At this juncture Washington was still unsure how to interpret the Soviet maneuvers: was the Soviet Union planning a full takeover or did it remain committed to preserving the April Revolution? Analysts remained skeptical that Moscow would occupy the country given the political and economic costs.
By the winter of , faced with mutinies and an uncertain leadership, the Afghan Army was unable to provide basic security to the government against the onslaught of Islamic fighters nearing Kabul. By that point the Soviets were sending in motorized divisions and Special Forces. Washington demanded an explanation, which the Soviets ignored. Finally, on Christmas Eve, the invasion began.
Although the Carter administration had closely watched this buildup from the outset, its reaction following the invasion revealed that, until the end, it clung to the hope that the Soviets would not invade, based on the unjustified assumption that Moscow would conclude that the costs of invasion were too high. In response, Carter wrote a sharply-worded letter to Brezhnev denouncing Soviet aggression, and during his State of the Union address he announced his own doctrine vowing to protect Middle Eastern oil supplies from encroaching Soviet power.
The administration also enacted economic sanctions and trade embargoes against the Soviet Union, called for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, and stepped up its aid to the Afghan insurgents. Instead, it took ten years of grinding insurgency before Moscow finally withdrew, at the cost of millions of lives and billions of dollars.
In their wake, the Soviets left a shattered country in which the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist group, seized control, later providing Osama bin Laden with a training base from which to launch terrorist operations worldwide.
Menu Menu. Response, — In this interview with Asia Society , he discusses the conditions under which the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in and the long-term implications of the proxy war there.
Professor Rubin also explains the origins of the Taliban, who emerged much after the Soviet withdrawal, and suggests that they in fact represent a "generational revolt against the mujahideen. In order to provide some context to events now unfolding in Afghanistan, I would like to begin by talking about the Soviet invasion in The Soviets came in ostensibly to quash a growing Islamic and nationalist resistance movement known collectively as mujahideen. Could you provide a brief overview of the conditions obtaining in Afghanistan at the time?
Actually the Soviets did not come in to quash the mujahideen; they sent the wrong military deployment for that. The Soviets came in to provide security for a change of government, from one faction of Afghan Communists to another. There was going to be a manipulated, peaceful change of government from Hafizullah Amin to Babrak Kamal. The Afghan Communist Party came to power through a military coup in Although the Soviet Union did not sponsor this coup, once the Communists were in power, they had the full backing of the Soviet Union.
The Afghan Communist Party was highly factionalized along several lines, but the most radical faction eventually took over and tried to push through a very poorly thought-out and radical transformation of Afghan society, solely through violence and coercion, without any participation by the Afghan people.
While it would be incorrect to say that the Afghans were totally conservative and did not want any changes, they certainly did not want changes at gunpoint that had been thought up by a small group of people who were not representative and were backed by a foreign power.
Along with their attempt to implement various policies, like land reform, literacy programs and so on, the Communists had a massive campaign of terror to eliminate groups that they thought were rivals, which included first of all other factions of the educated elite. This is very important to keep in mind because this is a process that has been going on in Afghanistan from till today, i. According to official figures, released after the Khalq faction was overthrown by the Soviets in December , in the 19 months that faction was in power, they killed 12, people just in the principal prison in Kabul.
When they went into the countryside, they killed the local Islamic leaders and the local tribal leaders or landlords not everywhere, but in many places. According to unofficial estimates, they may have killed as many as , people. This, combined with their attempt to impose changes by military force, generated revolts in various parts of the country.
However the romantic history of the Afghan resistance movement implies that the people took up arms everywhere and the Soviets came in to try to suppress this revolt. What really disturbed the Soviets was that, beginning in March , portions of the Afghan military started to revolt. In March there was a major uprising by the garrison in Herat led by Major Ismail Khan and Major Allauddin Khan, probably with some assistance from Iran this was just one month after the Iranian revolution.
In that uprising, Soviet advisers in Herat were killed as well as many of their families and some civilians from the Eastern Bloc, and it was put down with great difficulty.
Subsequently, throughout the rest of the year, there were uprisings in virtually every Afghan military garrison in the country, including in the Bala Hisar, the main garrison in Kabul itself in August In addition to which, with the melting away of the military, the provincial officials in the capitals were also losing their security, many of them were defecting this did not mean of course that they were running to the Islamic fundamentalists and taking up arms; they would start by going back home, to their family, clan, tribe, and some of them would subsequently leave for Pakistan.
Because the army was disintegrating, they started drafting people by force, so then young men started running away to avoid conscription. This heralded the beginning of the disintegration of the state structure, particularly of the army, and the Soviets stepped in to prevent that from happening.
The Soviets thought that if the state were to dissolve in this way, it would create a power vacuum that the United States would try to fill, since they had just lost their most important ally in the region, the Shah of Iran. With typical paranoia, the Soviets overestimated what the US was doing, just as the US, also in a paranoid way, thought that the Soviets planned to seize Afghanistan and then march on to the Persian Gulf.
