A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 13: 1992-1998

Since October 2001, the Pentagon has been waging an endless war in Afghanistan against the Taliban regime. Yet after the Taliban guerrillas first marched into Kabul in September 1996, an editorial in the October 8, 1996 issue of the New York Times stated that the Taliban regime “has brought a measure of stability to the country for the first time in years.”

In Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace, Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie indicated why the coalition of CIA and ISI-organized Mujahideen guerrilla groups that initially replaced the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] regime in Afghanistan in April 1992 failed to bring “stability to the country,” when they described what happened after the Mujahideen militia groups marched into Kabul:

“…Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes…The public services that the Najibullah regime had maintained were soon a thing of the past…

“About 20,000 people died in the fighting between April 1992 and December 1994 that followed the `liberation’ of Kabul. Almost three-quarters of those who survived were forced to leave their homes and move across the city, or flee to squalid camps for the displaced in Jalalabad…Kabul continued to be the focus for rocket attacks from the outside until 1995…”

In August 1992, for example the Mujahideen leader whose armed group had received the most military aid from the CIA in the early 1980s, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, “launched a barrage of rockets against Kabul from his bases north and east of the city that killed over a thousand civilians,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also noted that in January 1994, Hekmatyar’s Mujahideen group also “unleashed the most ferocious artillery and rocket attacks that Kabul had ever experienced” and “these attacks destroyed half the city, took some 25,000 civilian lives, and caused tens of thousands of Kabalis to seek safety in Pakistan or in the north” of Afghanistan.

The situation of women in Kabul also worsened dramatically after the CIA and ISI-organized armed Islamic groups entered Afghan’s capital city. As Guilles Dorronsoro’s Revolution Unending noted:

“The arrival of the Mujahideen in 1992 inaugurated a range of restrictions from the wearing of the veil to the ban on women appearing on television…In Kabul all the armed groups…were guilty of rapes and kidnappings, leading sometimes to the suicide of young girls who had been dishonored. The very few women who dared to dress in the western style in the modern part of Kabul were harassed by the Mujahideen. All this was a new departure, and a contrast, since Afghan women had seldom before been threatened with deliberate acts of violence and certainly not with rape…”

But, according to John Lucas’s “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan” article, although the Mujahideen now set up a “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” to “control women’s dress codes and the length of men’s beards,” under the Mujahadeen government “women were still allowed to work” and were still able to be employed in professional jobs in Kabul.

Outside of Kabul, the Afghan countryside was pretty much ruled by Afghan warlords and Afghan drug lords. And by 1994, the country in the world that produced the most heroin was now Afghanistan.

But in November 1994 a new anti-feminist, Islamic guerrilla group of Afghan Pashtun tribes that was apparently backed by Saudi government money and Pakistani government weapons--the Taliban--initiated its military campaign to gain control of Afghanistan’s government. As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “the heavy Pakistani involvement in arming, training and even providing logistical support in Taliban field operations was no secret to informal observers as early as 1995” and “the generous Saudi funding was also well known.” The Democratic Administration of Secretary of State Clinton’s husband also apparently wished, during the mid-1990s, to see the Taliban obtain control of the Afghan government, after one of its diplomats, Ms. Robin Raphael, held a meeting with Taliban representatives. According to the same book:

“The United States …was not an uninterested party. An eventual take-over by the Taliban…served both the U.S. political strategy of `containing’…Iran…, as well as its economic interests in fostering…an alternative land route through Afghanistan and Pakistan for the exploitation by U.S.-led companies of the seemingly inexhaustible oil and gas reserves of Central Asia.”

Dator Zayar’s “Afghanistan: An Historical View” article also asserted that “the Taliban were the creation of the Pakistan military and intelligence establishment with the active support of the CIA” and “U.S. imperialism is directly responsible for the Taliban reaction in Afghanistan.”

Less than three weeks after Taliban guerrilla fighters from Pakistan captured in two days the Afghan city of Kandahar on November 3, 1994, the number of Taliban guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan had rapidly increased to 2,500. And, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, many of these Taliban insurgents were “armed with brand-new weapons that could only have come from Inter-Service Intelligence [ISI] warehouses in Pakistan.” So, by February 1995, the Taliban forces were able to capture the base near Kabul of Hekmatyar’s Mujahadeen forces.

Although the Taliban apparently began to act more independently of the Pakistani government in March 1995, during the summer of 1995 the Pakistan government’s ISI agency trained more Taliban guerrillas; and, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, there is “no doubt that Pakistan through its ISI had played a key role in reinforcing the Taliban capacity to wage war.” The Afghan city of Jalalabad was then captured by the Taliban on September 12, 1996; and by September 26, 1996, the ISI-trained Taliban troops now controlled Kabul. By 1998, over 90 percent of Afghanistan’s territory was now controlled by the Taliban’s new Afghan government.

Coincidentally, after an October 21, 1995 agreement was signed between Turkmenistan President Saparmurad Nizazov, Unocal and Unocal’s business partner—the Saudi-owned Delta oil company—to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan, Unocal (which became a subsidiary of Chevron Texaco in 2005) began to handle “public relations for the Taliban and sponsored visits to Washington and Houston during the mid-1990s," according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. As the same book explained:

“Behind… U.S. acquiescence in an eventual Taliban takeover, engineered by its Pakistan and Saudi allies, lay the Unocal game plan. Unocal was a consortium of U.S. oil companies formed to exploit the hydrocarbon reserves of Central Asia. Unocal and its Saudi partner, Delta, had hired every available American involved in Afghan operations during the jihad years, including Robert Oakley, a former ambassador to Pakistan, and worked hand-in-glove with U.S. officials. Unocal staff acted for a time as an unofficial lobby for the Taliban and were regularly briefed by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. In U.S. eyes, the most important function of the Taliban would have been to provide security for the roads, and potentially for the gas and oil pipelines that would link the Central Asian states to the international markets through Afghanistan rather than Iran…The U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asian Affairs, Robin Raphael, went so far as to state that the Taliban capture of Kabul was `a positive step.’”

Following the September 1996 takeover of Kabul by the Taliban regime, Unocal Vice President Chris Taggart also said on October 2, 1996 that “if this leads to peace, stability, and international recognition, then this is a positive development.”

