A Slow Reckoning: The USSR, the Afghan Communists, and Islam by Vassily Klimentov (review)

The 1979 Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan toppled one Communist government and installed another. But Moscow and its Afghan allies failed to establish a viable socialist state in the country and found themselves embroiled in a war with an increasingly Islamist-minded Afghan opposition. James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT, 1998) showed how Soviet and other high-modernist states in the twentieth century overlooked complex, vital forms of local social order and knowledge and failed miserably. Vassily Klimentov's book on the Afghan Communist and Soviet governments' policies towards Islam in Afghanistan makes a similar case.

The book opens with a chapter on 'Basmachi and Soviet Islam', which examines how the Soviet experience of fighting opposition forces in Central Asia before World War Two and its subsequent management of Islam in the region shaped the Kremlin's approach to Afghanistan. It provides examples of anti-Soviet Basmachi cross-border operations but fails to thoroughly investigate the origins of Soviet policymakers' later concerns about the potential destabilization of Soviet Central Asia by Afghanistan-based radical movements.

Chapter two sets out to consider the 1978 Afghan revolution. Unfortunately, the commentary lacks a thorough historical analysis of the place of Islam and the rise of political Islam in Afghan society that would have prepared the ground for subsequent argumentation. The Islamists began plotting and rebelling against the government before 1978, during the rule of Mohammad Daoud, and Daoud harshly persecuted them. Klimentov insists that the uncompromising stance towards Islam taken by the ruling Khalq faction of the Communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) undermined the Afghan Communists' future chances of gaining legitimacy. However, he highlights the example of Khalq, which sought compromise on Islamic issues, dismissing them as 'paltry attempts to pay lip service to Islam', before going on to cite more such examples (pp. 47–50). However, these acts do not appear to have been simply hollow gestures — the creation of the Council of Ulema or the funding of mosques and mullahs, for example — and were constantly revised in the direction of increasing concessions to Islamic institutions and customs.

The third chapter, 'Ideology in the Karmal Era', discusses the Soviets' ideological arrogance in imposing their modernization model. Klimentov argues that the Soviet leadership did not understand Afghanistan and failed to consult 'Afghanists' or other specialists. However, during the 1970s and '80s, there were people in the Kremlin who knew the region firsthand: General Secretary Chernenko and Defence Minister Ustinov had fought the basmachi in Central Asia, and the deputy head of the CPSU's foreign relations department, Ulianovskii, had not only studied the region but had even worked in Kabul during the Afghan unrest of the late 1920s. Interestingly, the first two were among the key advocates of the 1979 intervention.

Nevertheless, Soviet government would have benefited from expert advice. Klimentov does not look into the state of Afghan studies in the Soviet Union, instead only listing specific scholars who the authorities failed to consult (p. 58), yet it is not clear that any of them had any actual expertise, since as of 1979, none of them had published serious evidence-based work on relevant Afghan topics. There were brilliant linguists, such as Alexander Grunberg or Martiros Aslanov, who had conducted unique studies of the languages of Afghanistan, but in other fields, such as anthropology, political science or economics, the scholarship was deeply compromised. Alexander Davydov's Afganistan: voiny moglo ne byt´. Krestíanstvo i reformy (Moscow, 1993), for example, examines numerous examples of how Soviet scholars of Afghanistan manipulated Marxist concepts to produce pseudo-scholarly works that ignored known evidence.

Klimentov documents the new concessions made to Islam by the Communist Karmal government but does not consider them to be genuine. They did not convince the opposition, and they became, Klimentov maintains, a (or even the) key factor in the failure of the PDPA under Karmal. 'Islam', he argues, played a decisive part in the Afghan opposition to the Communist governments and the Soviet military intervention. However, the role of Islam in Afghan society constantly changed and took many forms. Moreover, it is important not to confuse...