Hassan Kakar

Formerly professor of history at Kabul University

A distinguishing feature of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the internationalization of its politics. Two mutually hostile camps inside and around Afghanistan emerged in which the objectives of the naitons involved in the Afghan problem predominated and clashed with one another. In both camps Afghans were made to play a secondary role, even though the focus of policies of all was said to be the termination of the occupation of their country.

In Kabul the Parchami regime led by Babrak karmal claimed to lead a united called limited contingent of the Soviet army. Every significant move that the regime took or was taken in its name in any field of national life was initiated, instructed and even conducted by Soviet advisors. Even the statements which the regime’s officials, including Karmal, read, on various occasions, were made for them by the Soviet advisors. All this was because the regime had made itself a flexible instrument in the hands of the Soviet Union while the latter tried to promote first and foremost its own objectives in the region.  In fact, Afghanistan was dominated by the Soviet Union to the extend that it was neither united, nor independent, nor sovereign. It was not united because the countryside was beyond the regime’s control, it was neither independent because the Soviets controlled the regimes, and it was neither sovereign because a Soviet army had set it up. Hence a strong opposition to the regime as well as the invading army by the overwhelming majority of the people on whose behalf the militant Afghans known as the mujahideen waged jehad or armed struggle for the liberation of Afghanistan.

Quartered in Peshawar were the Islamic Tanzimat or organizations from where they directed the mujahideen to wage the jehad inside Afghanistan. The fact that the vast autonomous-like frontier region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is inhabited by Pashtuns and is porous for having 141 passes and passages (1) made it easier for the mujahideen to wage to jehad. Several factors, however, made them dependent on Pakistan. Foremost among them was the fact that the Tanzimat had been headquartered in Peshawar. Having exposed their country as a frontline state to the Soviet retaliation the military leaders of Pakistan took full advantage of this dependence. President Zia al-Haq, and General Akhtar Abd al-Rahman, head of the Intern-Service Intelligence or ISI led the rest in this endeavor. In the first place, they saw to it that there were seven Tanzimat rather than one a view to attaining national significance and the status of a government in exile. Pakistan made no genuine attempt for this purpose. At the end of the period it made only a half-hearted attempt toward that end and that too proved ineffective. Already, Pakistan had blocked the emergence of a national leadership that hundreds of Afghan elders hoped to bring about through two great assemblies that they had convened in Peshawar in 1980 and in Pishin in 1981. In the second place, the varieties of modern light and heavy weapons, logistics of various kinds and huge amounts of cash that Pakistan received in the name of Afghan resistance from many Western and Islamic countries notably the USA and Saudi Arabia were channeled through ISI mainly to the radical Islamist groups of the Tanzimat were also permitted to persecute those Afghan refugees whom they regarded as bad Muslims. They took full advantage of the permission in the prisons that they had set up in Pakistan. Also, in collusion with the ISI, they eliminated hundreds of Afghans in Pakistan some of whom had the potential of leadership. The latter were almost all Pashtuns, the major ethnic group composing the Afghan society. In this atmosphere those secularist and nationalist Afghans who could influence events one way or another took a second refuge in the Western countries. The responsibility of resistance as well as of future government, thus, came to rest with the Tanzimat among which the extremist Islamist groups emerged as the strongest, an event of far reaching consequences.

In all this the military leaders of Pakistan followed first and foremost their own objective, as had the Soviets in invading Afghanistan. It is now time to outline albeit with some simplification the contradictory objectives of the countries involved.

