Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  As for the Kandahar Airport, that whole idea had come to nothing. The airport had been built to accommodate propeller planes, but it was completed just as prop planes were becoming obsolete and jet flight was taking off. And, since the fuel pumps at the Kandahar airport did not work properly, long-distance air traffic did not end up choosing the Kandahar airport as a refueling station, so there it sat in the desert: huge, modern, and empty.

  Some of the development projects were completed successfully, but their benefits did not reach the villages, only the larger towns. One day’s walk in any direction from any of those marvelous modern highways brought one to villages that didn’t know what electricity was. People in these villages had never heard the term “Cold War.” As for the changes wrought in the cities, they knew only what other villagers had reported, and these were often distorted by the disapproval of the reporters.

  The old Afghanistan, which Abdu’Rahman had tried to crush, the one that had toppled Amanullah, was still out there, and most Afghans still belonged to it; but it was more disconnected than ever from the urban Afghanistan that the Kabul government and its technocracy inhabited and administered.

  18

  Rise of the Left

  AFTER TURNING TO THE SOVIET UNION FOR MILITARY AID, DAOUD had started sending Afghans to Russia and Eastern Europe for military training. By the early sixties, as hundreds of Afghans were coming back from Western universities, well trained to handle administrative and technical jobs, hundreds of other Afghans were coming back from Communist countries, well equipped to move into the ranks of the military. Those who had studied military sciences in Communist countries often acquired a Marxist-Leninist framework through which to understand Afghanistan and their own lives. Marxist ideology told them that Afghanistan was a feudal country in transition to prerevolutionary industrialism. It told the young officers that they, an enlightened vanguard, cleansed of all that heaven and hell nonsense, were destined to build a paradise here in Afghanistan right now—a worker’s paradise.

  From the military, these ideas spread into Kabul University. From Kabul University, graduates who moved into teaching introduced Communist ideology into the secondary schools. Many university graduates ended up teaching in government schools in the provinces because there weren’t enough jobs in the capital to absorb them all; young military officers were posted all over the country as well. Through them, proto-Communist ideas filtered into a thin stratum of provincial Afghan society. In Kabul, a handful of dissident intellectuals began to meet quietly in small study groups to educate themselves in Marxism-Leninism. These groups typically numbered no more than ten or twelve members, and, when the Parliamentary era began, there were no more than several dozen of them in all, but the ideas were there, percolating.

  In 1965, thirty men from a number of Marxist study circles got together at the home of journalist Nur Mohammed Taraki, who had gained some notice in the Soviet Union for his didactic novels and short stories about Afghan workers and peasants. Born into a poor Ghilzai Pushtoon family himself, he had made his way through government schools and into the technocracy, even clocking a short stint as an aide at the Afghan Embassy in America. One of his novels had been translated into Russian, and the Soviets had hailed him as “the Afghan Maxim Gorky.” Most of the men at the meeting were recent university graduates, and Taraki established his dominance in this assembly because he alone was a white-haired older man, and, in Afghan society, age counts.

  He failed to impress one man at the meeting, however. Babrak Karmal may have lacked Taraki’s white hair, but at thirty-six years of age, he was halfway to elderhood himself. Karmal had some prestige among the radicals of Kabul because, in his student days, he had organized a number of antigovernment rallies, which finally earned him a prestigious four-year prison sentence. It was there in Daoud’s dank cells that his fellow inmates, dissident intellectuals all, introduced him to Marxism. After his release, Babrak returned to the university and got a law degree, but, at the same time, as a charismatic older student with a glamorous prison record, he acquired a following among his younger peers. In 1965, he was no longer a student but still had lots of connections among student activists on the left.

  Before the night was out, the thirty men at the meeting had decided to form a political party and contest the upcoming parliamentary elections. They called themselves the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or PDPA. On that night, the men in the room were not just the leaders of the party but also (the bulk of) its members. About half of them hailed from rural Pushtoon families: they were boys drawn out of the old Afghanistan and into the new by government schools. The rest came from privileged urban backgrounds. Taraki embodied the first group: his father was a shepherd and his recent ancestors were nomads. Babrak Karmal embodied the second group. His father was a general and a good friend of Prime Minister Daoud’s.

