Introduction

AFGHANISTAN is one of the few countries of the modern world to have experienced a drastic decline in its population. Between April 1978, when a violent coup d'etat brought to power a radical, pro-Soviet political party, and early 1986 perhaps one-third of the populace fled the country. Although accurate data were not available in the mid-1980s, most observers estimated that 2.5 to 3 million Afghans lived in refugee camps in Pakistan, as many as 1.9 million were resident in Iran, and perhaps 150,000 had sought refuge elsewhere, including the United States. According to the United Nations (UN), this constituted the largest refugee population in the world. In addition, since the April 1978 coup-and particularly since the December 1979 Soviet invasion-hundreds of thousands have been killed or have died as a result of wounds, diseases, or other hardships and deprivations caused by warfare.

Although the refugees are known as Afghans and the name of the country literally means "land of the Afghans," within the national society the term Afghan usually refers specifically to a Pashto (or Pakhtu) speaker who is recognized as a member of one of the several Pashtun tribes (see Ethnicity and Tribe, ch. 2). An estimated 50 percent of the population-and reportedly over 50 percent of the refugees-are Pashtuns. The royal families from 1747 to 1973 were Pashtuns, and Babrak Karmal, who was installed as president by the Soviets in 1979 and who remained in nominal power in 1986, was a Pashtun. Although the figures were actually guesses, some observers suggested that Tajiks account for about 25 percent of the population and Uzbeks and Hazaras for about 9 percent each. Baluch, Turkmen, and other small ethnic groups compose the remainder (see fig. 5). The mother tongue of about half the population is Pashtu; Dari (Afghan Farsi or Persian) is the first language of about 35 percent: and Turkic (especially Uzbek and Turkmen), about 11 percent. There is extensive bilingualism.

All but a minuscule number of Afghans are Muslims. Islam is a central facet in the day-to-day life of the overwhelming majority of the members of society. Pashtuns, for example, accept it as a given that to be Pashtun is to be Muslim. Their ethnohistory stipulates that their apical ancestor, Qays, was converted by the Prophet Muhammad (see Meaning and Practice, ch. 2). In a society in which tribal, ethnic, linguistic, and class cleavages determine most social relations, Islam and the sense of belonging to and participating in the Islamic community (umma) continued in the mid-1980s to provide the overriding cohesive force for the freedom fighters. The name used by the resistance forces, mujahidiin (sing., mujahid), means those engaged in jihad (see Glossary), i.e. warriors of Islam.

Nevertheless, the Islamic community in Afghanistan is a heterogeneous one. A majority-something in excess of twothirds-are Sunnis (see Sunnis of the Hanafi School, ch. 2). The remainder consist of adherents either of Twelver or Imami Shiism (the dominant faith in neighboring Iran) or of one of the sects of Ismaili Shiism (see Twelver or Imami Shia; Ismailis, ch. 2). Numerous Afghan Muslims, particularly many Sunnis, are practicing Sufis (see Sufis, ch. 2).

These disparate and frequently warring peoples were first incorporated into a nation-state, albeit a fragile one, in 1747 by Abroad Shah (see Ahmad Shah and the Durrani Empire, ch. 1). His descendants, or those of his collateral lineages, ruled the nation with only brief interruptions until 1978. In 1973 the monarchy was abolished and a republic established by Mohammad Daoud Khan, who as a cousin and brother-in-law of the deposed king was a senior member of the royal family. The peoples of the region had always resisted government control of any kind, and they had contested with particular vigor invasions by non-Muslim aliens. In the nineteenth century the British Indian government sought on two occasions to establish a government in Kabul that would be amenable to British guidance, but in neither instance was it successful (see The First Anglo-Afghan War; The Second Anglo-Afghan War, ch. l). Because of their political victories in the aftermaths of these wars and of a brief border war that they provoked with the British in 1919, the Afghans have evinced pride that theirs is one of the few Muslim states never to be subjugated by a non-Islamic power.

Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth the kingdom's domestic affairs and its relations with its neighbors reflected its location between the expanding British and Russian empires. By the late 1890s the two imperial governments had determined Afghanistan's northern and eastern boundaries and had been instrumental in fixing the western boundary with Iran (see fig. 1). In 1893 the British Indian government coerced the Afghan ruler, Abdur Rahman Khan, to agree to a permanent boundary-the Durand Line. The central part of the boundary placed more than half of the Pashtuns within British India and the remainder in Afghanistan. Abdur Rahman disliked the division, and he and his successors continued to claim that they retained the right to protect the interests of the Pashtuns in British India. When in 1947 British India was partitioned and the new state of Pakistan was formed, the Kabul government launched a campaign to declare null and void the treaty that had established the Durand Line. This eventually created what became known as the Pashtunistan issue, which in essence was a demand that the Pashtuns in Pakistan should be granted autonomy within Pakistan, outright independence, or the right to join Afghanistan.

