Rev Left Radio - Reflections on Afghanistan: The Soviet Intervention (1979-1989)

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Shamayel Shalizi returns to the show to discuss the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the 70's and 80's, and the complex internal politics of Afghanistan at the time. Shamayel was also a guest on our "Reflections on Afghanistan" episode: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/reflections-on-afghanistan-culture-history-the-struggle-for-self-determination Links provided by guest: Decolonial therapy:  https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3OTAxNjc1NzM2ODk4Njc5?story_media_id=2560750183107113600&utm_medium=copy_link  Some of Miss Mina and I’s best Diaspora Passing lives : https://www.instagram.com/tv/CU-Yjl5jX4m/?utm_medium=copy_link https://www.instagram.com/tv/CUxh7yZjnny/?utm_medium=copy_link https://www.instagram.com/tv/CUN1I7HDeYd/?utm_medium=copy_link Our 2 current fundraisers:  https://chuffed.org/project/durkhanum https://aseel.xyz/us/fundraiser-afghans-kunar-ghazni.html ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

So like we talked about in our last talk, you know, there was, there was textbooks being flown in from University of Nebraska at Omaha and being dropped off in KPK, which is what we call Hyperpachnuir in a short end way. And they were being dropped off in teaching five-year-old kids that, you know, the alphabet through arms, like jeam is for jihad and how many grenades does it take to kids? 10 confid as non-Muslims. They were completely eradicating these kids' mind and these kids were so oppressed that they believed it.

And that is who became the Taliban. And I think it's incredibly ironic right now that there is so much of the Muslim world is so aligned with all this and they think it's some kind of anti-American imperialism.

The Taliban were created by America and are just a perfect example of American imperialism. And it's not some radical movement. They were actually, they are just the dogs of the U.S. and Pakistan. And what is important of this is to create, what is the reasoning besides this, besides, you know, the Soviet Union collapsing and that being like a goal of the U.S. and its allies, as well as eradicating communism in the, in the neighborhood. Another huge part of this was to continue instability in Apoenaissance

so that we would never ask for our rightful land back. There was a treaty signed in the 1800s that gave that KPK land on lease to the British Raj, to British Raj, not to Pakistan, because Pakistan was still 100 years away from being made. So then when partition happened, it was kind of like well now that that is changing and the British are doing this that land should be given back to us but no one listened and the British were a part of that

so that's what created so much of this bullshit that is our that was our access to water so it's very very important and now it's Pakistan's access to water it's very important for Pakistan to continue the instability in Aban by any means necessary is that we never have a stable enough government to be able to get that land back. Because during the monarchy, during the communists, we were starting to talk about this. It was a, the treaty was for 100 years, which would put us at exactly 1979, the year that the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan. That would be the year that we should have gotten our land back from Pakistan.

But it wasn't ever Pakistan. It was signed off to British Raj, right? So that's the backbone of this, that I want a lot of people. to digest is it is part of Pakistan, the fabric of Pakistan as a nation is to make sure that they keep KPK, which means doing anything to snuff out any movement that would threaten that. Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On this episode, I have back on the show Shama Yao Shalizi from our reflections on Afghanistan episode we put out a few months ago. This time she is coming on to discuss the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the Sauer Revolution, the legacy of the Soviet intervention, the complexity of differing groups that took part in this conflict, including a multitude of feminist, Maoist, communist, socialist organizations that both supported or opposed Soviet intervention.

as well as fought, you know, other sources of reaction and imperialism, et cetera. The Soviet intervention, and I'm not saying the Soviet Afghan war, and I'm not saying invasion for reasons that will become clear in this episode, but the intervention was a very complicated thing. And I think a lot of people on the left have a very underdeveloped understanding of all of the actors that were operating during this conflict, before, during, and after. And of course, I think most people on the left know the legacy of the CIA and the U.S. propping up what we call the Mujahadine, which eventually, you know, fractured in one of the factions of what we called the Mujahadine became the Taliban, that the U.S. then 20 years later invaded to fight, and we just recently, the U.S. just recently pulled out of Afghanistan. So I think there's this general understanding of that trajectory from the Soviet intervention, the U.S. CIA,

support of the Mujahideen, the growth of the Taliban, and then the eventual war in Afghanistan conducted on behalf of the U.S., which was properly an invasion. So there's just so much complexity, and I couldn't ask for a better guest to go through this stuff with. And Shamaiel, her heart is clearly in it. She has deep connections to Afghanistan, to the culture, to the people, to the history. A lot of her information comes, not from reading books on the subject, but from talking with actual people who lived during this period of time

and getting their numerous and multitudinous views and perspectives on what happened. So for those reasons and so much more, I think this is a really important, really interesting conversation. If you didn't hear our earlier conversation reflections on Afghanistan, I'll make sure to put that in the show notes so you can go and get even more understanding of Afghanistan. I think a lot of people in the West, in the U.S., and on the left in general, don't have enough understanding of that country, of its history,

and I think we're trying our hardest to sort of contribute to fixing that and to deepening our understanding of this amazing place on the globe and its amazing culture and its amazing history, etc. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us on patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio and in exchange for your generous support, you get access to bonus monthly content. as well as just supporting the show.

Because the time and the energy that goes into not only making Rev. Left, but making Red Menace and guerrilla history, it's a lot. And the support means everything and keeps these shows going. Without that grassroots, bottom-up support, this show just quite literally couldn't exist because I would have to be clocking in at some shitty job and spending the vast majority of my waking day, making somebody else rich,

as opposed to hopefully spreading principled, communist education to people in the U.S. and beyond. We have an international audience, and I never forget that. So thank you to everybody that supports the show. Thank you to everybody that will support the show. Thank you so much to Sean Mayle for coming on. And without further ado, here is our conversation. Enjoy.

My name is Shamoyal Shalizir, and I'm an Afghan woman who is currently in Berlin, and I run a e-commerce site called Blingestan, which started as a jewelry and apparel line that kind of was birthed during my high school years in Kabul. and deals mostly with identity and traditions and continuing culture and embracing up on a song. But now it's kind of turned into a bigger platform where I also do my own personal art and, quote, unquote, activism through. And that's, that's who I am. That's part of who I am. Yeah, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Rev. Left listeners might remember you from our relatively recent episode on Reflect. The title was Reflections on

Afghanistan. Really wonderful episode. And on that episode, you mentioned some stuff about the Soviet-Afghan War. We didn't have enough time to go into it in that episode, but I immediately asked you to come back on and cover this topic more in depth. And even before we started recording, I think both of us have this sense. And I know it's true in myself as well, that there's a lack of understanding on the left, at least in the U.S., when it comes to this particular and really important historical event. And, you know, you'd think with the Afghanistan war, that the Soviet-Afghan war would be better understood by Americans, especially on the left, since it's, you know, inseparable from that event. And really, you know, a lot of stuff

we'll talk about today point to why that happened. But yeah, I'm really excited to have you back on and to talk about this topic. Well, thank you for having me on. There was a lot. We seem to have quite a Venn diagram. You know, in a Venn diagram, the middle bit where there's the connection, the correlation, we seem to have that. There was a lot of people who I meet through Blingston that were completely excited and so shocked to see me and Mina on your show because they were avid listeners of you, which was delightful. This didn't happen like once or twice. It happened like dozens and dozens of times after our last show. I really, really appreciated that.

So I hope we can get really into some nitty, gritty stuff here. Absolutely. Yeah, that's really wonderful to hear. I love that. Always pleasantly surprised to hear that, especially from guests who get a really good sort of vibe and, yeah, just a really good reception from the Rev Left audience. And I always loved to hear that. But yeah, let's go ahead and just dive into it because this is a lot of history. And, you know, just based on what the platform offers here as a podcast, we're not going to be able to spend seven hours going into every little detail. But this will be hopefully a really good one. 101 introduction to an under theorized and underthought about historical event on the left. So I guess first and foremost, people probably are familiar with you if they had listened to that first episode, but for those that didn't, can you just talk a little bit about yourself, your political orientation, and your relationship to Afghanistan? Yeah, I would love to and also just give your listeners, like, why are you listening to me

tell this story and why not someone else? Let me just justify myself a little bit. So like I said, I am Afghan. I was born in the U.S. I spent time in Russia, the U.S., and then ultimately moved back to Afghanistan with my father, where I got a very sweet, endearing, and, you know, soul-affirming journey, crash course into being Afghan while my brain was still developing. So my English sounds really good, and I think sometimes it is, but I have a very strong allegiance to my Afghan identity. And when I spent time there, when I first arrived, my biggest desire was to absorb as much as I could about the country and who I was and my family, where they came

from, and everything that I had lacked in the years spending time in Russia and the U.S. So a lot of that was things that we will not be covering in this conversation. But a section of it was sitting around and talking to my countrymen. That was how I learned the most, right? were a very oral tradition, not just because of illiteracy, but just because that's part of our culture as well, oral traditions, sitting and talking to people who had lived through all of these years of history in Afghanistan and kind of absorbing as much as I could from the people around me. I then went on to studying, I studied X, Y, Z, but I ended up doing my master's in social anthropology. And that kind of also helped me get a little.

