Afghanistan

The Soviet Invasion in Perspective

Anthony Arnold

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 1985
• eBook ISBN: 9780817982133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

On December 27, 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan to save an endangered communist regime. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, founded in 1965 but almost immediately riven into two hostile wings, had been induced by Moscow into unifying in 1977 in order to seize power the following year. Within weeks, however, the majority Khalqi faction had driven out the rival Parchamis, only to discover that its rigid Marxism-Leninism was no match for Islam. As the Khalqi position deteriorated, Moscow thought to regain control by forceful replacement of the PDPA leaders with Parchamis. Instead, their invasion only consolidated popular determination to eject an alien ideology. In Afghanistan's Two-Party Communism, Anthony Arnold brings these dramatic developments to life, examining Parcham and Khalq in the context of the cultural, ethnic, and class factors that distinguish their leaders and separate constituencies. He analyzes the PDPA's development through 1982 and closes with speculation on the degree of Soviet commitment to communism in Afghanistan. Written in a lively, penetrating style, yet with a wealth of detail and analysis, Arnold's book reflects the intimate feel for the country that he acquired while serving there. His multilingual source material includes hitherto classified documents, and the appendixes (biographic sketches of PDPA leaders, translations of key party documents, charts of party and state personnel changes) will provide valuable sources for other researchers.

CHAPTER 1

The Historical Setting

The policy and practice of the Russian government has always been to push forward its encroachments as fast and as far as the apathy or want of firmness of other governments would allow it to go; but always to stop and retire when it was met with decided resistance and then to wait for the next favorable opportunity, . . .

(Lord Palmerston, British Foreign Secretary during the First Anglo-Afghan War, in a later [1853] letter to his eventual successor, Lord Clarendon.)¹

Where the Indian subcontinent collides with Eurasia, the slow-motion conflict of geologic plates has given birth to the highest mountain chain in the world, the Himalayas. Astride their western end lies Afghanistan, the first opportunity in nearly two thousand miles for unimpaired travel north or south around the mountain barrier. It is a stark land of barren deserts and mountains, one-third the size of Mexico, and home today for about 15,000,000 Muslims, most of whom are engaged in subsistence agriculture.

In earlier centuries its strategic position led to alternate enrichment and devastation, as merchants and armies in turn marched through on their way to other lands. Later, a drying climatic trend, combined with the depredations of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, caused traders to seek an alternative route to the Orient. The opening of the sea lanes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries largely destroyed Afghanistan's importance as a commercial crossroads. Its significance as a potential route for military invasion, however, remained unchanged.

In the nineteenth century, the British were keenly aware of tsarist Russia's expansion into Central Asia and of the eventual menace that such expansion might hold for India. Twice during that century the British invaded Afghanistan to forestall what they perceived as a Russian threat to take over the country and to use it as a staging area for an attack on India. Twice the Afghans made it so uncomfortable for them that, within a few years, the British withdrew. The Russians, witnessing this process and perhaps recalling that their own efforts to pacify mountain Muslims in the Caucasus had taken a full sixty-five years, prudently stayed away.

By the end of the century Russia and Britain had reached agreement: the British would control Afghanistan's foreign policy but would not occupy the country or try to manage its internal affairs; Russia formally conceded that Afghanistan lay outside its sphere of influence; and Afghanistan, perforce accepting British control over its foreign relations, dedicated itself to preserving its internal autonomy.

In 1900 Abdur Rahman Khan, the "Iron Amir," who ruled Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901, described his country's vulnerable position: "How can a small power like Afghanistan which is like a goat between two lions or a grain of wheat between two strong millstones of the grinding mill, stand in the way of the two stones without being ground to dust?"²

Even before putting the question, Abdur Rahman had found the answer. The solution was to keep Afghanistan from becoming a goat, a grain of wheat, or anything else remotely digestible by the hungriest of imperial lions or the most relentless of imperial millstones. His policies, like those of his predecessors and successors in Kabul's royal palace, were aimed at securing an internal toughness, impermeability, and integrity that would deter any foreign power from undertaking adventures on Afghan soil. At the same time he maintained a capability for smooth maneuvering between potential invaders, balancing one against the other. With these attributes, the Afghan tribes must have seemed to the two imperial millstones more like ball bearings than grains of wheat.

