> Cf. the acct and history of Pakastani socialist
> (imprisoned by the PDPA), "The Tragedy of
> Afghanistan: A firsthand account"
Raja Anwar. The book might as well be entitled "How Not to Make a Revolution."
A friend of mine who is a leftist of Pakistani descent points out that Raja Anwar was an advisor to the elder Bhutto, and I believe he came from the more pro-Soviet wing of the PPP originally. He hooked up with Murtaza Bhutto (the son of the murdered prime minister) to set up Al-Zulfikar, the resistance organization that hijacked a flight from Pakistan to Kabul in 1981. It's my understanding that Raja Anwar -- who was in exile in PDPA Afghanistan during this period -- was jailed by Karmal largely because he had a falling out with Murtaza Bhutto, who at that time was in good with the Parcham faction of the PDPA. None of this is clear in the book, and people who know more could correct me.
The book on Afghanistan draws heavily from the accounts of his fellow political prisoners in Afghanistan, so he has all kinds of juicy tales from the Khalq and from the Parchamites who had a falling-out with Karmal, as well as the various flavors of Maoists, Islamists and others. The book is probably colored by this wealth of inside information in that the picture that emerges is one of the PDPA as a collection of backbiting intriguers, who positioned themselves in relation to Soviet patronage rather than the people of the country, and who pursued "revolution from above" in the very worst sense of that term.
Babrak Karmal comes across as the quintessential unprincpled intriguer, though one can't help but think what the alternative to the Soviet intervention at that point would have been, given the ridiculously adventurist nature of the Hafizullah Amin regime, which almost certainly would have been toppled by the various Islamist bandits in collusion with the CIA had it been allowed to continue for much longer. Of course Karmal had the stigma of a puppet from the very beginning, and the crude way that the Soviets carried out the war (which is not dealth with in much detail in Raja Anwar's book), by bombing villages and dropping landmines everywhere, meant that the outcome was bound to be disastrous.
Or perhaps not. In light of susequent events I don't see how it's possible for anyone on the left not to prefer that the PDPA had won. Under Najibullah there were sincere efforts to broaden out the government (since Raja Anwar's book came out in the late 1980s, there's not much detail on this, either), but the problem was not that the US "abandoned" Afghanistan, but that it continued to support the various muj factions -- through Pakistan -- even after the Soviets left. Had the US war of 2001 been directed against removing the Taliban and installing more progressive forces, I might have even looked favorably on that, in a "they made the mess, they should clean it up" sort of way, but as things were they just ended up backing another collection of cutthroats.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!