little bit more understanding of where I sit. I come from a family that had the one aligning thing was a lot of patriotism and nationalism. But I sit firmly on the left. I have people in my family who were monarchists supporters. I have people in my family who were everyday people who ended up fighting with the Mujahideen. I have people in my family who were socialist aligned, people that or part of the, everything we're going to cover, it's reflected in my family, which is the case with a lot of Afghan families, right? Like, we just have a lot of diversity. So growing up with a father who was very decolonized in his thinking and thought very leftist, that was also helpful in terms of understanding it in an Afghan specific way. But another thing I want to make sure that

people understand is going from the imperial core and me technically going from both the imperial core and also like second world you know post-soviet russia that was where i'd come from you know before i got to Kabul and then coming to the global south especially at a young age i saw the necessity for decolonizing myself and how much how many problems were associated to not understanding history and the narratives that are spoken about of abouness on in the west being firmly rooted in this colonized mentality right so hope that gives kind of a rundown of who i am but what i will be saying what i will be talking about today is based mostly on the stories of the people of abouna san and what they lived through in the past you know absolutely

Yeah, and for my part, I think those deep cultural and familial relationships can often give you a better and more well-rounded understanding of a historical event than merely scholarship from a distance, although that's important as well. But really quick, before we move into the details, do you have any theories on why the left in particular just doesn't pay as much attention to this conflict and doesn't really know about it as much as they know about other, even relatively obscure left-wing political historical events? Do you have any theory as to why that might be? I don't have, I have a few theories, but I don't think I can fully give the entire reason, because I'm still confused. I would say one thing, and I mentioned this the last time I was here, within the Afghan community, the fact that there was so many Afghans who left up on Asana in multiple different waves since, you know, the 60s onward, the late 60s, early 70s onward, there is the loudest voices of Afghans in the West are the ones who live there, not the ones who have lived through all of this. I think that makes a big difference because then they change. the history, they change the narrative because of their own agendas and the people that they're aligned with, which then doesn't make this as interesting of a subject for leftists. I've noticed that international leftists like to talk about movements that are winning or won or, you know, can be like a sassy comeback to imperialism. Like let's talk about Cuba, let's talk about Vietnam, let's talk about these things. But then don't, don't want to. to get their hands certainty with something that has a bit of nuance, especially the nuance of Islam,

which people will not touch with a 10-foot pole because of inherent Islamophobia all over the world. And that's not to, I want to be very clear, as the Taliban have taken over Abu Assad, and we will be talking about this, this facet of how they're connected to this whole story. I do also want to acknowledge that with thinking about Islamophobia, let's also not forget that we can't go completely the other.

side and forgive everything that Islam has done because there are plenty of oppressors who use Islam to oppress other Muslims as well as non-Muslims. So there's a lot of nuance here and I feel like that's one of the reasons that people are not interested. I also think history has been so skewed on this. You know, like Hollywood controls so much and the fact that there even is the one fucking Rambo movie. Sorry, I don't know if I can curse.

Yeah, you can't absolutely. The one Rambo, okay, the one fucking Rambo movie that's all left us know about Afronistan. And it's like, that is a skewed American imperialist agendaed narrative. Come on. So these are a few of my theories. And I don't, I'm sure there's other reasons that I, you know, we can kind of hypothesize. But, and there's, you know, people don't listen to the Afghans in Abuasana who could tell you all about this nuance. Yeah.

No, absolutely. I think that's very insightful, and I think while there may be more variables involved, those are definitely a part of the picture. And as you say, you know, the Soviet-Afghan War in particular is a complicated, nuanced, and undercover historical event. And as such, I think it would be helpful up front to create some context before diving into the details. So can you kind of talk about Afghanistan's politics and its culture in the years leading up to the Sauer or the April revolution, as it's called? So Afghanistan's politics, like since the moment it became a nation state in the 1700s is up until now, has been violent and messy and turbulent and unstable.

I don't think this needs to be reflected as something that's inherently part of our culture. While I would say that there is historical documentation and also cultural documentation still to the stay present, that we are a warrior group of people and we do fight. That might be true, but I wouldn't say that it's been our, it's always our faults that we're fighting, right? So let's be able to look at this with nuance and a little bit of more of a decolonized mind that past 300 years have pretty much been unstable, turbulent, and violent. Is that a reflection of our people to some degree, but it's not because of something inherently present in Afghans? because right now the subject in big news media is that Afghans want the Taliban and Afghans are so barbaric that no one can control them and things like that. That's not it.

So I don't want this to fall into that type of thinking. We've been responsible for our problems as well as being preyed to just the geopolitical location of where we are in between big empires throughout these past 300 years, whether it's British, British Raj, Russia, then Soviet Union, the U.S., Pakistan, all of this stuff, geopolitically, or in a very specific place that's been, you know, invaded for thousands of years before the birth of what looks like what is now modern, the modern-day nation states. So that was happening before, when we're talking about the 1960s and 70s, before the revolution, we had a monarchy, and we had been a monarchy since the beginning of our nation's statehood.

Yeah, absolutely. What was the politics like in the 60s? Because I think a lot of people, especially in the West, like we get these snapshot photos of, you know, urban Afghanistan and mid-century, and it all looks very modern. And I think that's sometimes that's as deep as people's understanding of that period of time in Afghanistan's go. So can you talk a little bit about what was the situation? situation there and what were some of the political tensions, you know, against the monarchy even? Right. And that's, that's a problematic, you know, that's part of this whole package of who controls the narrative and why and what is the reasoning, right? Like, you see snapshots of the 60s of women

with their legs out to perpetuate the wars that have been happening for the past 20 years to position them as, you know, inherently different, right? Like, back then, we were different and now we need to be saved because we're not like this and we need to go back to that those are all very toxic you know white ways of looking at us but there is a true tit in the sense that there was rapid development of infrastructure there was roads and highways being being built um you know cobble university being built all of these these things towards what would be known as modernization or progression. But at the same time, underneath the monarchy, and this is not spoken about enough, the monarchy wasn't great for our people. It never was from the time that it started

to the time it was ousted. A lot of, a lot of people slipped through the cracks of the monarchy. The monarchy was inherently Pashtun, which is one of our ethnic groups. We have multiple and they have controlled power. They've consolidated and controlled power for the past 300 years. There has been extreme classism, like poverty, just incredibly widespread in the monarchy during the monarchy times, but then the monarchs live well and so does their government staff and like some elites in our cities, Kabul especially, right? there was deep problems of like no access to education, health care.

There was even tyrannical things going on at different stages. We've had tyrant rulers. We've had psychopathic rulers during the monarchy years. And so a lot of people were not represented fairly by the monarchy. Absolutely. And there's this rural urban divide that we'll get into as we go throughout this conversation. But I think we also mentioned in the reflections on Afghanistan episode, which is the role that, of course, British colonialism played in the construction of Afghanistan as a separate nation state.

And as with so many nation states in the global south, their borders were defined by colonialists, you know, hundreds of years ago. And with no regard whatsoever to the different ethnic enclaves or different, you know, tribal allegiances that may have already existed. But just with Western colonial interest in mind, and one of the things that Afghanistan did for the British, colonialist was kind of create a buffer zone. There's Pakistan and India on, you know, British controlled India on its eastern side. And it was helpful to have a buffer state. And so Afghanistan was carved up and sort of played that role among many other things for the British. So I think, you know, when we talk about these things, a lot of times it goes back specifically to British colonialism. Sorry to cut you up. I just want to interject really quickly, just so

your view is if they're not familiar with this area. When we talk about Afghanistan, because the modern nation state that it was, being in the 1700s, that is a cool 200 years before the formation of Pakistan, also by the British, who also hopefully will get into it, did a bunch of destructive stuff when they were making Pakistan, and then a year later they made Israel. That's why on my page, I often call Pakistan South Asian Israel, because they are virtually the same type of country. So very, very quickly, on for most of its history up until 1947, was bordered by just the British Raj.

There was no Pakistan. And we get the backbone of our problems today is because of the formation of Pakistan. And I don't mean that from a nationalist point of view. I am a nationalist, but I mean it from the point of view of borders being cut up, arbitrarily made by the British. Treaties going back against, you know, things that were written between British Raj and Afghanistan.

Years ago, treaties of that being breaking of treaties and just general colonization. and arbitrary borders. So Pakistan hopefully we'll get into it because they have a chunk of land that was Abouin Astana's, and that is pretty much one of the strongest reasons that there has been instability in Abounaissance since the formation of Pakistan in 1947. And that border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it splits the homeland of the Pashtun in particular right down the middle.

