Afghanistan, Another Untold Story -By Michael Parenti

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, mismanaged, and
unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive
demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after factions
of 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
under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “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 (SF Chronicle, 10/2/2001). 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 one of the last vast untapped reserves of the
earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, 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.