The country was the scene of a mass revolutionary upsurge as recently as 1978, following a popular revolt five years earlier that led to the ouster of king Muhammad Zahir Shah, who is today in discussions with Washington over the future of the country in his Italian exile. The struggles of peasants, workers, and students in Afghanistan have been connected with revolutions and protests in Iran and Pakistan over the past decades. And battles for national rights by the Baluchi people, who live in areas across Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and that of the Pushtun peoples, have political resonance in all three countries. The Pushtun people are divided by the boundary line between Afghanistan and what is today Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, an area taken away from Afghanistan by British imperialism at the end of the last century.

Today Washington is organizing a bombing campaign and invasion of a country in which more than one in four children die before the age of five and the average life expectancy is about 46 years, according to 1998 World Bank figures. In contrast, life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa--also one of the poorest regions in the world--is 50 years. Average life expectancy for the world's population is 67 years. The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) reported last year that Afghanistan ranked fourth from the bottom for infant mortality.

Washington's war drive against Afghanistan has exacerbated an already existing social crisis caused by one of the worst droughts in the country's history. The U.S. and British imperialists are preparing to use both "bombs and bread" in their onslaught, noted the Financial Times, as they combine their military offensive with the doling out of food aid.

Famine and drought conditions have already driven some 700,000 people--more than 3 percent of the country's population--from their homes. United Nations World Food Program officials estimate that 3.8 million Afghans confront severe food shortages, and report that in every part of the country people are fleeing from their homes. "Many have sold or slaughtered their cows and sheep, because there is not enough to feed neither animals nor men," an Afghan man told one reporter.

"In normal times, the young, the old, so many children go to sleep at night without food. And now what can I say?" said Muhammad Haider Toryali, a neurologist in Afghanistan's capital city Kabul. "I want to ask Mr. Bush how will he rationalize attacks on hungry, innocent people."

Afghanistan is composed of a number of nationalities of different languages and cultures, including Pushtun, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara, and others. In fact many of them have closer ties to people living in Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan than to others living in Afghanistan.  
 
Defeat of British occupation
Afghanistan was established by a confederation of Pushtun tribes. Next to the Ottoman Empire, it was the largest Muslim empire during the second half of the 18th century.

In the 19th century Afghanistan was a battleground in the competition between British colonialists and Czarist Russia for control over Central Asia. In three Anglo-Afghan wars British troops were defeated, including in 1839-42 when Afghan fighters overturned a British–installed puppet regime and forced out 4,500 troops along with 12,000 other occupiers. One person made it alive to the border.

Under Washington's newfound ally, Zahir Shah, the great majority of the population were peasants, who also comprised 80 percent of the workforce. The best land had been grabbed by wealthy landlords, while peasants labored under semifeudal conditions and sold shares of their coming harvest to landlords in order to rent land and obtain seeds, animals, and equipment. The dictatorships of the Shah in Iran, Ayub Khan in Pakistan, and Muhammed Shah in Afghanistan--despite divisions and conflicts among them--formed a reactionary bulwark against working people in the region.

The Stalinist regime in Moscow maintained relations with successive Afghan governments in the decades following World War II. In the 1950s, Kabul sought military aid from Washington on a par with its grants to the Pakistani regime. Washington demanded that Afghanistan join the imperialist-inspired CENTO military alliance and drop its support for the demand for a united Pushtunistan. Kabul rejected these dictates and turned to Moscow for military aid, receiving the largest amount granted any capitalist country by the Soviet Union.

In the late 1960s workers' strikes and protests, student demonstrations, and actions defending women's rights occurred in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Peasants, facing the impact of a severe three-year drought and famine, began expressing their discontent.

Seeking to head off a mass upheaval, Muhammad Daud, the king's cousin and former prime minister, overthrew him and declared a republic. Daud named to his cabinet members of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a party of middle class radical intellectuals. Facing mounting actions by the oppressed and exploited in the country, Daud sought closer ties with the pro-imperialist regimes in Iran and Pakistan.  
 