Support for the Taliban by the Clinton Administration apparently became “an economic priority,” after Unocal executives signed its October 21, 1995 agreement with the Turkmenistan president, based on potential gas exports evaluated at $8 billion, according to Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie also observed in their Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace book:

“… Afghanistan potentially offered advantages over all the alternative pipeline routes…The Clinton administration weighed in heavily on behalf of Unocal…In February 1997, and again in November of that year, Taliban representatives were in Washington meeting both Unocal and State Department officials. Unocal estimated it had spent some $15-20 million on the pipeline project…It hired…Zalmay Khalizad…a member of the National Security Council…Hamid Karzai…in 1997 represented Unocal in negotiations with the Taliban leadership…”

Yet for Afghan women in Kabul, the victory of the Unocal, Clinton Administration, Pakistani government and Saudi government-backed Taliban in September 1996 apparently “represented the triumph of the most fundamentalist tendency,” according to Revolution Unending. The same book also observed that the “earliest victims” of the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan “were educated women, who were mainly in Kabul and numbered around 165,000.” As a March 1998 article by N.O.W. vice president Karen Johnson noted:

“…On Sept. 27, 1996, the Taliban issued an edict that forbade women and girls from working or going to school. The edict took effect immediately, and women who tried to go to work the next day were beaten and forced to return home….On Sept. 26, 1996, women were 70% of the school teachers, 40% of the doctors, 50% of government workers and 50% of the university students…A woman must be accompanied by a male relative in order to leave the confines of her home…In the city of Kabul alone there are 40,000 widows who can no longer work to support themselves and their families…The Taliban asserts that the prohibitions for women and girls are religious and protective in nature…”

But, according to Revolution Unending, for “country women” in Afghanistan “the principal effect of the arrival of the Taliban was an end to insecurity,” since rural Afghan women already lacked the educational and work opportunities that urban Afghan women lost after the Taliban militias entered Kabul in September 1996.

At least one writer has questioned the assertion that all actions of the Taliban regime’s Afghan government between September 1996 and November 2001 deserved condemnation. For example, in his book, The World Is Turning, Don Paul wrote that “the Taliban…rebuilt schools and hospitals,” “eliminated (according to a year 2000 United Nations drug Control Program study) opium cultivation in their territory,” and “barred the selling of women as chattels.” In addition, the Taliban (according to a speech by their roving Ambassador, Sayyid Rahmatullah Hashemi, at the University of Southern California on March 10, 2001) claimed that it allowed women to “work in the Taliban’s Ministries of Health, of Education, of the Interior, of Social Affairs” and allowed” more women than men” to “attend the schools of Medical Science that the Taliban had re-opened in all of Afghanistan’s major cities.”

Another early victim of the Taliban occupation of Kabul on September 26, 1996 was the Afghan government leader whose regime had collapsed in April 1992, Najibullah. Between April 1992 and September 1996, Najibullah had enjoyed sanctuary at the United Nations diplomatic premises in Kabul. But “one of the Taliban’s first acts after entering Kabul was to violate the United Nations diplomatic premises” to “torture and execute” Najibullah “and two companions in a particularly gruesome manner and expose their mutilated bodies in a Kabul square,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Datar Zayar’s “ Afghanistan: An Historical View” article also observed that, additionally, the Taliban regime “unleashed a reign of terror with ethnic cleansing in Bamiyan and Mazar-e-Sharif and severe repression against oppressed religious minorities and nationalities” in Afghanistan.

(end of part 13. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 14: 1998-2001"

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 12: 1987-1992

In 2010 more than 600 individuals were still imprisoned by the Democratic Obama Administration at its Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan; and many of these Bagram prisoners have apparently been held without access to lawyers or an opportunity to legally challenge the basis of their imprisonment for as long as six years. Yet none of the U.S. government officials responsible for escalating the covert and overt U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan since the 1970s have ever been held legally accountable for the morally disastrous humanitarian effects their policies have had on the history of people in Afghanistan.

Yet in April 1986, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan[PDPA]-Parcham faction leader who had been installed in late December 1979 by Soviet troops as the head of the PDPA regime in Afghanistan--Babrak Karmal—was replaced by the former head of the PDPA regime’s secret police, Dr. Mohammad Najibullah, after Najibullah was elected by the PDPA’s Central Committee to be its new general secretary. Subsequently, on January 1, 1987, the new PDPA regime head of state attempted to bring peace to the people of Afghanistan and negotiate an end to the 1980s Afghan war by announcing a “program of `national reconciliation’ comprising three key elements: a six-month unilateral cease-fire, the formation of a government of `national unity’ and the return of over 5 million refugees from Pakistan and Iran,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also recalled:

“An `Extraordinary Supreme Commission for National Reconciliation’ was set up and branches were opened all over the country. Their job was to make contact with refugees…in exile or fighting with resistance groups, pass on the message of peace, and distribute essential relief items for the use of returning refugees. Other inducements offered were tax concessions, the return of confiscated property and the deferment of military service. Radio Kabul started calling the Mujahideen fighters `angry brothers’ rather than `bandits.’ Some 4000…prisoners were released. Six months later, just before the expiring of the 6-month ceasefire, Najibullah was able to claim that 59,000 refugees had returned; tens of thousands of men were negotiating with the government; 4,000 representatives of the opposition had been included in the reconciliation committees; and coalition governments had already been formed in several villages, sub-districts, districts and provinces.”

But the alliance of seven U.S., Pakistani and Saudi government-sponsored anti-feminist Afghan political parties apparently “turned down with disbelief and contempt” the January 1987 peace proposals of the PDPA regime in Afghanistan. As the same book explained:

“The Islamic parties…claiming to represent the Mujahideen resistance had developed into vested interests that were not receptive to power-sharing arrangements. They and their Pakistani sponsors, replete with funds and weapons generously contributed by `the international community’, developed their own agendas for a post-Soviet Afghanistan…The parties owed their `influence’ to the fact that they served as somewhat porous conduits for the U.S. and Saudi funds and weapons channeled to the resistance fighters inside Afghanistan by Pakistan’s ISI [Inter-Service Intelligence]…”

Ironically, “a survey among Afghan refugees conducted in 1987 by one of Afghanistan’s outstanding academics and intellectuals, Professor S.B. Majrooh, found that less than half a percent of those polled would choose one of the seven” Afghan Islamic political party “leaders to rule a free Afghanistan,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Coincidentally, the Union of Mujahideen (a coalition of these seven unpopular Islamic parties) apparently then arranged for Professor Majrooh to be assassinated in his office in Peshawar on February 11, 1988, shortly after his survey results were made public.

Yet despite the rejection of its January 1987 peace proposals by the U.S., Pakistani and Saudi government-sponsored Islamic parties, the PDPA regime extended its unilateral January 1987 ceasefire in Afghanistan for another six months in June 1987; and it invited its right-wing Afghan political opponents to suggest changes in the draft of a proposed new Afghan constitution which it published in July 1987. The proposed new Afghan constitution--that set up a democratic, multi-party parliamentary political system in Afghanistan in which Islam was the state religion—was then formally approved by the PDPA regime’s parliament [jirga] in November 1987.

