Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (4 page)

Meanwhile, a new generation of Iranian thinkers was exploring ways to counter the onslaught of Westernization and to assert a distinctly Iranian political identity. A writer named Jalal Al-e Ahmad chastised his compatriots for their humiliating desire to ape the ways of the West and urged them to find a way back to their own culture. Politician Mehdi Bazargan and religious scholar Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani speculated about how to bring economic policy in harmony with the teachings of the Quran. Sociologist Ali Shariati devised an idiosyncratic fusion of Marxist economics and the Islamic concern for social justice. He succeeded in melding his passion for revolution with what he saw as the original militant mission of the Prophet.

Neither the shah nor his opponents on the Far Left recognized just how potent these new ideological explorations would prove. Pahlavi and the communists were united in their failure to understand the reactive power of Islam scorned.

T
he masters of the Kremlin had little reason to worry about the obscure maneuverings of Shiite scholars. The global geopolitical situation in the seventies offered Moscow many opportunities, and Soviet leaders were eager to seize them. The same oil-price hikes that hit the Western economies so hard were a boon for the USSR, one of the world’s leading petroleum producers. At a time when the West was deeply demoralized by its declining economic fortunes, the Soviets moved to press their advantage. Their greatest successes came in the developing world, where the process of postwar decolonization was approaching its climax.

The epochal American defeat in Vietnam was the high-water mark of Soviet global ambitions. The North Vietnamese capture of Saigon in 1975 conclusively established Moscow’s presence in Southeast Asia. The new pan-Vietnamese communist government immediately granted the USSR full basing rights at Cam Ranh Bay, the superb deepwater port that the Americans had turned into a state-of-the-art logistics terminal. The Kremlin had already established a key strategic foothold
in South Yemen, right at the entrance of the all-important Persian Gulf, after a Marxist government had seized power there at the beginning of the decade. Moscow was cultivating close relations with the regimes in Iraq and Algeria. In Ethiopia, a communist military junta called the Derg seized power in 1974, anchoring Soviet power in the Horn of Africa. The Kremlin and its Cuban allies supported a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party in the bitter civil war in Angola. The USSR maintained a close alliance with South Africa’s African National Congress and a host of other revolutionary movements around the continent. Moscow also supported many leftist groups in Latin America.

But despite this upward trend, the Soviets did suffer just enough setbacks to keep them nervous. The Kremlin offered ample support to Chile’s Marxist president Salvador Allende, but he was toppled by an American-supported right-wing coup three years after he came to power—one of the few clear strategic setbacks suffered by the Soviets during the 1970s. Another was the decision by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to switch allegiance to the Americans after years of receiving Soviet assistance. The memory of that betrayal would haunt the Politburo in Moscow for years to come.

The Sadat precedent had particularly far-reaching consequences in Afghanistan. Throughout the 1960s, Kabul found itself the object of the two superpowers’ intense rivalry. Afghanistan occupied a geopolitical crossroads, right on the USSR’s southern border and north of the Persian Gulf, home to the energy resources that kept Western economies humming. Afghanistan was flanked by two important US allies, Iran and Pakistan, yet it had close historical ties to the Soviet Union, which had been the first country to recognize its independence in 1919. All this made it a focus of Cold War competition—something that the Afghans were able to leverage to their own benefit, at least for a while. The Americans and the Soviets spent hundreds of millions of dollars in their efforts to vie for influence. Washington sent in countless Peace Corps volunteers to offer assistance with agriculture or to teach in schools. Moscow built factories and roads and brought thousands of Afghans to the Soviet Union to learn engineering or medicine. And Afghanistan needed as much of this aid as it could get. It was one of the poorest countries in the region, hampered, among other things, by a weak state that had never managed to overcome the ethnic and geographic rifts that fragmented the country.

By the early 1970s, though, Moscow could begin to feel satisfied with its efforts. The Americans already had stronger regional allies in Iran and Pakistan, and policy makers in Washington were throttling back their assistance to Kabul. As American efforts waned, the Russians stepped up their own efforts to gain well-placed friends
among the Afghan elite. The number of Afghan notables who had studied in the USSR or otherwise directly benefited from Kremlin largesse increased. Most important, the Soviets brought thousands of Afghan soldiers to train in the USSR. The Afghan military was probably the most powerful institution in the country, and one of the very few with national reach. Many of the trainees returned home convinced that Moscow’s way, with its radical creed of social reorganization, offered the best path for overcoming their own country’s backwardness.