Officially the objective of the Soviet Union in sending the army was to rebuff “ … the armed interference from the outside” In Afghanistan. (3) It likewise claimed that since “…the Pentagon and the US CIA were counting on stealthily approaching our territories more closely through Afghanistan” our southern flanks had become “insecure.” (4) If the claims were real the Soviet Union would done what it did with the cooperation of the Afghan government, but instead it violently overthrew it and replaced it by a new one whereas in March of the same year Premier Kosygin, in response to a request by President Taraki, had refused to send in troops, presaging prophetically that “If our troops were sent in, the situation in your country would not improve. On the contrary it would get worse. Our troops would have to struggle not with an external aggressor, but with a significant part of your own people.” (5) Why now this reversal? The reason was President Ameen. With Taraki the Soviet leaders were comfortable because he had assured them that “We will never be as close to anyone else as we are to you. We are the pupils of Lenin.”(6) With Ameen they were uncomfortable to say the least. By the time he rose to high power Ameen had become disillusioned with communism and the Soviet Union, and had started to rule as an independent ruler with the scheme of having friendly relations not only with the Soviet block countries but also with all countries. His patriotism and nationalism had prevailed over his communism. Fearful that he may become another Anwar al-Sadat and thus lose the special relationship that they had built with Afghanistan over the years Soviet leaders came out against Ameen’s fashion of ruling. Hence the invasion. But it still does not reveal the real Soviet objective about which so much has been written.

Seemingly the Soviet purpose was to occupy Afghanistan the way Bukhara and Khiva had been occupied in 1918 and subsequently annexed. In both invasions minor factions were raised to power and the invading army called “a limited contingent of troops.” This “limited contingent” was said to be temporary that will be recalled as soon as the situation warranted it. (7) In the case of Afghanistan the Soviet leaders knew full well that it was potentially among the richest country of the world, and, more important their domination of it would enable them to eventually influence the region including the Strait of Hormoz. For the same reasons and some more many Western and Islamic countries led by the US strongly supported the mujahideen in their resolve against the occupation. In spite of the discords that existed among them the mujahideen showed an unwavering resolve to fight and die for their values, and this coupled with their backing by the friendly countries finally forced the Soviet to withdraw their troops. In their gambit of Afghanistan the Soviet leaders had made an unacceptable blunder.

But the withdrawal still did not mean that the Soviets had completely abandoned their objective. Afterward their focus of attention was northern Afghanistan beyond the Hindu Kush. This was the region that even the Tzarist Russia had intended to influence when its Tashkand’s officials encouraged the fugitive Sardar Abdur Rahman Khan to set up a kingdom there with their backing. (8) In the Soviet times after Premier Mohammad Da’ud established close ties with the Soviet Union in the 1950s the KGB concentrated on the region so much so that a number of foreign tourists including some Americans vanished there and many local peasants and shepherds along with their male relatives had to spend years in jail in Kabul for allegedly spying on the Soviet Union. Among them was a 16-year old shepherd, Khudie Nazar of Fayzabad, who had been kidnapped near the border and handed over officially by the Soviet authorities to the Afghan government. (9) It was over this region that an encounter between President Da’ud and Leonid Brezhnev took place in the Kremlin in 1977 in which the latter told the former that the UN aid workers employed there and others who worked for NATO elsewhere were “…noting more than spies” and that the Afghan government should” … get rid of those experts.” (10)

In the occupation period the region was treated as a special one. The Soviets undertook no major military operation and destruction there comparable to what they undertook elsewhere. (11) Also, Kabul allowed the provincial government as well as businessmen of the region to directly deal with the Soviet Central Asian Republics, a unique concession. More serious, on the eve of Soviet withdrawal a scheme was implemented for nine provinces in the north according to which a deputy prime minister and sixteen deputy ministers were stationed in Mazar. (12) Northern Afghanistan was thus given a shadow government, which President Najeeb Allah later termed as”… the plan for the partition of Afghanistan.” (13) His rejection of it became the preclude for Moscow’s opposition to him in particular after he warned Federal Russia’s ambassador in Kabul regarding the activities of his counsel in Mazar for working for the scheme. (14) It is perhaps a variation of the scheme that Russia as well as Iran have ever since persistently supported the so-called Northern Alliance with weapons and cash. The melodrama has not been abandoned even though it has taken no root with the people of the region.

