Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  In the end, journalist Nur Mohammed Taraki emerged as president, party leader, chief of this, and head of that—in short, proud possessor of all the titles that mattered. Coup captain Hafizullah Amin, who had once been the principal of the Teachers’ College, emerged as his number two.

  The cabinet consisted entirely of PDPA members, divided more or less equally among Khalq and Parcham faction honchos. Khalq had the dominant posts, however, and soon got rid of the Parcham. Comrade Karmal was sent to Eastern Europe as an ambassador. In the streets of Kabul, Khalq and Parcham cadre fought occasional Wild West–style gun battles, but Parcham was on the run and Khalq soon reigned supreme.

  The PDPA had matured underground, and, though some of its members went public when Parcham helped Daoud gain power, much of the party’s membership remained secret. After the coup, therefore, few knew who was and wasn’t in the party, including other party members.

  But, as the PDPA gained confidence, even its lower-ranking members began to flex their muscles. Throughout government offices, supervisors began to encounter eerie episodes of disrespect, disobedience, or mockery from random subordinates. Army officers began to realize that a whole alternative command structure existed in which corporals might outrank colonels. No one knew whom to trust or what could be said in front of whom: the safer course was just to shut up. Fear clamped over the city, then, as a hitherto invisible organism laced throughout the technocracy began to rise like a kraken into daylight: the PDPA. All these years, the various factions and splinter branches of the PDPA had been formulating “programs” in their clandestine sessions. Khalq therefore had a complete array of policies to enact—without having had one minute of experience actually enacting policies. It began issuing decrees based on “scientific” Marxist theories.

  In theory, many of its decrees were progressive, even noble. For example, they improved the status of women. Early decrees banned the domination of daughters by fathers and wives by husbands, outlawed the bride price, and forbade underage marriages—the same measures Amanullah had tried to promulgate. The new regime decreed that literacy classes be established for women and mandated 270 days of paid maternity leave to new mothers.

  Measures like these touched only people in the cities; in fact, for the most part, they affected only Kabul—which is not surprising since the PDPA was composed of disaffected members of the salaried urban technocracy, not of peasants still living the rural life. Because the people of the villages were not immediately affected, they took a wait-and-see attitude. Then the regime passed decrees aimed at their lives. One decree canceled all debts of peasants to landlords and outlawed high-interest loans secured by land. You can see why this one sounded noble. Big landowners had long been binding their local poor, their relatives, and dependents to serf-like servitude by lending them money on predatory terms. They practiced what amounted to radical usury, despite the Islamic injunction against charging interest, by using elaborate schemes to circumvent the letter of the religious law—and did so with the collusion of the clerics. Small farmers who had trouble making loan payments were gradually losing their lands to big landowners. The PDPA regime thought that canceling debts would wipe out this evil at one stroke, like an ax severing a head.1

  The trouble was, poor villagers often borrowed money for one of two purposes: young men did it to finance marriages; families did it to finance funerals. When the regime abruptly canceled debts, landowners and rich merchants simply stopped lending money to anyone for any purpose. Suddenly, young men could not afford to get married unless they were rich, so sexual and emotional frustration built up.

  Also, suddenly, only the rich could afford lavish funerals. When the patriarch of a poor or even a middling well-to-do family died, his survivors could afford to host only a scant turnout of mourners and could serve them only humiliatingly meager fare, which made them feel ashamed and dishonored.2 The PDPA wiped out social mechanisms tradition had created to meet crucial needs of a traditional society without providing new institutions to meet those needs. When things started to go wrong, the feudal lords had no trouble convincing the penniless poor that the regime was attacking their interests, their lives.

  Another decree set an upper limit for land ownership. No one could own more than sixty hectares (148 acres). In its first year, the regime took some eight hundred thousand acres of land away from big landlords and divided it up among 132,000 poor families. They also announced a plan to organize one million families into forty-five hundred farming cooperatives over the next year.3 These decrees magnified manyfold the mistakes American-educated administrators of the Helmand Valley had made when they forced nomads of different ethnicities to work together in model towns. The PDPA planners thought they could supersede the sense of group identity derived from tribe and village (and the cooperation it enabled) with an artificial new unit they had created by bureaucratic fiat: the “cooperative.”

