Last month, Carter's call for a boycott of the Olympic Games -due to be held in Moscow this summer - was endorsed by the House of Representatives. The boycott 'tactic' is merely the latest move in the anti-Soviet witch-hunt launched by Washington since the intervention in Afghanistan.
It has been backed by the cutting of trade and diplomatic links with Moscow, threats to reintroduce the 'draft" and calls to boost NATO. Naturally enough, such sabre-rattling has won the support of Carter's most strident ally - Margaret Thatcher - who has herself floated the idea of bringing back conscription.
The attempt to whip up anti-Soviet hysteria has, of course, been carried out on both sides of the Atlantic under the guise of protecting the 'independent Islamic people' of Afghanistan from Moscow's expansionist policies'.
DEMOCRACY?
If such moves were not so dangerous, they would be laughable. Is it really credible that a government which spent over 10 years pounding the Vietnamese into the ground is concerned with the 'right' of the Afghan people to self-determination?
Is it really believable that governments which have propped up the military butchers of Chile and Brazil, backed the apartheid regime in South Africa and kept an army of occupation in N. Ireland are worried about the democratic rights' of the Afghan workers and peasants?
Hardly. Concern for human rights is the furthest thing from the mind of Carter and Thatcher as they seek to build up a cold-war atmosphere against the Soviet Union. Their concerns are more sinister.
WORLD COP One of the main aims of the anti-Soviet propaganda spilling out of the press at present is to undermine the mass anti-war feeling that grew up in the USA (and elsewhere) in the late 60s in response to Washington's genocidal war in Vietnam.
The depth of this anti-war feeling has been a major handicap to US governments in their role as 'world cop' over the past decade or so. It has helped prevent them directly intervening against liberation struggles around the world - as in Iran, Nicaragua & Zimbabwe - Which threaten imperialist interests.
By trying to pose the USSR as an aggressive power, it hopes to change this opinion and free its hands on the world arena. Increased military spending and a 'pliant' public opinion will, it considers, equip it for more resolute action against liberation struggles that challenge its interests and enable it to intimidate more openly workers' states like the USSR.
Another key aim of the anti-Soviet drive is to defuse growing opposition, in the capitalist countries, to attacks on living standards and democratic rights as the recession begins to bite.
Holding down wages and slashing social services can be "justified' by the need to pour money into defence spending to secure the nation against Soviet 'expansionism'. Isn't this exactly what Thatcher is doing? At the very time of lopping millions off health, education and housing, she has proposed 'upping' defence spending (on Polaris missiles) to the tune of £4000 million.
DEFENSIVE Unfortunately, far from challenging the cold war hysteria being whipped up by a Carter or Thatcher, Labour leaders have meekly gone along with it. Jim Callaghan and other front-bench spokespeople have been only too willing to add their voices to the chorus denouncing the USSR intervention as a 'threat to world peace'.
It is not, however, the USSR which is a threat to world peace.
movement.
The pro-Moscow PDPA of growing unrest with the landlords.
the new PDPA president, the beginning of a 'national democratic revolution'. OPPOSITION Naturally enough, the measures introduced by the whose privileges were undermined. Landlords, usurers, former military officers and armed resistance.
Operating from bases in neighbouring Pakistan, these ton dubbed them) became a growing threat. Hit-and-run attacks were made against regime's measures became a potential target.
confined to outlying areas. In provoked a brief rebellion in Herat, the third largest city, in • which 120 PDPA members and their families were massacred. Smaller armed actions were What attitude should socialists take to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan? Are the Labour leaders - and certain forces on the left -correct to call for their withdrawal as a violation of Afghan rights? Or, on the contrary, is the intervention a boost to the Afghan revolution. Below, Pete Henning takes up the issue which is being debated through the labour to power in 1978 on the backs repressive Daud regime. Despite its narrow base of support - it had only 10,000 members at the time of the uprising - it pushed rapidly ahead with a programme of social measures to break the grip of the Afghan Such measures included land reform, a literacy campaign, legal recognition of trade unions and the introduction of elementary rights for women. Taraki, announced the programme as PDPA met with deep hostility from those layers in Afghanistan drug peddlers began to organise BACKING "freedom fighters' (as Washinggovernment offices, military outposts, schools, villages and even mosques. Anyone favouring the Such actions were not only mid-March 1979, rightist forces Right-wing guerrillas backed by Washington carried out in Kabul itself.
From the outset, these forces won the unbridled support of Washington, deeply concerned over the Afghan development. A little more than a month after the 1978 uprising. - O gerierais. admirals and diplomats met at the NATO Atlantic Command in Annapolis to assess the impact of the revolution and to discuss a possible response.
The first step was to cut off all economic aid to the new regime. The second was to mount a mass propaganda campaign to portray it as repressive' (carefully hiding all mention of the progressive measures it was seizure of power - when only 'controlled' demonstrations were promoted - and in the way they tried to push through their programme of reform. LIMITED There can be no doubt that these reforms were progressive in their attempt to break the back of the old land-owning class in Afghanistan. Instead of relying on the masses to carry them out, however. te PDPA government used the forces of the state. This bureaucratic method only alienated many workers and peasants who became open to the propaganda of the rebel forces.
Under the literacy campaign. for example, PDPA activists who went into the villages to organise classes immediately tried to introduce co-education without regard to the problem