Am I right on that? Yeah, so you can, if you guys are interested, I urge listeners to kind of just look at the way that Abonassad and Abonisand's mountain ranges go, right? The Hindu Kush, where you look at the Hindu Kush, where it starts and how it goes is, was the natural border between British Raj and Abonassan. So that border would have kept all of the pastures in one area as a naturally made. border, right? So all of the passions were on this side of the border. Yes, some traveled, but you know, that's kind of how it worked. There's also significant groups of Hazara people and Balooch people who are also divided and messed up because of that border. I see. Yeah. And like I, like I think we both know, we could spend hours just on that topic alone. But kind of zooming out a

little bit, this is also important to note that this is happening during the Cold War, of course, right? So can you talk about this larger political context in which? Afghanistan was placed particularly with regards to the Cold War? Right. So there was the, you know, there had been the great game being played between the British and Russia kind of courting upon us on. And then once Russia became the Soviet Union, it was Soviet Union and America courting Abouna San.

So the Cold War was happening and people, you know, these countries, these big empires wanted allegiances. and Avonasan was caught between them and our monarchs made quite a few mistakes where we got ourselves quite indebted to them so they were promising the legend kind of goes between monarchist supporters and upper echelon people

that the monarchs were playing the Russians against the Americans and the Americans against the Russians oh they built us Solang Pass what are you going to do for us? Oh, you're going to build us a bunch of schools what are you going to do for us? But that's not quite how it went. We actually ended up becoming the kind of dependent nation that we are still to this day

because of botched deals in this effort of trying to modernize and progress fast. We made deals with the devils or rather our monarchs did. Absolutely. So we have this broader context of colonialism, this newer context of the Cold War, lots of history there. and that leads us into the 70s in the late 70s in which the Sauer or the April revolution occurred. So what was that revolution? What were the party and the broader forces behind it?

And importantly, what were the new communist government's policies? So to kind of slow it down, once the monarchy was being, the monarchy was ousted, obviously that had to happen. Right. So we were first a republic. And that was because how it happened was the monarchy, the last king, Sarsha, was ousted by his cousin called Daudhuan, who took the role as the first president. This was a bloodless coup. He took over and was he was aligned with leftist parties in the country, some of them. And he had a more left way of thinking and was aligned more so with the Soviet Union.

Union than America. But he took over and was president, the first president of the new Republic. But then the Sauer Revolution was a little bit more, it was, it had blood, where we're going to have to slow down and kind of talk about the PDPA. But it was basically one group of communists in Abou Nassan who ousted Do Don, slaughtered him and his entire. entire family and took over bringing in the Republic, the People's Democratic Republic of Afonasan. And to go into this, I don't know if this is the appropriate time to do this, but we need to make sure that your listeners know that as much as the PDPA, the People's Democratic Party of Avonasan is spoken about as the only communists who split up between Halki and Pocchemi groups,

they are not the only communist or only leftist parties in Avanasan. It's kind of part of the whole rewriting of history that happens because of different agendas, that it's labeled as the people who made the Sour Revolution happen are not the only communist. That's just something that I need to make sure people understand. for sure yeah yeah so we have we have these these different factions the the sour revolution occurs the parties can you talk about what the what the new government's policies are after the successful sour revolution which i think killed roughly like a thousand or two thousand people like you said it was bloody unlike the the previous coup but it wasn't like a total bloodbath necessarily right so it starts to get even more messy and i'm kind of i'm kind of going to go on a little bit of a rant so the pd pdpa was divided into two sections, like I mentioned. So there was Pochami, which is, like, you know, of the flag. And they were mainly from cities, but also could be from country, the countryside.

They were typically more well off than the other side of the PDPA. They kind of came from the landowners, the kind of Nawabs, the bureaucratic class, and wealthy families. Typically more urban. There was some, there was more ethnic minorities and women. their overall makeup, as opposed to the Khalkis. And they were, they were, they were, they were less influential than Khalkis as well in terms of both controlling Kabul politics as well as membership in the party. So they, their rift came in 1967 and was based more in the previous governments and drama that happened in the previous governments, right? Because the,

the revolution was in 1978. So they're still having, problems from the 60s and things that happened under the monarchy as well as Dawu Kahn. So they, Chinese were kind of, they were not trusted by Khalkis because they had a closer relationship with Dogh Khan because they kind of believed in working with that establishment to help,

you know, move things along and get it to a more, more communist place. They helped overthrow the monarchy, which also alienated the other. half of the PDPA. So they were also in power to a certain extent

under Daoudhon. Half of his cabinet was Pochamese until he thought they were passing secrets to the Soviet Union, so he fired all of them and installed a one-party rule. So didn't talk about it too much, but there was, I will try and get back to at a later

point, just to prove why so much of the country turned red, not just as PDPA, but in all of the other parties, we had was to do with kind of the fascism that people were living under. Like there was a one-party rule. What the hell is that, right? So two notable Portuguese were Barbara Cormal, who would become president later in the 80s,

and then the following president after him, who was Dr. Nijib, also Porchamim, before he created his own party. And Halkis were more part of the bloodiness of the Sauer Revolution, okay? and they were mostly from rural areas, poor students. Typically, actually, a group of students had been sent by the Afghan government on some kinds of scholarships and training for military as a part of an international relationship between Soviet Union and Afghanistan, sent a group of poor students on scholarships to Soviet Union.

A lot of them came back radicalized as Khalkis. The Khalkis had a big support of the Afghan army, which would later turn crucial in the this revolution because the army helped them. When Khalkis took over, they first were kind of, they were working with the Porcammis and they were including them in the new government until kind of the leftover distrust couldn't go away and they started executing and imprisoning and making a lot of anti-Parcham campaigns. So the first new president after this revolution, after the bloody revolution, would be a Khalki

who was called Tareki. He was party leader. He was one of the founders of the PDPA before it split, and he became the new president post the revolution, only for a few months, though. I see.

So in very simple terms, would it be fair to say that the Parshamese were, as you said, sort of more urban, more middle to upper class, more reformist-oriented, like they thought you had to go through

more, like, you know, bourgeois reformation to get toward a place where you can move more aggressively in a social, direction. And the Halkis were more lower class, more poor, and more like sort of militant communist. But they initially formed a party together to oust the one party dictatorship. But after they came to power, those, as we so often see, those factions and their differences became

much more vivid. And that's when they sort of turned on each other. And in particular, the Halkis really imprisoned and even executed members of the Parsham Meats. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think you can, without doing any overgeneralizations on the makeup of their group, I think you would also say that the Pochemy's were focused more in like an international, nationalistic way as opposed to less nationalistic. And what I, what I do want to say is that almost every other leftist party at the time would accuse both Pochemis and, of being communists only in name and actually just both groups being interested in power

so reformist unreformist rural not rural from educated classes not educated classes the one common thread that the PDPA did have as for the rest of the Afghan left was that they were all only communists in name

and do you personally think that's a fair definition of them yeah Yeah, I would definitely say something as strong as that, because I'm hearing it from other people. If they live through that and there is so much evidence, yeah, because when you aren't doing communist things, but you're using communism to justify it, then, you know, that's, that is lying to the people. And what is, what, why I might be more firm in calling them like a more brutal term is because

they ruined the name of communism in the area by doing this bullshit. There are so many people I have heard so I want to go into this. So after Taraki, Taraki was killed. I know this is something that you would

speak to you were going to ask a question about right? Go ahead. Go ahead. That Taraki was killed by Hephi's Law, I mean, who is, was part of the Halki side, but what he is known as in the area

as being a recognized spy for the U.S. So he was the one who killed Dawud Khan. He was the one who killed the next person who got in power that he would have been, you know, technically rightful leader because of being the party leader of the PDPA.

But actually this man had studied in the U.S. and he had flipped his allegiance then and the harshest time of Avan Asan was during his three-month rule, where 100, over 100,000 people were executed, hundreds of thousands of prisoners went without trial and just were in prison. These could have been people who were Portuguese. These could have been people

from other leftist groups that typically were. They're monarchists. You didn't even have to have a political allegiance, right? And what's crucial here is when you miss these little bits, you can fall into the wrong narratives, right? I have heard Afghanistan, who have spent time in the West trying to justify having left up when I saw him by saying it was too dangerous during that means time and actually fuck the Soviet Union because it's all the Soviet Union's fault. And then in the same breath being like, but he was a recognized spy of the U.S. So if you're a spy of the U.S., are you a communist?

