A Revolution Backfires

The regime of President Mohammad Daoud Khan came to a violent end in the early morning hours of April 28, 1978, when military units stormed the Presidential Palace in the heart of Kabul. Overcoming the stubborn resistance of the Presidential Guard, the insurgent troops killed Daoud and most members of his family. True to Afghanistan's militant traditions, Daoud refused to surrender and died fighting. The coup had begun a day earlier, the date commemorated by Afghanistan's new rulers as the beginning of the Sawr (April) Revolution. According to Louis Dupree, a seasoned observer of Afghan affairs, the coup was an "accidental" one in which the poor organization of the rebels was exceeded only by the ineptitude of the government ("Foul-up followed foul-up, and the side with the fewer foul-ups won"). There was a comical element as rebel tanks, rolling toward the Presidential Palace, were caught in a noonday traffic jam (a half-holiday had just begun a day before Friday, the Muslim Sabbath), and speeding taxis wove in and out of the armored column. Passersby stood around casually, watching the action. The fighting, however, was bitter. Dupree estimates that the siege of the Presidential Palace and engagements at other points around the city cost 1,000 lives (other estimates are as high as 10,000, though this is unlikely).

The coup d'etat was touched off by leaders of the leftist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA-Jamiyat-edemokatiqi-khalqe-Afghanistan, in Dari) and was carried out by the party's cadres and sympathizers in the armed forces. Daoud's determination. to establish an autocratic, one-party state had alienated numerous people, particularly in the capital, and leftists were alarmed at the rightward shift in his policies: the president had reneged on promises to implement progressive reforms, had purged his government of leftists, and in the last years of his rule had sought financial support from Iran, ruled by the shah, and Saudi Arabia in order to make Afghanistan less dependent on Soviet economic aid. The immediate cause of the coup, however, was the murder on April 17 of Mir Akbar Khyber, a Marxist ideologue associated with the Parcham faction of the PDPA (see Daoud's Republic, 1973-78, ch. 1). The identity of the murderer was never established. The PDPA claimed after its seizure of power that the perpetrator was an agent of Daoud, while other accounts suggest with varying degrees of credibility that the assassin was an Islamic militant, a member of SAVAK (Iran's secret police under the shah), or a member of a rival PDPA faction. Although the government issued a statement deploring the assassination, PDPA leaders apparently feared that Daoud was planning to exterminate them all. On April 19 the party organized a mass rally and march on the occasion of Khyber's funeral. As many as 30,000 demonstrators (although the most reliable estimates are between 10,000 and 15,000) marched through the streets of Kabul and shouted anti-American slogans in front of the United States embassy. This show of opposition strength unnerved Daoud, who, after an inexplicable delay of a week, ordered the arrest of seven top PDPA leaders.

Daoud committed a fatal error in not ordering the immediate imprisonment of PDPA Central Committee member Hafizullah Amin. Placed under house arrest shortly after midnight on April 26, Amin hurriedly stitched together a plan for a coup d'etat and enlisted his children as couriers to communicate with PDPA cadres in the military. Because of police negligence, Amin's children were able to carry their father's messages through the streets of Kabul unimpeded; their task was made easier by the fact that most Afghan military officers lived with their families in the city rather than in separate military encampments. By the time Amin was taken off to jail late in the morning of April 26, the plan for the uprising had been disseminated.

The coup d'etat's execution the following day, however, revealed the haste with which the plan had been composed. The insurgents, including infantry, armored, and air force contingents, were poorly coordinated. The population remained ignorant of developments because the rebels did not secure the Radio Afghanistan broadcasting station in Kabul until the late afternoon on April 27. PDPA leaders were clearly not in command. It was not until 5:30 P.M. that they were liberated from a government prison. Some months after the April coup, Amin admitted at a press conference that it had occurred two years ahead of the PDPA's schedule for revolution. Daoud's determination to exterminate the left, Amin alleged, had forced the PDPA to act.

The contours of the new regime were at first very unclear. To outside observers, what had occurred was a conventional military coup. Two key figures were Abdul Qader, an air force colonel who had ordered air strikes against the Presidential Palace during the fighting, and Muhammad Aslam Watanjar, commander of a tank brigade who had led a column of tanks and armored cars into the capital from armored division headquarters on the city's outskirts. Both men had participated in the 1973 coup that had brought Daoud to power. At 7:00 P.M. on April 27, Qader made an announcement over Radio Afghanistan, in the Dari language, that a "revolutionary council of the armed forces" had been established, with himself at its head. Watanjar read a similar statement in the Pashtu language. The council's initial statement of principles, issued late in the evening of April 27, was a noncommittal affirmation of Islamic, democratic, and nonaligned ideals. The language of Marxist revolution was not conspicuous. The Soviet embassy in Kabul was ostensibly caught by surprise. The ambassador, Alexandr M. Puzanov, was enjoying a trout fishing holiday in the Hindu Kush at the time, although the Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti-KGB) and Soviet advisers posted in Afghanistan may have had a more active role than it appeared. As the month of April drew to a close, the Soviet news agency TASS referred to the coup simply as a military seizure of power.

Within two days of Daoud's fall, however, the armed forces' revolutionary council ceded power to a 35-member, PDPAcontrolled civilian body, the Revolutionary Council (RC) of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. This chain of events bore some similarity to Daoud's coup d'etat five years earlier. Although the military had lifted Daoud into power, they had a minimal political role once he formed a government. But the military's willingness to step aside also was testimony to the PDPA's success in transforming important sectors of the armed forces into an effective power base. Amin was principally responsible for this. As early as 1965, and certainly by 1973, he had devoted himself to building a cadre in the officer corps, "educating them on the basis of principles of the working class ideology" (in the words of an official account of the coup) and convincing them of the need to eliminate the old regime.

A major factor contributing to PDPA support in the military was disaffection over Daoud's predilection for awarding top commissions to cronies and fellow Mohammadzai clansmen. Able and conscientious officers who were not well-connected were frustrated by an entrenched system of nepotism that blocked their careers. Despite promises made in 1973, this was essentially the same system that had existed under King Zahir Shah. It is unclear how many officers understood Marxist concepts or considered themselves leftist, although a large number had received training in the Soviet Union, but by 1978 Daoud had forfeited the loyalty of many-though not all-military officers posted in the capital region.

On April 30 the RC issued the first of a series of fateful decrees. The decree formally abolished the military's revolutionary council. This body disappeared down an Orwellian "memory hole"; the official history of the Sawr Revolution makes no mention of it and describes PDPA leaders as having established the RC on April 27. The RC named PDPA secretary general Taraki as its president and prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The decree also designated the RC as the highest government body, whose pronouncements would have the force of law. A second decree, issued on May 1, named Karmal vice president of the RC and senior deputy prime minister. The other members of the first cabinet were also named; they included Amin, Qader, and Watanjar. A third decree, issued two weeks later, nullified Daoud's 1977 constitution and replaced it with a document entitled "Thirtytwo Basic Lines of Revolutionary Duties." It also established "revolutionary military courts" to dispense swift justice to enemies of the people. Two other decrees drawn up in the months following the coup declared the regime's commitment to the equality of Afghanistan's different ethnic groups and deprived the surviving members of the royal family of their Afghan citizenship.

