In the capital of Afghanistan, the day of April 27, 1978, dawned cool and clear. Through the morning the staffers at Radio Kabul, the national Afghan broadcaster, stuck to their normal routine. Then, shortly before noon, a colleague asked Akbar Ayazi to read the midday news bulletin; for some reason his friend, who was supposed to do the job, preferred to pass. He promised the twenty-two-year-old Ayazi that he’d treat him to a kebab at a place around the corner in return for the favor.
As Ayazi read the bulletin, he found himself suppressing a growing sense of dismay. The news was ominous. The first item announced that the government of President Mohammed Daoud had placed all the leaders of the Communist Party under arrest.
It was immediately clear that Daoud’s move could have catastrophic consequences—for he was doing no less than embarking on a showdown with the world’s Communist superpower. For years Afghanistan had stood in the shadow of the Soviet Union. Leaders in the Kremlin, eager to counter America’s influence in Iran and Pakistan throughout the 1970s, had responded by boosting their assistance to Afghanistan in every way they could think of. The Soviets poured in billions of dollars in aid. They built Afghanistan’s industry, paved its roads, and purchased its oil and gas. They invited thousands of Afghans to study in the USSR. They supplied the Afghan military with tanks and planes and artillery and filled its ranks with Soviet advisers. And now the president of the country was throwing their friends in jail.
Despite his youth, Ayazi had already seen enough of Afghanistan’s factional politics to understand the potential for serious conflict. In Kandahar, where he grew up, his father was the principal of a local high school. Early in the 1970s the student body had begun to fragment into competing blocs. No sooner had the school’s young Communists formed a discussion group than militant Muslims responded with a cell of their own. Ayazi’s father, a secularist liberal who disagreed with both tendencies, had banned all activism from the school grounds, earning him the enmity of both camps. Just for good measure he had also forbidden his son to get involved in politics until he was mature enough to make informed choices.
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.”1 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.2
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.
The plotters of the coup against Daoud also sowed the seeds of future problems with their Soviet patrons. Far from instigating the coup, as many in the West assumed, the men in the Kremlin had been caught completely off guard by the news—they learned of Daoud’s overthrow from a Reuters report.3 They were nonplussed. No one had warned them what was afoot, and initially they were not entirely sure they approved. Moscow had been happy enough with the situation under Daoud. But the Soviet leadership nonetheless responded positively to Taraki’s initial requests for additional aid and advisers. Daoud’s overtures to the West in his last years had unsettled Brezhnev and his entourage, so the news of the coup seemed, at first, to offer reassurance that the new government would safeguard Soviet interests on the Hindu Kush. Taraki’s rhetoric did little to disappoint them. He increasingly larded his speeches with references to the example of the Great October Socialist Revolution and praised the Soviet Union’s selfless efforts toward the betterment of his country.
But Taraki’s talk had an opposite effect at home. Afghans did not like to hear their leaders kowtowing to other countries. While many appreciated the aid that they had received from the Russians over the years, there were limits to their gratitude. Everyone knew that atheism was part of the Soviet Union’s official creed. Many Afghans, indeed, had personal memories of the 1920s and ‘30s, when the Soviet government had brutally suppressed an Islamic guerrilla movement in what later became the central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Many refugees from that campaign had fled across the border to the south and settled in ethnically congenial parts of Afghanistan, bringing with them a residual memory of heroic Muslims in revolt against atheist Russian rule. Afghans were quick to recall this poisonous legacy as Soviet involvement in their country’s affairs increased.
