[The following article appeared in the February 12 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), the French section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press].
What is the situation in Afghanistan after more than two years of occupation and general warfare throughout its territory?
Today we no longer need to do what we did in 1980 — assess from afar the reports furnished by "generally well-informed circles." An increasing number of observers are able to go there. In general, they only visit one province, or perhaps two. But by cross-checking reports we are able to get a clear look at the most important problems.
The Russian intervention force, about 100,000 men, patrols a few cities and only controls the major arteries of communication during the day, and only with large numbers of armored cars. They suffer relatively large losses in matériel and men in relation to the total numbers involved.
Russian defeat
Compared to the earlier situation, including the situation that existed at the end of the hated Amin regime, this is a clear setback. There is no longer the shadow of an Afghan state outside the fortified offices in Kabul.
There is, furthermore, virtually no more Afghan army, despite recruitment down to the age of fourteen. These troops, ravaged by massive desertions, are so unreliable and so uncombative that they are no longer given heavy weapons, starting with bazookas, so that the resistance fighters will not get hold of them.
In Nimruz (on the southwestern border with Iran), eighty border posts have been taken by the partisans, the early ones with some weapons, the later ones with loudspeakers, which is reminiscent of the Vietnamese tactic.
State of the resistance
The resistance remains heterogeneous. But all reports confirm that it seems to be simultaneously going through a process of polarization and of organization. Polarization, in that the counterposition between the fundamentalist currents and those who could be more generally considered nationalists is becoming increasingly violent and is moving to armed struggle, creating a sort of second front within the war against the occupier.
In immense central Hazarajat, where the population is of the Shi'ite persuasion and Khomeini is admired as chief of the Iranian revolution, but where the mullahs do not have the authority they do in Iran, the independent Bahsud Front — a federation of politico-military committees — has had armed confrontations with Akbani, who is governor of the province on behalf of the autonomous government of Hazarajat.
And according to Hervé Barre, who reports these happenings, the relationship of forces between the "liberal-democratic" and "fundamentalist" currents is tending to turn in favor of the former.
The confrontations are much worse where there are the forces of the Hezb-i Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In the Panjsher, an operation in which forces were grouping for a large attack on a Russian garrison was sabotaged by a Hezb-i Islami attack on the rear of the sector that was unguarded, forcing the breakup of the commandos who were supposed to have been brought together.
But such a situation, which could seem the most negative, actually provides the basis for a great advance in political consciousness, and spurs the organization and coordination of the nonfundamentalist forces.
Although it is difficult to generalize, it can be said that the opposition by the totality of the Afghan people to the occupation means the resistance must economically and socially organize the population of each province or sector that it controls. And this does not take place without democratization, the appearance of committees, elimination of large landowners in favor of collectives, and division of labor between production and armed struggle.
The consciousness of the relationship of forces brings with it consciousness that the struggle will be long. As a result the leaders of the resistance are organizing for a long haul. Everything is being reorganized, including the education of the children. This has special bearing on the phenomenon that we have already noted, which is that the intellectuals have been joining and continue to join the fronts. This is an unexpected and decisive phenomenon.
When the PDPA [People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan] was moving toward power, and then took it, the intelligentsia turned toward it and expected it to carry out the big indispensible reforms. The Russian occupation and the generalized repression have reduced the PDPA to a skeleton of its former self, and the spontaneous and peasant resistance movements have become this intelligentsia's most solid hope. The Afghan revolution can be forged in this fusion.
We are not there yet of course, and — with the distressing attitude of the big forces of the world workers movement, with the weakness of those who support the Afghan resistance — the initial coordination between the fronts is presently being carried out to the benefit of the "bourgeois" parties in Peshawar. But we can legitimately view this situation as a stage, and one that is very reversible.
There are also other situations. The Nimruz Front, which looks to the authority of a society of ulemas [Muslim theologians] whose leadership is located in Iran, calls itself nationalist and anti-imperialist and rejects not only the USSR and the USA, but also China, whose alliance with the Americans it denounces.
Finally, through various sources, the resistance is now better armed, even if it remains insufficiently armed.
The problem of weapons is reminiscent in all aspects of the situation in the war in Vietnam, although with a certain reversal in the participants. Just as the USSR never provided the Vietnamese with the planes, rockets, and sophisticated weapons (which it gave so generously to Egypt) that would have permitted them to finish off the U.S. army three times faster, so too the imperialists will not arm the Afghan resistance with the means to throw the Russians out of their country.
But as in Vietnam, the situation of occupation troops in a country where an entire people surrounds them with hatred - and even more so than in Vietnam because this involves soldiers of an army that still believes itself to be "red" and "soviet" - leads the occupation troops to become demoralized, and they show it, particularly by selling military matériel and gasoline to buy food, watches, jeans, and embroidered coats.
Their commanders compensate for this rot, as in Vietnam, by carrying out an increasingly terrorist war: high altitude bombing, fragmentation bombs, blind destruction of villages. Just recently, Doctors Without Borders denounced the systematic bombardment of their hospitals.
What perspectives?
There is certainly no short-term solution. But the experience of counterrevolutionary wars for more than thirty years now, and especially — again — the experience of Vietnam, abundantly proves that the most formidable material forces cannot prevail over an entire people, however miserable their weapons. Armand Gatti expressed this perfectly in the assurance that a board with nails in it could destroy a computer.
What will go rotten in Afghanistan is the Soviet army.
The bureaucracy, which has just made "order reign in Warsaw," is in the process of undergoing a creeping defeat in Afghanistan. It would be superficial to underestimate the importance of this.