In an official statement broadcast over Radio Afghanistan on May 10, President Taraki announced his regime's programs. These included land reform, development of both state and private sectors of the economy, universal free education, free health care facilities for all citizens, and promotion of the equality of the sexes. In foreign policy, Taraki affirmed the principles of nonalignment, peaceful coexistence, and support for national liberation movements worldwide. Nothing in this rhetoric was a dramatic departure from pronouncements of the early Daoud era. The Marxist-Leninist component of PDPA ideology was a decidedly minor theme because leaders feared alienating groups within the country and Afghanistan's conservative neighbors outside the country. But through the summer and autumn of 1978, as more decrees were issued, Taraki and his associates put Afghanistan on the road to revolution. Amin expressed this most clearly on November 7, 1978, the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, when he asserted that the Sawr Revolution was a continuation of the October Revolution. This revolutionary commitment was violently at odds with traditional Afghan values and interests, especially in the rural areas. As spring gave way to summer and autumn, however, the PDPA, wracked by internal rivalries, proved to be its own worst enemy.

Evolution of the PDPA as a Political Force

The history of leftist political movements in Afghanistan is a short one. The society is highly conservative and without bourgeois or working classes in the Western sense. The number of persons who can participate in Western-style politics is small; literacy in the years following World War II was around 5 percent, and the tiny handful of intellectuals receptive to Marxist ideas was concentrated in the urban areas. Because Afghanistan escaped exploitation by Western colonialists (one of the few Asian countries to do so), there was little or no stimulus for nationalist, anti-imperialist movements to develop.

Another factor in the slowness with which a leftist movement developed was the attitude of the Soviet Union. Soviet interests in the turbulent years following the October Revolution did not dictate the encouragement of a communist movement that would challenge the monarchy. King Amanullah established excellent relations with the Soviets as a means of asserting his independence from the British, and the Soviets found him a useful ally against both the British and Muslim conservatives, who challenged their control of what is now Soviet Central Asia. Marxist scholar Fred Halliday notes that, as far as can be determined, no Afghan communist party was formed under the auspices of the Communist International (Comintern). This contrasts sharply with Moscow's strategy in other Asian countries. As early as 1919, Lenin had encouraged the formation of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party in one of the most backward places on earth, and during the early 1920s communist parties were being organized under the guidance of Comintern agents in Turkey, Iran, British India, China, Japan, and Korea.

Neither the conservatism nor the isolation of Afghanistan, however, was absolute. Amanullah's bold but disastrous attempt to transform the country along Kemalist lines in the 1920s was a vivid memory. Schools and colleges were being established with European curricula. Many Afghans were also aware of nationalist and leftist movements in British India. The Communist Party of India (CPI) had been founded in 1925, and some Afghans who had spent time in the subcontinent were introduced to Marxist concepts by Indians. Halliday suggests that the influence of the CPI on Afghan leftism was more formative than that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); nevertheless, the Soviet Union gained considerable prestige among educated Afghans for its postwar aid programs, and the CPI always faithfully followed the CPSU's initiatives on matters of policy.

The winds of political change blew faintly through the Hindu Kush, and after 1945 the government vacillated between tolerating and repressing liberals who were trying to make the system more open. The 1947-52 period witnessed the emergence of the Wikh-iZalmayan (Awakened Youth) movement, which engaged in harsh criticism of the royal family. A highly politicized student union was organized at Kabul University, and a handful of opposition newspapers-Angar (Burning Embers), Nida-i-Khalq (Voice of the Masses), and Watan (Homeland)-were published (see Zahir Shah and His Uncles, 1933-53, ch. 1). As criticism of the status quo grew sharper, the government reacted by banning dissident organizations and jailing their leaders. Many leftists received their first schooling in politics during this period.

Three PDPA Leaders

Three men-Taraki, Amin, and Karmal-played a central role in the evolution of the Afghan left and the fortunes of the PDPA. Taraki, the oldest, was born in 1917, the son of a livestock dealer and smalltime smuggler. His family is described by Dupree and other observers as "seminomadic," traveling frequently between Ghazni Province and British India (see fig. 1). Despite his family's poverty, Taraki was able to attend a provincial elementary school and a middle school in Qandahar and was the first member of his family to be literate. He was in Qandahar during the fall of the reformist King Amanullah in 1929. Leaving school at age 15, he went to the Indian port city of Bombay to work in the office of an Afghan company that exported dried fruit to the subcontinent.

He learned English at a night school and became acquainted with Indian Communists, although he apparently never became a CPI member. Returning to Kabul in 1937, Taraki attended a college of public administration and then assumed a series of posts in the civil service.

While serving in the remote province of Badakhshan in the northeast, Taraki began a writing career. He gained a reputation as a writer of short stories during the 1940s, describing the living conditions of Afghan peasants. Soviet critics approvingly described his work as expressing "scientific socialist" themes. One essay composed in the late 1940s or early 1950s about Maxim Gorky, the idol of literary orthodoxy during the Stalinist period, reveals his close affinities to the Soviet point of view.

Taraki's career, however, was a checkered one. He seems to have played a peripheral role in the Wikh-i-Zalmayan movement (contributing articles to Angar but avoiding imprisonment and even retaining his government job), lived briefly in Washington as a member of the Afghan embassy staff, and was recalled to Kabul because of his outspoken criticism of Prime Minister Daoud. He ran his own translation agency between 1958 and 1962 and in the latter year was hired by the United States embassy in Kabul as a translator. Journalist Henry S. Bradsher relates that by 1964 Taraki had close ties with persons in the Soviet embassy and facilitated contacts between its staff (presumably KGB agents) and young Afghans. The Soviets apparently subsidized his literary career and translated some of his works into Russian.

Amin was born in 1921 in Paghman, a town near Kabul. His father was a minor civil servant. Amin studied mathematics and physics at Kabul University and became a high school teacher and principal. In 1957 he won a scholarship to study at Teachers' College at Columbia University in New York, and on completion of his course he returned home to administer teacher-training courses. Returning to Columbia to complete his doctorate in 1962, Amin became involved in the politics of the Associated Students of Afghanistan, an overseas student group in the United States. It was apparently during his sojourn in the student world of Morningside Heights on Manhattan's upper west side near Columbia's campus that he became interested in Marxism, although Columbia had not yet encountered the radical tumult of the late 1960s. In 1965 he returned to Afghanistan without his doctorate and accepted a teaching post at a girls' high school. His sympathetic biographer, Beverley Male, notes the enthusiasm with which the students responded to his advocacy of social and political revolution. According to Male, "educated Kabuli women were later to be among the PDPA's most enthusiastic supporters."

Unlike Taraki and Amin, Karmal, born in 1929, was a member of the social and political elite. His father, General Muhammad Hussain Khan, had served as governor of Paktia Province and enjoyed close ties with the royal family. Karmal, an indifferent student in high school and in the law school of Kabul University, quickly gained a reputation as an orator and activist in the university's student union in 1951. For his part in the Wikh-i-Zalmayan movement, he was imprisoned for a time, and while in prison he met Mir Akbar Khyber, whose Marxist views had a formative influence on him. After release from jail in 1956, he held posts in the civil service. Anthony Arnold, a former United States intelligence officer, notes that Karmal was able to secure government employment despite his jail sentence because of his family connections: "Babrak was Establishment, representing the modishly far left wing of the wealthiest and most powerful Afghan families."

Formation of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan

Taraki, Karmal, and other leftists (Amin was still in the United States) had been planning to organize a party and took preliminary steps in this direction in 1963, though study groups on Marxist topics had been held since the 1950s. They postponed formally establishing one, however, in anticipation that King Zahir Shah would sign a law legalizing political associations, as guaranteed in the 1964 constitution. Although the king never ratified the party law passed by parliament and thus parties remained technically illegal despite the constitutional guarantee, the PDPA held its First Congress on January 1, 1965. Twenty-seven men gathered at Taraki's house in Kabul, elected Taraki PDPA secretary general and Karmal deputy secretary general, and chose a five-member Central Committee. They also approved a party program. This document, published in the newspaper Khalq (Masses) the following year, advocated a national front of democratic and patriotic forces and progressive reforms. According to Arnold, the program's avoidance of Marxist-Leninist terminology reflected ears that its use would invite official repression. He claims that the PDPA First Congress adopted a "secret" constitution, replete with communist phraseology, that reveals its true character as "the party of the Working Class of Afghanistan." This document was allegedly unearthed by personnel of a Western embassy in 1978.

