Re: [Marxism] Afghanistan

["dazza1970@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <dazza1970@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Flewers wrote:

'... the adherents of the Cold War analysis continued to promote the 
idea that the Soviet Union represented a totalitarian threat to Western 
civilisation, with the Soviet leadership remaining committed to 
messianic world-revolutionary ambitions. ...

'When Soviet forces crossed into Afghanistan at the end of 1979 to 
prop up a  tottering allied regime, the usually sober Economist gravely 
warned of 'the steady accumulation... of Soviet military power and 
therefore of Soviet assertiveness: the expansion into Afghanistan (and 
Angola, Ethiopia, Yemen before it, and no doubt others yet to 
come)'...'

Fred Halliday (when he was still a Marxist) did a good job of 
deflating Cold War scaremongering about Soviet expansionism in his 1981 
book, 'Threat from the East?' (and in various articles in NLR, etc.) In 
the case of Afghanistan, the Soviet leadership had had cordial 
relations with both the monarchy and the Daud regime, played no role in 
the April 1978 revolution and sent in the troops only in December 1979, 
six months after the CIA had begun funding the mujahideen (as both 
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates have subsequently admitted).

Darren Williams.





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