And Now Afghanistan by Murray N. Rothbard Circa 1980

[Matthew Gaylor]

<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard8.html>


And Now Afghanistan

by Murray N. Rothbard

This article was originally published in the January-February 1980 
issue of The Libertarian Forum.

These are grim times for those of us who yearn for a peaceful 
American foreign policy, for a foreign policy emulating the ideals of 
Thomas Paine, who exhorted America not to interfere with the affairs 
of other nations, and to serve instead as a beacon-light of liberty 
by her example. The lessons of the Vietnam intervention have been 
shuffled off with obscene haste, by masses and by intellectuals 
alike, by campus kids and by veterans of the antiwar movement of the 
1960's. It started with Iran, with bloody calls for war, for 
punishment, for "nuking 'em till they glow."

But just as we have been whipping ourselves up to nuking Muslims and 
to declaring war against "fanatical" Islam per se, we are ready to 
turn on a dime and sing the praises of no-longer fanatical Muslims 
who are willing to fight Russian tanks with their bare hands: the 
heroic freedom fighters of Afghanistan. All of a sudden President 
Carter has gone bananas: declaring himself shocked and stunned by the 
Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, mobilizing the United Nations in 
stunned horror, levying embargoes (my how this peanut salesman loves 
embargoes!), and threatening the Olympics so dear to sports fans 
around the globe.

It's all very scary. There is the phony proclamation of personal 
betrayal – Brezhnev not coming clean on the Hot Line – all too 
reminiscent of the late unlamented King of Camelot before he almost 
got us into a nuclear holocaust over Cuba. There is the same macho 
insistence on regarding every foreign affairs crisis as a duel with 
six-shooters at high noon, and trying to prove that good ole Uncle 
Sam still has the fastest draw.

To set the record straight from the first: Yes, it is deplorable that 
Russia saw it fit to move troops into Afghanistan. It will, we can 
readily predict, be a disaster for the Soviets themselves, for tens 
of thousands of troops will be tied down, Vietnam-fashion, in a 
country where they are universally hated and reviled, and where they 
will be able to command only the cities and the main roads, and those 
in the daytime. But deplorable as the Soviet action is, it is neither 
surprising nor shocking: it is in line with Soviet, indeed with all 
Russian actions since the late 19th century – an insistence on 
dominating countries on its borders. While unfortunate, this follows 
the line of Czarist imperialism: it is old-fashioned Great Power 
politics, and presages neither the "fall" of Southwest Asia nor an 
immediate armed strike upon our shores.

Indeed, the righteous horror of the U.S. and the U.N. at Soviet 
actions in Afghanistan takes on an ironic perspective when we 
consider the massive use of military force wielded not very long age 
by the United States against Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the 
Dominican Republic. Indeed, the ground for Soviet invasion: the 
backing of one side in another country's civil war, was precisely the 
groundwork or the massive and disastrous U.S. military intervention 
in Vietnam. In Vietnam, too, we intervened on the side of unpopular 
repressive regime in a civil war against a popular revolution: and 
now the Soviets are doing the exact same thing. So why the selective 
moral indignation wielded by: Carter, the U.N., the war hawk 
conservatives, the Social Democrats, the liberals, the media, etc.? 
Hypocrisy has become rife in America.

There are two crucial difference between America's and Russia's 
"Vietnam" in Afghanistan. One, that Russia will be slaughtering far 
fewer Afghans than we did Vietnamese. And two, that Afghanistan is, 
after all, on Russia's borders while we launched our intervention in 
Vietnam half the globe away from our shores. And Afghanistan, of 
course is even further away than Vietnam. The whole thing is 
ludicrous and absurd. Is Afghanistan now supposed to have been part 
of the "Free World"? Afghanistan has no resources, has no treaties 
with the U.S., no historic ties, there are none of the flimsy but 
popular excuses that we have used for over a century to throw our 
weight around across the earth. But we go, intervening anyway, loudly 
proclaiming that Russia's actions in Afghanistan are "unacceptable," 
and for which we are ready to scrap SALT, detente, and the feeble 
past attempts of the Carter administration to shuck off the Cold War 
and to establish come sort of modus vivendi with Russia. The 
conservatives, the Pentagon, the Social Democrats, the 
neo-conservatives, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority – all the 
worst scoundrels in American life - have been yearning to smash 
detente, and to accelerate an already swollen arms budget and heat up 
the Cold War. And now Carter has done it – to such an extent that 
such conservative organs as Human Events are even finding Carter 
foreign policy to be better in some respects than that of its hero 
Reagan.

