$Unique_ID{COW00019} $Pretitle{265} $Title{Afghanistan Chapter 4A. Government and Politics} $Subtitle{} $Author{Donald M. Seekins} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{pdpa soviet taraki karmal afghanistan government amin party kabul april} $Date{1986} $Log{} Country: Afghanistan Book: Afghanistan, A Country Study Author: Donald M. Seekins Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1986 Chapter 4A. Government and Politics Afghanistan's government in the mid-1980s was dominated and controlled by the Soviet Union. A facade of independence was maintained, but the regime of President Babrak Karmal was subject to the dictates of Soviet advisers who directed his government's ministries and Afghanistan's pervasive secret police. The population was fully aware of Afghanistan's loss of independence following the Soviet invasion of December 27, 1979. As much as 80 percent of the countryside was outside government control. Although this reflected in part the traditional autonomy of local political leaders, antiregime guerrillas-the mujahidiin-made it virtually impossible for the regime to maintain a system of local government outside major urban centers. The mujahidiin also made their presence known in Kabul, the capital, by launching rocket attacks and assassinating high government officials. Even Afghans not actively involved in the resistance tended to regard the Karmal regime with contempt. To devout Muslims, the regime's collaboration with an atheist power, the Soviet Union, was unforgivable. Regime attempts to enlist the support of ethnic minorities, women, youth, tribal chiefs, and the ulama (Islamic scholars) met with very limited success. Observers estimated that only about 3 to 5 percent of the total population actively supported the regime. Karmal's difficulties in presiding over a government with virtually no popular support were compounded by the bitter and longstanding rivalry between the Khalq (Masses) and Parcham (Banner) factions of the ruling People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). In 1967 the PDPA split into these two groups, headed by Nur Muhammad Taraki and Karmal, respectively. The split reflected deep ethnic, class, and ideological differences. The Soviets coaxed a reunification of the party in 1977; but when the party came to power in April 1978, the animosity deepened as Khalq leaders purged, imprisoned, and even tortured their Parcham rivals. In late 1985 Soviet advisers were still unable to prevent violent confrontations between Khalqis and Parchamis, which often ended in fatalities. The Soviet Union has had a substantial interest in Afghanistan since the reign of king Amanullah (1919-29). After World War II, Moscow was the most generous donor of economic and military aid. United States involvement in Afghanistan was substantially less, owing in part to Washington's support of Pakistan. Afghanistan and Pakistan were at odds over the issue of Pashtunistan, an Afghan-supported campaign for the creation of an independent or autonomous state for the Pashtu-speaking nationals of Pakistan. After military supporters of the PDPA seized power and then ceded it to the civilian Revolutionary Council headed by Taraki in April 1978, the Soviets became increasingly tied up in Afghan internal politics. Because the PDPA had close ideological affinities with Moscow, it could not remain a neutral observer. Radical measures enacted by Taraki in the summer and autumn of 1978- particularly decrees relating to the abolition of usury, changes in marriage customs, and land reform-created great resentment and misunderstanding among highly conservative villagers. Insurrection began in the Nuristan region of eastern Afghanistan and then spread to most other parts of the country. Mujahidiin, operating from bases outside the country, launched attacks against the government, while their ranks were swelled by desertions from the Afghan armed forces. Although the Soviets increased drastically the volume of military aid, they were dissatisfied with the PDPA's radicalism. Top Soviet advisers attempted to pressure leaders to adopt a more moderate, united-front strategy, but with limited success. The chief obstacle was the brutal and ambitious Hafizullah Amin, Taraki's foreign minister and prime minister after March 1979. Taraki, with Soviet assistance, attempted to remove Amin on September 14, 1979; but Amin, turning the tables, arrested Taraki after a shootout at the House of the People (formerly the Presidential Palace), imprisoned him, and ordered his murder in early October. Relations between the Soviets and Amin grew distant. As the security situation deteriorated, Moscow ordered troops into the country. The plan, carried out on December 27, 1979, had been formulated over a period of several months. High-ranking Soviet military officers who had been