In June 1978, two months after the coup, Afghan government police in the remote Pech Valley, in the province of Kunar, arrested two local tribal elders, men who enjoyed considerable respect in the community. The reasons for the arrest remain unclear to this day: some say that the men were detained for opposing government policy, but other accounts suggest that the officials doing the arresting were abusing their power to settle a personal grievance. What we do know is the effect that the arrest had on the locals. As the jeep carrying the prisoners passed through the small town of Ningalam, an old woman cried out, “Is there no man among you? Two of our men are being taken away.” Someone in the crowd opened fire on the vehicle, killing an officer and two soldiers. The very next day the army invaded the town with tanks and artillery. According to local accounts, government forces set fire to the houses. They even burned the local mosque and the Qurans inside it.4
Out of these desultory origins was born the first uprising against the Communist government. The stream of disturbing decrees from Kabul stirred talk of heathen practices that would soon be extended to the entire countryside. It was said that officials of the new government had told people to abandon the Quran and study the books of Marx and Lenin instead and had instructed children in school to spy on their parents. Communist officials openly drank, smoked hashish, and paid for the services of prostitutes. And, as with the Ningalam arrests, they insulted tribal leaders, figures held in high esteem by local clans. The Communists said that women were equal to men and that all the received institutions of marriage, like the bride price, would be eliminated—perhaps even marriage itself.5
The arrest of the two elders, and the government retaliation that ensued, provided the spark. Locals gathered up their weapons and attacked the town, driving out the government troops. But they were able to hold it for only a few days before they were forced to withdraw. For months the rebellion remained fragmented and diffuse. That changed in January 1979, when one of the local tribal notables, a man named Samiullah Safi, returned home to the valley from a long sojourn in Kabul. He had served for a while as a deputy in parliament, where he had opposed Daoud’s increasingly authoritarian reform program. After the April coup, Hafizullah Amin, apparently seeing him as a potentially weighty ally in a notoriously fractious part of the country, had even tried to bring him over to the side of the Khalq. But now, disgusted by the government’s apparent contempt for Islam, Safi was returning home to take up the flag of revolt.
A few days after his return, he brought together a group of local leaders—who represented both his own Safi tribe (who were ethnically Pashtun) as well as the neighboring Nuristani people (who belonged to their own distinct ethnicity)—for a traditional conference. They agreed on the need to rise up against the government and organized an attack on a nearby district headquarters. It was the signal for a broad revolt that quickly seized the entire region. The lashkar, or tribal army, that materialized soon numbered, by their own estimates, fifteen to twenty thousand people.6 The leaders of the rebellion formed assemblies, or jirgas, representing the areas liberated from the control of the Communist government. The assemblies, protected by small detachments of armed men, moved down the valley, contacting villages still under ostensible government control, to persuade them to join the revolt. Sometimes the emissaries were fired upon by government troops, but more often than not the locals quickly declared their willingness to resist the government. The rebels were willing to accept the risks of this approach because they knew that maintaining tribal unity was paramount. Otherwise the government would play on long-established tribal feuds to divide the opposition.
One of the men who fought with the Nuristanis, starting in late 1978, was not a member of any of the local tribes. He was an ethnic Tajik from the Panjshir Valley, a place—though not that distant geographically—that was culturally and linguistically remote to the people of Nuristan. His name was Ahmed Shah Massoud, and he stood for an entirely new kind of Afghan jihad. The son of a high-ranking military officer, he was a gifted student with a good mind for math. He had received an elite education at the French high school in Kabul before going on to study engineering at the Kabul Polytechnic Institute. An obsessive consumer of literature and a natural leader—the kind of kid who ordered his friends around during their games—he had dreamed of embarking on a military career.
But then, as so often happens, his life was derailed by politics. Massoud, a man with a strong religious upbringing, soon found himself joining like-minded classmates in their fights against left-wing student groups. The contempt the two camps felt for each other spilled over into full-scale battles on the campus of Kabul University, just around the corner from Massoud’s institute, throughout the early 1970s.
Massoud was soon radicalized by the rivalry. He often walked over to the university campus to listen to lectures by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, two Afghan religious scholars who had had the privilege to study at al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prestigious religious university in the Sunni Islamic world. In Egypt the two men had also imbibed the Islamist ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, which they subsequently set upon importing to their homeland. It was to that end that Rabbani founded his Jamiat-e Islami, the “Islamic Society,” which set as its goal the establishment of an Islamic state in Afghanistan. The avowed secularist Daoud viewed the group as a natural foe and unleashed his secret police against its leadership.