Oddly enough, there were even some supporters for this view among the Afghan aristocracy. One of them was Mohammed Daoud Khan, who served as prime minister from 1953 to 1963 under King Zahir Shah (who also happened to be his cousin and brother-in-law). Daoud was a modernizing autocrat rather than a communist. A stint in Europe in his youth had sharpened his awareness of the technological superiority of the West; his long career in the military had given him a deep-seated respect for the realities of power of home. He harbored the conviction that the only hope for his country lay in a secular, modernizing despotism that would wrench it out of its medieval stagnation into the twentieth century. For Daoud, like so many Third World autocrats, Marxism-Leninism was attractive less as an ideology per se than as a blueprint for ruthless national mobilization. In just a few decades, the Bolsheviks had seemingly thrust their backward, overwhelmingly agrarian society into the ranks of the world’s industrialized nations; surely, that was worth emulating. There were also more personal reasons for Daoud’s interest. A wily intriguer, Daoud understood that Soviet backing—including the support of the many Kremlin sympathizers among Afghan military officers and intellectuals—could provide him with a secure base for taking power.

In 1973, Daoud put his plans into action. He launched a bloodless coup that enabled him to seize control of the government while Zahir Shah was away on an Italian vacation. But instead of proclaiming himself king in his cousin’s place, Daoud abolished the monarchy altogether. He declared Afghanistan to be a republic with himself as its president. He received crucial support for his takeover from the homegrown communist party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), whose members recalled his tilt toward Moscow during his term as prime minister under the deposed king.

Daoud soon demonstrated, however, that he was unwilling to let Afghanistan become just another East-bloc satellite. Although he was happy to continue receiving as much Soviet aid as he could get, he also signaled that he was determined to retain Afghanistan’s formal status as a “nonaligned country,” one that had no official alliances with either of the main parties of the Cold War. He maintained cordial
relations with the Americans and expanded Afghanistan’s ties with the countries of the Islamic world, especially Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. During his term as prime minister, he had soured Kabul’s relations with Islamabad through his support for Pashtun nationalism, aggravating the Pakistanis, who had a large Pashtun population on their own side of the border to worry about; that he was willing to soften his policies as president demonstrated his determination to avoid the trap of excessive dependence on the Soviets. The Afghan communists looked on this hedging strategy with skepticism; they felt that salvation could only come from closer ties with Moscow.

But Daoud was also unpopular with many conservative elements in this deeply traditional society. He wanted to build a strong activist state in a country where officialdom’s writ had never extended far beyond the capital. He wanted equal rights and educational opportunity for women. And, in keeping with the overwhelming majority of the other nationalist rulers who ruled in the Middle East and South Asia at this time, he wanted to structure Afghan society along secular lines. This meant the gradual removal of Islamic scholars and clerics from the educational and justice systems. Needless to say, not everyone was happy about this. But the mullahs and rural notables, fragmented and backward, proved ill-equipped to formulate an adequate response to Daoud’s policies. (In contrast to Iran, Afghanistan had no monolithic and powerful religious institutions that could pose a credible counter-weight to the power of the government.) Ironically, it was the rising intelligentsia, emerging from the state-sponsored schools and universities of the new Afghanistan, who would figure out how to fight back more effectively.

It took time for this growing discontent among the faithful to find an effective form of resistance. In 1975, a group of Islamic radicals tried to overthrow Daoud in a dilettantish coup attempt. His security forces made short work of the rebels. The president could be forgiven for failing to realize that these misguided enthusiasts—an odd mix of religious scholars and university students—would one day come to dominate the political life of his country. They styled themselves as a new kind of political movement that they called the “Islamic Society” (Jamiat-e Islami), organized according to the same cell structure used by underground communist groups. (Like the Iranians, they had learned much from the Marxists.) For the moment, though, that was little help to the militants. Most of them disappeared into Daoud’s jails or execution cellars; the rest fled to Pakistan.