  In this arid country, however, land is useless without water, and managing water requires intricate cooperation. Over the centuries, rural Afghanistan had developed a low-tech but effective water management infrastructure of wells and ditches and kahrezes, or underground canals, which required a corresponding network of social roles supported by tribal values and interlaced with religious and folk traditions.

  The Communist regime’s new rules tossed a Molotov cocktail into this delicate apparatus. In Afghanistan, most big landowners were not disconnected city magnates sucking revenue from distant estates (although a few of those did exist). Most were local chieftains who controlled large tracts of land that the whole local population in some sense saw as “theirs.” When these large tracts were broken up into parcels, they were distributed among hundreds of individual families who had no established social mechanisms for working together and thus could not muster the cooperation needed to manage their water collectively. The redistribution of land set families against families in a competition for water that resulted, finally, in no one getting as much water as they needed. My cousin Mazar, who was living in Afghanistan at the time, told me that small farmers were coming to the city to complain to the government that in the new arrangements their plots were receiving as little as thirty seconds of water a day. Land that had recently fed all the inhabitants of an area (albeit unequally) could not now sustain any of the families living on it. All were equal now, but starving.

  To cap the growing dispute of all against all, beneficiaries of the redistribution had to cope with a sense of guilt for accepting land seized from people whom custom and religion told them were its “rightful owners.” For many rural people, therefore, land reform meant crop failure, quarrelling, and a greater chance of going to hell. Add sexual frustration and shame to the mix and you can see why trouble began to bubble in the provinces, a rage that needed no ideological explanation, for, by their own strictly material standards, the PDPA was producing disaster.

  The Khalq regime kept plodding doggedly into this disaster because it analyzed Afghan society strictly in terms of class warfare. It assumed it would prevail in this war because it was siding with the many against the few. As a rule, however, Afghan peasants didn’t see their life in terms of class interests. They saw their world layered and compartmentalized by ethnic, tribal, and religious factors. Peasants were often the poor relations of wealthy local khans. Even leaving blood ties out of account, rich and poor were commonly bound together by mutual obligations and ties embedded in centuries of family history, personal interactions, and emotions. The very word khan derives, some say, from distar-khwan, or tablecloth: a khan was someone who laid out feasts for others.4

  In Afghanistan, Hemingway’s answer to Fitzgerald really held water: sure, the rich were different—they were richer. Religion taught peasant sharecroppers to accept their lot; culture ensured that their lot would be ameliorated by the generosity of their “betters.” Peasants derived some satisfaction from being part of something bigger—a tribe. I’ve heard clerks in corporations say “we” when they mean the corpor
ation, taking pride in the dynamism of the business that employs them. How much more powerful that sentiment of loyalty must be when the belonging stems not merely from a paycheck every two weeks and a bonus at Christmas but from reciprocal memories of funerals and weddings and Ramadhan fasting and Eid festivals going back generations.

  No law said khans had to feed their poor relations (and many didn’t), but custom decreed that munificence gave them prestige, and their dependents counted on that custom-driven generosity and were loath to alienate their khans lest it leave them out in the cold. Land reformers told the poorest in these structures to never mind, squander the goodwill of the khan, incur his hatred and enmity by using the land taken from him—and not to worry about it, because they wouldn’t need his generosity; the government would see to it.

  Then there were the nomads, who still numbered 12–15 percent of the people.5 They didn’t think of class as the factor that separated them from settled farmers and city folk. And what could class interest mean within a nomadic clan? What could it possibly mean between one nomadic clan and another?

  Wherever land was under tribal control, chiefs had tribal interests in the routes they used for smuggling, in the subsidies they had extracted from the government since Dost Mohammed’s day, and in the guns they used proudly to defend themselves against neighboring tribes. Were these people going to let themselves be absorbed into a framework defined by class interests?