And the fact that he did all of these things, he soured the name of communism and socialism And any of this stuff, he started the sour taste that then was only amplified by foreign meddlement and what we will get into later with Americans kind of taking advantage of the situation. So it makes me really, really angry. And I just want everyone to know that the worst time period in the past 40 years with having a quote unquote leftist government was because he was aligned with the U.S. fascinating yeah infinite complexity and nuances here do you want to talk about though some of the the communists policies that were at least in theory good policies but when implemented pissed off a bunch of different factions i don't even know how you want to frame that but um you know like some of the like nationalizing industries women's education land reform debt forgiveness um peasants to their landlords etc do you want to talk about any of those policies and yes Yeah. Some of those are really great and there is there would have been in from my opinion there was other leftist groups that were doing an even better job and I do want to go into those different leftist groups and what they believed in. I think they would have done a better job from the PDPA than the PDPA either faction of them but there was strides in in education. There was education for everyone not just education for women because under the monarchy I don't know there was a there was some I had I found similar.

crazy number, which was like the biggest expenditure for the government was the military and education, but then 80% of schools were only in Kabul, which is like, what the hell is that? So under the monarchy, don't let Afghan refugees in the U.S. or in the West dictate what's going on. No, under the monarchy, some people lived well, but a lot of people lived really terribly. So under this time, even though it was chaotic from the revolution, the sour revolution onward, there were still moments of, you know, access to education was getting better. Access to health care was getting better.

There was things being developed, whether it was like roads connecting cities and, you know, the sawline pass was made, which made travel very different and import, export politics different. There was strides made, but I cannot give flowers to the PDPA because of all of the the bullshit they did at the same time, right? And also because during all of this time, there was fighting going on. So I don't know if you want to kind of discuss this because I think I mean being a recognized spy of imperialist America would be a great way to talk about how the Soviets intervened. Yeah, if you have anything else to flesh out as far as context before the

USSR invasion and intervention, definitely laid on the table right now. So exactly this time period of Amin's very harsh rule was when the Soviet Union intervened. So they intervened because of how chaotic and unstable Amin was being. They were aligned with the Pocha Amin, so not his party. And Karmal, who would become the next president, were who orchestrated all of this for the Soviets to intervene. Operation Storm 333, however you call it. as well as what followed from them.

So some Soviets believed in the Communist manifesto and how you have to help a country that is trying to achieve communism. So that is part of the reason why some Soviets were invested in Afghanistan to achieve our full redness. But then there was also people in the USSR who didn't want us to be a satellite state.

They just wanted a safer boundary to their empire and an ally in the region. You know, just like how they had been courting of Afghanistan this whole time. The problem here, though, was that the Soviet, Moscow was seeing how crazy I mean was being. He was about to topple the entire country. So they work together with Afghans. And this is incredibly crucial because I think calling this whole thing, the Soviet Afghan war is incredibly misleading. Calling it the Soviet invasion is incredibly misleading. Give us a little agency. Those people intervene because the Kabul government arranged it. Afghans were a part

of it. Yeah. What would you rather, like, what term would you use instead of the Soviet Afghan war or whatever? Well, it's actually funny because I'm currently working at a series of paintings, these large scale paintings that are text-based to kind of, where the audience, I want the audience to be Afghan and kind of have to confront myths of our history and myths of who we are. And I'm currently working on one where it's like, it shouldn't be called the Soviet Afghan War. It wasn't an invasion, it was an invitation, and then it became an intervention, right? I don't know how to put it simply, because I have been thinking about that a lot, because it wasn't Soviets against Afghans, we'll get into it.

It was Soviets aligned with Afghans against other Afghans, against Afghans who were backed by the U.S. and Pakistan and Israel and House of South. There was random Muslims from other countries fighting Chichnians. There was Uzbeks from Uzbekistan. It was so much was happening. And in the years that are qualified as a Soviet-Aggan war, there was so many people fighting against each other that I don't think you can even call it something

that's like Soviet-Afghan. It would be too many names of people to put in that, right? There was a lot of people involved. Just like everything in Afghanistan's history, there was a lot of meddlemen from other people, right? I think calling it the Soviet intervention would be the most helpful for now, right? I see. That makes total sense. And yeah, you're 100% right. It wasn't the Soviet Union first Afghanistan. It was elements of Afghanistan asking the Soviet Union to come help them, given what was happening? So you're talking about the Amin and the sort of chaos under his rulership. When the USSR intervened, what did they do with Amin in particular?

He was killed. He was ousted, killed, and replaced by Babra Korbal. I see. Who was in charge of me. Okay. And so let's talk about the comment. conflict itself then. So there's this intervention. Can you you mention many of them, but they were even like, obviously like conservative Islamic rural formations that didn't like the atheistic USSR coming into their country or even under the PDPA where they did something like compulsory education for all women. That obviously ruffled a lot of feathers in the patriarchal and traditionalist elements of rural Afghanistan. But there was also like Maoist groups fighting the, USSR. It was very, very complicated. So can you kind of, can you kind of flesh some of this out? Like, what groups were fighting? How did the fighting sort of play out? And, you know, honestly, what role did forces like the U.S. and Pakistan play overall in the conflict?

So I think it's always important when we're looking at this to kind of stay decolonialist because it's like there is conservatives in every country. And when we put too, too heavy of a patriarchal, the rural conservative Afghans are super patriarchal, et cetera, it kind of makes it feel like, well, we live under global patriarchy. That can be anywhere. And it's kind of the path that you get on that goes down Islamophobia and brown women needing saving from brown men. There was plenty of rural Afghans who were Islamic and didn't have a problem with their women getting educated. They had a problem as an Afghan with boots of a foreign person. on their land, right? Not everything was so cut and dry post-war on terror, right? There was

groups, there was Maoist groups, like you said, who actively fought. There was people who were leftists and didn't believe in Soviet expansionism. There was Afghan refugees in Pakistan who got pulled into this as a way of making money, just fighting against Soviets, against Afghans against whatever. There was obviously the Afghan army, there was the Soviet army, and there was just so many groups fighting each other. There was Islamists. That is true.

There were people who were doing this in a jihad way, but it gets worsened as time goes on and will get to that because of the idea that the U.S. had in the middle of the Cold War, which was there was things in the Soviet Union satellite countries, histories that would show that this could work, which is turning Islam against communism, right? So the opposite of communism is Islam. Islam is inherently against communism, et cetera, et cetera. That kind of became more of a thing later during when the Taliban formed, right? During the Mujahideen time, it wasn't so cut and dry, oh,

These Russians are here, they want us all to be atheist, right? Because we had our own communists, we had our own socialist, we had our own Maoist aligned, et cetera, who hadn't forsaken their religion, whether it was Islam or being a Sikh or however. So that occurred organically and people saw it. That narrative slipped as time went on and, you know, foreign meddlement and foreign money came into play. And this, the ideological backing of some of the Mujahideen who became the Taliban was founded on this principle that communism is against Islam, so we have to eradicate it. What sad, though, is we've had organic occurring socialism and communism in Afghanistan

for decades prior to this. I mentioned this the last time I was on here. There's the Mangal tribe who are incredibly in a rural place in Abuasad, and they turned red in the early 1900s. We have border Pashtuns on the border of, at that time, Abunasana and British Raj who were all completely red. And there is even a movement called Haudai Hidmat God, which means servants of God, who believed in nonviolent socialism to, and that being aligned with their Islamic ideologies. So it gets complicated. And I think the easiest way to kind of, if you want to say it quickly,

during the fighting, I would say there was Soviet expansionists versus indigenous socialism versus Wahhabi Islam. That would be like kind of the way I would quickly put it. Fascinating. Yeah, you do

a really important and good job of breaking down these oversimplified narratives and as an outsider myself trying to compile information and prep for this episode. It's very hard because there's so much of the stuff that you can find online and stuff does have these very simplistic ways of referring to people and breaking down different factions, etc.

So I'm learning a lot and I really appreciate you, you know, breaking down those overly simplistic narratives and showing the immense complexity of the issue, which may also serve to, you know, put people off from trying to wrap their hands around the enormity of these historical events in the history that led up to it precisely because it can get very, very complicated in the ways that you're laying out. What did the U.S. in particular see with the Mujah Hadin? I mean, I know that you've talked about what role they played, but from the U.S. perspective, why was the Mujah Hadin in particular the sort of forces that they wanted to fund an arm? Well, it's, I have to first acknowledge, it's my pleasure to do this.

