Khalq

• 1. Introduction

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  Khalq, the Dari word for "the masses", was a faction inside the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan that seized control of an entire country in a single day. On the 27th of April 1978, a force of tank commanders and air force pilots loyal to Khalq took Kabul, bombed the Royal Palace, and killed President Mohammad Daoud Khan along with most of his family. Within hours, a faction that had been built largely inside schoolrooms and army barracks had turned Afghanistan into a one-party communist state.

  Where did Khalq come from, and how did a movement rooted in Pashtun rural villages achieve such rapid military dominance? What did it do with power once it had it? And why, despite that dominance, did its rule last barely twenty months before Soviet tanks arrived to end it?

• 2. Built in the Classroom

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  Hafizullah Amin was working with teachers in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he began shaping the base that would one day carry Khalq to power. Using his position in teacher training, he published political dramas and sketches under a pseudonym and organized conferences where he could speak directly with educators across Afghanistan. At a 1961 conference in Kandahar, he had direct access to the men and women responsible for education across the entire province.

  Amin believed that radicalizing Afghan teachers was the essential first step toward radicalizing rural youth. That conviction turned out to be strategically sound. Khalq drew its membership primarily from Pashtuns with rural backgrounds, and it was Amin's network of former students and radicalized teachers who formed that base. The movement even reached nomadic Pashtun Kochi communities.

  Amin was the only Khalqi member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan to win a seat in Parliament, in 1969. That electoral success pointed to a broader truth about Khalq's support: it was strongest outside Kabul, in the military and in the countryside, which would prove decisive when it mattered most.

• 3. Khalq Versus Parcham

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  On the 1st of January 1965, twenty-seven men gathered at Nur Mohammed Taraki's house in Kabul to hold the PDPA's First Congress. They elected Taraki as Secretary General and Babrak Karmal as his deputy. Within two years, those two men would be leading rival factions pulling the party apart.

  The split came down to a fundamental disagreement about revolutionary strategy. Taraki argued that Afghanistan could follow a classical Leninist model, building a tightly disciplined working-class party to drive revolution. Karmal disagreed, holding that Afghanistan was too undeveloped for that approach and that a broad national democratic front was needed first. Khalq drew more support from Pashtun, rural, and military constituencies; Parcham found more traction in Kabul's urban middle classes.

  The party launched a newspaper also called Khalq, and its first edition sold 20,000 copies. Later print runs fell to around 10,000, but the paper was particularly popular among students. The authorities shut it down on the 23rd of May 1966, citing anti-Islamic and antimonarchical content. Karmal's faction launched its own publication, Parcham, in March 1968, which ran until June 1969.

  By 1973, after former Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan seized power, Khalq found itself excluded from the new government because of its isolation and its refusal to cooperate with other political forces. Amin took over military recruitment that year, and the effort paid off dramatically: by the time of the communist coup in April 1978, Khalq outnumbered Parcham within the armed forces by a factor of two or three to one.

• 4. The Saur Revolution

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  The coup that brought Khalq to power began with a moment of extraordinary improvisation. On the 25th of April 1978, the police arrested the members of the PDPA Politburo, but Hafizullah Amin was the last to be detained, his imprisonment delayed by five hours. During those hours, without any formal authority to act, Amin passed instructions to Khalqi army officers to move against the government.

  The government named its takeover the Saur Revolution, after the month in the Persian calendar when it happened. Khalqist Colonel Mohammad Aslam Watanjar commanded the ground forces that seized Kabul. Colonel Abdul Qadir led the air force assault on the Royal Palace. President Daoud, most of his family, and a number of women and children were killed in that attack.

  The victory was partially the result of Daoud's miscalculation: he had regarded Parcham as the more dangerous threat and failed to move against Khalq before it was too late. During the first months of the new government, Cabinet seats were split eleven to ten in Khalq's favor. The armed forces, where Khalq had built its deepest networks over the preceding decade, gave the faction a structural advantage over its Parchami rivals that no election could have delivered.

• 5. Radical Edicts and Crackdowns

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  Nur Muhammad Taraki raised the issue of Pashtunistan at his first press conference, on the 6th of May 1978, signaling that the new government intended to challenge the Durand Line, the disputed border separating Afghanistan from Pakistan. By 1979 the official Afghan map had been redrawn to show Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan as new "frontier provinces" of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

  The Khalqist government governed through a series of eight edicts, suspending all laws except those inherited from the Daoud period on civil and criminal matters. A land reform campaign followed, and it brought mass violence: tens of thousands of people viewed as enemies of the state were arrested and summarily executed. By June 1978 an estimated 800 Parchami military personnel had been forced out of the armed forces in a purge Taraki personally demanded.