involved in the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 played prominent roles. The Soviets installed Karmal, exiled leader of the Parcham faction, as the country's new president and PDPA secretary general. Amin had apparently died fighting Soviet troops outside Kabul. Most observers believed that the principal factors in Moscow's decision to invade included the need to rescue a friendly socialist regime from certain destruction and to thwart potential security threats to the Soviet Union itself. If a militantly Islamic regime, like Iran's, had been established in Afghanistan, it might have had destabilizing consequences for Soviet control of the Muslim populations of its Central Asian republics. Other observers interpreted the invasion as part of a comprehensive strategy to gain access to the Indian Ocean and a dominant position in South Asia and the Middle East. In the mid-1980s negotiations for the peaceful withdrawal of Soviet troops, sponsored by the United Nations, were under way. Few believed, however, that Soviet occupation of the country would be a short-lived phenomenon. A Revolution Backfires The regime of President Mohammad Daoud Khan came to a violent end in the early morning hours of April 28, 1978, when military units stormed the Presidential Palace in the heart of Kabul. Overcoming the stubborn resistance of the Presidential Guard, the insurgent troops killed Daoud and most members of his family. True to Afghanistan's militant traditions, Daoud refused to surrender and died fighting. The coup had begun a day earlier, the date commemorated by Afghanistan's new rulers as the beginning of the Sawr (April) Revolution. According to Louis Dupree, a seasoned observer of Afghan affairs, the coup was an "accidental" one in which the poor organization of the rebels was exceeded only by the ineptitude of the government ("Foul-up followed foul-up, and the side with the fewer foul-ups won"). There was a comical element as rebel tanks, rolling toward the Presidential Palace, were caught in a noonday traffic jam (a half-holiday had just begun a day before Friday, the Muslim Sabbath), and speeding taxis wove in and out of the armored column. Passersby stood around casually, watching the action. The fighting, however, was bitter. Dupree estimates that the siege of the Presidential Palace and engagements at other points around the city cost 1,000 lives (other estimates are as high as 10,000, though this is unlikely). The coup d'etat was touched off by leaders of the leftist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA-Jamiyat-e-demokatiqi-khalq-e-Afghanistan,in Dari) and was carried out by the party's cadres and symphathizers in the armed forces. Daoud's determination to establish an autocratic, one-party state had alienated numerous people, particularly in the capital, and leftists were alarmed at the rightward shift in his policies: the president had reneged on promises to implement progressive reforms, had purged his government of leftists, and in the last years of his rule had sought financial support from Iran, ruled by the shah, and Saudi Arabia in order to make Afghanistan less dependent on Soviet economic aid. The immediate cause of the coup, however, was the murder on April 17 of Mir Akbar Khyber, a Marxist ideologue associated with the Parcham faction of the PDPA (see Daoud's Republic, 1973-78, ch. 1). The identity of the murderer was never established. The PDPA claimed after its seizure of power that the perpetrator was an agent of Daoud, while other accounts suggest with varying degrees of credibility that the assassin was an Islamic militant, a member of SAVAK (Iran's secret police under the shah), or a member of a rival PDPA faction. Although the government issued a statement deploring the assassination, PDPA leaders apparently feared that Daoud was planning to exterminate them all. On April 19 the party organized a mass rally and march on the occasion of Khyber's funeral. As many as 30,000 demonstrators (although the most reliable estimates are between 10,000 and 15,000) marched through the streets of Kabul and shouted anti-American slogans in front of the United States embassy. This show of opposition strength unnerved Daoud, who, after an inexplicable delay of a week, ordered the arrest of seven top PDPA leaders. Daoud committed a fatal error in not ordering the immediate imprisonment of PDPA Central Committee member Hafizullah Amin. Placed under house arrest shortly after midnight on April 26, Amin hurriedly stitched together a plan for a coup d'etat and enlisted his children as couriers to communicate with PDPA cadres in the military. Because of police negligence, Amin's children were able to carry their father's messages through the streets of Kabul unimpeded; their task was made easier by the fact that most Afghan military officers lived with their