The awful logic of genocide

National Review, Oct 4, 1985 by Jean-Francois Revel

Unhappily, there are few cases where even a summary knowledge of history so completely pulverizes that theory as Afghanistan. From the start of the Revolution in 1917, the new Soviet power moved to eliminate British influence from Central Asia. A Soviet-Afghan treaty of friendship was signed on September 13, 1920, a prelude to a long series of treaties destined to tighten the Soviets' ties with Kabul. The Soviets took up again the geopolitical objective of czarist Russia; but--and this is a major innovation--they added to it their panoply of ideological weapons. In November 1918, in a proclamation entitled "Do Not Forget the Orient," Stalin spoke of the need to "inspire the workers and peasants of these countries with the liberating spirit of the revolution." In characteristic fashion, this liberation ideology was evidently not to be practiced within the USSR itself: The Bolsheviks, who had never stopped denouncing the annexation of Moslem territories by the Czar, refused, once in power, to give these same regions their independence, instead putting down by force the insurrections that followed.

After the Second World War, the Soviet Union capitalized on the void left by Britain's retreat from India, the end of British influence, and above all the new situation that resulted from the creation of Pakistan to tie Kabul's foreign policy to her own. Indeed, why not? There was nothing scandalous in what the USSR was doing. But the democracies should at least have understood nothing of what the Soviet Union was up to in Central Asia. In December 1954, John Foster Dulles refused military aid to Afghanistan and threw that country into Moscow's arms.

Sardar Mohammed Daud, prime minister from 1953 to 1963 and president from 1973 to 1978, permitted the Soviet Union to take over the task of equipping and training the Afghan army. In 1955, Khrushchev and Bulganin, despite their concers in Europe and at home that year, made one of their first foreign trips to Kabul and accorded Afghanistan a grant of $100 million, the biggest grant given by Moscow to any country beyond the Iron Curtain. Such a demarche is incompatible with the thesis that Moscow never had any long-term plans for Afghanistan.

After the coup of July 16, 1973, which brought Daud back to power, the internal Soviet conquest of Kabul was accelerated. While he himself was not a Communist, Daud thought himself strong and wily enough to risk putting Communists in key posts. He did not understand the weakness of his position, given an army in which thousands of officers and men had been trained by the Soviet Union for twenty years. When, on April 27, 1978, the army assassinated Daud and installed a Communist regime in his place, it was picking ripe fruit from a tree planted long before.

Here too the Western experts and commentators who date the Sovietization of Afghanistan from the invasion of December 27, 1979, prove, at best, that they are professionally incompetent. The protectorate had been in the works for decades. The sterilization of Afghanistan, in the classical form of "a friendly government" installed in 1978, was the real turning point. Soviet garrisons took up their positions at various locations in Afghanistan starting early in 1979. Was this the result of "a chain of unfortunate accidents"? Was there no plan behind this?