  In the parliamentary elections, virtually all of Karmal’s group won seats. Virtually none of Taraki’s group did. Still, the PDPA now had representation in the country’s new legislative body. But when this Parliament began its deliberations, students from the university crowded into the spectators’ gallery and staged one of those demonstrations that give student activists a bad name. They booed the newly elected parliamentarians for not having produced full democracy yet, drowned out their speeches, and charged them with corruption and nepotism. They demanded that the prime minister and cabinet appointed by the king one year earlier resign or be dismissed. Apparently, the PDPA had organized the demonstration. In the middle of the shouting, one member of Parliament rose dramatically in the hall. It was Karmal, in shirt sleeves, dressed down, looking like a student. The demonstrators fell silent, giving Babrak Karmal an aura of command. He delivered an impassioned speech about the country’s troubles and the suffering of its peasant masses, which had even some of his enemies weeping. Once he sat down, the shouting rose up again, and Parliament had to adjourn.1

  The students kept disrupting the parliamentary proceedings day after day until at last security guards cleared them out of the building. They continued to demonstrate on the streets outside, and their numbers swelled as other students heard about the excitement and flocked in to be a part of this historic moment, whatever it was about.

  On October 25, 1965, some authority ordered the police to disperse the crowd. Three shots were fired, three bodies fell. Two were students, one a bystander. You might suppose that in a country where political violence had claimed so many lives, three more would go unnoticed, but you would be wrong. These three victims became a cause célèbre. The day went down in Afghan history. In the Afghan calendar, it was Sehum-i-Aqrab , “the third of (the month of) Aqrab,” and over the next decade Sehum-i-Aqrab came to denote not just a calendar date, but a movement.

  In 1965, the demonstrations turned into a strike that shut down the university. The students took a petition to the vice rector (who happened to be my father), demanding that the person who gave the fatal order to fire on the students be identified and punished. They warned that if their demand was not met, they would shut down the university for the rest of the year.

  The demonstrations had already forced the first prime minister to resign. His replacement Hashim Maiwandwal accepted the petition he was given and promised to investigate. Eventually, one obscure university teacher was charged with some ambiguous misdemeanor, but in reality nothing came of the investigation. Street gossip said the king’s cousin General Abdul Wali, commander of the Kabul garrison, had given the order to shoot; if so, it’s no wonder the investigation went nowhere. Some blamed the minister of interior Abdul Kayeum who resigned his post and went into exile, in a sense taking responsibility for the deed whether or not he was actually responsible for it.

  To this day, no one knows who really ordered the shootings, and in truth, it probably doesn’t matter. Something like this was bound to happen in the tinderbox that was Kabul. The events of that October day merely caused coals already smoldering to burst into flames. Eve
ry year after that for the next decade, students poured into the streets on the Third of Aqrab to demonstrate and disrupt.

  IN MOST OF THE WORLD AT THIS TIME, “STUDENT ACTIVIST” AUTOMATICALLY meant “leftist” or at least “liberal.” In Kabul, the two terms were not synonymous: here, an equally vociferous and disruptive number of campus activists were radical Islamists. A number of theology professors at the university incited and led them. Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani was one. Abdul Rasool Sayyaf was another. Both men had earned their degrees from Egypt’s famous Islamic seminary, Al-Azhar University. Just as the military students brought back Communist ideas from Russia, these theology students brought back Muslim Brotherhood ideas from Egypt. They embraced the Brotherhood doctrine of a universal Khaliphate and of the need to cleanse Islam of Western ideas such as democracy and humanism. They embraced, too, the Brotherhood vision of building a state based exclusively on the Shari’a.

