Afghanistan: What Should Have Been Done?

I was looking at the ISAF's (pdf) 2007 progress report, and I started reading a little bit of it. The usual bland euphemisms about "remaining challenges," and how Afghanistan realistically requires a "long term committment" and then it followed up with some factoids about roads and schools being built, also, that the hostile provinces only contained 6% of the country's population (something I remember always being said to dismiss the violence in Iraq).

Some of the statistics about redevelopment don't jibe with the sorts of left-wing propaganda that I tend to read (because it's usually vastly more accurate and dependable) and given the fact that this was NATO-ISAF propaganda ("our report is not objective/we have taken sides/we have taken the side of the Afghan people") I thought it best to see if there were any reviews of this progress report.

I didn't find anything very quickly, but I found this article: "NATO chief urges overhaul of Afghanistan effort," which isn't really all that interesting, but what the hell.

It was at that point that I thought that I wish I could be paid to do this digging and take the time to wade through pro-Western propaganda and genuinely evaluate the claims, and come to a "fair and balanced" conclusion on what we're doing in Afghanistan in terms of actual redevelopment (right now, I'm pretty sure that it's insufficient or even counterproductive) and foreign policy (at the moment I'm convinced that it's cycnial imperialism and political posturing).

It also occured to me that we on the left tend to say that the Western powers should just leave Afghanistan and let them sort out their own problems. At the same time we condemn the United States for having done just that after the Soviet Union left the country, allowing the country to descend into bloody chaos that was only arrested with the rise of the Taliban. Of course, the United States had enabled a bloody civil war between the Mujaheddin [sp?] and the pro-Moscow clique in Kabul. It was the fundamentalist warlords, ethnic warlords, gangster warlords, armed by the United States and financed and trained by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who turned the country into a charnel house after the Soviet exit.

So then, I thought of a "what if." What if the pro-Moscow coup in Kabul during the late-1970s had been allowed to stand. I honestly forget the title of the book a prof loaned me in grad school about US Cold War policy, but it stated that Afghanistan had long been a Russian client (since the mid-19th century) because Russia had been the least pressing imperialist between Russia and Great Britain during their "Great Game" in Central Asia during that time. When Russia became the Soviet Union, Afghanistan adapted some vestiges of Soviet political and economic policies to adapt to the changing nature of its now-super power neighbour and ostensible protector. As the Soviet Union became visibly stagnant during the 1970s (far more so than the extent of the USA's relative decline in the face of Vietnam, Soviet nuclear parity, OPEC and the economic recoveries of Europe and Japan), the leadership in Kabul decided to attempt a switch in allegiance from the USSR to the USA. This didn't sit well with pro-Moscow officials in Kabul. Their experience and expertise in managing the Soviet allegiance was to be dismissed in favour of new mandarins more familiar with the new hoped-for protector.

According to that book, this was the source of the palace coup in Kabul, the installation of a pro-Soviet regime, the Carter administration's funding of fundamentalist opposition to this, and the eventual bloody failure of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (If we're going to call the Soviet action and "invasion," consistency demands the same thing for the United States in Vietnam. Both powers were "invited" in by their respective puppets.)

So, at the end of this silly post, I ask this: What if we'd simply left Afghanistan alone in the late-1970s? What if this palace coup had been treated as the internal affair which it was, and allowed Afghanistan to deal with it in their own way?

Would a clearly pro-Soviet regime in Kabul have really arrested the material decline of the moribund Soviet political-economy? Would the Soviet Union's closer proximity to the Indian Ocean coastline have really altered the international balance-of-power? Would a brutal, pro-Soviet dictatorship have been any worse than the civil war, warlord gangsterism, and Taliban lunacy, and NATO occupation that instead occurred?

What would have happened?