families in the city rather than in separate military encampments. By the time Amin was taken off to jail late in the morning of April 26, the plan for the uprising had been disseminated. The coup d-etat's execution the following day, however, revealed the haste with which the plan had been composed. The insurgents, including infantry, armored, and air force contingents, were poorly coordinated. The population remained ignorant of developments because the rebels did not secure the Radio Afghanistan broadcasting station in Kabul until the late afternoon on April 27. PDPA leaders were clearly not in command. It was not until 5:30 P.M. that they were liberated from a government prison. Some months after the April coup, Amin admitted at a press conference that it had occurred two years ahead of the PDPA's schedule for revolution. Daoud's determination to exterminate the left, Amin alleged, had forced the PDPA to act. The contours of the new regime were at first very unclear. To outside observers, what had occurred was a conventional military coup. Two key figures were Abdul Qader, an air force colonel who had ordered air strikes against the Presidential Palace during the fighting, and Muhammad Aslam Watanjar, commander of a tank brigade who had led a column of tanks and armored cars into the capital from armored division headquarters on the city's outskirts. Both men had participated in the 1973 coup that had brought Daoud to power. At 7:00 P.M. on April 27, Qader made an announcement over Radio Afghanistan, in the Dari language, that a "revolutionary council of the armed forces" had been established, with himself at its head. Watanjar read a similar statement in the Pashtu language. The council's initial statement of principles, issued late in the evening of April 27, was a noncommittal affirmation of Islamic, democratic, and nonaligned ideals. The language of Marxist revolution was not conspicuous. The Soviet embassy in Kabul was ostensibly caught by surprise. The ambassador, Alexandr M. Puzanov, was enjoying a trout fishing holiday in the Hindu Kush at the time, although the Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti - KGB) and Soviet advisers posted in Afghanistan may have had a more active role than it appeared. As the month of April drew to a close, the Soviet news agency TASS referred to the coup simply as a military seizure of power. Within two days of Daoud's fall, however, the armed forces' revolutionary council ceded power to a 35-member, PDPA-controlled civilian body, the Revolutionary Council (RC) of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. This chain of events bore some similarity to Daoud's coup d'etat five years earlier. Although the military had lifted Daoud into power, they had a minimal political role once he formed a government. But the military's willingness to step aside also was testimony to the PDPA's success in transforming important sectors of the armed forces into an effective power base. Amin was principally responsible for this. As early as 1965, and certainly by 1973, he had devoted himself to building a cadre in the officer corps, "educating them on the basis of principles of the working class ideology" (in the words of an official account of the coup) and convincing them of the need to eliminate the old regime. A major factor contributing to PDPA support in the military was disaffection over Daoud's predilection for awarding top commissions to cronies and fellow Muhammadzai clansmen. Able and conscientious officers who were not well-connected were frustrated by an entrenched system of nepotism that blocked their careers. Despite promises made in 1973, this was essentially the same system that had existed under King Zahir Shah. It is unclear how many officers understood Marxist concepts or considered themselves leftist, although a large number had received training in the Soviet Union, but by 1978 Daoud had forfeited the loyalty of many-though not all-military officers posted in the capital region. On April 30 the RC issued the first of a series of fateful decrees. The decree formally abolished the military's revolutionary council. This body disappeared down an Orwellian "memory hole"; the official history of the Sawr Revolution makes no mention of it and describes PDPA leaders as having established the RC on April 27. The RC named PDPA secretary general Taraki as its president and prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The decree also designated the RC as the highest government body, whose pronouncements would have the force of law. A second decree, issued on May 1, named Karmal vice president of the RC and senior deputy prime minister. The other members of the first cabinet were also named; they included Amin, Qader, and Watanjar. A third decree, issued two weeks later, nullified Daoud's 1977 constitution and