From: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Rosser historiography (was: Stalin historiography)
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 1997 14:55:09 -0500 ()


Louis,
     Although it may not have been clear in my post, I am 
well aware that Taliban is a more recent invention.  I was 
anticipating someone who might say, "Soviet rule of 
Afghanistan was better than rule by the Taliban today," 
some of which statements we have already seen on this list, 
and which I am not in disagreement with.
     As for the Mujahedeen, I fully agree that they 
pre-existed 1979.  But they did not become a significant 
force until after the coup.  That was my point and that is 
something you have not remotely contradicted.  There was a 
split from the beginning in the Soviet leadership about 
what to do about Afghanistan and it was quickly realized by 
many that the intervention was a very stupid move.  The 
current Russian Foreign Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, who was 
head of the Oriental Studies Institute, was among those 
arguing such a position from an early period.  
     The Mujahedeen would not have gotten anywhere without 
the Soviet intervention.  It was dumb imperial overreach, 
and the smarter Soviet leaders understood it at the time, 
or soon thereafter.  This was my original point, and it 
stands uncontested by your emendations.
Barkley Rosser 
< 
On Thu, 27 Feb 1997 20:39:46 -0500 (EST) Louis R Godena 
<louisgodena-AT-ids.net> wrote:


> 
> Barkley tells us:
> 
> >The obvious beginning of the end [of socialism's high-water mark] 
> >was the imperial overreach in Afghanistan in 1979.  BTW, 
> >this has nothing to do with defending the Mujahedeen or the 
> >Taliban.  They were a response to the imposition of Karmal 
> >by the Soviets on a formerly neutralist, indeed 
> >Soviet-leaning regime, that was not fundamentalist.
> 
> 
> Barkley,  the origins of the Mujahedeen as a collection of CIA - backed,
> anti-Soviet feudal gangs pre-dates by several years Moscow's invasion of
> December 1979.   Indeed,  by the time of the Afghan revolution (in April of
> the previous year),  the US had been financing and arming fundamentalists
> along the eastern frontier bordering Pakistan for more than a decade.
> They had started doing so in anticipation of a successful Soviet-brokered
> reconciliation of the Parcham and Khalq factions of the People's Democratic
> Party of Afghanistan (PDPA),  and which they fully expected would result in
> a leftist takeover after the ill-starred coup of Mohammed Daoud in 1973.
> 
> Afghanistan had been an important front for anti-Soviet activity,  in fact,
> almost since the creation of Pakistan in 1947.   Over the years,  the
> machinations of Britain and the US in building up feudal and reactionary
> elements in India,  Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan began to bear fruit --
> culminating in the latter country about the time of the birth of the PDPA in
> 1965.    Dean Rusk,  in fact,  had confidently predicted the beginnings of a
> civil war in Afghanistan in June of that year,  predating by nearly fifteen
> years the departure of Amin and the "imposition" of Babrak Karmal (see
> Anthony Arnold, *Afghanistan's Two Party Communism: Parcham and Khalq*
> [Stanford, Ca., 1983:Hoover Institution Press].    For a good modern resume
> of Soviet activity in this region,  see Linda Racioppi,  *Soviet Policy
> Towards South Asia Since 1970*  [Cambridge, 1994: Cambridge University
> Press]).  
> 
> Taliban did not come on the scene as a political force in its own right
> until the Soviet withdrawal in 1988-89 (Saikal Amin and William Malley,
> eds., *The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan* [Cambridge, 1989: Cambridge
> University Press]).
> 
> Get your facts straight,  Professor.
> 
> Louis Godena 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu




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