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Afghanistan Under Soviet Domination, 1964-91 Afghanistan Under Soviet Domination, 1964-91 AFGHANISTAN UNDER SOVIET DOMINATION, 1964-91 AFGHANISTAN UNDER SOVIET DOMINATION, 1964-91 Anthony Hyman Third Edition M © Anthony Hyman 1982, 1984, 1992 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First edition (Afghanistan under Soviet Domination, 1964-1981) 1982 Second edition (Afghanistan under Soviet Domination, 1964-1983) 1984 Third edition (Afghanistan under Soviet Domination, 1964-1991) 1992 Published by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Footnote Graphics, Warminster, Wiltshire ISBN 978-0-333-49291-8 ISBN 978-1-349-21948-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21948-3 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Contents List of Maps and Plates Vll Preface IX Acknowledgements Xll Postscript (February 1991) Xlll PART ONE The Land and the People in History 3 2 Society and Economy 23 3 Afghan Foreign Relations 39 4 The New Democracy and its Limitations 52 PART TWO 5 The Saur Revolution 75 I: Two coups 75 II: Reforms- the attempt to mobilise the rural poor 85 III: The children ofhistory remake the world 92 6 Reforms from Above and Repressions 99 7 Afghan Centres ofOpposition 121 8 Disintegrating Army v. Divided Opposition 146 9 'Positive Non-alignment' 161 v Vl Contents 10 A State ofNature 176 11 Jihad and the Superpower Proxy War 197 12 A Bleeding Wound 223 Reading List 269 APPENDICES A Influential Figures in the PDPA 273 B Opposition Parties 275 C Shabnamah (night letter) of Kabul Opposition, summer 1980 278 D Land Reforms 281 E Chronology 283 Notes 285 Index 294 List of Maps and Plates MAPS 1 Principal tribes and ethnic groups 12 2 Provinces since 1964 57 3 Afghanistan 1982 123 PLATES Kabul street life (a) Kabul bazaar; (b) Selecting fruits 2 King Zahir Shah and his daughter with Queen Elizabeth II 3 Khalq Party demonstration 4 An arms-store in Darra Adam Khel 5 Choosing arms 6 Hizb-i-Islami mujahidin 7 Babrak Karmal 8 Loya Jirga of Afghan tribesmen 9 Refugees 10 Children in Baluchistan 11 The colossal figure of a Mujahid resistance fighter 12 Page of a picture book of the jihad 13 Tanks and gunships are destroyed 14a New patterns of rugs and carpets 14b Afghan activists of J amiat-i-Islami 15a Afghan soldiers smile with child 15b Armed rider leads mujahidin 16 Two Afghan girls pose by a Soviet bomb 17 Afghan opposition poster, 'the fate of the atheist' 18 Farmers at work in an independent area inside Afghanistan 19 President N ajibullah and tribal leaders Vll vm List of Maps and Plates 20 Afghan government poster - a smiling Soviet soldier declares he wishes only peace and good things to his 'dear Afghan friends' 21 President Najibullah 22 Afghan refugee school, Pakistan The photographs for plates 3, 4, 5, 8, I 0, 11, 12, 13, 14a and 14b, 17 and 20 were taken by the author; Plates 1(a) and (b) ©Alastair Cook; 2 © H.M. Government; 7 ©Camera Press; 6 © Hizb-i-Islami party; 9 © UNHCR, Pakistan; 15a, 15b, 20 ©Afghan Aid, UK; 16, 18 © Katarina Engberg/Swedish Com­ mittee for Afghanistan; 19, 21 © The Embassy of the Republic of Afghanistan, London; 22 © UNHCR, Geneva/D. A. Guilianotti. Preface The Afghan people are the victims of a bitter civil war, which grew into a nationwide guerrilla resistance after the Soviet invasion, and was compounded by foreign intervention. It is a war which has cost well over one million deaths, with millions more made homeless as refugees, orphaned, wounded or maimed, together with huge destruction to a country already poor and undeveloped even before the struggle began. The tragedy of Afghanistan since 1978 provoked intense but selective spasmodic media interest. Many other books, including some excellent reports and analyses of the political, social, economic and military developments of contemporary Afghanis­ tan have been published since. A great deal of research has been done into the complex interrelationship between political in~ terests and national identity, linking sociology, geography and geopolitics. It is all the more flattering, then, to be asked to pre­ pare a third edition of a book originally published in 1982, in­ tended to serve as a background history to modern Afghanistan. The course of the struggle for Afghanistan has shown up the full importance of the deep ethnic, tribal and religious divisions and rivalries within Afghan society. Massive intervention by the superpowers as well as by all the regional states has made this guerrilla war increasingly a proxy war. Yet historical experience