Relatively open elections were held for the Wolesi Jirgah (lower house of parliament) in September 1965. Four PDPA members were elected: Karmal, Anahita Ratebzad, Nur Ahmad Nur, and Fezanul Haq Fezan. Taraki and Amin also ran but were defeated; the latter lost by only 50 votes in his hometown of Paghman. From their seats in the lower house, the eloquent Karmal and his associates mobilized students to demonstrate against the government of Prime Minister Muhammed Yousuf. At least three demonstrators were killed and many more wounded when troops fired into a student rally near the prime minister's residence on October 25, 1965 (see The King Rules: The Last Decade of Monarchy, 1963-73, ch. 1). As an increasingly static and inflexible government reacted violently to growing opposition, the foundations of parliamentary rule were cloven.

The preoccupation with maintaining a low profile that dictated the PDPA's need for a secret constitution was in striking contrast to the outspokenness of Khalq, published by Taraki in April and May 1966. Khalq defined its mission in terms of relieving "the boundless agonies of the oppressed peoples of Afghanistan" and asserted that "the main issue of contemporary times and the center of class struggle on a worldwide basis, which began with the Great October Socialist Revolution, is the struggle between international socialism and international capitalism." The newspaper was highly successful, especially among students. Its first edition sold 20,000 copies, and later editions numbered around 10,000 (there were only six editions altogether). On May 23, 1966, the authorities closed it down on the grounds that it was anti-Islamic, anticonstitutional, and antimonarchical.

The Party Divided, 1967

In the spring of 1967 the PDPA formally divided into two factions, whose rivalry would be a decisive, and often deadly, factor in the party's political fortunes and misfortunes. The banning of Khalq in 1966 prompted Karmal to criticize Taraki for being foolhardy because of the newspaper's open expression of class struggle themes. Arnold suggests that Karma and the Soviets-may have pondered the bloody fate of the Indonesian Communist Party, whose radicalism led to its annihilation by Muslim militants in October 1965. On the ideological level, Karmal and Taraki differed in their perceptions of Afghanistan's revolutionary potential. Taraki believed that revolution could be achieved in the classical Leninist fashion by building a tightly disciplined working-class party. Karmal felt that Afghanistan was too undeveloped for a Leninist strategy and that a national democratic front of patriotic and antiimperialist forces had to be fostered in order to bring the country a step closer to socialist revolution. (This issue is a frequent theme in the history of Asian communism; the most famous instance is the disagreement between Stalin and Trotsky over the advisability of a united front or a revolutionary strategy for the Chinese Communist Party during the 1920s.)

Karmal sought, unsuccessfully, to persuade the PDPA Central Committee to censure Taraki's excessive radicalism. The vote, however, was close, and Taraki in turn tried to neutralize Karmal by appointing new members to the committee who were his own supporters. Karmal offered his resignation. This was accepted, apparently an outcome he did not expect. Although the split of the PDPA in 1967 into two groups was never publicly announced, Karmal brought with him about half the members of the Central Committee. Subsequently, the two groups operated as separate political parties, each with its own secretary general, central committee, and membership. Taraki's faction was known as Khalq, after his defunct newspaper, and Karmal's as Parcham (Banner), after a weekly he published between March 1968 and July 1969.

Ideology was only one factor-and probably not the most important-in the Khalq-Parcham split. Taraki and Karmal were men from two very different backgrounds. This was equally true of their followers, who formed self-consciously separate groups even before the 1967 breakup. Taraki appealed to a rural, lower-middle class constituency of Pashtuns, people like himself who had personal experience of poverty and the oppressiveness of the old order; they tended, however, to be conservative in matters such as the separation of the sexes. Their first language was Pashtu, rather than Dari, the dialect of Farsi spoken by Afghan city dwellers and government officials. The Parcham constituency was urban-based, middle class or upper-middle class, and tended to speak Dari rather than Pashtu. They were graduates of the best and most expensive high schools and colleges and were generally more Westernized in their habits and styles of life than the Khalqis. Although both PDPA groups were concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics, women such as Ratebzad, one of the four PDPA members elected to the Wolesi Jirgah in 1965, were more prominent in Parcham. Anthropologist Nancy Hatch Dupree notes that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Karmal and Ratebzad held party meetings that ended with disco music and dancing. Apparently many university students, chafing under the restrictions of their conservative parents, joined Parcham for recreation rather than to raise their political consciousness.

The Khalq-Parcham rivalry also reflected tensions that have characterized Afghan politics since the forceful unification of the country in the eighteenth century by Ahmad Shah Durrani (see Ahmad Shah and the Durrani Empire, ch. 1). The two leaders were both Pashtuns, but Taraki was a member of the Ghilzai tribal confederation that had been excluded from power by their old rivals, the Durrani. Afghan rulers had experienced limited success in promoting national integration. The result was that tribal sentiments, particularly in the Pashtun rural areas, remained intense. A majority of the Khalqis seem to have been Ghilzai Pashtuns, and their Marxism was often a vehicle for tribal resentments. Relatively few Ghilzai were members of the political, social, or economic elite. Durrani Pashtuns regarded them as a crude, rustic, and violent people who were nomads ("carrying their houses on their backs like snails") rather than settled farmers or townspeople. Since the political elite traditionally lived in towns, Ghilzai Pashtuns both envied and resented urban ways of life. In their eyes, the Durrani were effete and lacking in traditional Pashtun values. Amin, like Taraki, was a Ghilzai. After the fall of Daoud in April 1978, many Afghans recalled that a Muslim saint in the eighteenth century had cursed the Ghilzai, ordaining that they would endure seven generations of servitude. Taraki and Amin's rise to power seemed to mark the end of that period.

Parcham's ethnic composition was more diverse than Khalq's. Although the majority were apparently Dari-speaking Pashtuns from the Kabul region, Hazaras, Tajiks, and other minority groups were also represented. Karmal was neither a Durrani nor a Ghilzai, but a member of another Pashtun tribe, the Kakars. Coming from an urban and elite background, he lacked a strong sense of tribal identity or allegiance.

The issue of tribal and ethnic identity played a role in the emergence of other leftist movements during the 1960s. In 1964 the surviving relatives of Abdur Rahman Mahmudi, a popular opposition politician who had languished in jail between 1953 and 1963 and subsequently died from the effects of his mistreatment in prison, founded Shula-i-Jawid (Eternal Flame); this was a "Maoist" group that drew support from an odd combination of alienated intellectuals and professionals and Shia Muslims, especially Hazaras, who suffered harsh discrimination at the hands of the majority Sunni Muslims (see Tenets of Islam, ch. 2). The Shula-i-Jawid looked to China as a model for revolution. Its anti-Soviet bias reflected the intense Sino-Soviet antagonisms of the late 1960s and early 1970s and appealed to Afghans who feared the power of their northern neighbor.

Another radical group was Settem-i-Melli (Against National Oppression). This was formed in the late 1960s by Taher Badakhshi, a Tajik who had been a member of the PDPA Central Committee. In its "Maoist" emphasis on militant class struggle and mass mobilization of peasants, Settem-i-Melli resembled Shula-i-Jawid. But it was also strongly anti-Pashtun, and it accused the Soviet Union of supporting "Pashtun colonialism." The group was well-organized, not only within minority communities in Kabul but also in the northeastern provinces where minorities were numerous.