Revolutionary mobilizations spread
As revolutionary mobilizations spread in Iran, eventually leading to the overthrow of the shah, an April 1978 funeral procession in Kabul for a leader of the PDPA killed by police turned into a protest of 15,000 people, who marched on the U.S. embassy to protest complicity of the CIA and Iranian secret police in the murder. Other mass demonstrations followed. As dissatisfaction spread throughout the country, the PDPA, backed by its supporters in the army, overthrew Daud.

The PDPA, which had developed ties with Moscow, had no significant base among the peasants or the small number of wage workers. Initially its regime won popular support as it announced a program of social reforms, including land redistribution, a literacy campaign, construction of schools, and a ban on child marriage. The government released up to 13,000 political prisoners and burned police files. It proclaimed cultural and education rights for Turkomens, Uzbeks, Baluchis, Nuristanis, and other nationalities, enabling them to publish materials and produce radio programs for the first time in Afghan history.

Removed from the peasantry and the working class, however, the PDPA, with a guiding hand from the Kremlin, began carrying out these policies in a bureaucratic way, implementing them over the heads of working people, and providing an opening for reactionary landlord and capitalist layers to mobilize opposition. Instead of organizing and mobilizing the toilers, the Kabul government attempted to impose sweeping reforms by administrative decrees, and then force, when they were met by landlord-backed resistance. As backing for the regime dwindled, the Kremlin aimed to sustain a friendly capitalist government and used its influence to help maintain stability, spent millions of dollars, and sent increasing numbers of civilian and military personnel to shore up the regime.

Landlord-backed forces began waging an armed struggle and gained support as the Kabul government disintegrated. In December 1979 Moscow airlifted thousands of Soviet troops into Afghanistan and installed Babrak Karmal, who had been living in Czechoslovakia, as prime minister and president. The number of Soviet troops eventually reached 115,000. The action was another setback to the revolutionary struggle that opened in 1978, and to the class struggle in Iran and Pakistan.  
 
U.S. rulers back assault on Soviet troops
Washington and its imperialist allies responded to Moscow's occupation of Afghanistan by providing hundreds of millions of dollars of direct aid and military equipment, including shoulder-fired Stinger antiaircraft missiles, to rightist groups. Other aid was channeled through Pakistan, which received $3 billion from the U.S. government between 1982 and 1986, and Saudi Arabia.

U.S. government officials had worked alongside Osama bin Laden "to help oust the Russians from Afghanistan," wrote New York Times reporter Judith Miller. According to a September 18 BBC News report, bin Laden "received training from the CIA itself." While in Afghanistan, he founded the Maktab al-Khidimat, "which recruited fighters from around the world."

By the time the Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, an estimated 1 million people had been killed, and another 5 million had fled into exile. More than 3 million refugees went to Pakistan where the Pakistan, U.S. and other governments provided rightist forces with extensive bases and support.

Under a UN-brokered peace agreement in 1992 Burhannudin Rabbani was declared president and Ahmad Shah Masood was named defense minister. In 1994 factional fighting broke out again and the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, carried out its first military operation. Rabbani and Masood were forced out of Kabul in 1996 and the rest of the country was carved up among various factions, many of them mujahedeen commanders establishing virtual fiefdoms.

The Taliban is based predominantly on the Pushtun people, and its leadership came from a network of private, rurally-based religious schools in Afghanistan and the neighboring areas of Pakistan. With the backing of the Pakistani army and intelligence services as well as the regime in Saudi Arabia, the Taliban eventually swept across Afghanistan, scoring a string of military victories and capturing some 90 percent of the country. It was recognized as the official government of Afghanistan by the regimes in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in 1998, the only states to do so.
 
 
Related articles:
Protests against U.S. war held in Pakistan, Indonesia
Washington waives sanctions imposed on India, Pakistan
How state of Pakistan came into existence
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home