  In August 1978, Amin told Soviet Ambassador Alexander Puzanov and Soviet Major General L.N. Gorelov: "The territory of Afghanistan must reach to the shores of the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean. We wish to see the sea with our own eyes." Radio Afghanistan began broadcasting anti-Pakistan songs in May 1979, one carrying the refrain "We shall march against Pakistan."

  The crackdowns fueled armed resistance among religious communities and ethnic minorities, pushing more people toward Islamist exile parties in Pakistan. By the end of 1979 there were 400,000 Afghan refugees, mostly in Pakistan. American intelligence assessed the rebels as poorly equipped and unable to mount a sustained challenge, and Amin's forces successfully retook territory including the town of Bamiyan after Hazara rebels briefly seized it in mid-October 1979. Khalq retained the loyalty of key armoured units in Kabul and controlled most of the important parts of Afghanistan by November 1979.

• 6. The Taraki-Amin Rupture

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  Hafizullah Amin took over as Chairman of the Ministers Council, effectively prime minister, in March 1979, while also holding the position of field marshal and vice-president of the Supreme Defence Council. Taraki remained General Secretary of the party, chairman of the Revolutionary Council, and nominally in command of the army, though by that point he was reportedly spending much of his time at the former Royal Palace, which the regime had renamed the People's Palace.

  The rivalry between the two men turned lethal by September 1979. Taraki's followers, acting with Soviet complicity, made several attempts on Amin's life. The final attempt killed one of Amin's close friends instead. Amin then moved against Taraki, and Taraki was killed. The purge of Taraki's supporters that followed was met with only one significant mutiny, by the 7th Infantry Division at Rishkur on the 15th and the 16th of October, carried out by anti-Amin elements within the party itself. American intelligence concluded that the quick suppression of that mutiny showed Amin retained the loyalty of the critical armoured formations in the Kabul region.

  In October 1979 Amin addressed the unresolved border question again: "Our task is to direct the officers and soldiers and all the Afghan people to the Durand line which we do not recognize, and then to the valley of the Indus which must be our border." The Soviets, meanwhile, were alarmed by what they described as Khalqist radicalism, and had urged Amin to include Parchamis and non-communists in government. He did not. On a December night in 1979, Soviet intelligence forces stormed the government and killed Amin, replacing him with the Parchami Babrak Karmal.

• 7. After Power

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  The Soviet-installed Parchami government faced an immediate problem: the officer corps it inherited was full of Khalqis. Amin's recruitment work in the 1970s had ensured that. Many Khalqi officers mutinied against Babrak Karmal and his Soviet sponsors. Disaffected Khalqis inside the military frequently assisted the Mujahideen and accused Parchami officers of using them as expendable front-line troops while shielding young Parchami men from compulsory service. At the April 1980 military parade marking the second anniversary of the Saur Revolution, many Tank Corps units still flew the red flag of Khalq rather than Karmal's new national flag.

  A pro-Taraki military clique calling itself the "principled Khalqis", led by Asadullah Sarwari and Sayed Mohammad Gulabzoy, repeatedly clashed with the Karmal government. In December 1989, 127 Khalqist officers were arrested for an attempted coup; twenty-seven of them escaped and appeared at a press conference with Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Peshawar. In March 1990, Defense Minister Shahnawaz Tanai led another coup attempt, again with Hekmatyar's cooperation and the apparent support of Politburo members Sarwary and Gulabzoi; it failed because of faulty communications.

  When President Najibullah's government collapsed in April 1992, former Khalqists spread across the landscape of the Afghan Civil War. Hekmatyar gained the support of Khalqist hardliners including Interior Minister Raz Mohammad Paktin and Defense Minister Mohammad Aslam Watanjar. General Tanai provided the Taliban with experienced military officers according to western diplomatic sources. Khalqi pilots flew MiG-21 and Sukhoi fighters for the Taliban's small air force, and Khalqi crews operated Soviet tanks and artillery. General Babrak Shinwari, a former head of youth affairs under Taraki and Amin, later helped found the Afghanistan-Pakistan People Friendship Society and was elected to the Loya Jirga by a council of elders from Nangarhar province after the Taliban's fall.