In 1975 the Jamiat leaders decided to strike back by launching an uprising against Daoud’s government.7 Massoud, then age twenty-two, took on the job of fomenting an armed rebellion in the Panjshir Valley, his home district. The disastrous failure of the uprising—which ended in the execution and imprisonment of dozens of its activists—forced him to flee to Pakistan, where some of the movement’s leaders had found refuge. The abortive revolt also triggered a split among Afghanistan’s Islamists. A former Kabul University engineering student, a firebrand named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, denounced Rabbani’s leadership and established his own organization, which he called Hezb-e Islami (“the Party of God”). Massoud stuck with Rabbani and spent his time in Pakistani exile reading Persian classical literature and absorbing the classic works of guerrilla warfare, including Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Régis Debray.8 He also followed the reports from home of Daoud’s growing repression of the Islamist movement and the electrifying news of the Communist takeover. The stories of the new government’s campaign to crush Islam and implement its ideas by force deepened Massoud’s determination to fight back.
The revelation that the Nuristanis had revolted against Communist rule galvanized Massoud. He headed there, several colleagues and a French journalist in tow, to fight for several weeks at the side of the rebels. The tight-knit Nuristanis showed how a determined guerrilla force, motivated by faith and exploiting the difficult terrain, could fight back against to drive out government forces. The guerrillas managed to retain a hold over some of the territory they freed from the Communists for months. Massoud watched and learned.
The Nuristanis were surprised to see him. Afghans had little sense of themselves as citizens of a wider state. When they rebelled, they usually did so as representatives of tribes or villages. But Massoud brought a larger view, one influenced by the gathering agitation in the global Islamic community in the 1970s. As a student of Rabbani and Sayyaf, he knew about the burgeoning Islamist movement in Egypt and other faraway corners of the Muslim world. Islam could no longer be regarded as “merely” a faith, something innately separate from politics. The new Islamists were reminding believers that their religion offered an answer to all of life’s questions, that it was better at addressing the problems of modern life than Marxism or liberal democracy. Meanwhile, the astonishing success of the revolution in Iran had demonstrated that Muslims united by their faith could defy an oppressive local government even when it enjoyed the direct support of the world’s most powerful country.
Few in the West were paying much attention. Foreign-policy experts still viewed the world, understandably, through the lens of Cold War conflict. Even the Arab-Israeli conflict, which pitted mostly Soviet allies against the US-sponsored Jewish state, fitted neatly into the template. The Israeli political elite was still dominated by secular Zionists, and their Arab enemies—especially the Palestinians—adhered to this-worldly ideologies of their own. The Palestine Liberation Organization and its off shoots consisted of revolutionary Marxists. Even the Baath Party dictatorships in Syria and Iraq had little time for religion—and this made them all the more intelligible to Western observers. Very few people in the international elite suspected that Islam was capable of posing a fundamental challenge to the global order—and certainly not in a place as backward and marginal as Afghanistan.
What happened next was extraordinary, even in light of Afghanistan’s long history of organized resistance to central authority. What outsiders often miss is that Afghan revolts tended historically to be highly specific affairs: a particular group in a particular place rises up against a perceived affront and fights until its demands are met or an acceptable balance of power in Kabul is restored. But by late 1978 this was already beginning to change. The tribal revolt in the Pech Valley quickly found imitators all around the country. Afghans of a wide variety of ethnic and social origins rose up against the government, and most of them took issue with the very nature of the regime.
Most of the anti-government feeling in the countryside was spontaneous and poorly organized, following age-old fault lines of tribe and tradition. But increasingly the rebels were being encouraged by young holy warriors like Massoud, people who had been educated at a university—just like the Marxists—to serve as doctors and engineers of a future, more modern Afghanistan. These young men know about the wider world; some of them even spoke foreign languages. But what they shared with their Shiite counterparts across the border in Iran was the belief that Islam had all the answers—and especially when it came to problems with twentieth-century politics. These new radicals did not want to see Afghanistan transformed into a republic that merely gave lip service to Islamic beliefs; nor did they want to see it revert to monarchy, a system they, like Khomeini—regarded as un-Islamic. These young Islamic revolutionaries in Afghanistan wanted to see Islam capture the state, just as they had in Iran. They were about to get their chance.