On February 8, 1988, the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union next announced that on May 15, 1988 it would start to withdraw the 85,000 Soviet troops still in Afghanistan; and it would have all Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan by March 15, 1989. Parliamentary elections were then held in Afghanistan in April 1988 in which the National Fatherland Front [NFF] and other newly formed Afghan parties won more seats in the new, democratically-elected Afghan parliament than did the PDPA—which just won 22 percent of the parliamentary seats. In addition, 25 percent of the seats in the lower house of the new Afghan parliament were left vacant for representatives of the Islamic opposition parties in Afghanistan--that were still unwilling to negotiate an agreement in 1988 that would finally bring peace to Afghanistan.

A peace agreement between the Pakistani government and the Afghan government-- guaranteed by both the Reagan Administration and the Gorbachev regime in the Soviet Union --was, however, signed on April 14, 1988. But after the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Afghanistan was completed in February 1989, Pakistan’s “ISI drew up the battle plans and arranged the logistics, the intelligence and the communications,” for a March 7, 1989 attack from Pakistan by its Afghan Mujahideen units, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Although the Mujahideen quickly “captured the government base of Samarkhel, 12 miles south-east of Jalalabad,” their march to the local airport “ran into heavy resistance.” As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “despite human wave assaults and a heavy bombardment of the city that cost over 2,000, mostly civilian lives, the Muhajideen could not advance any further. And in July 1989, the Afghan government military forces were able to easily retake its Samarkhel base, where they found that 70 captured Afghan army officers had been murdered by the ISI-organized Mujahideen.”

Without the support of any Soviet troops, the army of the Najibullah regime’s Afghan government in 1989 was also able to defend Jalalabad “against the most massive attack ever undertaken by the Mujahideen during the whole war,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. And, despite a failed coup attempt by the Minister of Defense of the Afghan government regime in March 1990, Najibullah’s regime did not collapse until there was a successful 1992 Afghan military coup which, according to Dator Zayar’s October 2001 “Afghanistan: An Historical View” article, was “planned by the CIA and ISI” and “prepared the way for the capture of Kabul by the Islamic fundamentalists.” Afghan President Najibullah then announced in early April 1992 that he would resign as part of a UN-brokered transition of power and “ Kabul now became the scene for a power struggle between four main armed” Mujahadeen “groups,” according to Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace by Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie.

By April 1992, the commanders of the various Mujahideen guerrilla groups were also deriving a major source of their personal income from Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trade. As Trinity College Professor and International Studies Program Director Vijay Prashad wrote in his “War Against The Planet” article that was posted on the CounterPunch website:

“The opium harvest at the Pakistan-Afghan border doubled between 1982 and 1983 (575 tons), but by the end of the decade it would grow to 800 tons. On June 18, 1986, the New York Times reported that the Mujahideen `have been involved in narcotics activities as a matter of policy to finance their operations.’.”

In his Killing Hope book, William Blum also wrote:

“…Mujahideen commanders inside Afghanistan personally controlled huge fields of opium poppies, the raw material from which heroin is refined. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport some of the opium to the numerous laboratories along the Afghan-Pakistan border, whence many tons of heroin were processed with the cooperation of the Pakistani military. The output provided an estimated one-third to one-half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe ….”

(end of part 12. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 13: 1992-1998)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 11: 1981-1987

On March 29, 2010, the Associated Press reported that “a senior military official” in Washington “who was not authorized to speak publicly on the operation” said that “NATO forces...will make a long-planned assault on the Taliban’s spiritual home in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar;” and that “military officials say they expect `several thousand’" of the 30,000 extra troops that Barack Obama recently ordered to Afghanistan “to be sent to Kandahar.” But long before the Republican Bush II Administration ordered Pentagon ground troops to begin the endless war in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Republican Reagan Administration was involving the U.S. government even more deeply in the internal political affairs of Afghanistan.

The CIA’s SOVMAT program of arming anti-feminist Afghan guerrillas, for example, continued to operate after the Democratic Carter Administration was replaced by the Reagan Administration and William Casey (a former Capital Cities Communications media conglomerate board member who also then owned over $3 million worth of stock in companies like Exxon, DuPont, Standard Oil of Indiana and Mobil-Superior Oil) became the new CIA director in 1981. As Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History observed:

“Bill Casey’s CIA procurers scoured the globe in search of Soviet-style weapons. Egypt, which had large stockpiles of automatic weapons, land mines, grenade launchers and anti-aircraft missiles delivered by the Soviets was the first source…Other sources were Israel, which had a supply of Soviet-made weapons—captured during the Six-Day War and from Syrian troops and Palestinians in London—and China. Using Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence [ISI] as a go-between, the CIA contracted with the Chinese government to manufacture rocket launchers, AK47s and heavy machine guns in return for hard currency and new equipment. China became a major source of supply. As the requirements grew, the CIA arranged for copies of Soviet weapons to be manufactured in factories in Cairo and in the US , where one leading firm was given a classified contract to upgrade SAM-7-anti-aircraft missiles…”

The CIA’s covert military intervention in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s represented “the biggest single CIA covert operation anywhere in the world,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The money the U.S. government’s CIA secretly spent on giving weapons and military aid-- via its Pakistani ISI middle-men--to the Afghan Mujahideen guerrillas grew from $30 million to $280 million-per-year between 1981 and 1985. In addition, Reagan Administration CIA Director Casey also persuaded “Arab governments to contribute to a reserve fund that could be kept secret from Congress and the State Department” during the early 1980s, according to the same book. As a result, in late 1981 the repressive Saudi Arabian monarchical regime “began to match the CIA dollar for dollar in the financing of purchases of weapons for the Afghan resistance,” “funneled more than half a billion dollars to CIA accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands,” and made “substantial direct contributions of cash and weapons to its own favorites among the Mujahideen parties” in Afghanistan.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International [BCCI] in Geneva was the financial institution secretly used by the CIA and the Saudi government in the 1980s to manage the special “Afghan War” accounts--from which the CIA and Saudi government payments were made to the various arms dealers who supplied the weapons needed for the CIA’s covert military intervention in Afghanistan. By 1989, around $13 billion had been spent by the U.S. and Saudi governments on subsidizing the CIA and ISI’s Mujahideen militias in Afghanistan; and around 50 percent of U.S. government-supplied weapons had been distributed to Hekmatyar’s extremely anti-feminist Hizb-I Islami guerrilla group.