replaced it with a document entitled "Thirty-two Basic Lines of Revolutionary Duties." It also established "revolutionary military courts" to dispense swift justice to enemies of the people. Two other decrees drawn up in the months following the coup declared the regime's commitment to the equality of Afghanistan's different ethnic groups and deprived the surviving members of the royal family of their Afghan citizenship. In an official statement broadcast over Radio Afghanistan on May 10, President Taraki announced his regime's programs. These included land reform, development of both state and private sectors of the economy, universal free education, free health care facilities for all citizens, and promotion of the equality of the sexes. In foreign policy, Taraki affirmed the principles of nonalignment, peaceful coexistense, and support for national liberation movements worldwide. Nothing in this rhetoric was a dramatic departure from pronouncements of the early Daoud era. The Marxist-Leninist component of PDPA ideology was a decidedly minor theme because leaders feared alienating groups within the country and Afghanistan's conservative neighbors outside the country. But through the summer and autumn of 1978, as more decrees were issued, Taraki and his associates put Afghanistan on the road to revolution. Amin expressed this most clearly on November 7, 1978, the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, when he asserted that the Sawr Revolution was a continuation of the October Revolution. This revolutionary commitment was violently at odds with traditional Afghan values and interests especially in the rural areas. As spring gave way to summer and autumn, however, the PDPA, wracked by internal rivalries, proved to be its own worst enemy. Evolution of the PDPA as a Political Force The history of leftist political movements in Afghanistan is a short one. The society is highly conservative and without bourgeois or working classes in the Western sense. The number of persons who can participate in Western-style politics is small; literacy in the years following World War II was around 5 percent, and the tiny handful of intellectuals receptive to Marxist ideas was concentrated in the urban areas. Because Afghanistan escaped exploitation by Western colonialists (one of the few Asian countries to do so), there was little or no stimulus for nationalist, anti-imperialist movements to develop. Another factor in the slowness with which a leftist movement developed was the attitude of the Soviet Union. Soviet interests in the turbulent years following the October Revolution did not dictate the encouragement of a communist movement that would challenge the monarchy. King Amanullah established excellent relations with the Soviets as a means of asserting his independence from the British, and the Soviets found him a useful ally against both the British and Muslim conservatives, who challenged their control of what is now Soviet Central Asia. Marxist scholar Fred Halliday notes that, as far as can be determined, no Afghan communist party was formed under the auspices of the Communist International (Comintern). This contrasts sharply with Moscow's strategy in other Asian countries. As early as 1919, Lenin had encouraged the formation of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party in one of the most backward places on earth, and during the early 1920s communist parties were being organized under the guidance of Comintern agents in Turkey, Iran, British India, China, Japan, and Korea. Neither the conservatism nor the isolation of Afghanistan, however, was absolute. Amanullah's bold but disastrous attempt to transform the country along Kemalist lines in the 1920s was a vivid memory. Schools and colleges were being established with European curricula. Many Afghans were also aware of nationalist and leftist movements in British India. The Communist Party of India (CPI) had been founded in 1925, and some Afghans who had spent time in the subcontinent were introduced to Marxist concepts by Indians. Halliday suggests that the influence of the CPI on Afghan leftism was more formative than that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); nevertheless, the Soviet Union gained considerable prestige among educated Afghans for its postwar aid programs, and the CPI always faithfully followed the CPSU's initiatives on matters of policy. The winds of political change blew faintly through the Hindu Kush, and after 1945 the government vacillated between tolerating and repressing liberals who were trying to make the system more open. The 1947-52 period witnessed the emergence of the Wikh-i-Zalmayan (Awakened Youth) movement, which engaged in harsh criticism of the royal family. A highly politicized student union was organized at Kabul University, and a handful of opposition newspapers-Angar (Burning Embers), Nida-i-Khalq (Voice of the Masses), and Watan (Homeland)-were published (see Zahir Shah and His Uncles, 1933-53, ch. 1). As criticism of the status quo grew sharper, the government reacted by banning dissident organizations and jailing their leaders. Many leftists received their first schooling in politics during this period. Three PDPA Leaders Three men-Taraki, Amin, and Karmal-played a central role in the evolution of the Afghan left and the fortunes of the PDPA. Taraki, the oldest, was born in 1917, the son of a livestock dealer and small-time smuggler. His family is described by Dupree and other observers as "seminomadic," traveling frequently between Ghazni Province and British India (see fig. 1). Despite his family's poverty, Taraki was able to attend a provincial elementary school and a middle school in Qandahar and was the first member of his family to be literate. He was in Qandahar during the fall of the reformist King Amanullah in 1929. Leaving school at age 15, he went to the Indian port city of Bombay to work in the office of an Afghan company that exported dried fruit to the subcontinent. He learned English at a night school and became acquainted with Indian Communists, although he apparently never became a CPI member. Returning to Kabul in 1937, Taraki attended a college of public administration and then assumed a series of posts in the civil service. While serving in the remote province of Badakhshan in the northeast, Taraki began a writing career. He gained a reputation as a writer of short stories during the 1940s, describing the living conditions of Afghan peasants. Soviet critics approvingly described his work as expressing "scientific socialist" themes. One essay composed in the late 1940s or early 1950s about Maxim Gorky, the idol of literary orthodoxy during the Stalinist period, reveals his close affinities to the Soviet point of view. Taraki's career, however, was a checkered one. He seems to have played a peripheral role in the Wikh-i-Zalmayan movement (contributing articles to Angar but avoiding imprisonment and even retaining his government job), lived briefly in Washington as a member of the Afghan embassy staff, and was recalled to Kabul because of his outspoken criticism of Prime Minister Daoud. He ran his own translation agency between 1958 and 1962 and in the latter year was hired by the United States embassy in Kabul as a translator. Journalist Henry S. Bradsher relates that by 1964 Taraki had close ties with persons in the Soviet embassy and facilitated contacts between its staff (presumably KGB agents) and young Afghans. The Soviets apparently subsidized his literary career and translated some of his works into Russian. Amin was born in 1921 in Paghman, a town near Kabul. His father was a minor civil servant. Amin studied mathematics and physics at Kabul University and became a high school teacher and principal. In 1957 he won a scholarship to study at Teachers' College at Colombia University in New York, and on completion of his course he returned home to administer teacher-training courses. Returning to Colombia to complete his doctorate in 1962, Amin became involved in the politics of the Associated Students of Afghanistan, an overseas student group in the United States. It was apparently during his sojourn in the student world of Morningside Heights on Manhattan's upper west side near Columbia's campus that he became interested in Marxism, although Columbia had not yet encountered the radical tumult of the late 1960s. In 1965 he returned to Afghanistan without his doctorate and accepted a teaching post at a girls' high school. His symphathetic biographer, Beverley Male, notes the enthusiasm with which the students responded to his advocacy of social and political revolution. According to Male, "educated Kabuli women were later to be among the PDPA's most enthusiastic supporters." Unlike Taraki and Amin, Karmal, born in 1929, was a member of the social and political elite. His father General Muhammad Hussain Khan, had served as governor of Paktia Province and enjoyed close ties with the royal family. Karmal, an indifferent student in high school and in the law school of Kabul University, quickly gained a reputation as an orator and activist in the university's student union in 1951. For his part in the Wikh-i-Zalmayan movement, he was imprisoned for a time, and while in prison he met Mir Akbar Khyber, whose Marxist views had a formative influence on him. After release from jail in 1956, he held posts in the civil service. Anthony Arnold, a former United States intelligence officer, notes that Karmal was able to secure government employment despite his jail sentence because of his family connections: "Babrak was Establishment, representing the modishly far left wing of the wealthiest and most powerful Afghan families." Formation