I am pleased to see the awaited Part 2 of Josh Messite’s series on Afghanistan. I intended to reply to Part 1 when it first hit the printers, but refrained since any reply would have been premature. Some issues present then have continued in the latest entry to Josh’s multi-part essay, hence this letter. My comments come from a place of respect since an undertaking such as this project is no small feat, and the work itself is largely quite good (but misleadingly titled, as we will see).
First, I wish to praise the incredible detail in the series so far. Josh has drawn up quite the web of connections between various figures and organizations. It makes for great “true crime” reading – yet, herein lays a key flaw. The history of Afghanistan over the past 43 years, or the past century for that matter, is not one of true-crime. It is one of forces, movements, and magnitudes, which have all led to the present moment, wherein the youngest generation of Afghans to remember a time before war are entering their early 50s. So far, Josh’s account unfortunately neglects these processes in favor of a more geopolitics-oriented detective story, somewhat reminiscent of Bitter Lake by Adam Curtis. Let us begin.
Part 1 is both too reductive about 20th-century Afghan history and too focused on individual figures/moments. Regarding the Soviet Afghan War, Josh writes: “They wanted to annihilate their primary competitor […].” This and the following discussion are factually correct, but they suggest that the War was devised entirely by the US, which is simply not the case. American involvement merely worsened and catalyzed ongoing processes. Had the US remained aloof of Afghanistan during the prelude and concert of the War, the country would still have entered catastrophe, and the USSR would still have intervened. How do we know? Because this is not far from what actually happened. The PDPA’s rushed revolution required brutal force to actually effect. The Afghan populace were naturally displeased by this and turned towards violent revolt. The country spiraled into conflict. Meanwhile, factional killings within the PDPA – most notably, Amin’s murder of and coup against Taraki – deeply concerned the Soviets, who felt it necessary to forcibly pacify the fast-deteriorating situation. Thus, an even more destabilizing force was added to the country. In response, Afghans were swept into a spirit of “jihad”, which, for them, usually meant (and still means) the defense of the country against invaders and colonizers (historically the British). In all of this, not a single reference to the Americans is necessary to explain what happened. The famous stinger missiles did not arrive until after 1985 – six year into brutal war and misery. The scale of total aid up to that year was also a relatively small (though by no means insignificant) $25m per year – no different to that delivered to the Contras in Nicaragua i.e. a smaller force in a smaller country. The US began pumping mass aid into Afghanistan from 1985 onward, by which point the war was well underway and the Soviets were already beginning to make withdrawal plans. The Americans added fuel to an already raging fire. For further discussion, I refer readers to Gilles Dorronsoro’s excellent book Revolution Unending.
Josh’s discussion of the Taliban and Al Qaeda suffers similar issues as the above. It is worth quoting at length:
One of Abdullah Azzam’s Pashtun disciples, Mohammed Omar, became the founder and leader of the Taliban movement in 1994. Two years later, Omar’s Taliban seized Kabul and established the first “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” In 1989 or 1990, a CIA officer told investigative journalist Robert Parry that “we want to see Najibullah strung up by a light pole,” and in September 1996 the triumphant Taliban granted the CIA’s wish — Omar’s men broke into a United Nations compound that was sheltering “Najib the Bull,” then the Taliban soldiers captured, tortured, castrated, killed, and “strung up” former-President Najibullah. […]
There is much to dispute here. First, “disciple” is too strong of a word to describe Omar’s relationship to Azzam. They bore no personal contacts. Omar was a low-level fighter, known mainly for his rocket firing skills and his height. Organizationally, he was a member of a so-called taliban front – that is, a group of madrassa students (taliban) who took arms and mobilized together for jihad. These were typically “apolitical” (to echo Dorronsoro and Linschoten), lacking any coherent political ideology. In contrast, Azzam was a major figure in international Islamist circles. Further, Josh suggests that the CIA used Omar to slay Najibullah, but this is untenable. Bette Dam and Dorronsoro both argue that Najibullah’s murder was committed by Omar’s rivals in the Taliban – Dam suggests it was Mullah Rabbani – who also broke a possible safe-passage deal between Najibullah and Omar. The latter was said to have been outraged at the news of the murder. More importantly, the US government had promptly left Afghanistan after Soviet withdrawal, making the suggested link between the CIA and Najibullah’s murder highly unlikely. The Americans would not return until well after the Taliban had swept the country. Further, at no point (until even 2001 or well beyond) were the Taliban organizationally or ideologically linked to Al Qaeda. They remain aloof from one another to this day. The extent of mutual ground between the two have been personal relationships among members of both organizations, and the Taliban’s formal harboring of Bin Laden and AQ. It is worth noting that both often locked heads, and Taliban and AQ (alongside other Salafi) fighters disliked, even hated, each other. Salafists detested supposedly “pagan” practices such as dream interpretation, grave visiting, and Sufism more broadly, all of which has been integral to Taliban ideology. During the 80s and 90s, Afghan fighters (pre- and actual Taliban included) repeatedly voiced their distaste for puritanical and arrogant Arab foreign fighters, whose ideology they didn’t understand or care for. The Taliban’s vision for an Islamic state was nothing alike to that of the Salafi fighters. The former was an idealized return to pre-war Afghanistan, while the latter was a modernist jump to development and power. Moreover, the Taliban have always been a nationalist movement, while AQ and other Salafists are transnationalist. This tension repeatedly led to intense disputes between the two.
