After Khrushchev’s visit the Soviets announced a $100 million development loan,25 and thereafter continued to provide loans, grants, training, and technical and military assistance. They also developed their links with the small but fractious Afghan Communist Party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The PDPA quickly split into two viciously rival factions: Parcham (Banner), which had its main support in the cities, and Khalq (People), which drew its main support from the countryside. Throughout the 1970s the Russians devoted much energy to trying to dissuade these two factions from destroying one another. They were to have little success and the feud was to poison Afghan politics for the next twenty years.
The violent events which were now to convulse Afghanistan’s domestic politics presented the Russians with great opportunities and even greater headaches.
Daud had been waiting in the wings since Zahir Shah had sacked him in 1963. In July 1973, while Zahir was on holiday in Italy, Daud deposed him in a bloodless coup, supported by leading members of the PDPA and a group of Communist officers whose names will crop again in this story: Kadyr, Watanjar, and Gulabzoi. Those of Zahir’s relatives who were still in Kabul—one of the princesses was halfway through her wedding—were bundled unceremoniously out of the country. The Soviet Union recognised the new regime two days later. Despite their connections with the Communists, the Russians claim, reasonably convincingly, that they had no part in Daud’s coup.
Zahir Shah’s constitution prohibited members of the royal family from holding a government ministry. So Daud abolished the monarchy and declared himself President and Prime Minister. He denounced the previous decade as a period of ‘false democracy’ and promised ‘revolutionary reforms’. His new government contained members of the PDPA.
More forceful than Zahir, Daud ruled with a rod of iron. The freedom of the parties and the students was curtailed. A former prime minister died mysteriously in prison. There were hundreds of arrests and five political executions, the first in more than forty years. In 1977 Daud pushed through a new constitution which turned Afghanistan into a presidential one-party state, in which only his own party, the National Revolutionary Party, was allowed to operate.
Soon Daud’s spies started to tell him that the Muslim youth organisations and extreme factions among the Communists were plotting his overthrow. He began to move against both. Moscow did its best to get the Communists to support Daud, and warned Daud against pushing his repressions too far. Neither the Communists nor Daud took much notice.
In the summer of 1975 Hekmatyar and other Afghan Muslim leaders, backed by the Pakistani prime minister, Zulfikar Bhutto, launched a series of risings, which were easily suppressed by the government. The leaders were executed, imprisoned, or fled to Pakistan, where they were taken under the wing of the Pakistani Intelligence Service. Many of the survivors—Rabbani, Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Masud—had studied together at Kabul University. They later played a major role in the struggle against the Russians. This did not stop them manoeuvring and occasionally fighting viciously against one another, a conflict which broke out with such violence after the Russians left Afghanistan in 1989 that it practically destroyed the country and persuaded the war-weary people that anything—in this case the Taliban, the radical young Islamic fundamentalists who emerged in the early 1990s—would be preferable to a peculiarly murderous civil war.
Daud’s main aims were to build up the internal power of the state at home and its international position abroad. The instrument of both was the army, which he took great pains to strengthen. The Americans refused to help him, so he reinforced the previous practice of seeking arms and training from the Russians. Thousands of Afghan officers and military specialists studied in establishments scattered across some seventy Soviet cities.
But Daud was well aware that a small country should try not to rely too heavily on any one source of outside assistance: he is reputed to have said that his aim was to light his American cigarette with a Russian match.26 He strengthened his relations with the Shah of Iran, who offered him $2 billion on easy terms. The Saudis said they would help him only if he reduced his links with the Soviet Union. He increased his surveillance on the leftist parties, closed several of their publishing houses, purged leftist officials from the government, and released from prison some of the conservative politicians who had languished there since the coup of 1973. Outbreaks of armed opposition from the right, not always distinguishable from banditry, nevertheless occurred in several provinces.
Meanwhile the Soviets continued to increase their support for Daud. Afghan-Soviet trade trebled. There were many more high-level exchanges between Kabul and Moscow. Nikita Khrushchev visited Afghanistan again in 1960, his successor Leonid Brezhnev (1906–82) in 1964. The Treaty of Neutrality and Non-Aggression was renewed for another ten years.
