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Revolutionary Afghanistan Is No Exception

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Revolutionary Afghanistan Is No Exception CONTENTS PREFACE 1. In Search of Hafizullah Amin 6 2. Three Revolutionaries 12 3. A House Divided: the PDPA, 1965-1973 25 4. The Making of a Revolution: the PDPA, 1973-1978 39 5. The Inheritance: Afghanistan, 1978 53 6. Strategy for Reform 88 7. The Eid Conspiracy 106 8. A Treaty and a Murder: Closing the American Option 120 9. The Question of Leadership 133 10. The Summer of Discontent 147 11. The End Game 166 12. ‘. And the People Remain’ 186 Select Bibliography 190 PREFACE PREFACE The idea for this book arose from a visit to Kabul in March 1979 when it became immediately obvious that what was happening in Afghanistan bore little relation to reports appearing in the Western media. Further research subsequently reinforced that impression. Much of the material on which the book is based was collected in the course of my 1979 field trip which took me to India, Pakistan and the United Kingdom as well as Afghanistan and during a follow-up trip to India and Pakistan from December 1980 to January 1981. Unfortunately by then times had changed and on this second occasion the Afghan government refused me a visa. Texts of speeches and statements by Afghan leaders and other Afghan government documents have for the most part been taken from the Kabul Times, since these are in effect the official version. I have however taken the liberty where necessary of adjusting the syntax of the Afghan translator. The problem of transliteration is inescapable, and at the risk of offending the purists I have chosen what appears to be the simplest spelling of Afghan names and have tried to be consistent. Where I have failed, I beg the reader’s indulgence and plead in defence that not even the Kabul Times achieved complete consistency in this respect. Writing about contemporary politics is always a little like assembling a jigsaw puzzle knowing that some of the pieces are missing. Revolutionary Afghanistan is no exception. While it is important to acknowledge the gaps it seems worthwhile to attempt to put together the pieces available in the hope that a more accurate picture may emerge than many others so far presented. As new pieces are discovered they can be placed in position. Although responsibility for assembling this particular jigsaw and hence for the overall picture must ultimately and inevitably be my own, I should like to express my gratitude to those who helped me fill some of the gaps. My thanks must go first of all to the many people in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in Australia who talked to me freely, frankly and at length about the people and events in Afghanistan with which many of them had been intimately connected. To name them all would be to create severe embarrassment for some; to name only a few would be unjust to the others. But they will know who I mean. Some of them will probably disagree with what I have written but I hope they will not feel that they have been misrepresented. I should also like to thank Dr. Richard Lawless of the Documentation Section of the Centre for the Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Durham for placing the facilities of the Section at my disposal; Professor Brian Beddie, who once PREFACE described Afghanistan as a contagious disease, but who nevertheless gave generous support to the project; Mrs. Shirley Mason, who patiently typed and re-typed the manuscript, and who was an unfailing source of encouragement throughout; those many good friends who bore stoically with my obsession, gave me unstinting and kindly assistance and (happily) are still talking to me; and last but by no means least, my parents Mary and Bruce Male to whom I owe a debt of gratitude beyond words. I heard they brought him wounded; May heart started pounding in fear, What if the wound is on his back? (Anonymous Pashtun Couplet) The leader of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan always said the object of the struggle should not be death because this emanates from adventurism and egoism. The struggle should aim at rescuing the people from oppressive exploitation. And this struggle calls for gallantry, resistance and patience. Therefore, one should live to struggle. (Hafizullah Amin, 21 February 1979) 1 IN SEARCH OF HAFIZULLAH AMIN When Soviet tanks rumbled across the Afghan border and down through the Hindu Kush in December 1979 the Western world was shaken from its post-Christmas torpor. Why had the Russians made such a dramatic and potentially dangerous move? For some the answer was simple: they thought the Soviets were heading for the oil fields and warm waters of the Persian Gulf. The fact that if this was so the Russians were going the long way around and doing it the hard way was an inconvenience swiftly dismissed by the protagonists of the expansionist school. Others saw the Soviet move as essentially