Competition and Reconciliation, 1967-77

Although adept at rousing student passions, Karmal published in March 1968 a journal, Parcham, that was noticeably more moderate in its tone than Taraki's Khalq. His group earned the somewhat opprobrious nickname the "royal communist party" because of its willingness to cooperate with the authorities and its connections with the royal family. (Khalqis were irked by a speech Karmal had given in parliament in 1966 describing the king as "progressive.") Parcham was shut down in June 1969 on the eve of parliamentary elections, but the group had succeeded in getting some very powerful friends. The most important was Daoud. According to Arnold, Daoud, riding in his private car, was present at Parcham-sponsored student demonstrations, thus ensuring that the demonstrators would not be handled violently by the police. In the August 1969 election PDPA members won only two seats; the successful candidates were Karmal and Amin.

Parcham profited, but also ultimately suffered, because of its association with Daoud. Despite their "royalist" reputation, Parcham leaders supported Daoud's plan to seize power, and Parcham sympathizers in the military played a key role in the relatively bloodless coup d'etat that toppled the monarchy on June 17, 1973. Half of Daoud's first cabinet consisted of figures associated with Parcham. Khalq was excluded from the government because of its lack of good political connections and its go-it-alone policy on noncooperation. Taraki did sing a song of united fronts briefly after Daoud's takeover in an attempt to gain places in the government for his followers, but this effort was unsuccessful. Impressed by Karmal's success in infiltrating the armed forces, the Khalq leader abandoned his party's traditional emphasis on working-class recruitment and sought to build his own power base within the officer corps. He was aided in this endeavor by Amin, a brilliant organizer, whose work in the armed forces yielded fruit in April 1978. It is estimated that by the late 1970s Khalq had two or three times the membership of Parcham (the PDPA total was 4,000 to 5,000 persons). It recruited aggressively, whereas Karmal's hands were tied because of his government connections.

Daoud had little love for the left. He sent zealous young Parchamis off to the villages to promote social reforms, a kind of Afghan "Peace Corps," in order to get them out of the capital. After enduring the hostility of villagers for a while, most returned to Kabul disillusioned, only to be jailed by the regime for dereliction of duty. Qader, the air force officer who played such a central role in both the 1973 and the 1978 coups, was demoted and sent to manage the public slaughterhouses after he criticized the president for not implementing socialist reforms. When Daoud turned against leftists, purged them from his government, and instituted an authoritarian political system with his 1977 constitution, Parcham was most seriously exposed.

Both parties were consistently pro-Soviet. They accepted financial and other forms of aid from the Soviet embassy and intelligence organs. Taraki and Karmal maintained close contact with embassy personnel, and it appears that Soviet Military Intelligence (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye UpravleniyeGRU) assisted Khalq's recruitment of military officers. It is also apparent that Moscow played a major role in the reconciliation of Taraki's and Karmal's factions in 1977. During the previous year, the publications of the pro-Moscow communist parties of India, Iraq, and Australia called for Khalq and Parcham to resolve their differences. Most instrumental in the negotiations that led to a reunified PDPA were members of the CPI and Ajmal Khattak, a Pakistani leftist (and a Pashtun), who lived in exile in Kabul. It is unlikely that they would have taken the initiative, however, without the encouragement of the Soviet Union. In March 1977 a formal agreement on unity was achieved, and in July the two factions held their first joint conclave in a decade. In light of Daoud's growing repression of the left at that time, one of the questions discussed was the removal of his "dictatorial regime." But the merger was a patchwork affair (perhaps a shotgun marriage at the Soviets' insistence) that did not resolve the deep social, ethnic, ideological, and personal differences that separated Khalq and Parcham. These became evident once the PDPA came to power in the spring of 1978.

The Soviet Role in the 1978 Coup d'Etat

The issue of Soviet involvement in the overthrow of Daoud is one that has divided Western observers of Afghan affairs. Some believe that the Soviet Union lost its patience with Daoud and used the PDPA and its cadres in the military to eliminate him. Arnold writes in Afghanistan's Two-Party Communism that "Moscow's decision . . . to try to heal the irreconcilable differences between Parcham and Khalq implies that it was actively promoting the Great Saur (April) Revolution"; it insisted on unity rather than simply backing one faction because the "coup would need the full strength and complementary capabilities of Parcham and Khalq." Ralph H. Magnus in a 1983 article quotes Karmal (in an interview with an Indian journalist) as saying that Daoud was planning to become the "Anwar Sadat of Afghanistan" and that the PDPA factions were united because "Russia wanted that there should be a revolution here."

Other commentators are less sure how formidable the Soviet role was. Bradsher suggests in Afghanistan and the Soviet Union that Moscow did not engineer the coup but knew beforehand that the PDPA was planning one and took no steps to thwart it. Soviet military advisers, always under tight political control, were in a position to know about crucial developments in the days leading up to April 27 and may have assisted the insurgents in launching air and armored attacks. Rumors that Soviet pilots flew air strikes against the Presidential Palace began circulating because Westerners assumed, somewhat condescendingly, that Afghan pilots were incapable of firing rockets against their targets with the kind of accuracy displayed. Bradsher concludes that "Moscow authorized a Soviet role in helping the coup succeed while not becoming publicly committed in case it failed."

A third view, distinct from theses of Soviet maximal or minimal involvement, is that the coup d'etat caught Moscow almost entirely by surprise. Soviet influence in Afghanistan was pervasive, and Moscow regarded the PDPA as a friendly, if not fraternal, party deserving support and encouragement. But, according to this view, they had no desire to eliminate Daoud. Probably the most convincing evidence in support of this view is the hurried and haphazard manner in which the coup was planned and executed. If Amin had not taken the initiative in the first crucial hours, Daoud might have succeeded in eliminating the party. Moscow's role in ringing Parcham and Khalq together in 1977, however, and alleged assistance given the insurgents by Soviet advisers on April 27 suggests that Bradsher's interpretation is the most plausible: Moscow knew what was going on and wished to leave all options open.

A crucial element is the relationship between Daoud and the Soviet Union in the months before the coup. Daoud clearly resented the Soviets, and he sought to reduce their influence by developing ties with the conservative Arab states of the Persian Gulf and, especially, with the shah of Iran. In the mid1970s the shah, enriched by the quadrupling of oil revenues in 1973 and 1974, may have dreamed of drawing Afghanistan out of the Soviet and into a new Iranian sphere of influence. He promised Daoud as much as US$10 billion in aid. But by 1977 it was apparent that the shah's ambitious schemes would not materialize. Thus, it is unlikely that the Soviets regarded the shah as a threat at that time. During the 1973-78 period Afghanistan remained the second largest noncommunist recipient of Soviet aid, surpassed only by India.

In 1974 the Soviets pressured Daoud into agreeing to a Moscowsponsored Asian collective security plan that affirmed the legitimacy of contemporary boundaries between Asian countries; Moscow's intention was to invalidate Chinese claims to territories taken from them by tsarist Russia. The president was reluctant to endorse the plan because it meant that his regime had to take a less assertive stance on the issue of Pashtunistan (see Daoud's Republic, 1973-78, ch. 1). He had, however, little choice, since the Soviets were determined to improve their relations with Pakistan in order to counterbalance Chinese influence in that country. By 1977 strains between Daoud and the Soviets were becoming apparent. In April of that year, he visited Moscow. CPSU secretary general Leonid Brezhnev apparently gave him a tongue-lashing over his exclusion of leftists from his government and his eagerness to find non-Soviet sources of economic and military aid. According to Afghan witnesses, Daoud exploded, retorting that Afghanistan was an independent country and he could govern it any way he wished. The meeting between the two heads of state either broke up or continued on a sour note. On his way back to Kabul, Daoud stopped over at Tashkent, but he walked out of an official reception with Soviet Uzbek dignitaries when they began extolling the common destiny of Afghanistan and the Soviet Central Asian republics.