In the end, Russia and Britain came to understand that there were some advantages for all concerned in this situation—at least in the short run. Each had some fear of the other's intentions, and each perceived the useful role an independent country could play in keeping the two empires from coming into inadvertent conflict along a common border. Afghanistan became, in short, a model buffer state. So ideal was it for this role that in 1895 Britain and Russia agreed between them to add to it a new piece of territory, the Wakhan Corridor, running from the main body of Afghanistan to the Chinese border and dividing the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of India from the Pamir Mountains in Russia. Abdur Rahman, who had to deal with some twenty major tribal insurrections within his own country during his twenty-one-year reign, had no desire to take on responsibility for this whole new set of independent potential insurgents, but he had little say in the matter.³ He, better than anyone, understood the limitations that his country's economic backwardness had imposed on its independence in international affairs.

At the same time, that very backwardness was vital to continued Afghan internal self-determination. As long as the country remained poor and inaccessible, it would be unattractive to those with imperial designs.⁴ The fastest way to build a modern military deterrent against foreign encroachment would be to develop the nation's economy with the aid of foreign investment, but to take that course would be to invite the enslavement it was designed to forestall.

To identify the problem was not to solve it, but in Abdur Rahman's view there was no question as to priorities: national independence took precedence over all other considerations, with unification of the warring tribes that made up the country taking a close second. Only after these two goals had been secured would he be willing to tolerate the foreign involvement necessary for economic development.

He was particularly adamant in his opposition to any kind of railroad construction in the country. Once a railroad was built, he noted, foreign troops could be called in at any time to protect foreign investments or, indeed, merely at the whim of any great power neighbor, and Afghanistan's primitive military forces would be helpless to stop them. Afghan independence would be the inevitable victim.⁵ So trenchant were Abdur Rahman's arguments that to this day there are no railroads in Afghanistan, despite periodic proposals for building them. The old amir's pessimism became bitter reality anyway, however: it was the twentieth century equivalents of foreign-built railroads—airports and highways—that literally paved the way for the 1979 Soviet invasion.

With the death of Abdur Rahman in 1901 and the accession to the throne of his son, Habibullah, the former's rigid policies were relaxed to some degree. Habibullah had a lively curiosity, and, among other innovations, he helped introduce the automobile, photography, and hydroelectric power to Afghanistan.⁶ He also permitted far more domestic freedom than had his iron-willed father. Specifically, he permitted émigrés whom Abdur Rahman had exiled to return to Afghanistan and to become politically active.

Habibullah reigned in an age when pan-Islamism was spreading, and the phenomenon found reflection in his own court. There were three basic factions, all of them anti-British and pro-Turkish in their sympathies: (1) the conservative-clericals, who saw in Turkey a state that was grappling successfully with the necessary evil of modernization while still retaining Islam as the anchoring foundation; (2) the moderates, who viewed with favor Turkish modernization (especially the carefully paced nature of that modernization); and (3) the modernist-nationalists, the most anti-British, pro-Turkish of the three, who saw in the Turkish reforms changes that might be introduced in Afghanistan, but at a much faster pace than in Turkey, once their feasibility had been demonstrated.⁷ The modernist-nationalist newspaper, Seraj al Akbar, kept up a drum fire of anti-British propaganda that drew occasional royal reprimands when it overstepped what the amir felt were safe bounds.

Thus, with the outbreak of World War I, there was considerable pressure on Habibullah to join the Central Powers in their war with Britain and Russia. The amir, however, was well aware of both the geographic distance between Afghanistan and the Central Powers and the immediacy of his British and Russian borders. Consequently, despite agitation by the modernist-nationalists for a j...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Editor's Foreword to the Revised Edition
• Editor's Foreword to the First Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1: The Historical Setting
• CHAPTER 2: The First Twenty Years: 1919-1939
• CHAPTER 3: World War II and Its Aftermath: 1940-1953
• CHAPTER 4: The Soviet Drive for Economic Penetration: 1953-1963
• CHAPTER 5: The Drive for Political Control: 1: "Democratic" Political Influence: 1963-1973
• CHAPTER 6: The Drive for Political Control: 2: Political Manipulation: 1973-1978
• CHAPTER 7: The Drive for Political Control: 3: Rule by Communist Party Proxy: May 1978-August 1979
• CHAPTER 8: Prelude to Invasion: September-December 1979
• CHAPTER 9: Occupation Politics: The Internal Dimension: 1980-1984
• CHAPTER 10: Occupation Politics: The External Dimension: 1980-1984
• CHAPTER 11: US Policy: Before and After
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index