shows that the Afghans are not easily ruled by outside powers. Twice in the last century armies from British India invaded, held the capital and some of the towns, trying to impose a ruler upon the fiercely independent tribes- and each time, after initial military successes, the British retreated, leaving the country to its own devices. Even one hundred years ago, when Afghanistan was incompar­ ably more remote, more backward and much less open to foreign influences, there was plenty of evidence of Russian cultural penetration in Kabul. In 1879, when the army of General Roberts occupied Kabul, its chief wrote: lX X Preface we found Kabul much more Russian than English. The Afghan Sirdars and officers were arrayed in Russian pattern uniforms, Russian money was found in the treasury, Russian wares were sold in the bazaars, and although the roads lead­ ing to Central Asia were certainly no better than those leading to India, Russia had taken more advantage of them than we had to carry on commercial dealings with Afghanistan. Roberts did not make the simple mistake of equating Russian or English trade, fashions or influence in Kabul with actual political power in the country as a whole. He clearly saw that Afghan suspicions offoreigners in general were too intense to be ignored: It may not be very flattering to our amour propre but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they dislike us. Should the Russians attempt to conquer Afghanistan we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interest if we avoid all interference with them. This same cautious policy of keeping a low profile was adopted by Soviet troops in the capital, only rarely in evidence by daylight, their tanks kept discreetly out of sight behind public buildings and in military camps on the outskirts of Kabul. There are many other similarities between these chief exponents of European imperialism in Asia, separated though they are by a century of rapid change and fundamental differences in ideology. Just like British military writers in the second Anglo-Afghan war of 1878-80, Russian press and radio have consistently under-rated Afghan military abilities; British troops indignantly declared that it was not mere Afghans but Russian gunners who were raining down accurate fire from Afghan gun emplacements. A century on, the Soviet media denounced the activities of foreign agents from the USA, China, Pakistan, Britain, Iran and even Israel, rather than admit that 'mere Afghans' are hitting back by acts of sabotage in a nationwide guerrilla war. Yet it is hardly vulgar racism which explains the curious Soviet inability to understand the popular roots of resistance to three successive Marxist Governments in Kabul since April 1978. The need to justify to the world the extent of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan is the key to the intense Soviet Preface Xl propaganda. Neither at the beginning of this involvement, with full Soviet backing for the so-called 'Saur Revolution' of April 1978, let alone after the military adventure of December 1979, and the imposition of Babrak Karmal as Prime Minister, could the official line of the Kremlin afford to admit doubts as to the popular standing of its proteges inside Afghanistan. Not until the arrival of glasnost did the Soviet media begin to publish articles casting serious doubt on official policy. Viewed from outside, the cruelly destructive warfare may seem a continuation of older rivalries, the latest (and possibly the last) round of the Great Game- as Anglo-Russian imperial expansion into the borderlands of Central Asia came to be known. Such judgements ignore some basic shifts in regional and global power, not only since the independence and partition of India in 1947, but the gradual rise to pre-eminence in the region of the Soviet Union over the past decade, due to its firm friendship with India and loss of US prestige or even absence of US policy initiatives. If, then, the Russians are playing a game, it is essentially a new game with ground-rules in their favour. By now the grim reality of the power struggle going on is plain to see - a poor and underdeveloped country is tearing itself apart, while the world media look on spasmodically. The full extent of the tragedy affecting the lives of the Afghan people became only gradually and imperfectly understood by the out­ side world, with most foreign journalists long refused entry to Kabul. Those visiting Afghanistan were forced to make hazar­ dous trips inside with the mujahidin.
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