But for Daoud, this was merely a blip along the way. He pushed ahead with his modernization plans. In 1977, he created his own “National Revolutionary Party” and declared that the Republic of Afghanistan was thenceforth a one-party state.
He knew perfectly well that there was no room in such a state for a communist party beholden to the wishes of the Kremlin. One day, he knew, a showdown would come. Little did he know that it would pave the way for a renewed competition between the Cold War superpowers—and for the ascendance of a new Islamic insurgency.

U
ltimately, though, the superpower rivalries in the Third World were a sideshow. The crux of Cold War tensions lay in Europe—and, more precisely, in Central Europe. This meant Germany and, along with it, Poland.

Stationed in East Germany was a 400,000-man Soviet army, heavy with tanks, that formed the core of the Warsaw Pact’s forces in Europe. Together with the armies from the USSR’s satellites, the East-bloc force far outnumbered NATO’s conventional forces. The Kremlin had poured the cash from its oil boom into building a world-class navy and modernizing its nuclear arsenal with the latest submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers.

By the 1970s, both sides in the Cold War had reached the point where their nuclear forces were capable of destroying the world many times over, and it was above all this destructive potential that persuaded both sides to launch the era of détente, a concept that became one of the watchwords of the decade. Détente assumed that both sides—the Soviet bloc and its American-led rivals—were to remain fixtures on the international scene for the foreseeable future. Few experts at the time took seriously the possibility that the USSR might just collapse.

Marxism, it should be remembered, was not just an academic theory about historical truth; its adherents believed that they held the key to superior economic management as well. Communist central planners claimed for themselves the mantle of science and efficiency, knowledge that was supposed to grant them an edge over the messy spontaneity of markets. According to one widely held interpretation, American capitalism had demonstrated its essential weakness in the world economic slowdown of the 1930s, only to be pulled out of its doldrums by the extensive state intervention of the New Deal and the centralized planning of the war years that followed. “A Russian seeing the growth of the Communist empire over the past 15 years would not naturally come to the conclusion that its system of political organization was basically wrong,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 1960. “If the issue was simply the relative capacity to promote economic development, the outcome is foreordained [in favor of communism].” Kissinger would later become one of the authors of détente.
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But there were many others who thought similarly. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a book predicting that the rise of Western multinational corporations and Eastern bureaucratic socialism would end in a
hybrid that combined in the strengths of both—an idea that came to be known as “convergence theory.”
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In reality, of course, the Soviet colossus stood on clay feet. The intimidating might of the Warsaw Pact came at a crippling cost. Peacetime Soviet defense expenditures reached their peak in the 1970s. By some estimates, Moscow was spending up to a quarter of its gross domestic product on the military—a burden that no country, however well endowed with natural resources, can sustain indefinitely. The USSR and its satellites, committed to an economics of secretive autarchy, largely walled themselves off from the rest of the world, and it was hard to know precisely what was going on behind that wall. But many planners and economists inside the East bloc were well aware that their system was falling behind.

Central planning had functioned relatively well at the stage when managers needed big factories to produce goods identified as crucial to further industrialization. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Soviets had astounded the world by leapfrogging their way into the smokestack era, studding their enormous empire with steel plants and giant dams. For a few decades into the postwar period, they kept up the pace, rapidly rebuilding the European territories that had been leveled by the Nazi invaders. But by the early 1970s, the boom in investment was petering out. Productivity stalled. Consumer goods and many basic foodstuffs, especially meat and fruit, had never been plentiful in a system where planners gave priority to heavy industry, but now the scarcities became critical. Some historians argue that the West and the East were facing different forms of the same “post-Fordist” crisis: what was to be done with the coal mines and the giant factories that had outlived their usefulness in the new global environment?
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The countries of the West, to varying degrees, ultimately opted to let market forces sort it all out. But the Russians, wedded to an ideological vision of the primacy of heavy industry, had a much harder time coming up with a workable solution. At a time when the pace of innovation was picking up in the rest of the global economy, the tight control over information practiced by communist governments was becoming a critical handicap. The shift to a computerized, knowledge-driven economy was hard enough for the West. For the communist world, it proved almost insurmountable.