Ironically, one of the strongest proponents for the escalation of the Republican Reagan Administration’s escalation of Casey’s covert war in Afghanistan in the early 1980s was a Democrat: a now-deceased Democratic Congressional representative from Texas named Charles Wilson. As John Cooley’s Unholy Wars recalled:

“The single U.S. Congressman who emerged as CIA Director William Casey’s champion Congressional ally, especially for appropriating money was Democratic Representative Charles Wilson of Texas, one of the most colorful figures of the Afghan jihad…Always ready to promote the interests of the Texas defense contractors who supported him, he got seats on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee…

“Wilson made 14 separate trips to South Asia…In 1982, he began intensive work in secret hearings of the Senate Appropriations Committee to inject more and more money into the Afghan enterprise. On one trip in 1983 he crossed into Afghanistan with a group of Mujahideen…

“Wilson ’s best ally for money decisions below Casey’s level in the CIA was John N. McMahon, the agency’s deputy director since June 1982…

“McMahon did support Wilson’s efforts for more money for the jihad, after setting up, during Stanfield Turner’s watch as CIA Director [during the Democratic Carter Administration], many of the original financing and supply arrangements for the Mujahideen…”

In late 1984, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, the U.S. Congress, “in a rare show of bi-partisanship, and prompted by friends of the Afghan resistance such as Charles Wilson, Gordon Humphrey, Orin Hatch and Bill Bradley, also took the lead in voting more money for the Mujahideen than the Reagan administration requested, sometimes by diverting funds from the defense budget to the CIA.” And CIA Director Casey personally visited three secret training camps in October 1984 to watch some of the Mujahideen guerrillas being trained in Pakistan to wage war in Afghanistan.

The CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986-1989 who was apparently responsible for arming the Mujahideen was Milton Bearden, according to James Lucas’ “ America’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article. In Bearden’s view, “the U.S. was fighting the Soviets to the last Afghan,” during the 1980s. And around 1.5 million to 2 million Afghans would be killed during the CIA-sponsored Afghan war, before all Soviet troops were eventually withdrawn by the Gorbachev regime in the late 1980s. Thousands of Afghan civilians were apparently killed, for example, as a result of the Soviet military’s bombing of apparently 12,000 rural villages in Afghanistan (as part of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] government’s “counter-insurgency” campaign) during the 1980s.

As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “all pretenses that the United States was not directly involved in the Afghan war were dissipated at a stroke late 1984,” when Republican President Reagan then publicly authorized “the delivery of Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the Mujahideen.” The delivery of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Mujahideen by the CIA “would begin to turn the tide of the” Afghan “war in 1985” against the Soviet military forces and Afghan armed forces that supported the PDPA regime in Afghanistan, according to Unholy Wars. As James Lucas noted in his “America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article:

“Between 1986 and 1989, the U.S. provided the Mujahideen with more than 1,000 of these state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile launchers which by some accounts prevented a Soviet victory. Stinger missiles were able to destroy low-flying Soviet planes which forced them to fly at higher altitudes, thereby curtailing the damage they could cause."

By 1987, the U.S. government was giving the anti-feminist Afghan guerrillas nearly $700 million in military assistance per year; and were it not for the involvement of the CIA and the Pakistani government’s ISI in the 1980s war in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen might not have eventually succeeded in violently overthrowing the PDPA regime by the early 1990s. As Afghanistan: A Modern History noted, “the greatest advantage that the Mujahideen as a guerrilla force had were the safe havens in Pakistan to which they could withdraw from time to time to rest and refit, gather the supplies that they needed, receive training in the use of the increasingly sophisticated weapons that the United States was delivering, and be briefed on the superior intelligence…that the CIA was providing through the ISI.”

The same book revealed some details of how the CIA and ISI organized their military units of Afghan refugees to attack Afghanistan—in violation of international law—during the late 1970s and 1980s:

“Within the ISI, the Afghan Bureau was the command post for the war in Afghanistan and operated in the greatest secrecy, with its military staff wearing civilian clothes. Its head reported to [then-ISI Director General] Akhtar [Abdur Rahman], who also devoted some 50 percent of his time to the affairs of the Bureau and reported directly to [Pakistani President] Zia. The respective roles of the CIA and the ISI’s Afghan Bureau are best summed up by the army officer personally selected by Akhtar in October 1983 to head the Bureau, Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf:

“`To sum up: The CIA’s tasks in Afghanistan were to purchase arms and equipment and their transportation to Pakistan; provide funds for the purpose of vehicles and transportation inside Pakistan and Afghanistan; train Pakistani instructors on new weapons or equipment; provide photographs and maps for our operational planning; provide radio equipment and training, and advise on technical matters when requested. The entire planning of the war, all types of training for the Mujahideen, and the allocation and distribution of arms and supplies were the…responsibility of the ISI, and my office in particular.’”

Around 80,000 Mujahideen Afghan guerrillas were trained, for example in camps in Pakistan between 1984 and 1987. At the ISI Afghan Bureau’s 70 to 80 acre Ojhri Camp in Rawalpindi—not too far from Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad—were barracks, training areas, mess halls and a warehouse from which 70 percent of the weapons used by the Afghan Mujahadeen were distributed, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The anti-feminist Afghan combatants were mostly recruited by the ISI and CIA from the over 3.2 million Afghan refugees who settled in Pakistan and the over 2.9 million Afghan refugees who settled in Iran between 1980 and 1990.

Yet despite the opposition of the anti-feminist Mujahideen, the PDPA government refused to scrap its program for female equality and female emancipation in Afghanistan during the 1980s. As Gilles Dorronsoro wrote in his 2005 book Revolution Unending: Afghanistan: 1979 to the Present:

“…The regime maintained the proportion of women members of the party at around 15 percent…In addition, there were women members of the party militias, especially in Kabul and in some of the northern towns. The most marked changes were in public education…In Kabul half of the holders of the public teaching posts were women, as were the majority of the staff of the Ministries of Education and Health. Similarly, 55 percent of the students were girls…Dress codes showed the beginnings of a break with traditional practices, although these innovations were mostly restricted to the modern areas of the capital and to a lesser extent of Jalalabad and Mazar-I Sharif…”

In the Afghan countryside, however, “the Mujahideen imposed an order that was much more conservative or even fundamentalist,” the “prohibition of women’s participation in public activities became stricter,” and “opposition from fundamentalists…restricted the educational opportunities for girls,” according to the same book.

(end of part 11. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 12: 1987-1992)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 10: 1979-1981

In 2010 the Democratic Obama Administration is spending over $95 billion on the Pentagon’s endless war in Afghanistan. Yet many viewers of PBS-affiliated television stations or readers of Rolling Stone magazine in the USA still probably know more about the history of rock music since the 1950s than about the hidden history of Afghanistan since 1979.