In April 1977 Daud visited Moscow, where he signed a twelve-year agreement for the development of bilateral Soviet–Afghan economic and trade relations. But his meeting with Brezhnev ended in a row. Brezhnev told him to stop leaning towards the West and said he should expel the numerous Western advisers in Afghanistan. Daud stormed out, saying that he was the President of an independent country and would part with his foreign advisers only when he himself decided they were no longer necessary.
He now began to look for ways out of his dependence on the Soviet Union. The US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, met Daud in Vienna in October 1977 and invited him to visit the United States. The Americans began to increase their credits and grants to Afghanistan. In January 1978 the US Embassy in Kabul reported that the relationship with Afghanistan was excellent. Daud had accepted Vance’s invitation. Finance for the US military training programme had been doubled to offset—at least in part—Soviet assistance to the Soviet armed forces. And the Afghan government was cooperating, so the embassy said, in the struggle against narcotics.
This rising trend was reversed by the Communist coup of 1978, which brought to power a government determined to turn Afghanistan into a modern socialist state in a matter of years using the techniques perfected by Stalin in Russia and Pol Pot in Cambodia.
Paradise Lost
By the 1970s Afghanistan had many of the rudiments of a modern state. It was reasonably secure, and you could travel and picnic and see the sights with comparatively little risk. Foreigners who lived in Kabul in the last days before the Communists took over—diplomats, scholars, businessmen, engineers, teachers, aid workers, hippies—later looked back on that time as a golden age. So did many of the very thin crust of the Afghan middle class who lived in Kabul and some of the big cities.
In the 1970s much of old Kabul still stood, a rabbit warren of streets, bazaars, and mosques, still dominated by the great fortress of Bala Hissar, a place, the Emperor Babur said more than four hundred years earlier, with ‘the most pleasing climate in the world… within a day’s ride it is possible to reach a place where the snow never falls. But within two hours one can go where the snows never melt.’27
In the centre of the city was the imposing Arg, the fortified palace build by Abdur Rahman, the scene of one violent turn in Afghan politics after another. Amanullah, Abdur Rahman’s grandson, commissioned European architects to build him a monumental new capital, a vast palace, the Dar-ul Aman, on the south-western edge of the city; and a summer resort in Paghman, a village in the nearby hills, complete with Swiss chalets, a theatre, an Arc de Triomphe, a golf course, and a racecourse for elephants. Across the road from the Dar-ul Aman palace stood the Kabul museum, which was opened in 1924 and contained one of the richest collections of Central Asia art and artefacts in the world: flint tools forty thousand years old from Badakhshan, a massive gold hoard from Bagram, glass from Alexandria, Graeco-Roman statuary, ivory panels from India, Islamic and pre-Islamic artefacts from Afghanistan itself, one of the largest coin collections in the world, and more than two thousand rare books. A grandiose British Embassy, built in the 1920s as a symbol of British power, lay on the northern edge of the cit
y. An equally large Soviet Embassy lay in the south-west on the road to the Dar-ul Aman.
‘Kabul’, said a guidebook sponsored by the Afghan Tourist Bureau, ‘is a fast-growing city where tall modern buildings nuzzle against bustling bazaars and wide avenues fill with brilliant flowing turbans, gayly [sic] striped chapans, mini-skirted school girls, a multitude of handsome faces and streams of whizzing traffic.’28
Those were the days when Kabul was on the Hippie Trail and thousands of romantic, adventurous, and often improvident young people poured along the road from Iran through Herat and Kabul to India, driving battered vehicles which regularly broke down and had to be repaired by ingenious local mechanics, seeking enlightenment, drugs, and sex, living on nothing and sometimes dying on the way.
But behind that fragile façade lay the real Afghanistan, a land of devout and simple Muslims, where disputes between individuals, or families, or clans and tribes, were still settled in the old violent way, where women were still subject to the absolute authority of their menfolk, where the writ of the government in Kabul barely ran, and where the idea of national rather than family or local loyalty was barely formed.