Pakistan’s objective in supporting the resistance was straightforward but more unrealistic than that of the Soviet’s. Behind his immediate goal of securing Afghanistan from the occupation and Pakistan from the threat of occupation was President Zia al-Haq’s pan-Islam dream. In the words of author Selig Harrison, President Zia as well General Akhtar” …saw the war a way to achieve a ‘strategic realignment’ in which Afghanistan and Pakistan would be part of an anti-Indian, pan-Islamic regional bloc dominated by fundamentalist parties. “(15) As “a frontline state” and the biggest Muslim country in the region Pakistan was to lead the bloc. In his confederation scheme Afghanistan was to have a position similar to that under the Soviet domination. President Zia was serious about it when he told Mr. Harrison thus:” We have earned the right to have a friendly regime there. We took risks as a frontline state, and we won’t permit it to be like it was before, with Indian and Soviet influence there and claims on our territory.” His dream of “pan-Islamic regional bloc” which was variation of the pan-Islamic dream of Sayeed Jamal al-Deen Afghani was to embrace one day the Central Asian Muslims also. Zia predicted: “it will be a real Islamic state, part of an Islamic revival that will one day win over the Muslims in the Soviet Union.” (16)

Unrealistic schemes when put into practice have often produced results opposite of those originally intended. President Zia’s pan-Islamism was no exception. Possibly he as well General Akhtar along with others became its victims when they died in a mysterious plan crash in august 1988 a few months after the Soviets had agreed to withdraw their troops. (17) With their demise their pan-Islamism also died, but its legacy persisted and proved disruptive. For the radical Islamists felt so confident of their power that following the Tanzimat’s replacement of the Kabul regime in 1992 they felt they had won the title of running the country exclusively and permanently as well us of purifying the society of the non-Islamic features. Having stockpiled huge amount of weapons and intoxicated so much by their victory over the invading army and atheist internal enemies they felt only they were entitled, and only they were able to rule the country. They too were mistaken. There followed the worst civil war in the history of the country in which personality clashes, provincialism and ethnic nationalism played havoc on an unprecedented scale. This was the war that not other groups whether secular or religious, but the Sunni and Shee’I radical Islamists, ethnic militias, and the Supervisory council fought among themselves until the Taliban drove them out completely or nearly so. The whole situation resulted in part from the covert operations inside Afghanistan of the neighboring countries notably Pakistan and Iran who acted after the Soviet dissolution as the little Soviet Union. This at a time when the country had been ravaged by the war and the friendly government of the resistance period, notably the US, had disengaged from Afghanistan.

Despite suggestions to the contrary if the Afghan society had not undergone a significant degree of integration Afghanistan would have become another Yugoslavia. As has been aptly stated the country’s borders have proved stronger than the ethnic factor.

Notes

• Azmat Hayat Khan, The Durant Line, Its Geo-Strategic Importance, University of Peshawar and Hanns Seidel Foundation, Peshawar, 2000, 175-178
• Mohammad Yousuf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap, Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Jang Publishers, Lahore, 1992, 96
• Henry Publishers, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, Duke University Press, Durham 1985, 185
• Ibid, 155
• Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan, The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, University of California Press, Berekely, London, 1995, 50
• Ibid, 34
• Rosanne Klass ed, Afghanistan, The great Game Revisited, Freedom House, New York, 1987, 31
• Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan, A Study In Internal Political Developments, Punjab Educational Press, Lahore, Kabul, 1971, 35
• Haroon, Da’ud Khan in the KGB Trap (in Pashto), Khybar Publishing House, Germany, 1373/1994,18
• Abdul Samad Ghaus, The Fall of Afghanistan, Pergamon-Brassey’s International Defense Publishers, Washington, London, 1988, 179
• Elie Krakowski, “Afghanistan and Soviet Global Interests” in Klass, op. cit. 178
• Mohammad Hassan Sharq, The Cotton-wearing Bear-footed or the Memoirs of Dr. Mohammad Hassan Sharq, (In Persian), privately printed at Army Computer Point, New Delhi, 1993 ?, 233. Kakar (1995), op.cit.342
• Faqeer Mohammad Wadan, The Red Daggers, Moscow’s Policies and their Effects on the Situation in Afghanistan, 1986-1992, (in Persian) privately published, 1999,34. Mr. Wadan was head of the propaganda and cultural department of the central committee of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and a close confidant of President Najeeb Allah.
• Ibid, 92
• Selig Harrison in Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1995, 162, 256, 260
• Ibid, 92
• Mohammad Yousuf, op. cit. 8-19