In September 1979, for example, supporters of People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA]-Khalq Premier Noor Mohammad Taraki discovered that PDPA-Khalq Deputy Premier Hafizullah Amin was plotting to kill Taraki—after political disagreements between the two PDPA-Khalq government leaders developed between March 1979 and July 1979; and Amin apparently began appointing just members of his own family to fill important Afghan government posts. But Amin was still able to force Taraki to resign as Afghan prime minister on September 15, 1979, following Taraki’s return from abroad after attending a conference of leaders of Non-Aligned nations. And Amin apparently then arranged for former PDPA-Khalq leader Taraki to be killed on October 8 or 9, 1979.

When Taraki had visited Moscow in March 1979 to first request that Soviet ground troops be sent into Afghanistan to help his government’s Afghan army defeat the anti-feminist Mujahdeen guerrillas, the Brezhnev regime had refused to send large numbers of Soviet troops across the border into Afghanistan at that time. But Taraki—who, along with Amin, had personally signed in Moscow the December 5, 1978 Treaty of Friendship between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan—had apparently been considered friendlier to the Soviet Union than the Columbia University Teachers College and University of Wisconsin-trained Amin. So after Taraki was killed, the Brezhnev regime in the Soviet Union apparently decided that the PDPA-Parcham faction leader that Amin had demoted in late June 1978—Babrak Karmal—should replace Amin as Afghan head of state (if large-scale Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan was required to prevent the U.S. and Pakistani-backed Afghan Mujahideen militias--which by then controlled 23 of Afghanistan’s 28 provinces--from quickly overthrowing the increasingly unpopular government that had been established by the April 1978 Saur Revolution).

On December 12, 1979, the Brezhnev regime did decide to order large numbers of Soviet ground troops to cross the Soviet-Afghan border and march into Afghanistan on December 23, 1979. One result of this internationally unpopular December 1979 decision was that 13,369 members of the Soviet military would subsequently be killed (and 35,578 troops would be wounded), according to official Soviet government casualty figures.

On December 27, 1979, 300 Soviet commandos then surrounded and attacked Amin’s residence at 7 p.m.--at the same time that other Soviet troops seized Kabul ’s radio station. An apparently recorded message from PDPA-Parcham faction leader Karmal, announcing that he was the new head of the Afghan government, was then broadcast over the radio--while Amin and Amin loyalists unsuccessfully fought until 1 a.m. against the 300 Soviet commandos who were attempting to arrest Amin. After being taken to Soviet military headquarters in Kabul, Amin was apparently then executed.

The Democratic Carter Administration next used the Brezhnev regime’s internationally unpopular military response to the Pakistani and U.S. governments’ covert support for regime change and the right-wing Mujahadeen insurgency in Afghanistan as a pretext for once again requiring U.S. men between 18 and 26 years of age to register for a future U.S. military draft. As Democratic President Carter explained in his January 23, 1980 State of the Union speech:

“…The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.

“This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come….It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East…

“…I believe that our volunteer forces are adequate for current defense needs, and I hope that it will not become necessary to impose a draft. However, we must be prepared for that possibility. For this reason, I have determined that the Selective Service System must now be revitalized. I will send legislation and budget proposals to the Congress next month so that we can begin registration and then meet future mobilization needs rapidly if they arise…”

Former Columbia University Professor and then-National Security Affairs Advisor Brzezinski then visited Pakistan in February 1980 and “met with General Akhtar, the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence ] chief, as well as with [then-Pakistan] president Zia-al-Haq and with CIA station chief in Islamabad John J. Reagan,” according to John Cooley’s Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism.

But because covert CIA aid to the Afghan resistance fighters violated international law, “both Washington and Islamabad went to extraordinary lengths to cover up their” increased military “assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also noted that “for this reason it was decided that only Warsaw Pact weaponry would be delivered, as such weapons could not be traced back to the US …”

So “the Cold Warriors in Langley, Virginia ” then “developed…a top-secret program, codenamed SOVMAT,” which “was probably unknown even to President Zia al-Haq and the holy-war commanders in Pakistan’s ISI,” according to Unholy Wars. The same book also described how the CIA’s secret SOVMAT program of the early 1980s operated:

“…Working with a vast army of phony corporations and fronts, the CIA under the SOVMAT program would buy weapons from East European governments and governmental organizations…Their acquisition and testing by the U.S. military and the CIA facilitated development of counter-measures, such as improved anti-tank weapons used by the Mujahideen…

“…Officials running the CIA’s SOVMAT program provided wish lists for CIA and ISI officers operating from Pakistan, who sent their Afghan mercenaries to ransack Soviet supply depots…Some Afghan fighters were taught in their CIA-managed training by the ISI in Pakistan to strip Soviet SPETZNAZ or special forces soldiers of their weapons…”

(end of part 10. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 11: 1981-1987)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 9: 1978-1979

As the New York Times (4/26/10) observed, “small bands of elite American Special Operations forces have been operating with increased intensity...in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan ’s largest city, picking up or picking off insurgent leaders…in advance of major operations, senior administration and military officials say.” So if you’re a U.S. anti-war activist, perhaps now might also be a good time for you to revisit the post-1978 history of people in Afghanistan?

Following the April 27, 1978 “Saur [‘April’] Revolution” in Afghanistan, for example, a Revolutionary Council of the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan [PDRA]was established on May 1, 1978 with People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA]-Khalq faction leader Noor Mohammad Taraki as its President and Premier, PDPA-Parcham faction leader Babrak Karmal as Vice President, 30 PDPA civilians as members and 5 pro-PDPA military officers as members; and on May 6, 1978, Taraki announced that Afghanistan was now a non-aligned and independent country. Soon afterwards, however, control of the post-April 1978 revolutionary government of Afghanistan was shifted to the PDPA’s Politburo.

According to an article by John Ryan, titled “Afghanistan: A Forgotten Chapter,” which appeared in the Nov./Dec. 2001 issue of Canadian Dimensions, labor unions “were legalized, a minimum wage was established, a progressive income tax was introduced, men and women were given equal rights, and girls were encouraged to go to school,” by the post-April 1978 revolutionary government in Afghanistan. All debts owed by Afghan’s peasants and small farmers were also abolished; and 200,000 rural families were scheduled to receive redistributed land in accordance with the PDPA government’s land reform program. In addition, the PDPA government elevated the Uzbek, Tucoman, Baluchi and Niristani minority languages to the status of national language in Afghanistan, deprived members of the Afghan royal family of their citizenship and began building hundreds of schools and medical clinics in the Afghan countryside. A female member of the PDPA/PDRA’s Revolutionary Council, Dr. Anahita Ratebzad, also wrote, in a May 28, 1978 Kabul Times editorial, that “privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country;” and “educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention.”

