People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan
The
People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (in
Persian:
حزب دموکراتيک خلق افغانستان, in
Pashto:
د افغانستان د خلق دموکراټیک ګوند, PDPA) was a
Soviet-aligned
Marxist-Leninist party that ruled
Afghanistan from 1978 to 1991.
Founded in
January 1,
1965, by 1978 it successfully overthrew the regime of
Mohammed Daoud Khan. With the completion of the so-called Saur revolution, the PDPA declared the founding of the
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
Three men -
Nur Mohammad Taraki,
Hafizullah Amin, and
Babrak Karmal - played a central role in the evolution of the Afghan Left and the fortunes of the PDPA.
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 Karma1
Deputy Secretary General, and chose a five-member
Central Committee (or
Politburo).
However, the PDPA influence was largely limited to an educated minority in the urban areas. Generally, this group's perceptions and values clashed with those of the vast majority of religiously
conservative,
rural Afghans.
The party was weakened by bitter, and sometimes violent, internal rivalries. On the ideological level, Karmal and Taraki differed in their perceptions of Afghanistan's revolutionary potential:
*Taraki (leader of the Kalq faction - "Kalqis") believed that revolution could be achieved in the classical
Marxist-Leninist fashion by building a tightly disciplined
working-class party with a highly educated and revolutionary party leadership. The Kalqis pushed for immediate and violent revolutionary change, as prescribed in Marx's
Communist Manifesto.
*Karmal (leader of the Parcham faction - "Parchamis") felt that Afghanistan was too undeveloped for a Marxist/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. He advocated gradual socialist development and added a more
nationalist flavor to the PDPA.
The banning of Khalq in 1966 prompted Karmal to criticize Taraki because of the newspaper's open expression of class struggle themes.
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, and it was accepted by the Politburo of the Party. 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.
In the spring of 1967 the PDPA formally divided into two factions. 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, after a weekly magazine he published between March 1968 and July 1969. Parcham was shut down in June 1969 on the eve of parliamentary elections, but the group had succeeded in getting some very powerful friends.
Reconciliation
Moscow played a major role in the reconciliation of Taraki's and Karmal's factions. In March 1977 a formal agreement on unity was achieved, and in July the two factions held their first joint conclave in a decade.
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.
In 1978 a prominent leftist, Mir Akbar Khyber (or "Kaibar"), was killed by the government and his associates. Although the government issued a statement deploring the assassination, PDPA leaders apparently feared that Daoud was planning to exterminate them all.
Nur Mohammad Taraki,
Babrak Karmal, and
Hafizullah Amin, organized a coup d'etat, overthrowing the regime of Mohammad Daoud, and renaming the country the
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA).
On the eve of the communist coup, The police did not send Hafizullah Amin to immediate imprisonment, as it did with Politburo members of the PDPA on April 25, 1978. His imprisonment was postponed for five hours, during which Amin, without having the authority, instructed the Khalqi army officers to overthrow the government.
The regime of President
Mohammad Daoud Khan came to a violent end in the early morning hours of April 28, 1978, when military units loyal to the Kalqi faction of the PDPA stormed the Presidential Palace in the heart of
Kabul. The coup was also strategically planned for this date because it was the day before Friday, the
Muslim day of worship, and most military commanders and government workers were off duty. With the help of Afghanistan's airforce of Soviet
Migs and
SU-25's, the insurgent troops overcame the stubborn resistance of the Presidential Guard and killed Daoud and most members of his family.
The divided PDPA succeeded the Daoud regime with a new government under the leadership of
Nur Muhammad Taraki of the
Khalq faction. In Kabul, the initial cabinet appeared to be carefully constructed to alternate ranking positions between Khalqis and Parchamis: Taraki was prime minister, Karmal was senior deputy prime minister, and Hafizullah Amin of Khalq was foreign minister.
Once in power, the party moved to permit freedom of religion and place agricultural resources under state control. The secular nature of the government made it unpopular with religiously conservative Afghans in the countryside, who favored traditional Islamic restrictions on women's rights and in daily life. Their opposition became particularly pronounced after the Soviet Union occupied the country in 1979, fearing it was in danger of being toppled by
mujahideen forces.
The U.S. saw the situation as a prime opportunity to weaken the Soviet Union, and the move essentially signaled the end of the
detente era initiated by former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Funding for anti-Soviet mujahideen forces began prior to the Soviet invasion, under the
Carter administration, with the intention of provoking Soviet intervention (according to
Zbigniew Brzezinski) and was significantly boosted under the
Reagan administration, which was committed to actively rolling back Soviet influence in the
Third World. The mujahideen belonged to various different factions, but all shared a similarly conservative Islamic ideology, to varying degrees.
After the
Soviet Union had leveled most of the villages south and east of Kabul, creating a massive humanitarian disaster, the demise of the PDPA continued with the rise of the mujahedeen guerrillas, who were trained in Pakistani camps with U.S. support. Between
1982 and
1992, the number of people recruited by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency to join the insurgency topped 100,000.
The Soviet Union withdrew in 1989, but continued to provide military assistance to the PDPA regime until the
USSR's collapse in 1991.
President and PDPA leader
Mohammad Najibullah agreed to step down in favor of a transitional government in 1992, three years after the Soviet troop withdrawal. The mujahideen established a new government in
Kabul led by
Ahmad Shah Massoud. But the mujahideen were soon torn by factional struggles, particularly between Massoud's coalition government and the
Taliban. Taliban forces took Kabul in
1996, and Najibullah, who had been residing in a UN compound, was hanged from a traffic light post.
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan*
The PDPA and the Soviet invasion*
The future and legacy of PDPA members