Neither of these perceptions was true, of course. The Soviets put into power another faction led by Babrak Karmal, which was supposed to be more moderate. But any government that is put in to power by a foreign army in Afghanistan especially a foreign army of atheistic, white people is obviously not going to be very popular. They quickly lost legitimacy, large portions of the rest of the army subsequently defected, and the state structure began to melt away.
Then the students in Kabul started demonstrating so they began arresting a lot of students; more educated people were arrested and killed. So these were the beginnings of the process that continues till today. According to some reports, when Moscow intervened militarily in Afghanistan, there were several secular and nationalist Afghan groups opposed to the Soviet-backed Communists who had, as you indicated, seized power 19 months earlier in a military coup.
Washington had the option of bolstering these groups but instead, chose to support the three fundamentalist organizations then in existence. Do you agree with this claim, and could you comment on it? This implies the existence of a great deal more coherence, discipline and purpose among both Afghans and Americans than I believe existed at the time, and it also omits the role of Pakistan. First of all, there were secular and nationalist groups in Afghanistan; but if any of them exceeded people in number, I would be surprised.
Organized politics of this sort was completely confined to cliques of educated people in the capital city; there were no organized political parties in the country. Afghanistan had had three national elections to a consultative parliament in which almost no political party leaders were involved at all. The people who were elected were tribal leaders and ulama. Some times educated people who claimed they were political leaders would get elected but usually they would be elected from their native town or village by those who belonged to their tribe or clan.
Some of the Parchami leaders for instance, Babrak Karmal were elected from Kabul. So there were no political parties that had the capacity to mobilize people in Afghanistan. Another thing to bear in mind is that the old elite who ran the country prior to this could be swept away so easily precisely because Afghanistan did not have political parties and an autonomous political structure through which it could mobilize people.
The old elite controlled the country by controlling the state, and by controlling the state, they were able to get revenues from natural gas and foreign aid and a few taxes, and use those to redistribute them to buy off a few leaders.
It used that to support a clique because half of the ruling elite of Afghanistan if you define the ruling elite as consisting of cabinet members and top generals came from the Muhammadzai lineage.
So the government in Afghanistan was like a club for Muhammadzais and a few of their allies. This is why so many other newly educated elites who were not Muhammadzais resented them and became Islamists or radical nationalists or communists or Maoists. Still all this political contention was in a very small circle. Loya jirga is a state practice, not a tribal practice, but it is based on the tribal ideology that the Afghan state should represent.
Some exiles sympathetic to the national idea of the old regime tried to hold such a loya jirga a couple of times in Pakistan in order to constitute a kind of national resistance. The Pakistan government and military not necessarily in that order; they were actually the same thing at the time refused to allow this loya jirga to meet and used the religious parties as their channels of influence with the Afghans. They would not let the ex-king or his family come to Pakistan because they were associated with the demand for Pashtunistan.
They also liked to have different parties so they could manipulate them against each other; their nightmare would be the formation of an Afghan state in exile in Pakistan Pashtunistan. Within the Pashtun tribes there were and are two different competing elites, the tribal elites and the religious elites, with different ideologies and different bases of power.
The tribal elites were strengthened and were relied upon by the Afghan government whereas the religious elites were marginalized. Who were these religious elites? The Taliban.
The religious elites were tribal, rural ulama, and every government since Amir Abdul Rahman Khan in the s, has tried to marginalize these people and keep them from declaring jihad. They even created a new class of religious elites based on state madrasas some of whom were also sent to al-Azhar like Rabbani to try to marginalize those old rural elites who subsequently became the Taliban.
But they were very important, along with other groups like the new Islamists, to the Pakistani strategy of undermining not only the Communist government but also the tribal nationalist forces within Afghanistan that had tried to undermine Pakistan and had allied with India.
The ranks of the Afghan mujahideen were, from the outset, complemented by non-Afghan volunteers eager to join the anti-Soviet jihad. One of the first to do this was Osama bin Laden, who worked very closely with the CIA to collect funds from affluent Saudi citizens.
Is this correct? There are two points here: first, the volunteers really did not come in significant numbers until the lates, particularly after the Soviet withdrawal, which is when they became important. The Chinese were also involved although they were and are still rather discreet about this.
There were four intelligence agencies who met every week in Islamabad. A lot of weapons from China went into Afghanistan as well but they were not paid for by the Chinese. There was a division of labor between these groups. The foreign volunteers particularly the Arabs were organized by the Saudis, at least at the official level. He knew Prince Turki bin Abdul, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency.
Volunteers became more important after The private Arab money was important because sometimes the official money would run out and this was what saved the system, as Brig. Yousaf says in his book, The Bear Trap. This all came to a head on the 24 December when Soviet troops invaded Afghanisation. Amin was assassinated and a pro-Moscow leader, Babrak Karmal , was installed in his place.
Many Afghan soldiers had deserted to the Mujahideen and the Karmal government needed 85, Soviet soldiers to keep him in power. It was clear that his position as head of the Afghan government depended entirely on Soviet military support.
0コメント