Whether before, during, or after the War, these domestic Afghan dynamics are unexamined. The extent to which other moments and trends (such as opium or momarchist faux-development) are discussed is confined to America-centric geopolitics. The setting of Afghanistan is rendered into a vehicle for something else.
So far, the story has largely not been about Afghanistan, and in Part 2, it isn’t at all. However, Part 2 opens with promise. I was quite excited to see a discussion of the Saudi Arabia, the role of Islamism in the Middle East, and the relationship between the two. We are given a discussion of key moments in House Saud history, but it is not a materialist history. Consider this brief but illustrative line: “Faisal also helped pioneer the use of reactionary ‘pan-Islamism’ as a direct response to secular republicanism and atheistic socialism, a strategy Pakistani General Zia would adopt after overthrowing his country’s left-wing government in 1977.” There is no discussion of why Pan Islamism was even viable as a response to Pan Arabism or Soviet Communism – that is to say, Josh does not examine the organic support behind Islamism. Let us do so for our part.
The first blow to the abovementioned secular ideologies, particularly Communism, came with the Nakba. The failure of the Arab CPs to adequately fight Zionism – who, instead, actively supported the ’48 Partition – not unjustifiably tainted the name of Communism for many in the Middle East and beyond. Moreover, the Arab CPs remained broadly worthless when it came to anti Zionism (cf. Alexander Flores, Matzpen), further staining Communism’s name. It goes without saying that they didn’t either overthrow the tyrannical regimes which, then as now, governed that unhappy part of the world. This leaves Nasserist Pan Arabism as the main contender to Islamism.
Unfortunately, its adherents weren’t much luckier than the Communists. In 1967, the disastrous defeat of the Arab armies, and the occupying of the West Bank and Gaza deeply shook Pan Arabism and Arab nationalism as a whole. Of what use was this ideology when several armies could not stop the continued butchering of Palestine? It would be further damaged with the 1973 war. We also mustn’t ignore Pan Arabism’s greatest failure: its inability to undo the colonial borders of the Arab World, breaking it into barely functioning statelets, unable to adequately develop their productive forces and unite against Western imperialism. Secular Arab nationalism thus failed on two fronts: anti zionism/imperialism, and developmentalism.
With both ideologies increasingly discredited, radicalized middle-class professionals – an always volatile group in poor nations – turned toward something else: Islamism, pioneered in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan al Muslimeen. This ideology purported to bring development, power, wealth, equality, etc to Muslim countries through a strong Islamic state, brought in by revolution. In those days, the Ikhwan were violently opposed to their own governments, whom they regarded as “apostate” agents of Western imperialism – or more succinctly, the “near enemy” (as opposed to the “far enemy” of Israel and the West). The “near enemy” were usually (the oftentimes oppressive) secular nationalist governments, whose relations with Saudi weren’t very friendly. It was in this context that House Saud allied with Islamism against Arab Nationalism and Soviet Communism. Yet, this context is completely ignored by Josh’s brief assertion above. Unless I am misreading, he relies on tropes of an “externally created” Islamism, manufactured from “above” to kill movements from “below.” The remaining discussion in this Part does not pertain to Afghanistan, so it is beyond my knowledge. I have been informed that it is largely set-up for Part 3, to which I look forward, with the hope that my present comments are read during the preparation of the next entries in this series.
Comradely,
R. Ashlar
NOTE: I have written the above purely from memory since I am currently away from my house. The reader may consult the following sources for verification or correction of any claims in the above:
Looking for the Enemy – Bettem Dam
An Enemy We Created – Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn
Revolution Unending – Gilles Dorronsoro
Arab CPs and the Palestine Problem – Alexander Flores
Any references from the Cosmopod about the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan are also useful.