Although the Soviets were doubtless displeased with Daoud's testy show of independence, they were also well aware of the weaknesses and divisions in the left in Afghanistan. It is unlikely that they intended to eliminate the president, a man they knew, in order to replace him with leaders such as Taraki and Karmal who had little popular support and might plunge the country into civil war. Daoud was, moreover, an old man (69 in 1978). The Moscow-sponsored union of Parcham and Khalq may have been in preparation for his peaceful passage from the scene in the near future. Insofar as one can make generalizations, Soviet behavior on the international scene has been cautious; they will not act unless they perceive a direct threat to their interests. It is unlikely that Daoud was regarded as such a threat in 1977 or 1978.

An actor of some importance in the Afghan drama was Ambassador Puzanov. He had been at his post since 1970, and, according to some observers, he had far more freedom of action in the field than most Soviet diplomats, in part because of his status as a member of the CPSU Central Committee. Magnus notes that he was "extremely active and ambitious," but Bradsher offers another perspective, describing Puzanov as an "alcoholic seventy-two-year-old castoff from Kremlin political struggles two decades earlier."

"The Revolution Devours Its Own," May-November 1978

Like the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, the PDPA and its supporters constituted only a tiny percentage of the total population when the PDPA's cadres in the military seized power. Unlike the Bolsheviks, the party lacked leaders of the caliber of Lenin and Trotsky to steer it through myriad crises. The merger of Parcham and Khalq rapidly became unglued, and before the year was over, populations in large areas of the country had revolted against the regime's hasty and illconsidered reforms.

The first cabinet was a careful balancing act of Parcham, Khalq, and military personalities. Taraki, as prime minister, and Karmal, as senior deputy prime minister, occupied the highest and second highest places in a well-defined hierarchy. The third-ranked position, minister of foreign affairs, was awarded to Amin, a Khalqi; Colonel Watanjar, an officer with Khalqi inclinations, was appointed to the fourth-ranked post, minister of communications, while Qader, a Parcham sympathizer, occupied the fifth-ranked position, minister of defense. Nur Ahmad Nur, a Parchami, was awarded the sixth-ranked position, minister of the interior.

To. paraphrase Mao Zedong, in Afghanistan not only revolution but politics comes out the barrel of a gun. Parcham's control of the ministries of defense and interior (the latter having responsibility for the police), ostensibly placed Khalq in a distinctly disadvantageous position. But Qader seems to have been a bumbling incompetent, and Amin's pervasive connections within the officer corps enabled Khalq to turn the tables. Although there was no open violence of the kind that characterized Afghan politics in the months before the Soviet invasion, Parcham's fortunes began to ebb. During May and June 1978, press references to Parchami figures in the government became noticeably scarce. In late June and early July, however, Kabul newspapers announced the appointment of prominent Parcham figures as ambassadors abroad. Karmal was posted to Prague, Ahmad Nur to Washington, and Ratebzad to Belgrade. The conscription of Parcham leaders (10 altogether) into Afghanistan's foreign service followed a venerable precedent. Early oppositionist figures in Bolshevik Russia were not liquidated but were exiled to diplomatic posts. Because Amin was foreign minister, he was in a position to keep the exiles under surveillance while abroad.

Hard on the heels of the ambassadorial appointments was a reorganization of the PDPA and state leadership. The primary beneficiary of the changes was Amin, who became a party secretary and Taraki's sole deputy prime minister. He had also assumed control of the newly organized political police, the Organization for Protection of the Interests of Afghanistan (Da Afghanistan da Gato da Satalo Adara, in PashtuAGSA; sometimes translated Afghan Interests Protection Service). Watanjar replaced the exiled Ahmad Nur as minister of interior. Parchamis in the schools, civil service, and military were fired and in some cases arrested. The newly built prison at Pol-i Charki outside of Kabul was soon filled beyond capacity with both old regime figures and Parchamis. Amin's police chief, Asadullah Sarwari, soon gained a reputation for brutality and sadism that earned him the unaffectionate nickname, "King Kong." On July 19 Taraki boasted that "there was no such thing as a Parcham party in Afghanistan, and there is no such thing now."

Every revolution seems to need a counterrevolutionary plot in order to focus its energies, and Afghanistan's was unearthed in August 1978. On August 17, Qader, still defense minister, was arrested for his part in a conspiracy that allegedly had been organized by the Parcham exiles abroad. Arrests of other cabinet ministers and high-ranking military officers followed. Karmal and the other Parcham ambassadors were expelled from the PDPA and ordered to return to Kabul. Naturally disinclined to commit suicide, they went into hiding in Eastern Europe and, according to Louis Dupree, ended up in Moscow. It is unclear whether they were really involved in an antiregime plot. According to the official account, they had concocted plans for a second military coup that was to be executed in early September during a major Muslim holiday. Karmal allegedly planned to return from exile, assume the reins of power, and force the Khalqis (disarmed in the coup) to accept a moderate, united-front strategy; this was supposed to include moderates and non-PDPA leftists in a new coalition government. The real motivation for this "anti-revolutionary network," however, seems to have been the disaffection of Muslim and nationalist military officers who feared that Taraki was making Afghanistan a Soviet satellite. A wave of political arrests continued August to November. The brutality-reminiscent of the bloodiest episodes of the European Middle Ages and the Holy Inquisitionintensified. Sarwari personally tortured many victims, including the former minister of planning, Soltan Ali Keshtmand.

On November 27, 1978, the PDPA Central Committee convened a meeting that published the details of the alleged plot. It also announced Amin's appointment as a member of the Political Bureau (Politburo), the highest organ of the party. Amin was becoming a kind of Frankenstein's monster for Taraki. Officially described as the "loyal student" of the "great leader" Taraki, he was probably the most powerful man in Afghanistan by the close of 1978. The president, who according to some accounts lived in an alcoholic haze much of the time, had become little more than a figurehead.

Revolution and Popular Resistance

Revolution accelerated on both the symbolic and the substantial levels between June and November 1978. The ousting of Parchamis that occurred during the spring and early summer meant that there was no one within the regime who could act as a brake on Taraki's radicalism. In mid-June Afghanistan's new flag, a red banner with a gold emblem that bore suspicious resemblance to the flags of the Soviet Central Asian republics, was unveiled; the old flag had been black, red, and green, and the omission of green was regarded by Afghans as especially portentious since it is the color of Islam. Taraki was, of course, in no position to carry out a campaign of antireligious propaganda; but he wanted a reformed (tamed) Islam, and he asserted that "we want to clean Islam in Afghanistan of the ballast and dirt of bad traditions, superstition and erroneous belief. Thereafter, we will have progressive, modern and pure Islam." It is significant that while the first three decrees issued by the RC in April and May 1978 began with the conventional Islamic invocation "In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate", the fourth decree (issued on May 15 and declaring the regime's commitment to the equality of all ethnolinguistic groups) and the remaining four that followed it omitted this formula.

The sixth, seventh, and eighth decrees (proclaimed on July 12, October 17, and November 28, 1978) outlined comprehensive reforms designed to transform the countryside. The sixth decree aimed at eliminating usury. It abolished mortg ages on land made before 1973; forgave the debts of tenants, landless laborers, and small landholders; and established fixed rates for the repayment of mortgages agreed to after 1973. The 1973 date was chosen as a watershed because the regime assumed that interest payments on earlier obligations were more than sufficient to pay the principal. An amendment to the decree established a system of provincial and district committees to arbitrate peasant disputes. But these measures had serious and unintended consequences. Moneylenders became extremely reluctant to extend loans at the new, low rates, and some debtors managed to have their obligations forgiven even though they were not covered by the decree, which dealt only with debts on land and crops. There were new opportunities for corruption, as provincial and district officials serving on the arbitration committees had the power to determine which mortgages could be forgiven (records were easily altered). According to Louis Dupree, the decree "struck at the heart of the reciprocal rights and obligations around which rural life in Afghanistan is organized." Because peasants depended on loans from year to year, the drying up of traditional sources of capital created many hardships.