I've been trying to change people's minds on this for about 15 years. And I think once you Once you have all of these nuances and you are well versed in global politics, it all makes sense. It's not very difficult to understand what happened and why, right? And what was used against what and why the narrative is the way it is. Unfortunately, you're right. There is a lack of this kind of information on the Internet, in books, especially in English. You know, all of this stuff makes it difficult. So that's what my kind of privilege is of having sat with people who live through all of

this. So the Mujahideen, important when we say the Mujahideen, it can be, the Mujahideen can be what people call anyone who fought against the Soviets and the Afghan army and the Kabul government. The Mujahideen can be for some people only the ones who are Islamists. There is many, the term is not cohesive and it's not one group. The problem now in hindsight is the fact that Islamic Brotherhood, the Umah, et cetera, uses this name, the Mujahideen to kind of be like, look, Islam took down communism and collapsed the Soviet Union, and they rewrite history in this way that Afghans are these, you know, warriors who saved Islam on the battleground of Central Asia,

and not only that, but liberated other Soviet satellites who were Muslim and toppled the Soviet Union debt. that's way too simplified, especially because of the way that the UMA is itself, right? The only reason why these Islamists became who they were was because of the funding. It was because of what the breeding ground that this, that Avaldistan was in at that point, right? But also because of the funding of Americans and Pakistanis and Israel and Israel came and trained, Musad came and trained. Musad walked into Pakistan, was allowed into Pakistan to train Mujahideen in the border towns of Pakistan and Abunasad to go and fight against the Soviet Union.

House of Saud was involved in this. It's all, this is what I hate so much now, is if people don't know this history, then they get so brainwashed with what happened. It wasn't that Allah was on the side of these people and communists that got around. eradicated through it. No, it was like the CIA, anytime the CIA and its allies are involved, communism isn't going to win. We've seen that over and over again. And these Islamists, some of them weren't even Afghan and the fact that they are the ones who are labeled as, oh, the Afghans didn't want communism because it would have been anti-God. That's not fair. You're erasing the dozens and dozens of other parties of Afghans who believed in leftist politics

and had faith, whether it was Islam or not, we cannot erase the struggle of the people because just like there are conservative Muslims in Afghanistan, so too are there other religions, are there leftists, are there leftists who didn't believe in Soviet expansionism? There's way, way too many different groups, and I hate that that struggle gets lost because some of these other groups were doing incredible things that we still need to this day. Like, I would love to tell you a few snapshots of a few of parties. There was Cholet Jolvay, which was a Maoist populist party, and it was very, very rooted in having multiple ethnic groups. You'll start to see some commonalities between some of these. That was part of the foundation of their party.

And they were bigger than all of the PDPA combined until the late 1970s. Even though the last monarch had made their party illegal in the 60s, they were still the biggest group at a time, bigger than the ones who were in power. These are the kind of people that would call the PDPA opportunists who were only communist in name, right? There was the liberation organization of the people of Avonistan who were a Marxist-Leninist Maoist group with links to the revolutionary internationalist movement. They were, they are kind of often not credited as being the Mujahideen that people really support because they were a grassroots movement who did spectacular guerrilla

attacks. And Mujahideen are kind of known for doing that. But a lot of those examples were done by what we call Samma, S-A-M-A, that's the acronym. But they're labeled as, oh, the Islamist. No, they were firmly against Soviet expansionism, but they were socialist. And that always breaks my heart because it's like the Mujahideen are so romanticized, but often who you're romanticizing is this MLM group. They handed out pamphlets and did orations and villages. They turned so many places read, and they had excellent,

politics. They even had an uprising and they protest against the Soviet expansionism without violence at first and they got arrested and killed, a huge group of them. And then they kind of went into the mountains and started fighting more deeply in guerrilla warfare. There was Sittam Mili, which is also known as the National Oppression Party, or also this is a very funny name, or they could be called the Revolutionary Organization of the Toilers of Afghanistan. They were firmly against ethno-fascism. They wanted to address Pashtun supremacy. They thought a lot of our problems

were related to Pashtun's supremacy. And that was true. That is a true thing. And unfortunately, their leader was killed during the Amin killings and that kind of made them die out to a certain degree. There was the revolutionary association of the women of Avanistan,

which still exists to this day, but from my own personal the connections to it. I've heard that since the death of the original founder. It's not really the same, even though they kind of position themselves as, which is heartbreaking. But they were founded completely from intersectional feminism. And they, they did everything from a women's liberation point of view. That's the type of leftists. They were. And actually, the founder, the founder's husband was a head in the liberation organization of the people of Avaunasan, so they were closely linked to each other.

Then there was other parties, I mean, the list goes on. Communist Maoist Party of Avanistan, Chapa Radical, which would be the radical left of Avanistan, progressive youth organization, revolutionary communist cell of Avanistan, organization of the workers of Avanistan, Avanistan's Welfare Party, Solidarity Party of Avalosan, Watan Party, which means Homeland Party. Like, the list goes on. We were not just the PDPA. We have to remember, like I said, there was so many problems under the monarchy that urban, rural, upper class, lower class, kind of the non-existent middle class, men, women, whatever ethnicity all were turning red.

It was because so much of the country is agriculture, so much of the country was living in poverty, and it was just simple. Yeah, that is so, so interesting. And yeah, it totally destroys the idea that, like, some of these narratives, that communism was this foreign agent coming in. Like, no, there's this blossoming internally of left and communist and socialist movements and feminist orientations and formations and movements. And so I think that's really important to push back on that myth, that communism. They were, they were, it couldn't have been foreign brought because a lot of these groups were addressing things that we still have problems with to this. States was very indigenous socialism. We need to still address the problems with ethnic disparities to this day. So many of our problems are because of that, right? And these groups really made

space for that. Yeah, it's fascinating. You personally, given where Afghanistan was when the USSR intervened, what are your personal feelings on the USSR's intervention? Do you support it given what was happening or how do you orient yourself to that reality? Do I support the Soviet? Union intervening at the behest of the Kabul government during Amin's rule, I don't know. It's a really difficult question because I don't want foreign people on our land telling us what to do because there has always been problems with that. But technically, a group of them weren't telling us what to do. We were telling them what to do, which was go fight to help get stability in this country.

I don't believe in the PDPA. I don't align with what they did either faction of them. So I'm going to go with no. I don't think this was the right move. I believe in more of our, the people who are not communists in name. I think we could have, if we hadn't, anytime we make deals with foreigners, it bites us in the ass. And so I would rather stay away from that. In lieu of that intervention, do you, I mean, I know this is an impossible question.

alternative history. But in lieu of that intervention, what do you think would have happened? Do you think there would have been the internal communist movements fighting a mean? Or how do you think that might have played out? I know that's an impossible question, but I'm just interested in your thoughts. Yeah, I would only assume that everyone would kind of fight each other, depending on if they were violent or nonviolent, but just fight each other and kind of have like a power, a power grab. Who knows maybe that would actually make for compromise for a lot of these groups? Because a lot of these groups, like, for example, through the list that I've said, a lot of them were anti-ethnic, ethnic divisions, right? Kind of like healing the Pashtun supremacy and what they've done to all of our people.

Maybe there would have been more having to compromise and it would have been better for us. But there are people who live during the Soviet intervention times that I've sat and spoke to who, if they were in cities, had a relatively okay time, you know, because there was. access to things. There was fear because there was war going on, but you know, throughout Averna's history, there was always a war, you know, there was always fighting. So it wasn't so unknown. I think people were still like, what I don't like hearing about is the unease that having these random people who didn't speak the language just be like boots on the ground was that it made everyday people uncomfortable. Like I had an extended relative who, who when she was telling me about this time period

and her life was like, yeah, there was good, there was safety, I liked that all my kids could go to school, there was this thing, that thing. But then she also mentioned the story where she had one of her youngest children in her arms and was walking around the marketplace and a Soviet soldier

saw him and was saying in Russian, oh, he's such a handsome boy and things like that. And she, and like wanting to hold him and stuff like that. And my, I call her my aunt, she had a panic attack and was like they're going to just steal him and run away. I don't know what these people are up to. So that's uncomfortable. And our poor Agin people have had to live with that time and time again because 20 years later,

stupid American soldiers were doing that. And I'm not saying stupid, like the soldiers who fight on behalf of American imperialism aren't all to blame. But, you know, did similar things and honestly much worse things in some places, right? So it just makes my heart bleed. Like, why can't Agans just have some peace to not have to see some random white man potentially stealing their baby because he thinks he's so cute? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's self-determination all the way and, you know, what communists doesn't support that.

And you've talked about these enormous effects of the fighting on the country and the people. Obviously, the USSR, you know, kind of held some cities but didn't really have control over lots of the rules. areas is that fair to say making making the the rural and the urban divide even more stark with the soviets sort of holding cities etc or am i missing something yeah and let's let's just clarify for the audience like when we talk about at monosan's urban and rural divide i don't want you guys to see it as firmly like one is educated and reads and wears miniskirts and the other is backwards in country bumpkin because that's not what it is i've mentioned that before and that that is very, very, very true even to this day.

