[Marxism] Afghanistan, Another Untold Story By Michael Parenti

[Darren Williams]

This article by Michael Parenti seems a bit shaky factually. He suggests 
that Hafizullah Amin tried to take Afghanistan in a completely different 
political direction from that of his predecessor, Taraki, yet Amin had been 
Taraki's prime minister, they were both leaders of the 'Khalq' ('People' or 
'Masses'), the more radical of the two factions within the PDPA, and pursued 
the same policies of land reform, promoting women's rights, etc. The main 
difference seems to have been an increase in the violence with which 
opposition was repressed - although this had already begun under Taraki. 
Amin also seems to have tried to build bridges with Muslim clerics, but that 
hardly amounts to "mov[ing] toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic 
state."

The story that Amin's removal was an internal PDPA matter, that his 
successor invited the Soviet troops into the country, and that Amin had been 
a CIA agent, was the official Moscow explanation at the time, which was 
never very credible. It was Amin who had sought Soviet military involvement, 
to assist in defeating the US- and Pakistani-backed Mujahideen insurgency, 
but the Kremlin initially resisted, correctly anticipating that this would 
only inflame the situation. They apparently changed their minds because it 
seemed increasingly likely that Amin's policies risked destablising the 
whole regime. The Soviet troops were sent in on 24th December and were 
probably responsible for the killing of Amin three days later. His 
replacement, Babrak Karmal, the leader of the other PDPA faction, 'Parcham' 
('Flag'), had been in exile in Moscow. The fact that Amin had studied in the 
USA is hardly reason to suppose that he was recruited by the CIA; in fact, 
Taraki studied in the States too.

Parenti also suggests that Brzezinski admitted at the time that the CIA were 
supporting the mujahideen before the Soviet invasion but he has only done so 
long after the fact (in an interview with a French magazine that has been 
reprinted in Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html ). 
Robert Gates had, by then, admitted in his autobiography that the CIA were 
actively promoting the insurgency six months before Brezhnev and Kosygin 
sent in the troops. Brzezinski gleefully claims the 'credit' for drawing the 
USSR into the 'Afghan trap'.

None of this invalidates Parenti's basic analysis of the US involvement and 
its motives, of course.

Darren Williams.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Dbachmozart at aol.com>
To: "Darren Williams" <dazza1970 at tiscali.co.uk>
Sent: Sunday, December 07, 2008 3:55 PM
Subject: [Marxism] Afghanistan, Another Untold Story By Michael Parenti

> clip -- 
> 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  Afghan 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.
>
> <_www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279_
> (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279) >