  And although every village and clan had deeply rooted institutions for quasi-democratic decision making within the clan or village, few had any experience of democratic decision making between villages or across tribal lines. The regime was inviting them into a framework where affiliations would be based on policies rather than blood, history, and personal connections. It had no chance of working.

  A FUNCTIONAL GOVERNMENT IN KABUL MIGHT HAVE TAKEN STEPS TO stem the tide of woe, but the government in Kabul was the Keystone Kops of revolutionary juntas. It would have been comical had it not led to such epic tragedy.

  As soon as the Soviet-oriented Marxist-Leninist Khalq eliminated the Soviet-oriented Marxist-Leninist Parcham, it set to work eliminating those whose ideology was next closest to its own. It went after the Maoists. It went after other minor leftist parties. When it first came to power, the new regime made an ostentatious gesture of releasing political prisoners but only, it turned out, because they needed the cells for their own political prisoners.

  By most accounts, the coup took even the Soviets by surprise—sure they had hoped for some such outcome someday—but this was almost too soon! Oh well, they made the best of it by sending “advisors” in to help the new regime. Gradually, about five thousand of these technical and military advisors accumulated in Kabul, enough to provide every important government official and every key military commander with a personal Soviet advisor of his very own.

  The KGB helped the Khalq Party set up the single most indispensable branch of government for a tender young regime just finding its way—a secret police force. The intelligence service set up at this time kept changing its name as ruling cliques rose and fell, but finally it came to be known as KhAD, a name that still sends shivers up and down Afghan spines.

  While Khalq was herding its enemies, rivals, friends, and distant acquaintances into prison by the thousands, it was doing what it could to win the love and respect of the people. Mainly, this entailed instructing the masses on the greatness of Comrade Nur Mohammed Taraki. Gigantic posters of him appeared all over Kabul, identified by such honorifics as “the Genius of the East” and “the Great Teacher.”6 Taraki’s childhood home near Ghazni was turned into a shrine, decorated with red flags and colored lights. Here, visitors could see the bed he slept in as a child and the humble utensils he used to eat his simple meals.

  Taraki’s pre-coup home in a middle-class neighborhood of Kabul became a museum. (He himself moved into one of the former royal palaces.) In his old home, his desk went on display and his ink bottle and the pen he used to jot his great thoughts and his shoes and his boxer shorts and the chair upon which he liked to sit and think. Guides were on hand to explain to visitors the mighty insights that had occurred to him on that very chair! The Afghan Writers Union was directed to study the Great Teacher’s novels and short stories and to model their own style after his sentimental novels, which were thinly fictionalized didactic tracts.7

  Curiously, Taraki himself was not responsible for this florid campaign. His second-in-command, Hafizullah Amin, concocted and carried it out. For each title he assigned to Taraki, Amin gave himself a corresponding honorific. If Taraki was the Great Teacher, Amin was his Faithful Student. In one of his more colorful literary flourishes, Amin compared himself and Taraki to a fingernail and a finger, the one embedded in the other’s flesh, inseparable.

  Even more curiously, the two men had no such relationship whatsoever. Amin was a ruthless, cunning, well-educated political manipulator who exercised real power. Taraki was a dull-witted, self-educated buffoon who functioned as a mere token of that power. Amin didn’t have sole control of that token; he was one of several men wrestling to possess it. Taraki was not so much a leader as a piece of furniture upon which others were competing to sit.

  Amin had the edge because he had the biggest list of contacts, knew where all the bodies were buried, and had the best head for organization. It was he who had extended Khalq recruitment into the army until his faction had a deeper penetration of the armed forces than Parcham. Most importantly, on April 27, when all the other PDPA leaders had been arrested, it was Amin who acted decisively to launch the attacks that toppled Daoud. Without his leadership, they would all be dead.