Andrew Abram travelled to Kabul in 1975 and described what he saw: ‘Plane loads of young American and European tourists with their carefully shampooed waist length hair, wearing “ethnic” Afghan costume (which I haven’t yet seen any Afghans wearing), custom made Afghan boots, sequinned waistcoats, and custom made leather money pouches on each custom made leather belt. All looking pretty much identical and wandering around Chicken Street [the tourist shopping bazaar] looking for expensive souvenirs to show Mom and Pop at the country club before they jet off to their next sanitised travel experience. In the evening they return to their hippie style hotels to eat Western food from an extensive Western, misspelled, menu and smoke Hashish supplied by the smiling management… What a wasted opportunity to see how another culture lives. If they were to take a walk past the miles of export carpet shops and camel burger stalls they would reach the old city on the banks of the Kabul River and see part of the real Afghanistan. The old part of the city, which extends half way up the sides of the surrounding hills, is just like Herat, bazaars and filth, teeming with people. Shops selling anything and everything, factories making shoes and buckets from old car tyres, stalls with real, and good, Afghan food at low prices.’29
The hippies departed with the arrival of the Soviets in 1979. But apart from the influx of foreign soldiers and some incidental damage during the fighting, life in Kabul continued comparatively unchanged in many ways. ‘Even at that time,’ one woman wrote, ‘we still went to school. Women worked as professors and doctors and in government. We went for picnics and parties, wore jeans and short skirts and I thought I would go to university like my mother and work for my living.’30 Jonathan Steele, a British journalist who was there at the time, later wrote, ‘In 1981, Kabul’s two campuses thronged with women students, as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras and music centres. The Russians did nothing to stop this vibrant private enterprise.’31
A few months after the Russians left, one journalist reported that Kabul, ‘although still a city at war, had almost a festive air. It was June, the wedding month, flowers and blossoms perfuming the air, the Kabul River swollen with molten snows, and I had sat in the sunshine licking ice-creams in the University café with lively young women in high heels, some with dyed blonde hair, one even wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “I’m not with this idiot” tightly pulled across her large breasts. At the apartment of a bureaucrat I had met, I had danced at a party where a well-known singer called Wajiha had strummed at her guitar in between puffs of her cigarette. The only real signs of war, apart from the large number of men—and women—in uniform and the drone of planes, had been the dawn queues at the bakers as people waited for the daily rations of five pieces of nan per family and the music and ideological commentary blaring from the loudspeakers hung in trees around the city which bizarrely sometimes included work-out classes and the theme from Love Story.’32
But by then paradise was already doomed. Kabul was reduced to ruins by the civil war which broke out after the Russian departure and the old life was swept away by the arrival of the Taliban, which brought the civil war to an end. The palaces and the hotels were destroyed, the museum looted, music, dancing, and women’s education all brought to nothing.
– TWO –
The Tragedy Begins
On 27 April 1978 President Daud was bloodily overthrown by the Afghan Communists, the innocuous-sounding People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The victors called it the ‘April Revolution’, the beginning of a new age which would transform their country. More than a decade later Russians were still arguing whether it had been a proper revolution or only a coup. But General Lyakhovski, the chronicler of the war that followed in which he himself served for five years, had a starker name. For him the April coup was the beginning of tragedy not only for Afghanistan, but for the Soviet Union as well.1
Several accounts maintain that the PDPA leaders were closely linked to the Soviet KGB from the start and that most of them were directly under Soviet control.2 But reliable evidence that the Russians were behind the coup is lacking. Vladimir Kryuchkov was in charge of the KGB’s external operations at the time and was a leading figure in the formulation of Soviet policy on Afghanistan until he was arrested after the unsuccessful coup in 1991 against President Gorbachev (1931–); he claimed that the KGB had nothing to do with it.3 Kryuchkov was perhaps not the most obviously reliable witness, but other Russians in some position to know back him up.
