For the people of Afghanistan, daily life in the year 2004 does not appear to have progressed from where it was back in early 1978. Fully twenty-five years have been wasted through wars, civil strife and outside interventions, leaving the country desolate and its people desperate.

In April of 1978 a revolution took place which brought the government of president Noor Mohammed Taraki to power. Its declared objective was to establish establish a secular state including freedom of religion and a policy of non-alignment in foreign affairs. This was not a communist take-over (no communist party had ever existed in Afghanistan) and the government maintained that their revolution was not foreign inspired but rather carried out by Afghan nationalists and revolutionaries.

As William Blum tells it:

"Taraki's Peoples Democratic Party inherited a backward nation where people had a life expectancy of about 40 years, an infant mortality rate of at least 25%, absolutely primitive with widespread malnutrition, illiteracy of more than 90%, very few highways, not one mile of railway, most people living in nomadic tribes or as impoverished farmers in mud villages, identifying more with ethnic groups than with a larger political concept, a life scarcely different from many centuries earlier." (1)

Clearly the Taraki government faced a monumental task to bring the nation into the modern era." But they tried. Reform with a socialist bent was the new government’s ambition. It included land reform (while still retaining private property), controls on prices and profits, and strengthening of the public sector, as well as separation of church and state, eradication of illiteracy, legalization of trade unions, and the emancipation of women in a land almost entirely Muslim. These objectives were clearly in the interests of the Afghan people and, had the USA been truly interested in the wellbeing of the Afghanis, they should have supported such efforts for reform.

In May 1979, after just one year of the Taraki government, British political scientist Fred Halliday observed:

"probably more has changed in the countryside over the last year than in the two centuries since the state was established".

Peasant debts to landlords had been canceled, the system of usury (by which peasants, who were forced to borrow money against future crops, were left in perpetual debt to money lenders) was abolished, and hundreds of schools and medical clinics were being built in the countryside.

But the United States saw the hand of Moscow lurking behind all this and decided to thwart Taraki's program. A CIA inspired coup overthrew Taraki (he died or was killed shortly after) and brought his former deputy Hafizullah Amin to power, who tried to institute social change by riding roughshod over tradition and tribal and ethnic autonomy, thereby strengthening the powers that opposed change. The US meanwhile was actively supporting the opposition forces, including the at that time rather unknown (to us) Osama bin Laden.

According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, president Carter's National Security Advisor,

"it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap "

Meanwhile the USSR, which shared a 1600 kilometer long border with Afghanistan, feared the establishment of an Islamic state next door to its southern republics, a fear which certainly in hindsight appears fully justified. They also feared a potential US presence on their southern border. When requested by Amin to send troops, and with a mutual assistance treaty in effect, the Soviet Union walked right into the US trap and got embroiled in what Brzezinski called "the Soviet's Vietnam".
What followed is well known. Ten years of a devastating war, tens of thousands killed and maimed and the country in ruins. Then followed the years of the Taliban, in turn followed by more war ending in todays' US and NATO occupation. With a US appointed government more or less in control of Kabul and the rest of the country in the hands of regional warlords, Taliban forces are again increasing their strength and biding their time for a return to power.

Where does this leave the Afghan people? With the benefit of hindsight, if the USA had not been so blinded by its obsessive anti-communism and instead had supported the social reform efforts of the Taraki government, the people of Afghanistan might have been spared 25 years of misery. If US--NATO promises of today can be believed, their efforts are aimed at the implementation of many of the same reforms the Taraki government had already started or in place in 1979, i.e. building hospitals for the sick and schools for children, giving women equal status with men, the freedom to work and the right to wear or not to wear the burka.

Twenty-five years.....and the struggle appears a long way from being over. For the Afghan people, being caught in the grips of power politics, it must seem like a lifetime.