of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan Taraki, Karmal, and other leftists (Amin was still in the United States) had been planning to organize a party and took preliminary steps in this direction in 1963, though study groups on Marxist topics had been held since the 1950s. They postponed formally establishing one, however, in anticipation that King Zahir Shah would sign a law legalizing political associations, as guaranteed in the 1964 constitution. Although the king never ratified the party law passed by parliament and thus parties remained technically illegal despite the constitutional guarantee, the PDPA held its First Congress on January 1, 1965. Twenty-seven men gathered at Taraki's house in Kabul, elected Taraki PDPA secretary general and Karmal deputy secretary general, and chose a five-member Central Committee. They also approved a party program. This document, published in the newspaper Khalq (Masses) the following year, advocated a national front of democratic and patriotic forces and progressive reforms. According to Arnold, the program's avoidance of Marxist-Leninist terminology reflected fears that its use would invite official repression. He claims that the PDPA First Congress adopted a "secret" constitution, replete with communist phraseology, that reveals its true character as "the party of the Working Class of Afghanistan." This document was allegedly unearthed by personnel of a Western embassy in 1978. Relatively open elections were held for the Wolesi Jirgah (lower house of parliament) in September 1965. Four PDPA members were elected: Karmal, Anahita Ratebzab, Nur Ahmad Nur, and Fezanul Haq Fezan. Taraki and Amin also ran but were defeated; the latter lost by only 50 votes in his hometown of Paghman. from their seats in the lower house, the eloquent Karmal and his associates mobilized students to demonstrate against the government of Prime Minister Muhammed Yousuf. At least three demonstrators were killed and many more wounded when troops fired into a student rally near the prime minister's residence on October 25, 1965 (see The King Rules: The Last Decade of Monarchy, 1963-73, ch. 1). As an increasingly static and inflexible government reacted violently to growing opposition, the foundations of parliamentary rule were cloven. The preoccupation with maintaining a low profile that dictated the PDPA's need for a secret constitution was in striking contrast to the outspokenness of Khalq, published by Taraki in April and May 1966. Khalq defined its mission in terms of relieving "the boundless agonies of the oppressed peoples of Afghanistan" and asserted that "the main issue of contemporary times and the center of class struggle on a worldwide basis, which began with the Great October Socialist Revolution, is the struggle between international socialism and international capitalism." The newspaper was highly successful, especially among students. Its first edition sold 20,000 copies, and later editions numbered around 10,000 (there were only six editions altogether). On May 23, 1966, the authorities closed it down on the grounds that it was anti-Islamic, anticonstitutional, and antimonarchical. The Party Divided, 1967 In the spring of 1967 the PDPA formally divided into two factions, whose rivalry would be a decisive, and often deadly, factor in the party's political fortunes and misfortunes. The banning of Khalq in 1966 prompted Karmal to criticize Taraki for being foolhardy because of the newspaper's open expression of class struggle themes. Arnold suggests that Karmal-and the Soviets-may have pondered the bloody fate of the Indonesian Communist Party, whose radicalism led to its annihilation by Muslim militants in October 1965. On the ideological level, Karmal and Taraki differed in their perceptions of Afghanistan's revolutionary potential. Taraki believed that revolution could be achieved in the classical Leninist fashion by building a tightly disciplined working-class party. Karmal felt that Afghanistan was too undeveloped for a Leninist strategy and that a national democratic front of patriotic and anti-imperialist forces had to be fostered in order to bring the country a step closer to socialist revolution. (This issue is a frequent theme in the history of Asian communism; the most famous instance is the disagreement between Stalin and Trotsky over the advisability of a united front or a revolutionary strategy for the Chinese Communist Party during the 1920s.) Karmal sought, unsuccessfully, to persuade the PDPA Central Committee to censure Taraki's excessive radicalism. The vote, however, was close, and Taraki in turn tried to neutralize Karmal by appointing new members to the committee who were his own supporters. Karmal offered his resignation. This was accepted, apparently an outcome he did not expect. Although the split of the PDPA in 