Forty years ago, communists took over Afghanistan hoping to bring modernization and social progress to the country. Were their sweeping reforms doomed to fail?
Day after Saur Revolution in Kabul, Afghanistan. Cleric77 / Wikimedia
Tahir was a lecturer in Pashto literature at the University in Kabul. He’d come a long way. His father was a small peasant in a village in Nangrahar, near the border with Pakistan. The family worked their own land, and had one sharecropper, so they were doing better than most. Tahir got to university, and into his job, through raw intelligence. He loved his father, and his brothers and his mother. But he had to set his face against his father’s values.
Afghanistan in the 1970s was a feudal country. Power lay not with urban businessmen, but with great landowners who lived in countryside forts. Sometimes there were two great lords in a village, sometimes one, and in some places one man dominated several villages. There were many middle peasants, men like Tahir’s father, with maybe one sharecropper, but still also working their own land.
Below them were the sharecroppers, perhaps half of the population, who were allowed to keep a third of the crop they harvested. In Tahir’s village it was a fifth, because the land was better. Everywhere sharecroppers, workers, and shepherds were paid just enough to buy three naan breads each for two adults and two each for two children. That was 2,000 calories per adult and 1,300 per child. They couldn’t afford any other food.
I was an anthropologist in Afghanistan in the early 1970s. The people I engaged with had been nomads with sheep, but had fallen on hard times. Their standard of living was pretty typical for poor Afghans. Women had two dresses in their lifetimes, one when they reached puberty and a second when they were married. An ordinary family had one small cup for tea. They ate meat, with great excitement, once a year at the Feast of the Prophet. For relish to go with the bread, they made soup by boiling clover and other greens they gathered. Two of the three wealthiest families in the small village of thirty-three households competed to display hospitality to me and my wife. One household fried me an egg on a special occasion. The other gave me stew with my own small potato. No one else had one. Studio photograph of Mohammad Zaher Khan in military uniform. Haji Amin Qodrat, Kabul / Wikimedia
Exploitation on this scale — two-thirds to four-fifths of the crop to the landowner — required cruelty and violence. Most of this came from the local lords and their bodyguards and thugs, backed by the government. Mohammed Zahir Shah, the king in Kabul, and his family had built their power by favoring one lord in each district, and ruling through him. “Sometimes we have tyranny,” Tahir said to me once. “Then they come and kill you and all your family. Now we have democracy. It’s only you, and they only put out your eyes.” It was a joke. We laughed.
Afghanistan was a poor country, mostly arid, desert or mountains. The government was powerless to tax the great lords or the small peasants. They relied on limited customs duties instead. Since 1842, different Afghan governments had relied on some form of foreign subsidy, usually from the British. From the 1950s on, Afghanistan had “development.” As part of the Cold War, Russian and American aid paid about 80 percent of the civil budget and most of the military budget. The Russians paid about two thirds, and the Americans about a third. There was very little industry or economic development. The aid money went to the army, schools, and the civil service. Now there were a few thousand students at Kabul University, and hundreds of thousands in the schools. The old ruling class of landlords was tiny, and there was no way they could supply the teachers and civil servants. The newly educated were men like Tahir, the children of middle peasants. Their parents and grandparents had quietly hated the great lords and the government, and the newly educated hated them too.
They dreamed, these young teachers, of a developed, modern Afghanistan. One time, down in Helmand Province, Tahir and I stood in a silent crowd of onlookers watching a demonstration by a few dozen high-school boys. The students took turns standing on the box to shout their slogan: “Death to the Khans.” Khan was the local word for the great lords. The boys’ slogan was not abstract. Their political program was to kill those men in their district.
“Do you have such things in America?” Tahir asked me.
I told him we did, and I had been part of some. He told me about the Third of Akrab, in 1965, when the students in Kabul demonstrated outside the newly elected parliament, and three protesters were shot dead. He had been there.
The young men and women of this new urban class, the majority of them teachers like Tahir, were all turning to Islamist or Communist parties. The Brotherhood were Islamists. They were university educated, from the same class as Tahir, and their young activists would become the leaders of the resistance to the Russians. The Communists were split in two. Parcham (the Banner) were more educated, urban, and moderate. Khalk (the People) were less educated, more often from rural families, more often Pashtuns. Tahir joined Parcham. In 1973, the Communists were growing faster than the Brotherhood.
I sat with Tahir in his father’s reception room in the village, and we walked and bussed to villages around Nangrahar. Tahir was selected by the university to be my “counterpart” during the early part of my fieldwork. I paid him four times his monthly salary of 1,500, three times what a worker earned. I was still learning the language, and he translated for me. He also wrote regular reports on me for the secret police. We both knew this but did not mention it.
Tahir’s marriage was arranged. His wife had never been to school. There was a lot he couldn’t talk to her about. But he had married to please his family. They had chosen a local girl for him in the hope that would keep him tied to the village, and for the first few years of the marriage she lived with his parents and he visited when he could. He tried to develop a real relationship with her. A lot of other girls were going to school, though, in the cities and in the villages. Both Parcham and Khalk were full of women comrades. Women’s liberation was central to their dream of a better world. Tahir hoped that one day soon he could move his wife to live with him in Kabul. When that happened, he promised me, I could meet her, because he would never seclude her.
In 1972 there was a drought, an early effect of climate change. A famine enveloped parts of the north. Food aid came in from America. In the district towns, the government officers piled the bags of grain in the squares. Soldiers guarded the grain, and the officials sold it ten times the usual price. Small peasants sold their land for almost nothing to the feudal khans and bought the grain. The landless sat and waited for death. A French journalist asked them why they did not storm the piles of grain. “The king has planes,” they said, “and they would bomb us.”
The king and his government lost almost all support. The king’s cousin, Mohammed Daoud, had been a brutal prime minister until 1963. He had leaned more to the Soviets, and the king more to the Americans. Now the US was cutting aid after Vietnam, and most of the money was coming from Russia. Daoud staged a military coup, with Soviet support. The coup met no opposition. After the famine, no one was prepared to die for the king.
The actual work of organizing the coup was done by Communist military officers, mostly from the Khalk wing. Like the teachers, the officers were from middle peasant backgrounds, often the first of their families to be educated, and often trained in the Soviet Union.
The coup changed nothing important. Power remained with the great lords, though Daoud’s rhetoric was left wing. The university, high schools, and elementary schools became intensely political places, particularly in the towns and cities. Some teachers proselytized for the Brotherhood, others for Khalk and Parcham. Students debated. Parcham argued for working with Daoud’s dictatorship. Khalk wanted full revolution.
The Communists were growing. In April 1978 Daoud ordered the assassination of a Communist leader, Mir Akbar Khyber. Both wings of the Communists came together for a large public demonstration at his funeral in Kabul. Daoud had all the leaders of both wings arrested, and they knew they would soon be killed. One leader, Amin, managed to give the word to put a planned coup into motion. The same army and air force officers who had brought Daoud to power now killed the leader and his entire family. As with the king, no one at all would fight for Daoud, and the Communists succeeded.
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