  Among their student followers, two firebrands stood out: Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Ghilzai Pushtoon. Hekmatyar cut a particularly menacing figure. He (allegedly) started out as a Communist but swung to the other extreme with a vengeance. He and his cohorts protested social change in Kabul by stalking unveiled women on campus and throwing acid into their faces.2

  In short, the student activists of Afghanistan were polarized from the start. What’s more, neither extreme had a single, unified leadership. Both Right and Left splintered into many factions, reflecting underlying ethnic, tribal, and personal conflicts; and even the splinters were riven by rivalries, which generated further splinters. The PDPA was founded in 1965, with thirty members. Two years later it had grown to—thirty-five members. Then Taraki and Karmal had a falling out—you could see it coming. After that, the PDPA consisted of two factions, each with a little more than a dozen members. Each faction published a newspaper that not only reviled the government and the monarchists but the other faction. Taraki’s newspaper, and therefore his party, was called Khalq (The Masses). Khalq more or less became the Marxist-Leninist party of the rural Ghilzai Pushtoons. Karmal’s newspaper called itself Parcham (Banner). Parcham became the name of the Marxist-Leninist party of the detribalized urban technocratic elite. (Some mockingly called it The Royal Communist Party of Afghanistan.) Neither Khalq nor Parcham could hold together. Even tinier leftist groups split off from each of them, identified with even more particular ethnic groups, subtribes, or “leaders.”3

  Ominously enough, throughout this decade of the “new democracy,” Daoud was inviting carefully selected leftists to his house for private discussions, sounding them out on their affiliations, loyalties, and ideas, and building a network of new alliances in the old Afghan way. It was natural for the former strongman to seek friends and allies among the younger officers of the military, many of whom belonged to the Parcham Party (“The Royal Communist Party of Afghanistan”), and it was not improbable for them to rally to Daoud, for it was his policies that had sent them to the Soviet Union to be trained and educated—and radicalized. As the 1960s came to a close, Kabul was boiling with energy. The hippies were flowing through, music was thundering from nightclubs and private parties, factories were growing, workers were proliferating, and schools were sprouting. Students were incessantly shutting down their schools over academic demands like easier grading. Workers were agitating for change and shutting down their factories over issues like higher wages and shorter hours. In the summer of 1968, Afghanistan saw fifteen major student strikes and twenty-five industrial strikes. Meanwhile, junior officers in the military were muttering about “the revolution.” Islamist students in the university and in the mosques were fulminating about the apocalypse—it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The vitality of Kabul overwhelmed the senses, but trouble lurked behind the merrymaking; and the whole time—still!—a few hours walk from any major highway or government outpost, the other Afghanistan, the universe of village republics and nomads, of mullahs, maliks, and khans, rumbled along on its own course.

  In 1973, the inevitable ax fell. The king went on a vacation to Italy, and his cousin Daoud executed a quick, nearly bloodless coup. It was probably a coup-by-arrangement: at least one of the king’s Rolls Royces was sent to him in Italy, which is a nice coup if you can get it. The core royal family had probably decided that anarchy was the biggest threat to the country and had to be staunched. Daoud had long been preparing for this day. Once he deposed the king, he declared himself the country’s first president. Many would say that real presidents don’t appoint themselves, but hey, political development is a slow process; America wasn’t built in a day. “King” sounded too old fashioned now. “President” had a more modern ring to it.

  Daoud used the Parcham Party to come back to power, but he himself was no Communist. As soon as he felt safely powerful, Daoud began to undermine his leftist allies, demoting some, promoting others to irrelevance, and sending a great many abroad as harmless ambassadors. He kept talking about the everlasting friendship between Afghanistan and Russia but started cultivating relations with America’s regional allies. He met with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the Berkeley-educated president of Pakistan who wore suits from Savile Row. He met with Reza Shah, America’s ironman in Iran. The three leaders talked about organizing a regional trade alliance—Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. They pondered a collective security pact. They discussed building a railroad linking the three countries. The Soviet Union looked upon these talks from afar, and alarm bells began to sound.