The seventh decree attempted to promote equality between the sexes in married life. It fixed a maximum amount for the bride-price (mahr), established a minimum age for marriage at 18 years for men and 16 years for women, abolished forced marriages, and established legal penalties of imprisonment for violating the decree's provisions. It also gave officials the power to confiscate all properties exchanged between the bride and groom's families in excess of the legal maximum. Like the decree on usury, this represented an unexpected and unwanted intrusion on the system of reciprocal exchanges that were basic to rural society (see Family, ch. 2). Excessive brideprices, often bankrupting families, were an ancient evil, but they cemented alliances between families that were often vital for survival. Limiting them, moreover, deprived women of often their sole source of economic security if they were divorced or separated from their husbands. Although the PDPA leadership designed the measure to improve the lives of rural women, anthropologist Nancy Tapper suggests that they may in fact have suffered a loss in status, in places where the decree was effectively implemented, because they were now being given away "free" (thus, without honor) in marriage transactions by their families. Any government initiative redefining gender roles, moreover, was doomed to encounter the hostility of rural Afghan males whose sexism, in the words of one writer, is as massive as the Hindu Kush. The Khalqi policy of encouraging the education of girls, for example, aroused deep resentment in the villages. Local sensibilities were also offended by the secular character of new curricula and the practice of putting girls and boys in the same classroom.

The eighth decree dealt with land reform. It sought to redistribute arable land to "deserving persons," including agricultural laborers, tenants, the smallest and poorest landholders, certain classes of nomads, and members of other categories who were perceived to be the least well-off in a society where suitable land is in short supply and its distribution unequal (see Land Tenure and Land Reform, ch. 3). Louis Dupree suggests that the object of the decree was to foster the development of a new class of small landholders who could be organized into cooperatives. On November 14, 1978, a "charter to form cooperatives" was promulgated that outlined the organization and membership of these bodies. Land reform was begun in January 1979. Haste and lack of planning, however, frustrated the attainment of its stated goals.

Although the sixth decree, abolishing usury, was an innovation, the measures relating to marriage and land reform had ample precedent in modern Afghan history. As early as 1884, Amir Abdur Rahman had sought to curb excessive bride-prices and improve the status of rural women. There had been limited experiments with land reform, and Daoud had announced a land refor-:i program in 1975 (see Abdur Rahman Khan, 18801901; Daoud's Republic, 1973-78, ch. 1). Little in the experience of the PDPA and its leaders, however, had prepared them to deal effectively with rural problems. They were either impractical tea shop radicals, like Taraki, or urbanites with little understanding or sympathy for village life, like Karmal. The result was that their policies, while attacking the systems of rural inequality and poverty, ignored basic causes and provoked widespread resistance. Like Amanullah, the party intemperately challenged traditional patterns and ways of life. Its symbolic politics were perceived by many as attacks on Islam. Its growing reliance on the Soviet Union, moreover, earned it the contempt of the majority of Afghans, who had long felt hostility toward the intrusive, atheistic colossus to the north.

In May, a month after the coup, Burhannudin Rabbani, a professor at Kabul University, established the National Rescue Front composed of nine Islamic and anticommunist groups opposing the regime. There were occasional bombings in Kabul and a flood of antiregime shabnamah (night letters). But the country was relatively quiet in the period between the coup and the autumn of 1978. The first insurrection in the countryside flared up in the Nuristan region of eastern Afghanistan in September 1978 (see fig. 2). It was followed by uprisings in areas as widespread and ethnically diverse as Badakhshan Province in the northeast, Paktia and Ghazni provinces in the east, Balkh Province in the north, Herat and Farah provinces in the west, and Parvan and Kapisa provinces near the capital. Louis Dupree notes that the insurrections did not conform to the traditional mode of intergroup and antigovernment resistance. Usually, the fighting season began in the fall after the gathering of the harvest; at that time there was sufficient leisure time to pick up guns and settle old scores. With the coming of spring, hostilities generally ceased as men occupied themselves with planting crops. This did not happen in the spring of 1979. The regime, aided by Soviet military advisers, met popular resistance with brutal tactics, such as the bombing and extermination of whole villages. The fighting continued through spring and summer as a large portion of the rural population and thousands of deserters from the Afghan army joined the rebellion (see Political Bases of the Resistance, this ch.).

Guerrillas began operating from neighboring Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, Iran. In March 1979 the city of Herat was convulsed by a popular uprising, supported by local garrisons, whose targets included Khalqis and Soviet advisers. As many as 100 Soviets were killed, sometimes tortured to death in horrible ways, by enraged Afghan mobs. Government forces recaptured the city, killing between 3,000 and 5,000 Afghans.

Growing Soviet Involvement

The Soviet presence in Afghanistan had always been substantial, but Moscow increased the volume of aid and the number of military and other advisers in the wake of the April 1978 coup. The Soviets also granted all-important recognition of the socialist nature of the regime, although they must have been aware of the weaknesses and idiosyncrasies of the PDPA. On May 18, 1978, Amin, in his capacity as foreign minister, visited Moscow on his way to the Nonaligned Movement conference in Havana. He was received warmly by Soviet foreign minister Andrey Gromyko. The language of their joining communique, identifying their party as well as state offices, signaled the CPSU's willingness to accept the PDPA as a fellow Marxist party. (In meetings with noncommunist dignitaries, the Soviets customarily mention only their state, but not party, titles.)

Taraki visited Moscow December 4-7, 1978. On December 5 he and Leonid Brezhnev signed a 20-year Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighborliness, and Cooperation between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. This brief, 15-article document, similar in general outline to friendship treaties made by Moscow with such states as India, the Mongolian People's Republic (Mongolia), Vietnam, and South Yemen, includes promises to "strengthen and broaden mutually beneficial economic, scientific, and technical cooperation" and promote cultural exchanges (Articles 2 and 3); expressions of mutual respect for Afghanistan's "policy of nonalignment" and Moscow's "policy of peace" (Article 5); and a provision that the two countries "shall consult each other on all major international issues affecting the interests of the two countries" (Article 10). There is also a commitment to carry out a "consistent struggle against machinations by the forces of aggression" in order to achieve "the final elimination of colonialism and racism in all their forms and manifestations" (Article 9). In terms of future developments, however, Article 4 was the most portentious. It promises that the two states "shall consult each other and take by agreement appropriate measures to ensure the security, independence, and territorial integrity of the two countries" and will "develop cooperation in the military field on the basis of appropriate agreements concluded between them." This security clause, one of the most explicit agreed to by the Soviet Union and a non-Warsaw Pact state, provided the formal justification for the Soviet invasion in December 1979.

While Taraki was in Moscow, he also signed agreements providing expanded interparty relations between the CPSU and the PDPA and the establishment of a permanent SovietAfghan intergovernmental commission to promote economic cooperation. On the occasion of the signing of the friendship treaty, Brezhnev commented expansively that Soviet-Afghan ties "have assumed, I would say, a qualitatively new character-permeated by a spirit of friendship and revolutionary solidarity."

By early 1979 Soviet leaders had agreed on a proper characterization of the PDPA regime that placed it firmly in the socialist camp. In a speech on February 29, 1979, Mikhail A. Suslov, the CPSU's chief theoretician, included Afghanistan as one of the "states of socialist orientation" that had appeared in the Third World during the previous five years. Given Suslov's immense prestige and authority in matters of ideological importance, his imprimatur carried tremendous significance. There followed, from the official Soviet media, further affirmations of Afghanistan's having "chosen socialism."

