Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (19 page)

The tensions in Ayazi’s high school reflected what was happening in the country at large. President Mohammed Daoud Khan had originally sympathized with the Communists. In 1973 he had overthrown King Zahir Shah, his own cousin, and declared a republic with himself at the helm. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the local version of the Communist Party, had helped him overthrow the king. But as the years went by, Daoud grew wary of his allies and maneuvered to avoid becoming an outright client of the USSR. He sought improved relations with the Muslim Middle East and particularly with Iran, America’s main regional ally.

The Kremlin viewed these efforts with a growing degree of alarm, and they transferred their dissatisfaction to their Communist allies inside Afghanistan. PDPA leaders grew increasingly vocal in their criticisms of Daoud’s policies. As a result, by the spring of 1978, Daoud’s friends on the Left were beginning to make him nervous. Tensions between the president and the Communists rose. In April one of the senior leaders of the PDPA was shot dead by two assassins who appeared at the door of his home. Who orchestrated the killing remains unclear to this day, but there is no dispute about the consequences. The Communists, scenting a government plot, railed against the government and staged a big protest march through downtown Kabul. Daoud hesitated for a few days, then rounded up the leaders of the PDPA. It was a declaration of war.

As he read the announcement of the arrests, Ayazi suspected that the Communists might attempt to fight back. Little did he know how quickly he would be proved right. As he and his friend walked out of the radio station, they were startled to see a tank lumber into the courtyard. Confused, the two men ran into the street—just in time to see more tanks heading toward them. As Ayazi watched, one of the tanks swiveled its turret and fired a shell into the nearby presidential palace. Soviet-made MiG fighter jets swirled overhead. Ayazi rushed off to warn his
mother, who was working in another part of the city, and bring her home to safety, where they sheltered as the fighting continued.

The gunfire and the confusion went on for another twenty-four hours. By the end the Communists and their allies were able to celebrate their triumph. With surprising ease they had succeeded, in less than a day, in routing the government. Daoud and most of his family were dead, gunned down in the palace, where they had held out until the end against the rebels. The commander of the tank that fired that first shot became the new minister of defense.

When Ayazi returned to work, he discovered that he was out of a job. It turned out that most of his colleagues at the radio station, who were now proudly sporting red armbands, had been covert members of the Communist Party. Ayazi was not, and the new order no longer required his services. He was fired.

Officially, supreme power in the state now resided with the PDPA and its leader, a former writer by the name of Nur Mohammed Taraki. The new government immediately launched a public relations campaign lauding his modest origins, his grand plans, and his extraordinary talents. Afghans learned that the new ruling party, the heroic vanguard of workers and peasants, was solidly behind the man who was now described as the “great leader,” united like no organization before it in the country’s history. The future was bright, and Afghans were heading straight for it.

It was all facade. The new rulers grandly dubbed their seizure of power the “April Revolution,” but it was actually a classic palace coup that had been orchestrated by a Taraki aide named Hafizullah Amin. While the other PDPA leaders languished in prison, Amin, for some mysterious reason, had drawn only house arrest. Perhaps Daoud regarded him as a relatively harmless junior. It was a fatal mistake.

Over the next few months, Amin would prove to be the most relentless schemer in the PDPA, combining thrusting ambition with an easy if somewhat reptilian charm. Unbeknownst to Daoud or even the other Communist leaders, Amin had spent years patiently honeycombing the Afghan military with his supporters, often building on the proto-Communist inclinations of officers who had received much of their training in the Soviet Union. When Daoud made his move against the PDPA, Amin was ready and took advantage of his lax detention to send his armed followers into the field against the president. Once he had heaved Taraki into power, Amin positioned himself as the older man’s most loyal acolyte—the substitute son of the childless leader who had sacrificed his entire life to the cause of the party. None of this, as events would show, altered the fact that the son was really the more powerful of the two and that his feelings toward his father figure were fueled more by Freudian resentment than filial piety.

As for the party’s unity, this was the biggest lie of all. Far from the monolithic structures of so many Communist Parties elsewhere, the fractiousness of the PDPA was an open secret. It was actually two parties bolted together, a coalition of necessity that reflected the ethnic and sectarian fault lines that ran through Afghan society.