I wish we could go into that more in-depthly. But without those examples, what's important to know is that throughout Abouin Assange's history as a nation state, there are parts of the country that have not been under the control of whoever is in Kabul government at the time. So what you're saying about Soviets in the Afghan army and the Kabul government not controlling certain parts of the country is fair, but that existed prior to them as well. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, this is basically a nine-year conflict. By the mid to late 80s, the war, you know, was dragging on, losing support at home, costing the USSR a lot to

say nothing of Afghanistan. Brezhnev was eventually replaced by the reformist Gorbachev, who then began withdrawing troops. Can you talk about how this conflict came to an end and what happened in the immediate aftermath of the USSR's withdrawal? Right. So as you mentioned, the Soviet Union was spending billions of dollars at that time to be in Afan Assad. It was dragging on and it was costing the country a lot of money, which was part of the plan that the U.S. and its allies made when funding the Mujahideen, who one faction became the Taliban. That was part of it, right? Just like how they had cooked up the plan of positioning Islam against communism. So two was the plan to kind of boost. lead the economy of the Soviet Union dry, and they knew that they could do that because Afghans are good fighters and have been doing this for centuries. Even before Avon Asan was called Avonisan, we've been in history books as being ruthless fighters and always winning. We won against the British three times with swords, which is just ridiculous. We weren't

even a united group of people at that time. And I do have a hypothesis that I kind of share with a few close people, which is that is that something that we're still paying the price for that we broke the egos of the British not once, not twice, but three times that that is partially why they continue to meddle in the country and won't let us have peace. That's not the only answer, but sometimes you wonder, because it's like the British have been doing bullshit to have on us on for so, so long. And it definitely pivots when they lost to us three times. It was a, I highly recommend looking up some of the post. poetry and things that have been written about that time of British soldiers being in Avonisana

and just being completely mind-blown at the kind of people we are. And while it might come from an Orientalist lens, it does come from like we are a strong and proud group of people who always want these things. So the Soviet Union was getting bled of their money. And let's also remember that the Soviet Union had conscription. So this was, you know, 18-year-old boys just fighting for something they, not necessarily believed in. They were forced into doing that.

What was happening at the time was that the Madridine were fighting with them, with the Soviets and the Agans, of course. But this one cell of them, this group of them that were financed by the U.S. and Pakistan and trained by Musad and given more money by House of South were getting stronger and this is where I want to bring up the whole Pakistan border. when the division happened, when partition happened, there was a big call or the group of people living on that land to be returned to Afghanistan or to be given their own country. This is part of the activist work that the Khadai-Hadkar were doing.

They wanted to be given to Abuasan or to be their own country and not part of Pakistan. Pakistan obviously didn't listen. They snuffed this entire movement out. And since they were non-violent, it was very easy for ISI to do that. The problem started then because that group of people on that border of Afwanasan and Pakistan have been continuously oppressed. Both by Afwanistan, we have used, our monarchs have used those people to fight their wars, but heavily colonized by Pakistan. And really, given such dire living circumstances, that moments like, oh, here is some money, if you can fight with the Mujahideen,

people would literally take that because they had no food. When you have situations like this of severely oppressed people, they can be manipulated. There used to be songs sung in Pashto, one of our languages in Avonasan, and also one of the languages spoken on this border town, border sliver between Avonasan and Pakistan that is rightfully our land, which is known as Khyber Pachtun Hua. British called it the Northwestern Frontier Province, there was songs sung that don't you dare send your kids to the madrasas, the Islamic schools, where the mullahs are trained by the ISI and British, do not send them there because they're brainwashing us. There was actual

rhyming songs in Pashto sang by our people, don't do that. But slowly, as 40 years of Pakistan went on and the people, our people, were oppressed to such a degree. There is incredible. incredible racism towards the people of that area because they're not, you know, from the other ethnic groups of Pakistan. Baluchi people, Pashtun people and Hazara people are treated like absolute shit in Pakistan. They're not allowed to do anything. They have no rights. And then when you get people in this kind of vulnerable situation, it's easy to manipulate them with money. And that's exactly what happened.

So like we talked about in our last talk, you know, there was there was text. books being flown in from University of Nebraska at Omaha and being dropped off in KPK which is what we call Hyperpachun Hua in a shortened way and they were being dropped off in teaching five-year-old kids that you know

the alphabet through arms like jeem is for jihad and how many grenades does it take to kill 10 confid as non-Muslims like they were completely erratic

these kids' mind and these kids were so oppressed that they believed it. And that is who became the Taliban. And it's, I think it's incredibly ironic right now that there is so much of the Muslim world is so aligned with all this. And they think it's some kind of anti-American imperialism. The Taliban were created by America and are just a perfect example of American imperialism. And it's not some radical movement. men. They were actually, they are just the dogs of the U.S. and Pakistan. And what is important of this is to create, what is the reasoning besides this, besides, you know, the Soviet Union collapsing and that being like a goal of the U.S. and its allies, as well as eradicating communism in the neighborhood. Another huge part of this was to continue instability in upon us on so that we would never ask for our rightful land back. There was a treaty signed in the 1800s that gave that that KPK land on lease to the British Raj, to British Raj, not to Pakistan, because Pakistan was still 100 years away from being made. So then when partition happened,

it was kind of like, well, now that that is changing and the British are doing this, that land should be given back to us. But no one listened and the British were a part of that. So that's what created so much of this bullshit. That is our, that was our access to water. So it's very, very important. And now it's Pakistan's access to water. It's very important for Pakistan to continue the instability in Afghanistan by any means necessary so that we never have a stable enough government to be able to get that land back. Because during the monarchy, during the communists. We were starting to talk about this. The treaty was for a hundred years, which would put us at exactly 1979, the year that the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan. That would be the

year that we should have gotten our land back from Pakistan. But it wasn't ever Pakistan. It was signed off to British Raj, right? So that's the backbone of this that I want a lot of people to digest is it is part of Pakistan, the fabric of Pakistan as a nation is to make sure that they can, they keep KPK, which means doing anything to snuff out any movement that would threaten that. And right now you can see, go ahead and look them up, there is PTM, there is a movement currently that has started in the past couple of decades that is anti-Talib, anti-Isi, anti-Pak, Pakistan anti all of this bullshit that has been created of indigenous people to KPK wanting rights and wanting to not be a part of Pakistan. Yeah, fascinating, deep, deep history there.

And crucial to understanding this and so much more, including modern, I mean, what's happening right now. Can you just talk a little bit about what government took over after the USSR withdrew? Like, how did, like, what happened to the politics of Afghanistan after the withdrawal? Okay, so this was, this was, this got messy, right? So just the case your, your listeners, like, when the Soviet Union left, Apoena-San was like just minutes before the entire union collapsed. And then, you know, the Russian Federation existed and then all of the satellites became their own countries again and et cetera, et cetera, right?

So it's 100% tied to each other. The Soviet Union collapsed because of the intervention in Abonassan. After that, what happened within Avonasan was that, okay, typically said that the Geneva Convention of 1988 was the document that got the Soviets to withdraw, even though the final troops that left were in February, 1989. What the convention said was a timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet Union. But what's more interesting and not often talked about is that the Geneva Convention was a treaty signed by Pakistan and Afghanistan with the USSR and the U.S. serving as guarantors. The treaty said Pakistan would no longer interfere or intervene in Afghanistan, which is something that they have consistently turned their back on. They are to this day meddling in Abuasana all the time.

There was also a stipulation of the voluntary return of all Afghan refugees from Pakistan, which, like, gladly, because they're treated so badly in Pakistan, let's take them back. Great. Then there was the timeline of how the Soviets were planning on pulling out. But through this, with the U.S. serving as a guarantor, they broke an agreement that they had with the Mujahideen. So the Mujahideen said that they would not recognize it, not just because they broke. the U.S. broke an agreement that they had made with the Majdine while they were funding them, the group of the Mujahideen that were Islamists. Also, what happened was that they were not invited to the Geneva Convention, which they took as a huge snuff, right? So they refused to accept

the terms of the Geneva Convention. So that means all the other parties stopped fighting, but the civil war continued because Mujahideen, right? And so the Mujahideen continue the fighting. And again, it's even problematic that I'm calling them the Mujahideen. We need different names because it's a faction of the Mujidine, right? The Islamic ones, that's very necessary to put. So why did they continue fighting? Because after the Soviets left, because it was never about the Soviets. It was about the power.

And now they were indebted to their creators and their funders, which was the U.S., Pakistan, Assad, House of South. So, Dr. Najeev, who was the president at the time, said that he will step down if it helps. This is the first time something like this has happened in Al-Bonesson's history. He's willing to step down and change the power dynamics so that people are happy. When he steps down, he is brutally murdered by the Taliban, the Majidin faction that was Islamic that became the Taliban. He was brutally murdered. Like, it is one of the most disgusting and upsetting things to have ever happened on Afghan soil.

I am not going to talk about that, that story, but if someone is not squeamish, reading about that, it's, they did all types of things to this man's body that they did not need to. No human being should be doing that, but it does show you what kind of mentality did these people have. a man who was a nationalist and a lover. I'm not condoning some of the things that Dr. Najeeb did because he was head of the secret, Haad, the secret, you know, like our version of the KGB.