  There was, however, one asset Amin did not possess: the trust and affection of the Soviets. They wished another Afghan Communist had carried out the coup—ideally Karmal, but, if not him, at least Taraki. Perhaps they believed the rumors that Amin was a CIA agent. In Afghanistan, which may well be the world capital of conspiracy theory, hardly anyone was ever not suspected of being a CIA agent, but in Amin’s case there was some basis for the rumors. When he was a student in the United States in the midsixties, he headed up the Afghan Student Association. In 1967, Ramparts magazine published an expose revealing that the CIA was funneling money to the Afghan Student Association through a quasi-governmental aid organization called the Asia Foundation.

  The rumors were probably false,8 but Amin did pose a problem because he didn’t want to be absorbed into the Soviet camp as a wholly owned subsidiary. He envisioned carving out some autonomy for himself and his country. He hoped to make Afghanistan like Yugoslavia or at least Albania: a hard-line Communist state, but nonaligned. This objective the Soviets found unacceptable.

  The conflict between Amin and the Soviets might explain the strange events that took place February 14, 1979, nine months after the Communist coup. On that Valentine’s Day, a group of armed men kidnapped American ambassador Adolph Dubs. Yes, America still had an embassy in Kabul at this time. Surprisingly, perhaps, America still hoped to retain some influence in Afghanistan. Amin’s nonalignment ambition fanned this hope. The kidnappers allegedly belonged to a Maoist splinter party that Afghans characterized as chupi-i-chup, “left-of-left.” (There were quite a number of these “left-of-left” groups, most too tiny to be called “parties.”) The kidnappers were allegedly trying to get their leader released from a PDPA prison, but, if that had really been their goal, why kidnap the American ambassador? The Americans had no pull with the PDPA. Why not the Soviet ambassador, a hostage who would really have put some pressure on a regime acting as a proxy for the Soviets?

  Furthermore, instead of whisking their victim away to a hidden location and issuing demands from that safe spot—as any normal kidnapper would have done—they took him to the biggest, best-known, and most centrally located hotel in Kabul—to the Kabul Hotel, in fact, where diplomats and foreign journalists stayed, the one location in which the government’s security apparatus was already established, the one place from w
hich the kidnappers could not possibly escape, no matter what the outcome of their adventure. A strange decision.

  American embassy personnel begged the Communist authorities in Kabul to let them negotiate with the kidnappers. They knew how to wear down such hostage takers with talk. They felt sure they could get the ambassador out safely. The regime—on the advice of a KGB agent in Kabul—said no: the Afghan government would take care of this. And they took care of it all right. They sent a strike team into the room guns blazing, killing all the kidnappers and Dubs as well. Problem solved. In mere minutes.

  Predictably, the United States closed its embassy, pulled out all its personnel, and cut off diplomatic relations with Afghanistan. Thus ended Amin’s dream of autonomy. The regime had no choice now but to rely totally on Soviet aid and protection. The mysterious Adolph Dubs affair inched Afghanistan closer to becoming one more Soviet Socialist Republic.

  The following month, a bunch of rebels kidnapped and killed nine Soviet advisors in the city of Herat. Immediately, planes took off from Dushanbe, the capital of Soviet Tajikistan, and bombed Herat, reducing a third of the city to rubble and killing, by most accounts, as many as twenty-five thousand people. (The Soviets and some leftist writers of the time claimed the number was closer to eight hundred.)9

  Whatever the body count, the Soviets implausibly denied any connection to the massacre. Hafizullah Amin, by contrast, saw an opportunity to build his reputation as an intimidating enforcer, so he insisted he had ordered the destruction of Herat. In Peshawar, a number of Islamist Afghan exiles went through a parallel exercise. Professor Rabbani, late of Kabul University, claimed he had instigated the uprising that drew such a horrific government response, but his rival Subghatullah Mujaddedi protested that no, no, he was the one—he had organized the rebellion that led to such destruction. At both ends of the political spectrum, people were competing to claim credit for carnage.