World

MOSCOW — As snow fills the moun-
tain passes of Afghanistan and the fighting
season draws to a close, it is clear to all who
wish to see that the Afghan army and
government are performing far better on
their own than they ever did with the Soviet
troops present. Indeed, aside from muja-
hedin enclaves around Jalalabad and
Khost, the country seems mostly quiet for
the first time in a decade.

Surprised? Just about everybody west of
Moscow claims to be. The U.S. media have
only just gotten around to asking a few
feeble questions of the CIA and State
Department sources whom they trusted so
implicitly and parroted so uncritically last
winter and spring.

We all remember the picture they
painted: the People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA) government in Kabul
is illegitimate, isolated and finished. Once
the Soviet military prop is withdrawn, it will
collapse like a house of cards, or be pushed
over by the surging, victorious mujahedin.
Give it a few weeks, “‘six months at most.”

Indeed, most western countries actually
withdrew the staff from their embassies in
Kabul, heightening the impression of chaos
to come.

Now the same official sources in
Washington are floating their explanation
of what went wrong, which is once again

FROM
MOSCOW

being blithely repeated in the media. The
problem, they say, was that the new Bush
administration underestimated Gorbachev
and misjudged the Soviet Union’s determi-
nation to support the PDPA government in
Kabul.

“The expectation was that Moscow really
was looking for little more than a decent
interval” between the departure of Soviet
troops and the expected early collapse of the
Kabul government, says the Washington
Post, quoting an unnamed White House
official.

That keeps it simple. It’s all because
Gorbachev’s smile has iron teeth, and
Bush’s fault for not understanding that at
first. It couldn’t be that Washington’s read-
ing of Afghanistan was dead wrong from
the beginning, or that the U.S. policy of
aiding the mujahedin never had much to do
ee! promoting peace in that country, could
It!

Actually, President Bush, or-anyone else
for that matter, could have obtained far
more accurate intelligence and a much
clearer estimate of what was going to
happen in Afghanistan by reading the Trib-
une. And, it seems, we are still in a position
to explain to them where the entire predic-
tive machinery of U.S. foreign policy has
gone wrong.

The central point is that the turmoil in
Afghanistan is fundamentally related to a
profound social revolution in that country.
Outside involvement, on both sides, has
served to aggravate and protract the civil
war, but has done, and can do nothing to
alter the basic political lines of division.

Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest
and most backward countries. It’s social

Media predictions ©
were echo of U.S.
Afghanistan policy

fabric is torn between an almost medieval
pattern of relations in the countryside,

masses of urban poor — now swollen as a '

result of war — and enclaves of modernity
served by a relatively tiny educated elite.
The country’s ethnic diversity is staggering,
and even its religious tradition is skewed
between Sunni and Shi'ite branches of
Islam.

The revolution launched by the PDPA in
1978 was essentially a modernizing, national-
democratic one. It aimed to bring Afghanis-
tan into the 20th century, to unify it as one
nation under a single central government,
and find a constitutional formula that could
encompass the complexity of Afghan real-
ity. It attempted to bring down feudal rela-
tions in the countryside through land
reform, to emancipate women from medie-
val clerical strictures, to expand and secular-
ize the education system and, its long term
goal, to develop an industrial infrastructure.

The PDPA was — and remains — the
only party in Afghanistan devoted to these
objectives as well as the only party whose
membership cuts across the country’s vast
ethnic spectrum.

Under the PDPA, Afghanistan has gone
through a disastrous period of ultra-leftism,
followed by a difficult yet ambivalent nine
years of direct Soviet military involvement
in the civil war. Through all of this, the
PDPA has survived and developed its polit-
ical and military base but has failed so far to
gain broad social legitimacy.

The PDPA now faces its greatest chal-
lenge more or less unified around its
national-democratic program, and out-
spokenly willing to engage in a broad dia-
logue with opposition forces in order to find
a lasting formula for peace. Tough expe-
rience has taught it the difficult arts of com-
promise and accommodation.

The mujahedin, on the other hand, are
more disunited than ever. Disputes may
rage in Washington over why this might be,
with right-wingers insisting the problem is
insufficient American support, but none of
this has much to do with objective reality.

Look rather at their social composition:
the leadership of the so-called mujahedin
are overwhelmingly feudal landlords, tribal
chiefs, cross-border smugglers, drug-runners,
mercenaries, bandits and religious funda-
mentalists. In short, everyone who has
vested interests in traditional, feudal forms
or has reasons to fear a modernizing central
government.

Any Marxist could have told the CIA 10
years ago that they would never be able to
forge these disparate, parochial and
mutually-hostile reactionaries into any kind
of lasting political alliance. All the money
and modern weaponry in the world will not
create an appealing alternative political
program. Hence, the mujahedin may yet
manage to bombard the residential districts
of Afghan cities with any number of cluster-
bombs (hardly the behaviour of a revolu-
tionary liberation movement, is it?), but
they are not going to win the war.