The idiocy of the sudden wailing and hand-wringing over Afghanistan 
may be gauged by the fact that that land-locked and barren land had 
been a Russian client state since the late nineteenth century, when 
clashes of British and Russian (Czarist) imperialism came to draw the 
Afghan-Indian border where it is today. (An unfortunate situation, 
since northwest and western Pakistan is ethnically Pushtu – the 
majority ethnic Baluchi: the same group that populates southern 
Afghanistan and southeastern Iran.) Ever since, the King of 
Afghanistan has always been a Russian tool, first Czarist then Soviet 
– to the tune of no bleats of outrage from the United States.

Then, in 1973, the King was overthrown by a coup led by Prince 
Mohammed Daud. After a few years, Daud began to lead the Afghan 
government into the Western, pro-U.S. camp. More specifically, he 
came under the financial spell (i.e. the payroll) of the Shah of 
Iran, the very man much in the news of late. Feeling that they could 
not tolerate a pro- U.S. anti-Soviet regime on its borders, the 
Russians then moved to depose Daud and replace him with the Communist 
Nur Taraki, in April 1978. Ever since then, Afghanistan has been 
under the heel on one Communist ruler or another; yet nobody 
complained, and no American president threatened mayhem.

The reason for the latest Soviet invasions is simple but ironic in 
our world of corn-fed slogans. For the problem with Hafizullah Amin, 
the prime minister before the Soviet incursion, was that he was too 
Commie for the Russians. As a fanatical left Communist, Amin carried 
our a brutal program of nationalizing the peasantry and torturing 
opponents, a policy of collectivism and repression that fanned the 
flames of guerrilla war against him. Seeing Afghanistan about to slip 
under to the West once again, the Soviets felt impelled to go in to 
depose Amin and replace him with an Afghan Communist, Babrak Karmal, 
who is much more moderate a Communist and therefore a faithful 
follower of the Soviet line. There are undoubtedly countless 
conservatives and Social Democrats who still find it impossible to 
conceive of Soviet tools who are more moderate than other Communists, 
but it is high time they caught up with several decades of worldwide 
experience.

I deplore the Soviet invasion; I hope for victory of the Afghan 
masses: and I expect that eventually, as in Vietnam, the oppressed 
masses will triumph over the Soviet invaders and their puppet regime. 
The Afghans will win. Buy that is not reason whatever for other 
nations, including the United States, to leap into the fray. We must 
not die for Kabul!

The crocodile tears shed for the Afghans point up once again the 
disastrous concept of "collective security" which has provided the 
basis for the U.S. foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson and is the 
very heart and soul of the United Nations. Collective security means 
that any border skirmish anywhere, any territorial rectification, any 
troubles of any pipsqueak country, necessarily provides the sparkplug 
for a general holocaust, for a world war "against aggression". The 
world does not have one government, and so international war is not a 
"police action," despite the successful attempt of the warmonger 
Harry Truman to place that seemingly innocuous label on his military 
invasion of Korea.

U.S. hysteria over Afghanistan is the bitter fruit of the doctrine of 
collective security. If we are to avoid nuclear holocaust, if we are 
to prevent World War III, we must bury the doctrine of collective 
security once and for all, we must end the idea of the United States 
as God's appointed champion of justice throughout the world. We must 
pursue, in the immortal words of classical liberal Sydney Smith 
quoted in this issue, "apathy, selfishness, common sense, 
arithmetic." But we can't be apathetic in this pursuit, because 
time's a wastin.' American officials are ominously spreading the word 
that the Afghan crisis is the most threatening foreign affairs 
situation since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, or even since World 
War II. No doubt: but only because the Carter administration and the 
war hawks have made it so.

Libertarians must mobilize to Stop the War, and to stop it now! We 
must stop the embargo (Carter's favorite foreign policy tactic), 
which is both criminal and counterproductive. Criminal because it 
aggresses against the rights of private property and free exchange. 
Criminal because it represses trade and thereby injures both the 
American public and the innocent civilian public of both Iran and 
Afghanistan. Counterproductive because, while hurting innocent 
civilians, embargoes do nothing to injure the power elites of either 
side. Embargoes will only unify the people of Iran and Afghanistan 
behind their regimes, which they will identify as defending them and 
their food supply against the aggressor Carter.

We must stop the war...and earn the gratitude of all Americans who 
cherish peace and freedom, and of future generations of Americans who 
will, one hopes, emerge from the bloody century-long miasma of 
nationalist chauvinism to see their way clear at long last for the 
truly American and the genuinely libertarian policy of 
nonintervention and peace.

Copyright © 2001 <http://www.mises.org>Ludwig von Mises Institute

<http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard-arch.html>Murray 
Rothbard Archives

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