Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century Read Online Free Page A

to overthrow Daoud in a dilettantish coup attempt. His security forces made short work of the rebels. The president could be forgiven for failing to realize that these misguided enthusiasts—an odd mix of religious scholars and university students—would one day come to dominate the political life of his country. They styled themselves as a new kind of political movement that they called the “Islamic Society” (Jamiat-e Islami), organized according to the same cell structure used by underground communist groups. (Like the Iranians, they had learned much from the Marxists.) For the moment, though, that was little help to the militants. Most of them disappeared into Daoud’s jails or execution cellars; the rest fled to Pakistan.
    But for Daoud, this was merely a blip along the way. He pushed ahead with his modernization plans. In 1977, he created his own “National Revolutionary Party” and declared that the Republic of Afghanistan was thenceforth a one-party state.He knew perfectly well that there was no room in such a state for a communist party beholden to the wishes of the Kremlin. One day, he knew, a showdown would come. Little did he know that it would pave the way for a renewed competition between the Cold War superpowers—and for the ascendance of a new Islamic insurgency.
    U ltimately, though, the superpower rivalries in the Third World were a sideshow. The crux of Cold War tensions lay in Europe—and, more precisely, in Central Europe. This meant Germany and, along with it, Poland.
    Stationed in East Germany was a 400,000-man Soviet army, heavy with tanks, that formed the core of the Warsaw Pact’s forces in Europe. Together with the armies from the USSR’s satellites, the East-bloc force far outnumbered NATO’s conventional forces. The Kremlin had poured the cash from its oil boom into building a world-class navy and modernizing its nuclear arsenal with the latest submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers.
    By the 1970s, both sides in the Cold War had reached the point where their nuclear forces were capable of destroying the world many times over, and it was above all this destructive potential that persuaded both sides to launch the era of détente, a concept that became one of the watchwords of the decade. Détente assumed that both sides—the Soviet bloc and its American-led rivals—were to remain fixtures on the international scene for the foreseeable future. Few experts at the time took seriously the possibility that the USSR might just collapse.
    Marxism, it should be remembered, was not just an academic theory about historical truth; its adherents believed that they held the key to superior economic management as well. Communist central planners claimed for themselves the mantle of science and efficiency, knowledge that was supposed to grant them an edge over the messy spontaneity of markets. According to one widely held interpretation, American capitalism had demonstrated its essential weakness in the world economic slowdown of the 1930s, only to be pulled out of its doldrums by the extensive state intervention of the New Deal and the centralized planning of the war years that followed. “A Russian seeing the growth of the Communist empire over the past 15 years would not naturally come to the conclusion that its system of political organization was basically wrong,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 1960. “If the issue was simply the relative capacity to promote economic development, the outcome is foreordained [in favor of communism].” Kissinger would later become one of the authors of détente. 9 But there were many others who thought similarly. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a book predicting that the rise of Western multinational corporations and Eastern bureaucratic socialism would end in ahybrid that combined in the strengths of both—an idea that came to be known as “convergence theory.” 10
    In reality, of course, the Soviet colossus stood on