Tue, Nov 18, 2003 page9

• For Afghans, the Soviet days weren't so awful

  Two years after the Talibans fall Afghans fondly reminisce about the best times they can remember -- those under Soviet occupation

  • By Jonathan Steele / THE GUARDIAN
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  Two years after Kabul was freed from the Taliban there's a sense of deja vu about Afghanistan. The striking comparison is not primarily with Iraq, although reminders of the trouble the Americans are having in Mesopotamia pop up constantly. Indeed, in some ways things are worse. Fighting is on a heavier scale, with US helicopters and aircraft conducting almost daily raids on Taliban groups. Swathes of the south have become no-go areas for UN aid workers and NGOs. More than 350 people have been killed by Taliban attackers or US air raids since August, a death toll greater than in Iraq.

  No, Kabul today bears a strong resemblance to the Kabul of 1981. This time the men setting the model are American rather than Russian, but the project for secular modernization which Washington has embarked on is eerily reminiscent of what the Soviet Union tried to do. Schools, hospitals, electrification, rights for women, an expansion of education -- it's the same mix as the Russians were encouraging. Moscow's aid came within the framework of a one-party state and national control of fledgling industry as opposed to today's liberal democracy and an open door for private investors; but for most Afghans, then as now, the ideological trappings matter less than the practical results and the amount of money put to work.

  Kabul's two campuses thronged with women students, as well as men, in 1981. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras and music centers. The Russians did nothing to stop this vibrant private enterprise.

  Of course, Kabul was an invaded city, but most residents did not seem worried. Baghdad-style bomb attacks on Soviet troops were rare and the mujahidin who fought the Russians in the countryside never approached the capital. Unlike the Americans in Iraq, the Russians had enough intelligence from locals to forestall sabotage attempts.

  I was no supporter of the Soviet invasion. Although nominally a response to an invitation from Afghan leaders, the dispatch of Soviet troops in December 1979 was illegal and foolish, as I vigorously argued against an official from the Soviet embassy at a protest meeting at the London School of Economics a few days later. But what I saw in 1981, and on three other visits to several cities over the 14 years that the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was in charge, convinced me that it was a much less bad option than the regime on offer from the Western-supported mujahidin.

  It's a view that surfaces continually.

  "Those were the best times," said Latif Anwari, a translator with an NGO in Mazar. Now in his late 30s, he studied engineering in Odessa from 1985 to 1991.

  "There was no fighting, everything was calm, the factories were working," he said. I asked him about Mohammed Najibullah, the PDPA leader who ruled for more than three years after Soviet troops withdrew. He's universally known as "Dr. Najib." "He's still popular. If Dr. Najib were a candidate in the presidential elections, he would easily win. No one likes the mujahidin," Latif said.

  Or take Margaret Knill, a doughty Christian missionary from Britain who has worked at Kabul's Vocational School for the Blind since 1983. She has seen every regime for the past 20 years and has no hesitation in saying the 1980s was the high point.

  "The Russians re-opened the school in 1979. We had up to 130 pupils when I came. In 1993 the building was destroyed by shelling between the mujahidin factions. We moved closer to the center but, under the Taliban, girls and the six women teachers were excluded." Now the school is reviving, but with 98 pupils it's still behind its PDPA heyday.

  The paradox of the Soviet invasion was that it was both liberation and occupation. The Russians removed a PDPA autocrat, Hafizullah Amin, and installed a more benign ruler from a different wing of the party. But by then the damage had been done. The PDPA's modernizing agenda was easy for local tribal leaders and rural landlords to portray as anti-Islamic. Internationally, the Soviet move was denounced as a push for global expansion. The West, which had already been covertly supporting anti-communist rebels, now massively stepped up its efforts to arm the fundamentalist resistance.

  The Russians did not run a pretty war. They showed no mercy in bombing villages suspected of harboring guerrillas, as they sought to "cleanse" the border regions. But this was no Chechnya. For one thing, Soviet forces were more disciplined than their Russian successors, and they did not use kontraktniki, or mercenaries, who give Russian behavior in Chechnya a bad name.

  Secondly, Kabul was not Grozny. The Russians captured it without a fight, and most Kabulis supported their agenda. This was not a war of Russia versus Afghanistan, but a civil war in which the Russians supported secular, urban Afghans against Islamic traditionalists and their Arab and western backers.

  For a foreign journalist to make that case at the time was a lonely, unpopular business. Had the PDPA given more visas, they might have done better. Instead, they got a diet of romantic stuff about treks with the mujahidin. The West's greatest mistake was not that it armed the mujahidin but that after Soviet troops pulled out, it failed to back UN efforts to broker a coalition between the PDPA and the mujahidins. Washington wanted revenge for defeat in Vietnam, and then US president George Bush senior was not ready to accept a communist role in government, however much educated Afghans preferred that to victory for the fundamentalists.

  Fourteen years later, after mujahidin mayhem and the even worse tyranny of the Taliban, the Americans are picking up where the Russians and the PDPA left off. In one way, Washington is worse off than Moscow was. For the Russians, the jihadi warlords were an external enemy, propped up from outside. Now they are in the country, and even in government, resisting modernization. But in two other ways, the prospects for the Americans are better. The fiercest armed opponents -- the Taliban -- are not getting as much foreign backing as the anti-Soviet mujahidin did. Most Afghans have learned from their parents' mistakes. The mullahs' ability to manipulate people into mistrust of the world has faded.

  Why did Afghans fight the Russians 20 years ago, but not the Americans now, I asked Nasir Rahman, a doctor. "Because they were ignorant," he said. "They didn't know the Russians were bringing schools and hospitals or that neighboring countries would use Afghanistan to put pressure on Russia for their own reasons. Now people wish they hadn't caused all this suffering. People are tired of war."

  I don't expect western leaders will revise their ideological image of Afghan history or accept that arming the mujahidin was a blunder. I just hope they will nurture secular democracy this time by fighting, rather than supporting, the fundamentalists and by helping Afghans to rebuild their shattered state. Let the development money keep on flowing in. Governments will call it aid. I prefer to see it as reparations.
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