  Even as he was defanging his leftist allies, Daoud made sure to neutralize all danger from the Right. When leading Islamists such as Rabbani, Ahmad Shah Massoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and a number of others tried to stage a revolt, Daoud crushed it and the Islamists fled to Pakistan.

  Daoud was still a tough guy. He could still defeat his political enemies with guns and prison cells and the new torture equipment he ordered from Germany upon resuming power,4 but he couldn’t hold the society together with these instruments; he couldn’t keep the fabric from tattering. He could not stop students from striking or keep workers on the job. In April 1978, two unknown gunmen assassinated a popular leftist leader, Mir Akbar Khyber, and his death triggered days of massive demonstrations in Kabul. This time, Daoud decided, he would do something decisive—something that sent a message. In one swift swoop, he arrested all the leftist leaders he knew about, especially those belonging to Khalq—but he wasn’t swift enough. Just before being hauled away, one high-up Khalqi, a smooth operator named Hafizullah Amin, managed to send his young son out with a message to the underground cadre of his party, telling them to launch the coup. Apparently, the party had worked out a plan long ago and was merely waiting for the right moment to carry it out.

  A day or two later, one of Daoud’s tank commanders came to him with worrisome news. He had heard rumors of some conspiracy in the works—something big. The attempt would be made on April 27. He asked permission to load his tanks with live ammo and advised Daoud to station them around the Arg, the royal palace in downtown Kabul, on the morning of the 27th—just in case.

  The 27th dawned bright and clear. All morning, the streets remained quiet. The minutes ticked by. Had it been a false alarm? At twelve noon, a cannon boomed from a nearby hilltop—no cause for concern. That cannon was fired every day at noon, to mark the hour. The people of Kabul set their watches by it. This time, however, minutes after the cannon sounded, the tank turrets swung around until their guns were pointing toward the palace. Only then did Daoud realize why his tank commander knew about a conspiracy in the works. He was in on it: he belonged to Khalq, secretly.

  Daoud retreated deeper into his besieged palace. There he called his family and associates together and told all who wanted to leave to do so now. They should take this chance to survive if they could: he would think no less of them. No one left.

  Outside, the guns began to thunder. Some two thousand elite bodyguards manned the palace grounds, and they fought ferociously, but
planes came flying in low, strafing the yard. Later, some people said the planes had come from Tashkent, not from Afghanistan’s own Bagram military airfield, which would have tied the Soviets directly to the coup, but as far as I know, no proof of this has ever been produced. In any case, the guards in the courtyard were all killed. The Khalqis moved in and engaged Daoud and his family in hand-to-hand combat. Daoud went down with a gun in his hand. Between eighteen and thirty members of his family were killed with him. In his heyday, Daoud had inspired such dread that, once the palace was taken, a small group of Khalq cadre quickly, secretively loaded his corpse into a covered truck and drove it away for burial in some unmarked location. They never revealed where they had buried Daoud. Indeed, the party never named the men who had done the burying. That’s how much they feared Daoud. Thirty years later, however, one of those men still remembered the spot, and he led some officials to Daoud’s bones, which were dug up and reburied—but that happened much later. On April 27, 1978, Daoud, his whole family, and his two thousand bodyguards went to their graves, and the House of Dost Mohammed came to an end.

  19

  Change by Decree

  THE PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF AFGHANISTAN WAS NOW IN charge—theoretically. In practice, it faced the same challenge as Dost Mohammed: somehow it had to consolidate a power in Kabul that could dominate the countryside and hold the outside world at bay. In the days after the coup, PDPA militias began hunting down surviving members of the royal family throughout the city. Royals and royal relatives who could escape the country did so. On Radio Kabul, a little-known PDPA functionary announced that “the revolutionary council” was in control. Much of the country wondered what the hell a revolutionary council was. Later, on the radio, Afghans learned that air force lieutenant Abdul Qadir was in command. Most said, “Lieutenant who?” The coup had been so sudden, even the winners didn’t know who exactly had won. It took a few days to sort it all out.