Like Brer Rabbit in Uncle Remus' tale of the Tar Baby, the Soviets found themselves getting more deeply-and inescapablyinvolved in a very sticky situation. The bloody Herat uprising elicited a commitment of hundreds and perhaps thousands of new military advisers. Women and children dependents of Soviet personnel were evacuated. In April 1979 Vasily S. Safronchuk, a diplomat who had served for a time as deputy permanent representative to the United Nations (UN) in New York, was posted to Kabul to serve as a kind of senior adviser to the PDPA leadership. Formally a subordinate of Ambassador Puzanov, he apparently acted independently of the embassy and maintained offices in the House of the People (formerly the Presidential Palace) and the foreign ministry. One of his tasks seems to have been to dampen the Khalqis' radical zeal. He persuaded Taraki and Amin to make highly visible trips to mosques in order to placate popular religious feeling, and he advised them to include Parchamis and noncommunists in the government to gain wider popular support. This latter suggestion, so much like Parcham's unitedfront strategy, was rejected. The unpopular land reform program, however, was halted in July 1979.

According to Male, whose account of events in her book Revolutionary Afghanistan is perhaps overly sympathetic to Amin but still highly informative, Amin was highly suspicious of the Soviets and struggled to preserve Afghanistan's independence and nonaligned status. As foreign minister he repeatedly emphasized the nonaligned theme and strove to preserve the United States presence in his country, modest though it was, as a counterweight to the Soviets. On several occasions he requested an increase in United States aid. Male notes that Amin enjoyed a "good working relationship" with the United States ambassador, Adolph Dubs. During the seven months that Dubs served in Kabul, he called on Amin 14 times (apparently most diplomats found Amin insufferable and avoided him).

On February 14, 1979, however, Dubs was kidnapped by three (some accounts say four) gunmen. Most observers agree that they were members of the Maoist extremist group Settemi-Melli. They apparently announced that they were holding Dubs hostage for the release of several of their imprisoned comrades. Despite United States insistence that the crisis be settled through negotiation, Afghan security forces charged the hotel room where Dubs was held captive. The ambassador and two (or three) of his captors were killed. Rumors, largely unsubstantiated, that Soviet advisers had ordered the security force attack circulated in Kabul. Washington held the regime responsible for the ambassador's death.

Male suggests that the order to attack may have been given by Taraki. Dubs' murder remains shrouded in mystery, but in any event the incident resulted in the sharp reduction of United States operations in the country. The regime offered condolences but no formal apology, and an indignant President Jimmy Carter suspended all aid programs; conditions for their resumption were an apology and improving internal conditions. Diplomatic representation in Kabul was downgraded to the chargé d'affaires level. United States attention, moreover, was focused on Iran, where the shah, a major ally, had been forced out of power in January 1979. In Washington's eyes, dealing with chaos in Iran was a higher priority than dealing with chaos in Afghanistan. Even if Iran had been stable and Dubs' tragic death had not occurred, it is unclear that the United States presence would have deterred Soviet activities. Male argues, however, that "the assassination provided the coup de grace to Amin's efforts to maintain relations with the US." The Soviets were left with a clear field.

Clear, that is, except for Amin himself. On March 27, 1979, he took over the office of prime minister from Taraki, although Taraki remained president of the RC and PDPA secretary general. The popular insurrection intensified, and more soldiers joined or attempted to join the rebels during the spring and summer months; there were major mutinies at Jalalabad in June and at the Bala Hissar, the old fortress overlooking Kabul, in August. Soviet advisers and civilians continued to be the targets of violence. Safronchuk and his superiors grew increasingly impatient with Amin, whom they blamed for the chaotic situation in the country. By midsummer the Soviets were virtually running the government, but Amin stubbornly refused to go along with their policy recommendations. In July he took over the post of minister of defense and reshuffled the cabinet. Three ministers were demoted to minor portfolios.

According to Indian communist sources, Parchamis still at large attempted unsuccessfully to seize power in the spring of 1979. There was a wave of arrests, and special courts sentenced many Parchami "counterrevolutionaries" to death; it was estimated that around 300 political prisoners had been executed in the year since the April 1978 coup. There was evidence that Moscow had been behind the Parchamis' plot. By summer United States intelligence sources in Kabul indicated that the Soviets were determined to get rid of Amin. Rumors circulated that the Soviets were holding talks with Yousuf and Nur Ahmed Etemadi, men who had each served as prime minister under King Zahir Shah. Etemadi, confined in the Pol-i Charki prison, allegedly was picked up at the prison several times by a Soviet embassy car.

Ultimately, the Soviets enlisted Taraki in their attempt to liquidate Amin. On his way back from the Nonaligned Movement conference in Havana in September, Taraki stopped over for a couple of days in Moscow. There Taraki and Brezhnev apparently agreed on broadening the regime's popular appeal by including noncommunist figures like Etemadi. Some sources say that the Soviets concocted a second reconciliation between Taraki and the émigré Karmal, although other observers deny this, saying that Karmal was living in Prague rather than Moscow at the time. The first step in the plan was Amin's assassination. Sarwari, head of the police and loyal to Taraki, arranged to have his men assassinate the prime minister as he made his way to Kabul airport to welcome Taraki back from Havana and Moscow on September 11. But Amin was informed by his own man, Syed Daoud Taroon, a police commandant in Taraki's entourage, and replaced Sarwari's men with loyal army units as his escort to the airport. As Arnold notes, "Taraki's surprise at being greeted by a live and healthy Amin was obvious." Both men indulged in a comradely bear hug.

A second attempt was made on September 14. Taraki summoned Amin to his office in the House of the People. Puzanov assured the suspicious Amin over the telephone that Taraki meant him no harm and that the two men should seek a way to overcome their differences. Still suspicious, Amin brought along an armed escort. There was a shootout. Amin's associate Taroon was killed, but Amin left and returned with a contingent of soldiers and arrested Taraki.

On September 16 it was announced that Taraki had resigned his posts for "health reasons." Amin became both PDPA secretary general and RC president. On September 23 he claimed at a news conference that Taraki was "definitely sick." On October 10 the Kabul Times published a small back page announcement that Taraki "died yesterday morning of [a] serious illness, which he had been suffering for some time." The real illness, according to Arnold, "was lack of oxygen, brought on by the application of fingers to the neck and pillows over the nose and mouth by three members of the presidential guards service . . .°; to borrow the title of Akira Kurosawa's film version of Macbeth, Amin set atop a "throne of blood."

Soviet Preparations for Invasion

In April 1979, General Aleksey Yepishev, head of the Soviet Army's Political Directorate, visited Afghanistan with an entourage of generals and "political workers" to assess the training, morale, and political consciousness of the Afghan armed forces. His report back to Moscow was reputedly negative. The significance of his visit was suggested by the fact that he had performed a similar mission in Czechoslovakia in 1968 during the short-lived "Prague Spring" and had recommended Warsaw Pact intervention. In August another military delegation, led by General Ivan G. Pavlovskiy, arrived in the country. Whereas Yepishev's visit had lasted only a week, Pavlovskiy's lasted two months and was shrouded in secrecy. His delegation traveled around the country, assessing the security situation. Western observers noted with considerable consternation that Pavlovskiy had planned and commanded the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In the spring and summer of 1979, there was an unusual amount of military activity in the Soviet republics bordering Afghanistan. As early as March, the United States issued a warning to Moscow against intervention. But Afghanistan's inclusion in the socialist camp, a theme emphasized by Suslov and reiterated in the official press in early 1979, justified (from Moscow's perspective) armed intervention. The Brezhnev Doctrine, first unveiled after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, asserted the Soviet Union's right to intervene in friendly, socialist countries if reactionary forces threatened socialist construction.