Once the PDPA had gained control over the Afghan government, however, internal party conflict between the leaders of its Parcham faction and its Khalq faction developed again; and at a June 27, 1978 PDPA Central Committee meeting, “Karmal and other leading Parchamis were shunted off to lives in glorified exile as ambassador” and “virtually ousted…from the government” by the Khalq faction, according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History. A number of Parcham activists were then also imprisoned by the PDPA-Khalq faction’s regime. Besides Taraki, the PDPA-Khalq faction in late June 1978 was also now being led by Hafizullah Amin--the Columbia University Teachers College graduate (who some Afghan leftists subsequently claimed may have been previously recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency when he studied in the United States--during the Cold War period when the Afghan monarchical government was considered by the CIA to be too friendly with the Soviet Union).

Karmal, who had been appointed Afghanistan’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia, apparently then met with “Parchamis who were still in place, notably Defense Minister Qadir and the Army Chief of Staff, General Shahpur Ahmedzai;” and a PDPA-Parcham faction internal coup against the PDPA-Khalq faction’s Taraki-Amin regime was planned for September 4, 1978, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. But in August 1978, Amin learned of the planned coup, arrested Qadir and Ahmedzai, and “went on a witch-hunt for Parchamis, eliminating them and their sympathizers from key government and party posts and filling the jails with them,” according to the same book.

Right-wing Islamic opponents of the Taraki-Amin regime in rural Afghanistan, meanwhile, also began to soon organize against the mixing of sexes in the classrooms of the post-Saur Revolution’s literacy campaign and against its democratic reform of Afghan’s marriage laws--which would now abolish forced marriages, now insure freedom of choice of marriage partner and now make 16 years the minimum age for marriage. But the anti-feminist rural Afghan religious leaders, rural village heads, and rural elders who opposed the literacy campaign and marriage law reforms--along with their followers--were also either repressed in large numbers by the PDPA-Khalq regime in 1978 or fled to Pakistan during the last 6 months of 1978. As James Lucas’s recent “ America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan ” article recalled:

“…Efforts to introduce changes involved a degree of coercion and violence directed mainly toward those living in areas outside of Kabul where the vast majority of the population lived in mountainous, rural and tribal areas where there was an exceptionally high rate of illiteracy. Steps to redistribute land were initiated but were met by objections from those who had monopoly ownership of land.

“It was the revolutionary government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed orthodox Muslim men in the Pashtun villages of eastern Afghanistan to pick up their guns. Even though some of those changes had been made only on paper, some said that they were being made too quickly.

“According to these opponents, the government said their women had to attend meetings and that their children had to go to school. Since they believed that these changes threatened their religion, they were convinced that they had to fight. So an opposition movement started at that point which became known as the Mujahideen, an alliance of conservative Islamic groups.”

The anti-feminist Afghan alliance of Sunni Islamic party groups, also known as the “Peshawar Seven,” soon called for a jihad, or holy war, against the post-April 1978 revolutionary government in Afghanistan. And by the end of 1978, some 80,000 Afghans from the eastern half of Afghanistan had reached Pakistan;” and “eight training camps were established in the North West Frontier Province” by Pakistan’s right-wing military dictatorship “to turn simple Afghan refugees into guerrilla fighters,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

A report in the February 1979 issue of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung indicated that the CIA apparently initially provided Pakistan’s military dictatorship with the money needed to purchase weapons for the anti-feminist Afghan refugees that it began training in late 1978. According to John Cooley’s 2001 book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, American and International Terrorism, “Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] officers and a few key Afghan guerrilla leaders were first secretly schooled in the service training centers of the CIA and the US Army and Navy Special Forces in the United States” and “main training took place under the watchful eyes of the Pakistanis and sometimes a very few CIA officers in Pakistan…”

In response, the Taraki-Amin regime signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the government of the neighboring Soviet Union on December 5, 1978, which then agreed to provide more Soviet military advisors and Soviet military aid for the PDPA-Khalq government in Afghanistan. Yet “in January 1979 a first contingent of some 500” anti-feminist Afghan guerrillas, “under the banner of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizbi-i-Islami” group," still “entered Kunar province, attacked Asadabad, its principal town, and captured a strategically located government fort,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Hekmatyar’s followers had initially “gained attention” in Afghanistan “by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil” according to journalist Tim Weiner.

In the western half of Afghanistan, Afghan Shiite Islamic party groups also had prepared for armed resistance to the post-April 1978 revolutionary government; and in February 1979 the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, was taken hostage by an anti-government Shiite Islamic group that demanded the release by the PDPA-Khalq government of a political prisoner. The U.S. Ambassador was then killed during a shootout between Afghan police and his anti-government captors. The following month, hundreds of Afghan government officials (who were in charge of introducing the women’s literacy program in the western city of Herat ) and their Soviet advisors--along with members of their families—were apparently killed by rebellious local Afghans and a garrison of mutinous Afghan government soldiers in Herat on March 24, 1979. Major attacks were then made in Jalalabad, in Pattia province, and in Gardez during April 1979, “by Mujahideen organized from Pakistan by Syyed Ahmd Gailani and Mujaddidi,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Even before Democratic President Carter secretly signed a July 3, 1979 directive to officially provide covert military aid to the anti-feminist Islamic guerrillas in Afghanistan (that Pakistan’s ISI agency had covertly trained to seek a regime change in Afghanistan), both the Tarkai-Amin regime and the government of the Soviet Union had accused Pakistan’s military dictatorship of illegally intervening in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, in violation of international law. As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “both Kabul and Moscow were convinced, not without reason, that the spreading insurrections in Afghanistan were encouraged, armed and directed by Pakistan.”