From their beginnings, back in the 1960s, Afghan Communists had tended to gravitate around two poles. One was the group known as Parcham (meaning “Banner”), led by the imperious Babrak Karmal, a general’s son who never quite lost the aura of his privileged upbringing.

Karmal and his followers believed that Afghanistan was too backward to fit the orthodox Marxist template of a prerevolutionary society, and even as they railed against the ruling classes, it was clear that their view of social transformation was essentially a gradualist one. While the Parchamis included in their number many Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, their membership drew heavily on the other ethnicities—Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras—who tended to communicate in the Afghan lingua franca of Dari (the local version of Persian). Though Karmal liked to claim descent from a rough-hewn Pashtun clan in order to broaden his appeal, his family actually came from an urban, Persian-speaking milieu.

Taraki and Amin both belonged to the PDPA’s other faction, known as Khalq (“the People” or “the Masses”). Khalq’s ethnic basis was narrower than Parcham’s: Khalqis were overwhelmingly Pashtuns, and more often than not they hailed from a particular subset of the Pashtuns. Taraki and Amin were both members of a particular Pashtun tribal confederation, the Ghilzais, that had long chafed under the domination of more powerful Pashtun groups—and especially the Durranis, the dynasty that had dominated Afghanistan for centuries, right up until the Communist coup. (Both Daoud and Zahir Shah were Durranis.) The Khalqis tended to be far less vested in the existing system of ruling elites, and this helps to explain the radicalism that dominated their thinking.

Khalqis were, above all, dutiful Leninists. Like so many other would-be Third World modernizers, they detested their country’s backwardness, and they believed that the only reasonable cure was to frog-march it into the twentieth century by brute force, if need be. To be sure, Afghanistan didn’t really have a proletariat, and though many aspects of its agricultural system appeared backward and traditional, most peasants actually owned their own land. But no matter. There was one institution that could still serve as a revolutionary vanguard, and that was the army. For years the military had been one of the few structures in the country—along with the monarchy and a steadily expanding state educational system—that managed to coalesce the notoriously unruly Afghans around a sense of shared national destiny.
The military was one Afghan institution that offered opportunities for advancement even to those who weren’t part of the traditional elites. And the upper ranks were filled with officers who had studied in the Soviet Union, which offered them a clear example of a primitive rural society that the Communists had mobilized into a modern industrial power.

The ideological differences between Parcham and Khalq were just part of the problem. There were also intense personal feuds at work. Karmal, the Persian-speaking patrician, despised Taraki and Amin as upstarts, and they were happy to return the favor. In the old, prerevolutionary parliament, Amin had been famous for his easy joshing with his opponents among the religious conservatives, who gave their atheist colleague the joking nickname of “Satan.”
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Karmal, a formidable orator once imprisoned for five years by the king, had emerged to become a political heavyweight courted even by Daoud himself, and he cultivated a self-regard that alienated just about everyone. As the new Communist regime got under way, Amin couldn’t help reminding the Parchamis that they had spent the “revolution” cringing in prison while the Khalqis got on with the job. The Parchamis, in turn, regarded the Khalqis as bumbling zealots who needed a bit of adult supervision.

The Afghan public at large knew little of this, of course. What they saw instead were slogans, revolutionary parades, and a burgeoning personality cult centered on Taraki. There is little doubt that the vast majority of Afghans—most of whom had no access to television or newspapers—regarded all this with bemusement, apprehension, or apathy. But the state almost immediately denied them the luxury of disengagement. Within weeks of seizing power, the new revolutionary government announced a series of far-reaching edicts that would tip Afghan society into a maelstrom from which it is still struggling to recover.

Decree Number One proclaimed land reform. The proclaimed intent was to uproot the supposedly feudal underpinnings of Afghan society, stripping power from traditional landlords and canceling unfair lending arrangements that had kept millions of people indentured to local power brokers. The political aim was to give the majority of Afghans—who overwhelmingly lived in the countryside—a reason to love the new government. A flurry of other new reform measures followed. A literacy campaign taught the benighted how to read and write. Women received full civic rights. It was a program that bore a striking resemblance to the shah’s White Revolution.

