Given all that has happened in Afghanistan since its demise in 1992, studies of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government have been comparatively few and often suffer from being either too Soviet oriented or too parochially Afghan. Vassily Klimentov’s A Slow Reckoning balances the two aspects in an outstanding book that details the changing relationship between Soviet Afghan policy makers and their client regime in Kabul. Within both there were divisions between true believers in building socialism and pragmatists willing to jettison that project. There was a parallel process occurring in the USSR where Klimentov notes a shift away from a firm belief at the beginning of the 1980s in socialism’s inevitable victory over the west and capitalism to one of growing doubt about both as that decade ended. The book’s documentation is particularly detailed and extensive with over one thousand endnoted citations that include not only published works but Soviet and PDPA documents as well as interview material.
The Soviet Union’s experience suppressing the Basmachi resistance movement in Central Asia in the late 1920s had a profound impact on how it initially viewed the situation in Afghanistan when the PDPA took power in 1978. Iosif Stalin’s policies of radical collectivization had successfully uprooted traditional ways of life there and driven Islam out of the public sphere in the 1930s. From a materialist Marxist-Leninist perspective, this was an inevitable process since Islam was a retrograde belief system condemned to extinction in the crucible of socialist modernization and proletarian class struggle. It was this Soviet model that inspired the radical Khalq faction of the PDPA that would also dismiss religion as a political factor in their plan to transform the country’s economy and social organization. But after the Khalqis jettisoned Islam to declare a secular government and issued radical decrees challenging deep rooted cultural values, opposition to the new government exploded. It was on the verge collapse after only eighteen months in power when the Soviet army arrived to save it in 1980.
The Soviets did this by installing the more moderate Parcham faction to run the government under the leadership of Babrak Karmal, who abandoned the regime’s most unpopular policies and attempted to make it less overtly anti-Islam. Klimentov notes that such an accommodation was tactical, as the Soviets could not conceive of religion being a significant political danger even though their mujahideen enemies were using it to unite groups otherwise hostile to one another. But like the Titanic heedlessly plowing full speed into the iceberg, failure to recognize the danger came too late as the mujahedeen opposition undergirded by an Islamic worldview ripped a hole in their socialist modernization plan, which was now sinking fast. Still, because Karmal was a true believer in the socialist project, he urged the Soviets to continue rearranging the ship’s deck chairs until their inevitable victory was achieved.
Afghanistan may not be the graveyard of empires but it is a place where the dreams of great powers go to die. After becoming leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to disengage from Afghanistan and replaced the true believing Karmal with Mohammad Najibullah, who had previously run the regime’s security and intelligence agency. In the book’s most fascinating chapter, Klimatov describes how (in consultation with Gorbachev) Najibullah rebranded the PDPA as a nationalist party with no socialist agenda that respected Islamic institutions as he prepared to rule without Soviet troops that were withdrawn by 1989. Real politick had replaced ideology: by abandoning the illusory socialist state building project, Gorbachev could claim to have left Afghanistan without being defeated. Najibullah’s government not only survived the withdrawal of Soviet troops but now seemed posed to remain in power as long as military supplies and economic assistance continued to flow from the Soviet Union into Afghanistan. What neither Najibullah nor Gorbachev anticipated was the collapse of the USSR itself in December 1991, and the end of the aid it provided to Afghanistan, precipitating the dissolution of Najibullah’s government a few months later.
Although A Slow Reckoning ends a decade before the Americans arrive with their own modernization plans for Afghanistan, readers will find many parallels in the two attempts. But another takeaway is subtler. It would be post-Soviet Russia that adopted Najibullah’s Afghan template by recruiting Vladimir Putin, another leader drawn from the intelligence and security services, to gin up an ideology rooted in nationalism and religion as a rationale for state power that had no utopian aspirations of any kind.
