weapons, leaving up to a million dead and millions of refugees. It is partly because of this that expanded the guerrillas" alienating still wider sec- propaganda mill of the new Reagan administra- the Soviet forces not only smash the mujahedin, but actually of support by tions of the Afghan population. The invasion provided easy grist to the failed te base demand for troops out. than military defeat, the fruits of Gorbachev's rethink of panic; no desperate soldiers escaping by clinging on to the skids of helicopters. The evacuation of the last Soviet batal- fions from Afghanistan was a confession of a political rather domestic and foreign policy rather than a rout on the bat- The Soviet troops had never been sent as a full-scale army of occupation to annex or "assimilate' Afghanistan to the 1451 kilometers of South Viet- E operation was only ever F n8m) showed that thes seen as a limited move to cupy 170,000 square. USSR. The relatively small number of troops (only 120,000 to police 500,000 US troops to oc- square kilometers, compared to 650,000 tlefield.
and cold-warrior in Asia, favours the withdrawal would have been worse: but we do not regard the withdrawal as any kind of victory for the working class. On the contrary, pogrom of progressives, riding to power on a programme of religious obscurantism, opposition to literacy campaigns, in- stitutionalised oppression of