defensive, although they were divided over precisely what it was the USSR was defending itself against. Two such schools of thought argued that the Soviet objective was to prevent the imminent overthrow of a neighbouring communist government but they differed over the nature of the threat confronting that government. One group believed it came from an invincible Islamic tide, already sweeping Iran and Pakistan, intolerant of the alien, atheist, Marxist philosophy represented by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and with serious implications for the security of the Soviet Central Asian republics to the north. The other, discounting the political importance of Islam, claimed that the Afghan government had too narrow a base of support and had alienated even this by its harsh measures. It was losing its grip, not before an Islamic rebellion, but in the face of mounting internal chaos. In either case, the overthrow of the Afghan government would have serious consequences for the USSR. These two theories proved convenient for both the right and the left. For the right, the imminent collapse of the PDPA government before an overwhelming Islamic uprising was important, for a socialist revolution must not be allowed to appear successful. For the left, the myth that the government was no longer in control of a situation which threatened the survival of the PDPA regime is essential, because it saves the necessity of explaining the destruction by the Soviet Union of a perfectly competent socialist government. A third school of thought argued that, as a result of the instability in Iran and the seizure of the American hostages in Tehran the USSR perceived the international environment as suddenly more menacing. It therefore moved to replace a government in Afghanistan which, even though it was socialist, Moscow could not control and regarded as potentially hostile, with one more amenable to Soviet tutelage. At the centre of this controversy was one man, Hafizullah Amin, the Afghan President destroyed by the Soviet Union intervention. Seldom has any revolution been so widely misrepresented as that which began in Afghanistan in April 1978, or any revolutionary leader so viciously slandered as Hafizullah Amin. For the most part Amin has been condemned with scant regard for the evidence by his enemies across 6 7 In Search of Hafizullah Amin the ideological spectrum. They claim that he was at once so cunning and powerful that no one could outmanoeuvre him, and so weak and unpopular that he was about to be overthrown. The fact remains that Amin commanded immense personal loyalty among members of the PDPA and the armed forces. When he was finally overthrown, it was not by any internal Afghan opposition, but by four thousand specially trained Soviet airborne troops, backed by three divisions of the Soviet army. Despite the claims of Babrak Karmal, the new Soviet-backed Afghan president, that Amin had lost the support of the Revolutionary Council, Karmal was able to retain only four of Amin’s ministers, while three of the former president’s closest supporters, including one who had been involved in the early stages of the April 1978 uprising, were executed in June 1980.1 For the persistent misrepresentation of events in Afghanistan the Western media bears special, but by no means sole, responsibility. Afghanistan has traditionally been recognised as a difficult country from which to report and about which to collect information, but the problem was compounded, after the 1978 Revolution, by journalists who arrived with preconceived ideas which they never questioned. Those who bothered to interview President Taraki or his Foreign Minister Hafizullah Amin seldom reported these interviews ( the texts of which were usually published in the Kabul Times or broadcast over Kabul Radio) in any depth. Despite the frequently hostile and ignorant questions, Taraki and Amin patiently tried to explain what their revolution was about. Consistently they requested that Western journalists report accurately and honestly what they had been told, what they had seen. They might as well have saved their breath. The stories were written long before the journalists set foot in Kabul. One American journalist who went to Kabul in the wake of the April Revolution did not wait for President Taraki’s first press conference on 6 May despite the uncertainty in the West regarding the aims of the new leadership. ‘I had all the atmosphere I needed and I figured I could get the rest from the wire-services’, he said.2 A New York Times report gave more column inches to an unidentified student malcontent than it did to the Afghan Foreign Minister, with whom the journalist had recently had a long interview, and even then, he managed to quote Amin out of context.3 In contrast, press conferences given by leaders of the Afghan counter-revolution in Pakistan were reported sympathetically and uncritically, their extravagant claims taken at face value.
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