Pakistan obviously insisted on the validity of the Durand Line, and Britain and most Western countries supported Pakistan's position. During the 1950s Pakistan became increasingly aligned with the United States, Britain, and numerous Asian nations in bilateral agreements and multilateral treaties that were designed to prevent or contain Soviet and Chinese expansion. Because of its close relationship with Pakistan and other related reasons, the United States declined repeated Afghan invitations to supply military equipment, training, and assistance. Kabul then turned to Moscow for assistance, and within a few years Soviet economic aid had become critically important to the Afghan economy, and its military aid and training had become pervasive. By the late 1970s almost all army and air force equipment was of Soviet or East European manufacture, thousands of Afghan officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) had received training in the Soviet Union, Soviet military advisers were posted throughout the Ministry of National Defense and almost all levels of the two services, and the Russian language was used extensively in the officer corps. In addition, the officer corps had become increasingly politicized (see Background; Politicization of the Officer Corps, ch. 5).

On April 27-28, 1978, elements in the armed forces carried out a successful coup d'etat that toppled the regime of President Daoud. A few days later the Revolutionary Council (RC) of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, a body dominated by civilian leaders of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), assumed power. Nur Muhammad Taraki, PDPA secretary general, was designated president of the new republic. In the months following the coup, he and other party leaders initiated radical policies that challenged both traditional Afghan values and well-established power structures in the rural areas. The measures-especially those dealing with changes in the status of women and the nature of marriage, the abolition of usury, and land reform-were so unpopular that by late 1978 insurrections had begun in various parts of the country. These movements were headed both by traditional political and religious leaders and by a new generation of Islamic fundamentalist leaders who had been actively opposing Afghan regimes since the mid-1970s (see Political Bases of the Resistance, ch. 4).

The PDPA was a Marxist-oriented party whose following was largely limited to an educated minority in the urban areas. Because this group's perceptions and values were at variance with those of the vast majority of conservative, rural Afghans, it enjoyed a minimum of popular support. The party was further weakened by bitter and sometimes violent internal rivalries. Two years after its founding in January 1965, the PDPA split into two factions that in terms of membership and ideology operated essentially as separate parties: the radical Khalq (Masses) faction, led by Taraki, and the more moderate Parcham (Banner) faction, headed by Karmal. Khalq's adherents were primarily Pashtuns recruited from the nonelite classes. Parcham's adherents included other ethnic groups and tended to come from the Westernized upper classes. At the urging of foreign communist parties and probably the Soviet Union, the two factions agreed in 1977 to reunite as a single PDPA. But once the party was in power, Khalqis, having a strong following in the military, initiated a purge of Parchamis. Following an alleged Parchami plot in the summer of 1978, many Parchamis were thrown in prison and tortured. Parchami leaders, such as Karmal, were sent abroad as ambassadors in mid-1978, and they remained in exile in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union rather than return to Afghanistan and face certain death (see A Revolution Backfires, ch. 4).

The internal situation deteriorated further through 1979. Armed opposition to the regime spread to practically every region of the country, and there were several serious mutinies within the Afghan armed forces. Hafizullah Amin, a ruthlessly ambitious Khalqi leader, became the most powerful man in the regime as he sought to undermine the position of the less astute Taraki. When Taraki attempted to remove Amin in September 1979, the latter, warned by an informer, turned the tables, arrested Taraki after a shootout at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, and assumed the highest party and state posts. In October Taraki was dead, murdered in prison by Amin's agents.

Amin sought desperately to preserve his country's independence from steadily growing Soviet influence. By late November-early December, the Soviets, acting on the advice of high-ranking military personnel who had toured the country to assess the political and military situation, prepared for a military intervention. On December 27, 1979, Soviet troops seized the center of Kabul. Amin was killed (he probably died fighting the Soviets, though official accounts relate that he was executed for counterrevolutionary activities), and the Soviets installed Karmal as the new president.

The Soviet role in Afghan internal politics before the invasion is unclear. It was, however, probably substantial. The PDPA adhered to the Soviet model of revolution, and its leaders in both Khalq and Parcham had close ties with Moscow's embassy in Kabul and operatives of the KGB, the Soviet secret police. Soviet advisers may have played a role in the April 1978 coup detat, and during the 19 months following the coup, the regime became increasingly dependent on Soviet aid and military backing. The Soviets were probably involved in the September 1979 attempt to remove Amin. The December 1979 invasion, undertaken to rescue a friendly regime and prevent the establishment of a hostile new regime (similar ideologically, perhaps, to the radical regime in Iran) on the Soviet Union's southern border, was apparently intended to be a short-term operation. But in early 1986, six years after the invasion, an estimated 118,000 Soviet troops were deployed in Afghanistan and played the principal role in combating the mujahidiin.