Yet Pakistan ’s military dictatorship apparently lied about its role in illegally intervening in the internal affairs of Afghanistan following the April 1978 Saur Revolution in Afghanistan. As Afghanistan: A Modern History recalled:

“Whenever such charges were publicly leveled at Pakistan, they were flatly denied. Pakistan was able to maintain the fiction…The whole support program was a very covert operation from beginning to end, conducted in…secrecy by the ISI whose chief, General Akhtar, reported directly to [then-Pakistani Dictator] Zia…The fiction was maintained even when the level of support reached massive proportions after the United States became involved…”

Prior to the introduction of large numbers of Soviet troops into Afghanistan by the Brezhnev regime in December 1979, the Carter Administration apparently also was not completely honest about the degree to which it was working for a regime change in Afghanistan by illegally intervening in Afghanistan’s internal affairs in early 1979. For example, as Steve Galster observed in his “ Afghanistan : The Making of U.S. Policy 1973-1990” article:

“According to a former Pakistani military official who was interviewed in 1988, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad had asked Pakistani military officials in April 1979 to recommend a rebel organization that would make the best use of U.S. aid. The following month, the Pakistani source claimed, he personally introduced a CIA official to Hekmatyar who… headed what the Pakistani government considered the most militant and organized rebel group, the Hizbi-i Islami…”

And according to John Cooley’s 2001 book, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, during “the summer of 1979…National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski got Carter to sign a secret directive for covert aid to the Mujahideen resistance fighters.” As Brzezinski--a former Columbia University Professor of Government and former policy advisor to Barack Obama--confessed in a January 15, 1998 interview with the Paris newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur:

“…According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec. 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul . And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”

The Unholy Wars book also observed that “Charles Cogan, until 1984 one of the senior CIA officials running the aid program…agrees with Brzezinski…that the first covert CIA aid to the Afghan resistance fighters was actually authorized fully 6 months before the Soviet invasion—in July 1979…” As a then-classified U.S. State Department Report of August 1979 stated, "the United States larger interests…would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan," according to James Lucas’ recent “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article.

(end of part 9. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 10: 1979-1981)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 8: 1977-1978

Right-wing anti-feminist Islamic parties and Mujahideen or Taliban militias have exercised a special influence in Afghan politics since the 1980s. But the history of people in Afghanistan between 1977 and 1978 indicates that the radical secular left People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] also played an historically significant role in Afghan politics.

In July 1977, for example, Noor Mohammad Taraki’s PDPA-Khalq faction/party and Babrak Karmal’s PDPA-Parcham faction/party agreed to form one, united PDPA party, with a 30-member Central Committee in which each faction would be represented equally. After Mohammad Daoud seized control of Afghanistan’s government in 1973, the Khalq faction of the now-united PDPA had apparently been successful in persuading more members of the Afghan military to join the PDPA. A key role in the PDPA-Khalq faction’s recruitment of members of the Afghan military into the PDPA was apparently played by a graduate of Kabul University, the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University Teachers College named Hafizullah Amin, who had lived and studied in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

But between July 1977 and April 1978, Afghan ruler Daoud was apparently “moving towards a one-party dictatorship by banning all political parties and opposition newspapers and by setting up his own National Revolutionary Party,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam. Yet 85 percent of Afghanistan’s 15 million people in March 1978 were still “either peasants who made a precarious living off the land, or nomads.” The same book also indicated how the standard of living for most people in Afghanistan under the Daoud regime compared to the standard of living existing in other countries of the world in March of 1978:

“…The economic and social indicators relative to Afghanistan were the worst in the world. Per capita income was $157…It was the most backward country in the world with respect to energy consumption, with almost the entire rural population having no access to electricity. The country also ranked among the lowest in the world in terms of public health facilities, with one doctor for every 16,000 Afghans, 80 percent of the doctors being concentrated in Kabul …76 percent of Afghan children had not received any education, with no more than 4 percent of rural girls having ever attended a primary school. Afghanistan occupied the 127th place in the world in terms of literacy…”

While 45 percent of Afghanistan’s cultivated land in March 1978 was owned by just 5 percent of all Afghan landowners (who owned between 25 to 50,000 acres each), 60 percent of all landowners were still impoverished peasants who each only owned between 5 to 10 acres of cultivated land, from which they earned little money.

But after the autocratic Daoud regime apparently imprisoned or executed numerous PDPA-Parcham leaders and activists--and following the assassination of a leading PDPA-Parcham faction activist and Afghan Marxist intellectual, Mir Akbar Khyber (by the two gunmen who had led him out of his house), on April 17, 1978--Afghan government ruler Daoud was killed on April 28, 1978 during Afghanistan’s “Saur [April] Revolution” of April 1978. Yet according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, the April 27, 1978 Afghan Revolution “was in fact a military coup carried out by leftist officers of the” Afghan “armed forces under the direction of the PDPA without any popular participation.”

Following the murder of PDPA activist Mir Akbar Khyber (who was the editor of the Parcham faction’s Parcham newspaper), the PDPA had organized a funeral procession and demonstration by 15,000 supporters at which PDPA leaders Babrak Karmal and Noor Mohammad Taraki each gave anti-imperialist speeches. But the Daoud regime had responded to the demonstration by arresting Karmal, Taraki and a few other PDPA leaders during the night on April 25, 1978 and early hours of April 26, 1978. According to Afghanistan: A Modern History, however, “the arrests of the PDPA leaders implied that their sympathizers in the armed forces had to take urgent action to forestall their own arrests and certain execution by Daoud.”

So, after first taking over the armories, command centers and radio station in Kabul on April 27, 1978--and announcing on Radio Kabul that a military council led by a pro-PDPA-Parcham faction Afghan Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Abdul Qadir Dagarwal, now controlled Afghan’s government—supporters of the PDPA-Khalq faction within the Afghan military (led by Lt. Col. Mohammad Raf of the Fourth Armored Corps and his troops) overcame the resistance of Daoud’s 2,000-man presidential guard (most of whom were apparently killed in the fighting); and seized Afghanistan’s presidential palace in the early hours of April 28, 1978. After Daoud apparently resisted arrest by wounding one of the pro-PDPA military officers who attempted to arrest him, Daoud and his family were then “killed in a burst of gunfire” by other pro-PDPA military officer-led troops, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also notes that “except for a strong note…protesting against the arrests of the PDPA leaders…there was no Soviet involvement in what was purely an Afghan affair, not-withstanding Cold War-biased Western reports to the contrary.”

(end of part 8. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 9: 1978-1979)

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.

A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 7: 1968-1976

Since Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, between 500 and 800 people have been killed by Pentagon drone attacks in Pakistan, as a by-product of the U.S. War Machine’s endless military intervention in Afghanistan. Yet much of the history of people in Afghanistan since 1968 may not still be widely-known, even by many readers of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States.

In 1968, for example, when student revolts broke out in the United States at Columbia University, in France, in Mexico and in other countries of the world, student revolts also broke out in Afghanistan and “student strikes that began in Kabul spread to provincial centers, where students who had returned to teach and work had become carriers of a new politically radicalized militancy,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam. The following year, Afghan workers also struck for better pay and better working conditions in the few places in Afghanistan where some factories existed. Between 1965 and 1973, two thousand meetings and demonstrations—mostly led by activists of the secular leftist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] factions/parties—were held in Afghanistan which demanded more democratic reforms and modernization efforts in Afghanistan.