The PDPA was apparently apprehensive about the possibility of a Soviet invasion. The media through 1979 appealed to traditional Afghan xenophobia by using the Dari word farangi to describe foreign enemies of the revolution. This word, literally meaning "Frenchman," generally refers to Westerners, although historically it was used to describe the British. Arnold suggests that in the context of 1979 it may have referred to Russians as well as British and Americans. In the face of social collapse and repeated military disasters, both Taraki and Amin repeatedly asserted the regime's ability to handle its own problems. There was also a pathetic insistence of Afghanistan's "nonaligned" status.

Although Soviet leaders Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin sent their congratulations to Amin on the occasion of his election as PDPA secretary general on September 16, he had no illusions about Moscow's intention to eliminate him. Relations between Amin and Puzanov were naturally hostile, given the latter's attempt to lure him into a death trap on September 14. He demanded Puzanov's departure. The Afghan leader's absence was conspicuous at the Soviet embassy's November 7 celebration of the anniversary of the October Revolution. Puzanov left Kabul on November 19; his replacement was Fikryat A. Tabeyev, who was still ambassador in late 1985.

Amin sought to leave his own mark on Afghan policy by establishing a 57-member constitutional committee to revise or rewrite the constitution. The inclusion of several Muslim clergymen on this body suggests that Amin was seeking a wider base of popular support. He established a special revolutionary court to review the cases of political prisoners confined since April 1978, with the result that several hundred were (he claimed) released. A critic of Taraki's "personality cult," Amin stressed the importance of legality. He renamed the secret police, AGSA, the Workers' Intelligence Institute (Kargari Astekhbarati Muassessa, in Pashtu-KAM) and promised that its excesses would be curbed. KAM was placed under the command of his nephew, Asadullah Amin. In early December 1979 Amin established the National Organization for the Defense of the Revolution. This body was designed to mobilize popular support for the regime throughout the country.

On September 9, 1979, Amnesty International published a report claiming that since the April 1978 coup 12,000 political prisoners were being held without trial in the Pol-i Charki prison alone. There were also charges of widespread use of torture. Amin heatedly denied the charges.

Tensions with Pakistan were increasing because antiregime guerrillas, the mujahidiin (literally, holy warriorssee Glossary), used camps in Pakistan as bases from which to launch attacks into Afghanistan. In autumn of 1979 there were around 228,000 refugees and guerrillas on Pakistani soil, mostly in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) but also in Baluchistan Province (see fig. 1). The UN High Commissioner for Refugees calculated that an additional 9,000 crossed the border each week. On September 29 Amin's foreign minister, Shah Wali, extended an invitation to President Mohammad Zia ul Haq to visit Kabul to resolve differences. Amin wanted to persuade Zia to stop offering sanctuary to the mujahidiin, and he perhaps also hoped, unrealistically, that improved relations with Pakistan might deter Soviet intervention. Friendly overtures to Islamabad continued through December, with increasingly desperate insistence on a summit or foreign ministerlevel meeting.

In late November General Viktor S. Paputin, Soviet first deputy minister of internal affairs, arrived in Kabul. Paputin may have been involved in arranging a second attempt on Amin's life. Although be returned to the Soviet Union on December 13, it appears that there was a shooting at the House of the People four days later. Amin was reportedly wounded in the leg (Pakistani sources indicate two assassination attempts, on December 3 and December 19). On December 19 the president, with a contingent of loyal Afghan troops and a few armored vehicles, moved to the Darulaman Palace complex that Amanullah had built a few miles outside Kabul.

The Soviets drew their noose tighter. Troops from the elite 105th Guards Airborne Division were ferried from Fergana in the Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republic to Bagrami air base near Kabul. By early December they numbered 2,500 men. On December 20 a Soviet armored unit secured the vital Salang Tunnel on the major overland route from the Soviet border to Kabul. A week later, on December 27, 1979, the invasion plan switched into high gear. Although the center of Kabul was secured by Soviet troops by the evening, resistance continued at the Darulaman Palace, probably until the early hours of December 28. According to an official announcement, Amin was sentenced to death by a "revolutionary tribunal". Most sources agree, however, that Amin, remaining true to Afghan traditions, had died fighting the foreign invader.

At 8:45 P.M. on December 27, 1979, a Soviet radio transmitter located in Termez, just across the Amu Darya from Afghanistan, broadcast a statement by Karmal castigating the "intolerable violence and torture by the bloody apparatus of Hafizullah Amin" and announcing a "national jihad . . . a holy war of the Afghan people for true democratic justice, for respect for the holy Islamic religion . . . for implementation of the aims of the glorious April revolution." The transmitter was broadcasting on the same frequency as Radio Afghanistan in Kabul but was more powerful. Further broadcasts, transmitted from Kabul once Soviet troops controlled Radio Afghanistan, named Karmal president of a new 57-member Revolutionary Council, prime minister of the government and secretary general of the PDPA. Early in the morning of December 28, an announcement was disseminated claiming that the government had requested "political, moral, and economic assistance, including military aid" from the Soviet Union because of the provocation of Afghanistan's "foreign enemies." Specifically, it recalled the December 5, 1978, friendship treaty as the basis for such a request.

Like many of the communist leaders who came to power in Eastern Europe after World War II, Karmal did not march into his capital in triumph but was trucked-or flown-in by the Soviets. Kept "on ice" in Moscow or Czechoslovakia after the purge of the Parcham ambassadors in August 1978, he apparently did not return to Afghanistan until after Amin was killed and Kabul secured by Soviet troops; his first public appearance was on January 1, 1980. This was, for both Karmal and the Soviets, a sensitive issue because the fiction of Karmal's dynamic leadership and a genuinely Afghan request for Soviet military intervention had to be maintained. According to one story, Karmal had slipped into Kabul in the autumn of 1979 and gained the support of a majority of the members of the PDPA Central Committee; he claimed on several occasions after the invasion that he had arrived in Kabul by way of Pakistan and mountainous Paktia Province, a miniature "Long March" that deemphasized his Soviet connections. The Central Committee allegedly forced the reluctant Amin to agree to a request for Soviet military assistance in December. A Soviet publication claims that he made such a request four times during the month because of the insistence of other PDPA leaders (Karmal claimed with crafted ingenuousness in March 1980 that he had been ignorant of the call for Soviet help). On December 27, with the clatter of Soviet Army boots in the background, the Central Committee majority (according to official accounts) convened the revolutionary tribunal that sentenced Amin to death. It supposedly elected Karmal to the post left vacant by Amin's execution.

According to regime sources, Amin had planned an anticommunist bloodbath to commence on December 29 with the cooperation of Islamic militants. Supposedly, Amin had made contact with Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, leader of the Hezb-iIslami (Islamic Party) in early October and promised him the post of prime minister in a new government.

On January 9, 1980, the regime announced a general amnesty for political prisoners. About 3,000 to 4,000 prisoners were released from the Pol-i Charki prison. Karmal allegedly invited some of the more prominent imprisoned figures to his office to ask their cooperation in forming a new government. Most politely asked for time to think the proposal over and then took themselves and their families off to Pakistan. On January 10 the membership of a new PDPA Central Committee and Politburo was formally announced. Five of the Politburo's seven members were Parchamis and included Karmal, his fellow exiled ambassadors, Anahita Ratebzad and Nur Ahmad Nor, and Soltan Ali Keshtmand. Keshtmand's Khalqi torturer, Sarwari, was also a member.

This page maintained by Luke Griffin and last updated on 01/14/2002 .