In the 1960s, Zahir Shah engaged in ethnic cleansing, forcefully relocating Tajiks and Hazaras and moving Pashtuns in to take over their lands. One source is Nicholas Cullather, professor of history at Indiana University. He discusses the issue in “The man who would be king, again, of Afghanistan�, San Francisco Chronicle Thursday, November 15, 2001.

On King Zahir Shah taking power after the assassination of his father in 1933 you are correct. Thanks for the correction. I’m not sure how I mixed it up, but the significance of the date 1947 is that was the year that Britain had created Pakistan. British imperialism had purposely divided the Pashtun nationality between what then had become Pakistan and Afghanistan. This played a large role in the conflicts to which you refer where a number of different Pastun leaders, including in Pakistan, and including King Zahir Shah, advocated and fought for a united Pashtunistan.

I do not hold the regional boundaries drawn by British imperialism as sacred. The fight for a united Pashtunistan does not necessarily imply national chauvinism. In fact a fight for a larger nation uniting the Pashtun nationality on both sides of the border in a fight against U.S. troops and the U.S. puppet governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan is not something I would oppose.

The role of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was not imperialist. The role of the U.S. is.

When I speak of the potential modernizing influence of the Soviet Union I am talking about the advantages they could have had under a PDPA government with good economic relations with the Soviet Union and the enlightened outlook they both had on women’s rights and education. Just as in Soviet Central Asia where the Soviet Union did more to advance the region economically than was gained for the rest of the Union, Afghanistan as poor country would have only benefited. Similar types of beneficial trade relations could be seen with the Soviet Union and Cuba, with the Soviet Union paying a fair price for Cuban sugar rather than the world capitalist price.

The role of the United States in underdeveloped countries has always been imperialist. The U.S. always extracts resources and labor for the cheapest possible price and uses every kind of force possible against the people of the world to enforce those economic relations. In Afghanistan that U.S. defense of its own imperialism included the CIA organizing, arming, financing, recruiting, and training a holy war of misogynist killers that that they eventually put in power.