But right-wing Islamic opponents of democratic reforms and modernization efforts in Afghanistan also mobilized between 1965 and 1973 in Afghanistan. In 1971, for example, the University of Kabul “was closed for six months as a result of the bitter confrontation between Islamic and leftist radicals,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The same book also recalled that in the early 1970s in Afghanistan:

“The Islamic backlash also took the form of attacks instigated by the mullahs on women wearing Western dress. They were incensed by the campaigns for female literacy and women’s rights led by the All-Afghanistan’s Women’s Council. According to a senior leader of the Council interviewed by George Arney, the mullahs declared in 1971 that women should stay in the house. Reactionaries sprayed acid on women’s faces when they came out in public without a veil. And when women wore stockings they shot at their legs with guns with silencers…”

By the early 1970s, dozens of Afghan political groups existed on campus at the University of Kabul. In addition, around 2,500 people in Afghanistan were also members of the PDPA faction/party [Khalq] led by Noor Mohammad Taraki and 1,500 to 2,000 Afghans were members of the PDPA faction/party [Parcham] led by Babrak Karmal. The number of people in Afghanistan who were members of the secular Maoist party was also between 1,500 and 2,000 in the early 1970s. But the Islamic party in Afghanistan still only had between 1,500 and 2,000 members. Yet, as James Lucas noted in an article, titled “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan”, that was posted on March 5, 2010 on the www.antiwar.org site, “according to Roger Morris, National Security Council staff member, the CIA started to offer covert backing to Islamic radicals as early as 1973-1974.”

Nearly all the members of the PDPA faction/parties, the Maoist party and the Islamic party in Afghanistan in the early 1970s, however, were still just members of the educated urban middle-class; and all of these political groups still did not have much of an organizational presence or mass base outside of Kabul, in the rural areas of Afghanistan.

Yet many people in the countryside were suffering from the effects of a drought in Afghanistan between 1964 and 1972, which developed into a famine in 1971 and 1972. One result of this famine in Afghanistan in 1971 and 1972 was that between 50,000 to 500,000 people starved to death because of the famine. And 75 percent of Afghanistan ’s land was still owned by only 3 percent of Afghan’s rural population in 1973.

Backed by Afghan military officers, Mohammad Daoud (the brother-in-law of Afghan King Zahir Shah who had previously been the Afghan monarchical regime’s autocratic prime minister between 1953 and 1963) then seized control of the Afghan government from the Afghan king (who had been sitting on the throne since 1933) in a July 17, 1973 coup—while Zahir Shah was on a holiday in Europe. After his 1973 palace coup abolished the monarchy, Daoud next “set up an authoritarian regime which made the government isolated” and “moved rapidly to undermine all the representative institutions” in Afghanistan “and, in particular, Parliament,” according to Revolution Unending: Afghanistan: 1979 to the Present by Gilles Dorronsoro. The same book also recalled that “to avoid any challenge Daud systematically suppressed the opposition, both legal and illegal” in Afghanistan and “following the coup the former Prime Minister and leader of the social democratic Hezb-I Demokrat-I Mottarki party, Dr. Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal ,who had been in power in 1965-67, was arrested in September 1973 and executed.”

Yet long before the U.S. government began to covertly arm the anti-feminist Mujahideen guerrillas during the Democratic Carter Administration—following the 1978 Afghan Saur (‘April’) Revolution and prior to the December 1979 Soviet government’s military intervention in Afghanistan—even the non-communist, autocratic Daoud monarchical regime and the post-1973 non-communist Daoud authoritarian regime felt that it was in Afghanistan’s national economic interest to align itself with the Soviet Union during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. As Afghanistan: A Modern History recalled:

“…Economic hardships caused the Afghans to turn to the Soviets for help…A four-year barter agreement was signed in July 1950, with the Soviets providing petroleum products, cement, cotton cloth and other essentials in return for wool, raw cotton and other Afghan products. The Soviets also agreed to the free transit of Afghan exports through their territory, and offered to invest in oil exploration…”

After lending the Afghan government money to construct a grain silo, a flour mill and a bakery in Kabul in 1954, for example, the Soviet government followed-up with loans for constructing an oil pipeline and three oil storage facilities, for road-building equipment, and for an asphalt factory and equipment to pave Kabul’s streets. Nearly $1.3 billion in Soviet economic assistance, mostly in the form of loans, was given to the non-communist Afghan government between 1956 and 1978; and an additional $110 million was received by the Afghan government from other Eastern bloc governments during the same period.

The U.S. government, in contrast, only began to provide some economic assistance to the non-communist, autocratic Afghan monarchical regime in 1956; and, after 1956, also began awarding some Afghan students grants to study at certain U.S. universities. But, according to James Lucas’s recent “ America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article:

“The CIA…recruited Afghan students in the U.S. to act as agents for them when they returned home. During this period at least one president of the Afghanistan Students Association (ASA), Zia H. Noorzay, was working with the CIA in the U.S. and later became president of the Afghanistan state treasury. One of the Afghan students whom Noorzay and the CIA tried in vain to recruit, Abdul Latif Hotaki, declared in 1967 that a good number of the key officials in the Afghanistan government who studied in the U.S. `are either CIA-trained or indoctrinated.’”

Coincidentally, the Afghanistan Student Association [ASA] also apparently received part of its funding from the CIA’s Asia Foundation conduit [on whose board sat then-Columbia University President Grayson Kirk] during the Cold War Era.

In addition, between the mid-1950s and 1978, the Teachers College of Columbia University—under a U.S. Agency for International Development [AID] government contract—was involved in training teachers, developing educational curriculum and producing textbooks for the autocratic Daoud monarchical regime’s Ministry of Education in both Afghanistan, at the Ibn Sinn Teacher Training Institute in Kabul, and at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City.

Military assistance was also given by the Soviet Union to the non-communist, autocratic monarchical Afghan regime during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Between 1956 and 1978, for example, the Afghan government “received the equivalent of $1.24 million in military aid from the USSR , mostly in the form of credits” and “by 1978 some 3,725 Afghan military personnel had been trained in the Soviet Union,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

But after the Shah of Iran’s regime agreed to provide the Afghan government with $2 billion in economic aid in 1975 and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited Kabul, Afghanistan in August 1976, the non-communist, authoritarian Daoud regime apparently began to reverse Afghanistan ’s post-1950 policy of aligning with the Soviet Union.

(end of part 7. To be followed by “A People’s History of Afghanistan—Part 8: 1977-1978")

This article originally appeared in the Austin, Texas-based Rag Blog alternative news blog.