It all sounded wonderful, on paper. The problem was that this blizzard of reforms, and especially the realities of their implementation, bore little or no relation to the society they were intended to change. Of course, everyone believed in the goal of literacy, but the catch was that the government had little in the way of resources to accomplish the task of educating the rural poor. So it relied, as Communist
regimes so often had in the past, on a mixture of mobilization and brute force to fill the gap. Zealous young schoolteachers dispatched to the villages, invariably without proper textbooks or teaching materials, often ended up haranguing the locals on their backwardness. What particularly inflamed the locals was the newcomers’ insistence that women should take part in the courses, in classrooms that mingled both sexes. Mobs drove the arrogant outsiders away. In some cases the do-gooders then returned with escorts of government troops, and literacy classes then proceeded at bayonet point.

The land-reform program similarly ignored the complex skeins of social relations that bound Afghans together in the countryside in a million site-specific ways. Given its extreme topography, hybrid civilizations, and ethnic and social pluralism, Afghanistan has never been a country about which useful generalizations can be made. But this is precisely what the land reform of 1978 entailed. It attempted to impose a one-size-fits-all template on a messy array of situations. It is true that Afghan landlords acted as exploiters—but they were also important organizational centers of society who played religious or social roles as well as economic ones. And there were massive problems with implementation as well. Plots of land awarded to previously landless peasants could not be cultivated without money for seed and fertilizer—yet the reforms had failed to provide for supporting changes in the financial system, like the creation of agricultural banks. Instead, they stripped away traditional sources of finance without replacing them with new ones.

What all of this showed, of course, was that the April Revolution (as the new government referred to the coup against Daoud) failed to root itself in Afghan society. Its leaders essentially admitted as much. Taraki’s official speeches stressed that the April Revolution was advancing a dramatically new theory of Marxist revolution—one driven by a progressive, antifeudal military elite rather than an industrial working class or a militant peasantry. (Afghanistan had no industrial class to speak of, and the peasantry was largely quiescent.) Marx would have probably interpreted this view as a form of “Bonapartism.” The keepers of the faith in Moscow—people like the Kremlin’s chief ideologue, Mikhail Suslov—ought to have regarded this as a perversion of orthodox Marxist-Leninism. But by this point they had spent so many years trying to stir up Third World revolutions in places with little or no signs of “proletarian consciousness” that they don’t seem to have noticed.

In the developing world, indeed, the word
revolution
had long since devolved into code for just this sort of brute-force modernization. Starting in 1975, the Cambodian Maoist off shoot known as the Khmer Rouge adopted a bizarre amalgam of Communism, primitivist nostalgia, and militant ethnonationalism that involved
driving all city dwellers into the countryside, where they would be forcibly reeducated at the hands of zealous revolutionaries. (In practice this meant that you could be killed for wearing a pair of glasses.) An estimated 2 million people died. The Communist military junta that seized power in Ethiopia unleashed a Red Terror in 1977 that took a half-million lives. The rhetoric as well as the actions in both cases represented ominous precedents for Afghanistan.
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What stood out for many Afghans was, simply enough, that the new government consisted of Communists, and Communism, by definition, is an atheistic ideology. Though Taraki and his ministers never tired of proclaiming their respect for Afghanistan’s Islamic society, their actions consistently undercut that message. One of the new government’s first actions was to change the Afghan flag from the black, red, and green tricolor that had survived from the monarchy into Daoud’s republic (in slightly modified form) with a new design in basic red, that unmistakable signature of revolutionary intentions. This was deeply offensive to those Afghans who regarded the removal of the color of Islam (green) as a clear indication that the Communists were planning to reduce the role of religion in public life. The slogans and imagery at PDPA demonstrations included virtually no religious references, and the demonstrators often included women as well as men, which incensed conservatives. As political violence increased, the PDPA buried its deceased members in secular ceremonies and sometimes left the bodies of its opponents in the field without following the Islamic customs that dictated burial within a certain period.