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Created: January 10, 2002
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Left, Right, and Nowhere A PSN post. Adversarilism unleashed.
On Thursday, January 10, 2002, Louis Proyect posted to PSN:
From: Louis Proyect
Subject: Re: Fred Halliday review books on Afghanistan
>The Afghan story begins in an unlikely way, with a lack of colonial >experience. Afghanistan was forged in the middle of the eighteenth century, >as an expression of resistance against Iran, the most long-established >imperial power in the region. Despite two invasions from British India >(1839-1842 and 1878-1880), Russian encroachment across Central Asia and an >Iranian aspiration to control it, Afghanistan became one of the few Third >World countries not to suffer external domination.
This is absurd. Not being a colony in the formal sense has nothing to do with whether or not you suffer "external domination". Ethiopia was never a direct colony, but Haile Selassie never made a move that was not in the interest of Anglo-American imperialism. The same thing is true of Afghanistan. It was cobbled together from different nationalities for reasons that suited the British Empire's geopolitical goals. The same practice was followed throughout Europe and with the same kind of fratricidal results. To make the world safe for capitalist investment, it is best to keep the natives at each others' throats. Pashtuns versus Uzbekis. Tutu versus Hutsi. And so on.
>The result, as Barnett Rubin lucidly points out in The Fragmentation of >Afghanistan, was that Afghanistan had acquired, by the 1960s, two rival >modernizing elites, the one espousing dogmatic Marxism, the People's >Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the other espousing forms of Islamism, >under the influence of Pakistani and Egyptian fundamentalists. If, as Rubin >aptly puts it, the Afghan state came increasing to rely on external funds, >in this manner becoming a "rentier state," its opponents became rentier >revolutionaries, who sought support, intellectual, financial and military, >from outside the country, and used that support to rally support from, and >impose their will on, the Afghan population itself.
Garbage. Whatever else one says about the USSR, it was not in the business of colonial plunder. One of the biggest complaints of the Western-oriented wing of the CP bureaucracy during the 1970s and 80s is that they were "throwing money away" in Cuba and Africa. Comecon, the Soviet trading bloc, saw a net capital flow away from the USSR into East Europe and Cuba. If this is "imperialism", I am the nephew of Jesus Christ.
>Different as they were in ideology and in patrons, Rubin's analogy between >the pdpa and the Islamists is a strong one. Both borrowed dogma from abroad, >ideologies that claimed to represent the needs of Afghanistan but accorded >little with it.
Yes, what does it matter if the Kabul Communists and their Russian benefactors operated on different economic principles than capitalism. It is "ideology" that matters in this kind of Weberian run amok cold-war crapola scholarship.
>Here, of course, lies the ultimate irony of Western policy in Afghanistan. >Today the Western world is happy to do business with, and indulge >politically, the governments of the newly independent republics of Central >Asia, which are really continuations of the old Brezhnevite nomenklaturas, >replete with grand palaces, presidential votes of 99 percent, refurbished >and "nationalized" KGBs and dutifully pliant mass media. This is precisely >the kind of regime which the war in Afghanistan was fought to remove.
Unbelievably stupid. The newly "independent" republics of Central Asia are wide open for capitalist investment. A Communist Afghanistan would have been closed to it. The fight to open up the Soviet Union to the Exxons and GE's of the world took trillions of dollars and millions of lives to accomplish.
>Fred Halliday is Professor of International Relations at the London School >of Economics.
And he is incompetent.
Louis Proyect
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