In the mid-1980s Soviet advisers supervised and controlled state institutions on the national, provincial, andwhere guerrilla resistance did not prevent it-district levels. Afghan foreign policy was, according to Afghan defector sources, virtually dictated by the Soviets. Moscow's attempts to foster the development of a stable and viable political system, however, were largely unsuccessful. The central government controlled little more than a fifth of the country's land area. Popular support was estimated to amount to little more than 3 to 5 percent of the total population. Millions had fled to Pakistan or Iran to escape what they perceived as an intolerable situation under de facto Soviet rule. Although Karmal and his associates established bodies like the National Fatherland Front and convened a Loya Jirgah (grand national assembly) in early 1985 in attempts to garner public support and an aura of legitimacy, they relied increasingly on Soviet-backed coercion to remain in power (see The Soviet Occupation, ch. 4). Instruments of coercion included not only Soviet troops and the regime's own armed forces and paramilitary units but also the State Information Service (Khadamate Ettelaate Dowlati, in Dari-KHAD), the dreaded and pervasive secret police that retained close ties to the KGB (see Internal Security, ch. 5). After the invasion, Parcham became politically dominant, but the rivalry between the two factions continued to smolder, and violence erupted periodically.

Resistance forces in the mid-1980s reflected the divisions and diversity of Afghan society. There were as many as 90 different localities throughout the country where guerrilla commanders and their forces operated. To Western observers, the seven major emigre parties, based in Peshawar, Pakistan, were the most prominent goups in the resistance. These were divided into two loose coalitions of "traditionalists" and "Islamic fundamentalists." Although they provided the in-country commanders with much needed arms and other forms of aid and represented the Afghan struggle to sympathizers and supporters in the Arab and Western worlds the emigres did not possess the guerrillas' unconditional allegiance or maintain well-defined chains of command. Most mujahidiin, unified but also divided by their allegiance to Islamic values and hostility to the atheistic Soviet invader, operated with substantial autonomy. In the central part of the country, known as the Hazarajat, Shia Muslim Hazaras maintained their own resistance groups, some of which had ties with Iran.

Desertion had thinned the ranks of the Afghan army to about 40,000 men in the mid-1980s, compared with 90,000 to 110,000 before the April 1978 coup. Morale and the quality of personnel were low. Most soldiers were conscripts, often rounded up by press-gangs, and soliders frequently went over to the mujahidiin rather than fight. Soviet commanders considered them undependable, often using them to spearhead offensives or defend isolated posts of secondary importance in guerrilla territory. The air force consisted of about 7,000 men. Both on the ground and in the air, the most advanced equipment was used only by Soviet troops, for it was feared that Afghan troops might allow them to fall into the guerrillas' hands (see The Afghan Armed Forces, 1985, ch. 5).

Soviet military operations in the mid-1980s were designed to deprive the resistance of sustenance and popular support by destroying local economies and communications networks, causing large-scale migration to urban areas and neighboring countries, and infiltrating guerrilla organizations to stir up intergroup and intragroup conflict and defections (this latter activity was largely the responsibility of KHAD). The guerrillas, in turn, sought to cripple the regime by sabotaging strategic facilities, such as bridges and power plants, and by assassinating regime officials and collaborators. Western observers noted that despite long-standing rivalries between the emigre resistance groups, commanders on the battlefield possessed far greater coordination and effectiveness than in the months after xxvi

the invasion, when they fought the Soviets using traditional tribal tactics. The mujahidiin were learning, through costly trial and error, how to fight a modern, well-armed opponent (see Resistance Forces, ch. 5).

The Soviet invasion precipitated a crisis with serious implications for the South Asian and Middle Eastern regions. The presence of as many as 3 million Afghan refugees on Pakistani soil was a source of concern for Islamabad. Pakistan continued, however, to offer sanctuary and aid to the refugees and guerrillas based in the mountainous border region, despite repeated Soviet and Afghan army incursions into Pakistani territory. India, enjoying comparatively good relations with the PDPA regime, viewed foreign, and especially United States, military aid to Pakistan as a potential threat to itself. Principal material and moral support for the resistance came from the Arab world, the Western alliance, and China. The UN General Assembly, in resolutions passed overwhelmingly since 1980, repeatedly called for withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.

In early 1986 UN-sponsored "proximity talks" between the foreign ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan were continuing; the "proximity" meant that the minister did not meet face to face but negotiated through a senior UN official. Many observers believed that it was possible that procedures could be worked out that would result in the gradual withdrawal of Soviet forces and the acceptance by all parties of some form of national government of a truly neutral Afghanistan. Other observers, however, while hoping that such an agreement could be achieved, doubted that the mujahidiin would accept any proposal that failed to provide not only for the departure of the Soviets but also all Afghans who had collaborated with the Soviets. A central feature of the Pashtun code-Pashtunwali-is an insistence on revenge (badal). To one degree or another every mujahid has a grudge; loss of kin, loss of property, personal injury, eviction from the land of the lineage and its ancestors, torture, and related grievances not only justify acts of revenge but also make them a matter of family and personal honor. For any realistic resolution of the occupation of Afghanistan, the claims of the mujahidiin will have to be resolved.

Richard F. Nyrop

January 15, 1986 Donald M. Seekins

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