He was the head of that during a certain time, but he was fiercely anti-Mala, anti-Islamic Wahhabism, anti-all of these people. And he was a staunch nationalist. And a lot of Afghans felt comfortable under his time as president.

A lot of people said that that was the best, time period of up on Assad. But the way that they murdered him was, you know, again, it shows that it was never about Soviet Union. It was never about godlessness. It was never about any of that bullshit. It was always about power, 100%. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. Now, you know, 30 years later, we're looking back over this history and it takes on even new wrinkles, new complications given what happened in the wake of 9-11 and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and then the Afghanistan war, blah, blah, blah. That's an insane legacy that drives exactly back to the Soviet intervention and, of course,

before to colonialism and imperialism more broadly. But just like looking back, what has the legacy of the Soviet intervention and the conflict been, both within Afghanistan as well as outside of the country, particularly with regards to its connection to the eventual war on. and the Afghanistan war by the U.S. This is a good question. I want to address it fully. So I just want to add this one last bit that I think is important for your listeners,

just if they want to have more to bite down on with the whole why some of this stuff is happening. So during the time period of the Taliban, you know, the Madridine being carved out to what is now become what now is called the Taliban. The leader of Pakistan at the time was Zia al-Hak, who was one of the most evilest men on earth. And he has specifically said that he was, he helped the breeding ground of making the Taliban because he wanted a Pakistani generation of Afghans to counter the Pashtunestani generation. So meaning that if he could colonize these people on the border, what he would do is not only create a generation, of these people who were completely unlike their parents and their grandparents who fought for either wanting to be part of Afghanistan or being their own separate nation, what he would do is

make them colonized enough to not fight for that, like the generations before them, but also to help eradicate the Afghan culture and as part of it are very, very fierce embedded in the culture nationalism, right? This would help with continuing the instability in Afghanistan, and these people, the people divided by the colonial border would help make sure

that Pakistan would never have to give our land back. So that's just one more thing I wanted to add. The legacy is a great question because what I'm telling you right now is very different than what is spoken about, especially post

2001, right? What I think is urgent for me to talk about is this fuels capitalist propaganda, number one, this whole story, right? I remember early on in my days of learning about Afghan history, I was quite emotional when I read. This is very early on. Like I was 14, please give me a break, what I'm about to say. But there was, I encountered the fact that in 1980, 60-something countries boycotted the Moscow Olympics in solidarity with the people of Afon Hassan. And I got misty-eyed when I first read that. And then I got like five minutes older.

And I was like, that's just usual the U.S. and its allies kind of wanking themselves off with what they, what they're projected as what they're doing. No, they were, they were already meddling in affairs in Afghanistan, so it's rich and incredibly hypocritical that they led that Moscow boycott. Like, absolute bullshit. And also, all of those countries that boycotted didn't do anything about this situation if they so-called cared about it, right? So there's so many layers of capitalist propaganda. I would love to talk about the fact that Afghans help with this capitalist propaganda. Because the immigrants who left during this time, the refugees who left Abounaissance, wherever they ended up, whether it's the West or even sometimes in Iran and Pakistan, what they end up doing is being supremely anti-communist, somehow kind of, you know, monarchy sympathizing. And not only do they change Abonistan's history with what they tell non-Avgan's, but they help this capitalist American imperialist propaganda where, oh, we had to run from the state.

scary, blonde communist and we ran all the way to the U.S. where now we're taxi drivers and can't afford, you know, meet half the week, you know? But there's a lot of, there's a lot of Uncle Tom kind of, I call it Cockatom, which is our way of saying, uncle. Like there's a lot of Cockatom soft shoes situations by immigrants who have now assimilated to their Western homes or to their non-Afghanistan homes

and perpetuate some kind of creepy, were the successful immigrants and this is why capitalism works and then they also run around talking about how we wore miniskirts in the 60s. Did we wear miniskirts? Yeah, but we also wore miniskirts during the communist time.

Like you're complete, like if you want to talk about women's liberation, why don't you talk about the Afghan women who were fighting for liberation against the fucking monarchy, you know? Stop making everything so westernized.

It's such a westernized way of looking at it. And people really, Afghans and non-Avans alike really, really twist this up. Like, I wrote a piece about this on my site with an Afghan athlete who's kind of toaded around in Western

spaces and Muslim spaces as being like, she ran away from Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion. Invasion. They have to use that word. The Soviet invasion. They ran away her and her family ran away, they went to Netherlands or something, and she speaks 11 languages because of all of the places she had to go through and, you know, the different ethnic groups

and everyone's something, but all of the trauma she had to live through, to come to the Netherlands where she proceeded to become a professional football player or to your audience, professional soccer player for their women's team. And look at this good immigrant story. When it's like, why is she playing for the Netherlands? She should be an amazing. football player in Afghanistan playing for our national team. Oh, wait, you guys destroyed our country. And that's why she can't do that. Don't make this some kind of, even if communism tries to take over your people, they persevered and went above it. And it makes this very anti-communist story as well. There's layers of anti-Islam that gets put into this as well. and it creates the kind of foundations

to justify the war on terror and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan which was an invasion the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. We can call it that. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Whereas with the Soviet intervention, there were elements, at least within Afghan society,

asking them to come in with the U.S., that was completely absent. Right, and it's also rich because the U.S. and its allies created the bullshit of the 90s where there was internal wars, like even Kabul was divided up by districts, by different warlords,

controlled different sections of just the city of Kabul. Imagine the entire country, right? So these people that the U.S. and its allies and, you know, a huge section of the Muslim world funded, and then everyone turned their back on them when there was a power vacuum, the people of Abonistan who had to live through this, were their backs, everyone's backs were turned, when for all of the years prior and then to the

years that followed, the everyday Afghan person, especially our women, are used to justify other people's wars, you know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. The people of Afghanistan are just pawns in the, you know, in the hands of these broader imperialists. They don't actually care about the well-being or the quality of life of the people there. It's just a fig leaf they put over their imperialist ambitions and geopolitical interests so it's definitely worth remembering that it's also incredibly classist some of the discussions that are had about i want to son during this with regards to the 80 the 70s onward right because like i've mentioned if you got

out during that time period you usually were from an upper class so what does it mean when the in time with the loudest voices of a country are their upper class will be manhandle the narrative have, right? You hear all these people who had very privileged lives in Kabul saying, you know, in the 60s, we were free and we lived great. And it's like, well, about 13 million people would say, no, it actually was the exact opposite during that time, just like it was shit during the Mujahideen controlling Abunasantime period. Yeah, and there's obvious parallels to like Cuban exiles in Miami, right? Like, they don't ever talk. Yeah. They never talk about the Batista regime. They play up all this anti-communist tropes. They're embraced by the right wing in America and propped up as like, see how bad communism is in this.

Yeah. Exactly. It's an old playbook. Exactly. And I would like to also mention that a lot of these people are the people who the American puppet government was formed with. A lot of these upper class people who had allegiances to monarchy who were safe somewhere else during all of these years of turmoil and then got put in as presidents.

Both of our last presidents, that's who they were, 100%. So it gets even worse, right? And then what my heart breaks about is the fact that this creates divides within Apon and within the everyday people, right? Like a person, like, for example, if I don't want a daughter of a father who fought with ALO, the Afghan Liberation Organization, who fought as a Mujahideen, anti-Soviet expansionism, but pro-socialism.

I don't want her to be uncomfortable to go into a group of Afghans and talk about the heroic things that her father did, which is what a lot of people feel. And this is, again, class-related. It's ethnic group-related. It's like where you are in the world. But that shouldn't have to exist.

People should be able to celebrate that that was super badass. There was a group of leftist Afghans who ran around handing pamphlets out and giving orations in the middle of villages and leading some of the most spectacular guerrilla war tactics that the world has ever seen. Yeah, absolutely.

So as a way to end this conversation, I absolutely love listening to you talk and learning from you. Your knowledge is profound and deep and your connections, and the amount of heart you put into this is obvious to anybody with ears listening to this. And so I really appreciate you coming on.

Ultimately, what do you hope listeners take away from this conversation? And importantly, what are your hopes for Afghanistan in the coming years and decades? The coming years and decades, I would love for us to open up all of the conversations that people were having in the 60s and 70s, like at 80s and to a certain degree in the 90s. I want to have these conversations about pestian supremacy and the toxicity that the monarchy created, which led to all of these things. Everything, like, nothing happens one-off. Everything domino affected each other, right? We need to heal this huge wound of the problems of pestian supremacy and what that's created and what the monarchs created.