Perhaps it is time the big media learned to
be skeptical of their governmental and intel-
ligence sources — who seem only capable
of running reality through the cold war
meat-grinder — and tried taking an inde-
pendent reading of the subjects they cover.
It’s not too late to start with Afghanistan.

Or Cambodia. Here too Western hypoc-
risy and cold war monomania is aiding and
abetting some of history’s most ferocious
criminals. Earlier this month, the Cambo-
dian government released its official white
paper on the extent of the genocide commit-

,

%

*
te

othe 4!

AFGHAN MILITIA UNIT ... despite predictions that regime would be overrun by

mujahedin, they have held positions.

ted by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot
between April 17, 1975 and the end of Jan-
uary, 1979.

Even though the world has grown some-
what jaded about this subject, the white
paper’s findings still have the power to hor-
rify: of Cambodia’s pre-1975 population of
around six million, some three million were
murdered or fled abroad. The greater part

of them — probably around two million :

— died in the “killing fields.”

Among the victims, the white paper says,
were fully 80 per cent of Cambodia’s urban
population. Ninety percent of its military
servicemen were liquidated. Non-Khmer
ethnic minorities were for all intents and

purposes eliminated, as were Cambodian
Moslems and Buddhist monks.

Intellectuals were the hardest hit. Of
1,145 doctors and medical nurses in the
country in 1975, only 43 remained alive five
years later. Of 1,240 artists, only 12 sur-
vived. Post-Pol Pot Cambodia could find
among its population just seven lawyers,
two civil servants and three professional
diplomats.

As Cambodia braces for another Khmer
Rouge assault — this time, effectively, with
aid from Washington — everyone who
cares about the truth ought to go out and
nail this white paper to the front doors of
newspaper Offices everywhere.

By HANS LEBRECHT

TEL AVIV — On Sept.22, members
and friends of the Communist Party of
Israel celebrated the party’s 70th anni-
versary in the romantic setting of the
ancient walls of Acre (Akko), which
withstood Napoleon’s armies. Many
thousands from all over the country
filled the seats on the spacious lawn while
others had to content themselves with
standing room. Some even scaled the
heights overlooking the stage.

The festive evening was opened by
Nimr Murkus, mayor of Kfar-Yassif and
a member of the CPI central committee
who read a long list of names of
honoured party veterans of more than 40
years’ standing. “He reported that
hundreds of greetings had been sent by
various parties, organizations and groups
of workers.

CPI deputy-general secretary Tawfiq
Toubi told the gathering that during its
70 years of struggle, the party had put its
stamp on the history of the country and
the crucial fight for peace, socialism and
national liberation and that it has
worked consistently for the daily needs
of the working people and for Jewish-
Arab friendship.

“Thanks to all those comrades who
sacrificed their lives in the revolutionary
struggle ... for a socialist future in our
country, our party has deep roots,” said
general secretary Meir Vilner. Despite
repeated onslaughts on its unity and
ideological and political positions, he
said, the party gained in strength and
reaches its 70th birthday as.a strong,
united Jewish-Arab party. Many slogans
and positions which for decades were
only put forward by communists are
today shared by many groups and par-
ties, he said.

Vilner cited as an example the peace
program adopted at the CPI 18th Con-
gress in 1976 which, among other things,
advances the “‘two-states”’ solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since then,

Israeli Communists
mark 70-year history

this solution has been accepted to vary-
ing degrees by large sections of the non-
communist Israeli peace forces. Recently,
acceptance has extended to leading
members of the ruling Labour Party, the
Palestine Liberation Organization and
almost the entire international commun-
ity. Former barriers of anti-communist
prejudice have been dropped by many
Israeli peace leaders.

The main task today facing Israeli
communists and their partners in the
Democratic Hadash Front, Vilner said,
is the creation of a united, strong peace
force capable of becoming a real alterna-
tive to the current government and its
anti-national, anti-peace policies.

Vilner strongly condemned the occu-
pation terror perpetrated by the Israeli
army and gangs of Jewish settlers. But,
he stressed, even the most brutal occupa-
tion terror will not be able to break the
will and the strength of the Palestinian
people who are fighting for their national
liberation and their own independent
state, as well as for peaceful coexistence
with Israel and all their neighbours.

“We Israeli: communists recognized
the Palestinian state proclaimed in
November, 1988 by the Palestine
National Council and demand the Israeli
government make peace with it,” Vilner
said to enthusiastic applause.

In conclusion, Vilner called on Israeli
communists to guard their international-
ist Jewish-Arab unity as the apple of
their eye and to strive for new successes
in the patriotic struggle for an “Israel
that will peaceful coexistence with its
Arab neighbours — in particular with
its Palestinian sister nation — and foran
Israel built on socialist foundations .. ..”

A rich cultural program featuring sin-
gers, folklore ensembles and poetry fol-
lowed. ‘Its highlight was a magnificent
performance by Moscow's Bolshoi
Ballet, in Israel on its first-ever tour.

Abridged from the U.S. People’s Daily
World.

Pacific Tribune, October 23, 1989 e 9