Whatever the truth—and until the KGB archives are opened nothing can be said for certain—the Afghan Communists were a growing nightmare for the Russians almost from the beginning. Though they had only fifteen hundred members in 1968,4 the Russians could not ignore them. They proclaimed their devotion to Marxism and their loyalty to the Soviet Union, and they should have been a great asset inside the complicated politics of Afghanistan. But their political views were crude and unsophisticated. Their Marxist theories, which they propounded at length in writing and on the tribune, had little application in a country which lacked the theoretically essential attribute of an urban proletariat and was about as far from a classical revolutionary situation as it was possible to be. Their solution was to sweep theory aside. They concentrated instead on the seizure and exercise of power.
Even worse, almost from the beginning the party was riven, sometimes murderously, by the feud between its two wings, Parcham and Khalq.
Parcham was made up mainly of urban intellectuals. It was led by Babrak Karmal, a Pushtun and the son of an army general. Karmal studied law at Kabul University and was imprisoned for several years for his part in student politics. He later worked in the ministries of Education and Planning. He helped found the PDPA in 1965 and later became a member of parliament. The Russian military, who kept profiles of the Afghan leaders, said of Karmal that he was ‘emotional, inclined to abstraction to the detriment of concrete analysis. He has little knowledge of or interest in economic matters. He speaks English fluently and knows some German.’5
Khalq drew its supporters from the countryside and the Pushtun tribes. Its leaders were Nur Mohamed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin. Taraki learned English while working as a clerk in Bombay as a young man and studied political economy at Kabul University. Amin also studied at Kabul University, spent some time at Columbia University in New York as a postgraduate, and on his return worked as a teacher.
There was some theoretical basis for the division between the factions. Both believed in the goal of a socialist Afghanistan. But the adherents of Parcham thought that Afghanistan was not yet ripe for social
ism. That target would have to be achieved gradually, in alliance at least at first with other nationalist and progressive forces. Khalq thought, on the contrary, that the urgent task was to seize power by force. Thereafter socialism could be imposed on Afghanistan in short order, using the methods that Stalin and Mao had applied so successfully in their own backward countries.
Each faction set up its own organisation to work among the military. In 1974 Colonel Kadyr, who had played a significant role in getting rid of the King the previous year and was a firm supporter of Khalq, set up a secret United Front of Afghan Communists within the army, where Khalq became a significant covert force.
Because the Soviet government valued its relationship with the Daud government, the Ambassador and the Chief Soviet Military Adviser were instructed to have no dealings with the PDPA leaders. Relations with them were conducted instead through the KGB representative in Kabul. In January 1974 he was instructed to see Taraki and Karmal separately, and express the Soviet government’s ‘deep alarm’ about the continuing mutual fighting between the leadership of Parcham and Khalq. This, he was told to say, only played into the hands of domestic and foreign enemies. The PDPA should instead ‘combine their efforts at giving comprehensive aid to the republican regime’ of President Daud.6
Daud himself was worried about the intrigues of the PDPA within the army and the bureaucracy. In April 1977 he told the Russians that he was concerned ‘about information given him by security agencies of plans supposedly hatched by leftist forces to remove him from power. He stepped up the arrest of activists on left and right, who were incarcerated in the notorious Pul-i Charkhi prison on the eastern outskirts of Kabul. This had been built by Germans according to a Czech design. It was in the form of a ‘snowdrop’: there were eight blocks radiating out like spokes from the centre. The ends of the spokes were joined in a circle by a stone wall. There were guard towers where the spokes joined the wall. From the air the prison looked like the wheel of a wagon. The roofs of the spokes were covered with copper sheeting, which glowed in the evening light with a bloody colour. The prison was guarded by a battalion of three hundred soldiers and four tanks. Executions were carried out in a small square in the central part of the prison; the victims were shot lying face down on the ground, so there were no traces of bullets on the walls. Built to hold five thousand prisoners, by the time of the Soviet invasion it was holding at least twelve thousand.7
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