of Iran, side by side with its support for the “heroic Moslem freedom fighters” of Afghanistan. This is especially clear because the two movements have many similar characteristics.
Yet, PWOC is only using the flip side of the same coin in praising the “progressive, anti-imperialist” government of Iran while condemning the “counter-revolutionary, feudal” Afghan movement. This, whether it comes from PWOC or the Wall Street Journal, is the logic of imperialism, not the proletarian revolutionary support for third world self-determination, independence and sovereignty.