1967 into two groups was never publicly announced, Karmal brought with him about half the members of the Central Committee. Subsequently, the two groups operated as separate political parties, each with its own secretary general, central committee, and membership. Taraki's faction was known as Khalq, after his defunct newspaper, and Karmal's as Parcham (Banner), after a weekly he published between March 1968 and July 1969. Ideology was only one factor-and probably not the most important-in the Khalq-Parcham split. Taraki and Karmal were men from two very different backgrounds. This was equally true of their followers, who formed self-consciously separate groups even before the 1967 breakup. Taraki appealed to a rural, lower-middle class constituency of Pashtuns, people like himself who had personal experience of poverty and the oppressiveness of the old order; they tended, however, to be conservative in matters such as the separation of the sexes. Their first language was Pashtu, rather than Dari, the dialect of Farsi spoken by Afghan city dwellers and government officials. The Parcham constituency was urban-based, middle class or upper-middle class, and tended to speak Dari rather than Pashtu. They were graduates of the best and most expensive high schools and colleges and were generally more Westernized in their habits and styles of life than the Khalqis. Although both PDPA groups were concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics, women such as Ratebzad, one of the four PDPA members elected to the Wolesi Jirgah in 1965, were more prominent in Parcham. Anthropologist Nancy Hatch Dupree notes that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Karmal and Ratebzad held party meetings that ended with disco music an dancing. Apparently many university students, chafing under the restrictions of their conservative parents, joined Parcham for recreation rather than to raise their political consciousness. The Khalq-Parcham rivalry also reflected tensions that have characterized Afghan politics since the forceful unification of the country in the eighteenth century by Ahmad Shah Durrani (see Ahmad Shah and the Durrani Empire, ch. 1). The two leaders were both Pashtuns, but Taraki was a member of the Ghilzai tribal confederation that had been excluded from power by their old rivals, the Durrani. Afghan rulers had experienced limited success in promoting national integration. The result was that tribal sentiments, particularly in the Pashtun rural areas, remained intense. A majority of the Khalqis seem to have been Ghilzai Pashtuns, and their Marxism was often a vehicle for tribal resentments. Relatively few Ghilzai were members of the political, social, or economic elite. Durrani Pashtuns regarded them as a crude, rustic, and violent people who were nomads ("carrying their houses on their backs like snails") rather than settled farmers or townspeople. Since the political elite traditionally lived in towns, Ghilzai Pashtuns both envied and resented urban ways of life. In their eyes, the Durrani were effete and lacking in traditional Pashtun values. Amin, like Taraki, was a Ghilzai. After the fall of Daoud in April 1978, many Afghans recalled that a Muslim saint in the eighteenth century had cursed the Ghilzai, ordaining that they would endure seven generations of servitude. Taraki and Amin's rise to power seemed to mark the end of that period. Parcham's ethnic composition was more diverse than Khalq's. Although the majority were apparently Dari-speaking Pashtuns from the Kabul region, Hazaras, Tajiks, and other minority groups were also represented. Karmal was neither a Durrani nor a Ghilzai, but a member of another Pashtun tribe, the Kakars. Coming from an urban and elite background, he lacked a strong sense of tribal identity or allegiance. The issue of tribal and ethnic identity played a role in the emergence of other leftist movements during the 1960s. In 1964 the surviving relatives of Abdur Rahman Mahmudi, a popular opposition politician who had languished in jail between 1953 and 1963 and subsequently died from the effects of his mistreatment in prison, founded Shula-i-Jawid (Eternal Flame); this was a "Maoist" group that drew support from an odd combination of alienated intellectuals and professionals and Shia Muslims, especially Hazaras, who suffered harsh discrimination at the hands of the majority Sunni Muslims (see Tenets of Islam, ch. 2). The Shula-i-Jawid looked to China as a model for revolution. Its anti-Soviet bias reflected the intense Sino-Soviet antagonisms of the late 1960s and early 1970s and appealed to Afghans who feared the power of their northern neighbor. Another radical group was Settem-i-Melli (Against National Oppression). This was formed in the late 1960s by Taher Badakhshi, a Tajik who had been a member of the PDPA Central Committee. In its "Maoist" emphasis on militant class struggle and mass mobilization of peasants, Settem-i-Melli resembled Shula-i-Jawid. But it was also strongly anti-Pashtun, and it accused the Soviet Union of supporting "Pashtun colonialism." The group was well-organized, not only within minority communities in Kabul but also in the northeastern provinces where minorities were numerous. Competition and Reconciliation, 1967-77 Although adept at rousing student passions, Karmal published in March 1968 a journal, Parcham, that was noticeably more moderate in its tone than Taraki's Khalq. His group earned the somewhat opprobrious nickname the "royal communist party" because of its willingness to cooperate with the authorities and its connections with the royal family. (Khalqis were irked by a speech Karmal had given in parliament in 1966 describing the king as "progressive.") Parcham was shut down in June 1969 on the eve of parliamentary elections, but the group had succeeded in getting some very powerful friends. The most important was Daoud. According to Arnold, Daoud, riding in his private car, was present at Parcham-sponsored student demonstrations, thus ensuring that the demonstrators would not be handled violently by the police. In the August 1969 election PDPA members won only two seats; the successful candidates were Karmal and Amin. Parcham profited, but also ultimately suffered, because of its association with Daoud. Despite their "royalist" reputation, Parcham leaders supported Daoud's plan to seize power, and Parcham sympathizers in the military played a key role in the relatively bloodless coup d'etat that toppled the monarchy on June 17, 1973. Half of Daoud's first cabinet consisted of figures associated with Parcham. Khalq was excluded from the government because of its lack of good political connections and its go-it-alone policy on noncooperation. Taraki did sing a song of united fronts briefly after Daoud's takeover in an attempt to gain places in the government for his followers, but this effort was unsuccessful. Impressed by Karmal's success in infiltrating the armed forces, the Khalq leader abandoned his party's traditional emphasis on working-class recruitment and sought to build his own power base within the officer corps. He was aided in this endeavor by Amin, a brilliant organizer, whose work in the armed forces yielded fruit in April 1978. It is estimated that by the late 1970s Khalq had two or three times the membership of Parcham (the PDPA total was 4,000 to 5,000 persons). It recruited aggressively, whereas Karmal's hands were tied because of his government connections. Daoud had little love for the left. He sent zealous young Parchamis off to the villages to promote social reforms, a kind of Afghan "Peace Corps," in order to get them out of the capital. After enduring the hostility of villagers for a while, most returned to Kabul disillusioned, only to be jailed by the regime for dereliction of duty. Qader, the air force officer who played such a central role in both the 1973 and the 1978 coups, was demoted and sent to manage the public slaughter-houses after he criticized the president for not implementing socialist reforms. When Daoud turned against leftists, purged them from his government, and instituted an authoritarian political system with his 1977 constitution, Parcham was most seriously exposed. Both parties were consistently pro-Soviet. They accepted financial and other forms of aid from the Soviet embassy and intelligence organs. Taraki and Karmal maintained close contact with embassy personnel, and it appears that Soviet Military Intelligence (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye-GRU) assisted Khalq's recruitment of military officers. It is also apparent that Moscow played a major role in the reconciliation of Taraki's and Karmal's factions in 1977. During the previous year, the publications of the pro-Moscow communist parties of India, Iraq, and Australia called for Khalq and Parcham to resolve their differences. Most instrumental in the negotiations that led to a reunified PDPA were members of the CPI and Ajmal, Khattak, a Pakistani leftist (and a Pashtun), who lived in exile in Kabul. It is unlikely that they would have taken the initiative, however, without the encouragement of the Soviet Union. In March 1977 a formal agreement on unity was achieved, and in July the two factions held their first joint conclave in a decade. In light of Daoud's growing repression of the left at that time, one of the questions discussed was the removal of his "dictatorial regime." But the merger was a patchwork affair (perhaps a shotgun marriage at the Soviets' insistence) that did not resolve the deep social, ethnic, ideological, and personal differences that separated Khalq and Parcham. These became evidents once the PDPA came to power in the spring of 1978.