We need to address the deep divides in class. We need to address the general, not just post-tune supremacy, but the ethnic faction fighting and the hierarchy of our ethnic groups. And we need to discuss Islam versus all of our other religions that are organically occurring in Afghanistan. We need to sit and discuss all of this as a nation. I don't know how I would do it, but there is deep healing that needs to be done. And there needs to be country-wide education on this subject so that people know. And we have to stop being able to be used by other people. We have sold ourselves out and we have participated for whether it's trauma-related,

not having food-related, whatever. We've also participated in our own demise. We can't blame everything on the Soviet Union. And that's another problem with the Soviet invasion argument is that it never holds any of the Afghans accountable. Like, Afghans are guilty of so much of this bullshit. There is a lot of things that we have to heal. There was problems before any of these massive wars that put us on the international news, right?

Like, we were fighting as a nation within our land for years prior that just the international news media didn't care and wasn't invested in that as much. We have a lot to heal as a group of people. And I do believe that I always have. hope for my people in my country, but I do believe that what we're seeing right now and the rock bottom that we have hit and we hit in August, I feel like does actually create a space to really be able to, you can't, the beauty of being at the lowest is you can only go up from there, right? And I think I have so much belief and hope in the younger generation because they make up more than half of the country and they were raised with access

to internet and they were raised differently and they're seeing all these years of war and they don't want fighting and they want to have an avonisan that reflects all of the best of the country and gets the shit away. I'm incredibly excited by the fact that in my generation, people are talking about Hazora genocide. People are talking about ethnic. ethnic fighting and how there's been a hierarchy of ethnicity. People are talking about how every single religion that Afghans can be, whether it's Jews, Zoroastrians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindu, all of those were organically occurring in our region or were actually founded in our country,

for example, like with Zoroastrianism. The only one that was brought by other people was Islam, and it wasn't brought by other people. We were killed and raped into Islam, and people are actually starting to talk about this in my generation, and I am so fucking proud. I think there is a lot of hope and a lot of people are ready to make the sacrifice for their country, and that's where I have all of my beliefs in. I don't think anything will happen unless we eradicate the systems that allow all of this shit to go on, right? Like I firmly believe in socialist politics for Abouan Asam because you can incorporate all of these things into, right, where you can't do that in this American imperialist, this global imperialism that's all over the place in this post-capitalism kind of landscape. You can do it.

I want our people to thrive and I do think that that's possible. I hope that people leave this podcast knowing a little bit more about. I want to send and hopefully being thirsty to know more because it's a fascinating history I only touched on it and you know give our leftists some love you guys run around and give all other leftist love give us our true flowers because we have been completely manipulated for so many things when that wasn't even our history you know and it's needed all of this is needed to combat what's currently happening in Afghanistan. If you are a 20-year-old Afghan in the diaspora or you're a 20-year-old Afghan living in

KPK, and you think that the Taliban are anti-American imperialists, well, guess what? They were actually created by those imperialists. So you need, we all serve, it serves us to learn this history, because if not, it will be used against us like it always has. We never have learned from history and we need to learn from history. No more of this Islamic bullshit, these mollas that are trained by outsiders in a form of Islam, we don't even practice. We don't have Wahhabism and Aban Asan.

That's why we're so against it. That's why the Taliban are an anti-Avgid project. We're uninterested in Wahhabism. That's not our brand of Islam. And we need to quickly learn this history. so that it doesn't, we don't repeat it. We can't glorify and idolize the warlords of the past 20 years. We cannot glorify the Americans.

We can't think that anyone is saving us. No one is saving us. We have to save ourselves. We, you know, there's plenty of stuff that needs to be addressed. But I think with a united group of people, it's a lot easier than, you know, disbanded by class and ethnicity and political beliefs. I think if you heal the whole nation, it will all turn red because it is, we are an agrarian nation. Like, we are, why are we good at being guerrilla fighters?

Because we're little rebels, we've always been little rebels, you know, we're a very, our culture is very aligned with socialist way of thinking. And I just want people to start seeing that when you say Islam is the opposite of communism, You actually show that you haven't read the pran, because in the prong, there is the way that economy and economics has spoken about is actually much closer aligned to a socialist economy, not some wonky capitalist economy where House of South controls almost all of the money and funds wars in different countries while they sit in their oil-rich countries doing whatever the hell they want. you know it's there's a lot there's a lot of betrayal that abgans have to understand that's been happening there's a lot of there's a lot of enemies that we have that pose as friends and we have sold ourselves out um there needs to be a strong tie of love i think to all this i don't mean it in a hippie-dipy way i mean it genuinely the moment you have a strong love relationship with abnaissance

that's 3D and you know unconditional it makes it a lot easier to deal with all this stuff i mean that's how i haven't gone crazy in these past 15 years of being like i am speaking into a void it feels like you know when i argue these things and i talk about these things yeah well absolutely i hope this this opens up to more people and gets this narrative out there and your your point about is and not being antithetical to the values of socialism and communism is so important, and I think in every major, I would argue in every major religion, there are kernels of a communistic way of relating to one another, of being equals, of loving your neighbor, right? And these religions do not need to be set up in opposition to those ideas.

They need to have the kernel of those ideas that already exist in their religion amplified and emphasized and say, actually, this is very much in line with our religious beliefs. And to your point about healing and self-determination, a prerequisite, for that possibility is for other countries to leave Afghanistan the fuck alone. Let the people determine their future. They are not the puppets of any other nation state. And it also reiterates the importance of combating colonialism and imperialism, no matter what country you happen to live in,

because it's exactly those forces that would prevent the blossoming of that already existing organic leftism that's present in Afghanistan and so many other countries. It would allow the boot to get off of their necks and allow those, opportunities to open up. So no matter where you live, you have to take seriously opposition to colonialism and imperialism. And by doing that, you're contributing to a human universal movement that gets the boot off of many necks, including the neck of the Afghan people. Wow. Sad. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. And I always learn so much. And so I really deeply appreciate your perspective.

how much heart you put into all of this. Before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you online? Yeah, well, thanks again for having me. It's very fun to speak to you and thank you for being invested in up on a song like this because we very rarely get platforms to discuss any of this, let alone the intricate one and a half hours but can go on for seven hours, nuances of Juanisad's history. You can find a lot of my work that I do on Blingistan, on Instagram,

B-L-I-N-G-I-S-T-A-N, as well as the website at Lingaston.com. There's many things that I would love to recommend to listeners for further information, whether they want to read or listen to or however. And I can maybe put something together to give to you that we can publish with this. Yeah, absolutely. Let's do some resources for people to follow up and learn more, as well as like last time when you offered some music that we can put at the end of this, I think that'd be really cool too.

For sure. I kind of want to input that, the one that I sent you last time, right? Because it was now with music. Oh, yeah. Let's do it. All right. Well, thank you so much, and let's absolutely do this again sometime. Thank you so much and speak to you later.

Kulun, Bahadram, Ano Psylam, The Gala'a'i, al-Jezhidhahezhahe, janehahean jane, jane, jane, jane, jane, jane, jane, y'an-a-ra-te-lawed

the vows-nuduja-barren, al-o, al-Nal the land-de-dai. I'm Ateaman, Zaynoy, Jahn, Jani, John, The Tetracko, HADAMBADASHUKUKIN-HON-EES-Bang-A-W-T-A-W-T-ROW-N-A-N-W-T-A-N-W-T-RIN.

Shukur, God, and two ways, Salah, and, and aught, and aught, hush, Kari, Mawridae, God, Mawai,

Ombrae, Ophry, Amah, Opholam, the starry, Staharerham, Tahriehs, the starry,

starry, Zahajunan, Tawber, chun, chund, and chasm starry... Tawad, Khudun, hudun chasm

at lumb starry star in chan jat, Chubal of three-hungan Jehid Shabhaharanh. Shadhihihii, Shadhihii, Roshan, Jehid, Shabrarii. Gavad, Khadur, and Faharan, Al-Qqqqqqa, Raii.

You know what I'm going to know what I'm going to be able to be able to be a lot of people. SIN-N-O-SIN-N-O-FATION SHAPA-ROW-N-A-N-W-N-A-W-H-Haw-R-S-HON, JORN-N-A-SHA-N-LIN, J'O-N-N-A-Sha-Haw-E-N-N-W. God, I, it's a man, the world, I think, haem, Ophan,

Yamin, and I'm in the al-Laman Mastir, and Rahib, and Mali, and I'm J'amad,

and I'm Jain, I'm The moon, no, tomah tomahean, chasaheilahe jaheadan, c'unahean

ma'an ha'amahean ma'am to-and-a-h-haw-and-o-sham starry. Gawber, Kuhulaharan, Abhaharan,

Alom, Shad, star, rae. Chalbittie Rhyi, Shadhihii Shadaleh.

Chalphi Rheehati Rih, Shadhii Shadhaerah Javan I love Azoch of Chath-Daray

Mawand-Qunot-Kul-Taharanah A-Doh-Sach-T-Laharan. A-Oct-S-T-Laharer. You know what I'm going to be.