People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan

• 1. Introduction

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  The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan was born on the 1st of January 1965, when twenty-seven men gathered at the home of a journalist named Nur Muhammad Taraki in Kabul. They elected Taraki as their first Secretary General, chose a five-member Central Committee, and set in motion a chain of events that would eventually consume a country. What drew these men together? What kind of party did they intend to build? And how did a movement that began in a private house end up holding state power for more than a decade, only to collapse when mujahideen fighters took Kabul in 1992?

• 2. A Party Born in Secret

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  Taraki had spent time in India in 1932, where he encountered members of the Communist Party of India and became a communist. His co-founder, Babrak Karmal, would serve as his deputy. The party at first operated under the name People's Democratic Tendency, because secularist and anti-monarchist parties were illegal in Afghanistan at the time.

  The PDPA's founding documents reveal a careful double identity. The secret party constitution, adopted at the January 1965 congress but never shared with rank-and-file members, described the party as "the vanguard of the working class and all laborers in Afghanistan" and defined its ideology as "the practical experience of Marxism-Leninism". In public, however, the party refused to call itself communist. Its public platform, published in April 1966, spoke of creating a "democratic national government" and eventually a socialist state.

  Four PDPA members won seats in the 1965 Afghan parliamentary elections. Taraki was invited to Moscow later that year by the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The three parliamentarians who made it inside the legislature were Karmal, Anahita Ratebzad, and Nur Ahmed Nur. Taraki also launched what he called the first radical newspaper in Afghan history, named The Khalq, though the government forced it to stop publishing in 1966.

• 3. The Khalq-Parcham Split

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  By 1967 the party had fractured. The two largest factions took their names from the publications each side favored. The Khalq faction drew most of its support from ethnic Pashtuns in rural Afghanistan. The Parcham faction was rooted in urban populations who favored gradual social reform.

  Karmal tried and failed to persuade the Central Committee to censure Taraki for excessive radicalism. Taraki responded by packing the committee with his own supporters. Karmal offered his resignation, which the Politburo accepted. He left and took with him less than half the Central Committee's members. The rupture was never publicly announced.

  The Khalqists accused the Parchamis of being too close to the monarchy, pointing out that the Parcham newspaper had been tolerated by King Mohammed Zahir Shah and published from March 1968 to July 1969. By the 1969 parliamentary election, the party's representation had fallen from four seats to only two. A decade of mutual suspicion would follow before the Soviet Union brokered a reunification in July 1977, with both factions now pointed at a single target: the government of Mohammad Daoud Khan.

• 4. Seizing Power

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  Mir Akbar Khyber, a prominent Parcham figure, was assassinated in 1978 under disputed circumstances. His funeral drew a massive public protest. The government arrested most PDPA leaders shortly afterward. Hafizullah Amin, however, was placed under house arrest rather than immediately imprisoned on the 25th of April 1978. During those five hours, he managed to pass instructions to Khalqi military officers through his own family before being sent to jail the following day.

  The coup came in the early morning hours of the 28th of April 1978. Military units from the Kabul military base stormed the Presidential Palace. Major Aslam Watanjar commanded the tank units. Colonel Abdul Qadir led the air force. The insurgent troops overcame the Presidential Guard, killed Daoud, and killed most members of his family. Qadir assumed control of the country from the 27th to the 30th of April as head of the Military Revolutionary Council. The operation became known as the Saur Revolution.

  The timing was deliberate. The coup was set for the eve of Friday, the Muslim day of worship, when most military commanders and government workers were off duty.

• 5. Reforms and Resistance

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  Taraki became Prime Minister, Karmal became senior Deputy Prime Minister, and Amin took the foreign ministry. The new government immediately launched a program of rapid modernization: separating mosque from state, abolishing feudal practices like bride price and forced marriage, raising the minimum age of marriage, and running an ambitious literacy campaign. Illiteracy at the time stood at 90 percent.

  The literacy campaign became a political disaster. Unlike earlier reform efforts, in which local villagers helped build schools and teachers came from nearby communities, the Khalq sent teachers from Kabul and provincial capitals. Rural populations perceived these teachers as arrogant and disrespectful toward village elders. Young men teaching adult women in mixed-gender classes offended local values. The textbooks carried Marxist slogans, and students were required to study Russian, which many rural Afghans regarded as the language of a foreign imperialist power.

  The first visible rebellion appeared on the 20th of July 1978, in the far eastern provinces of Nuristan and Kunar. Political scientist Olivier Roy later estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 people disappeared during the Taraki-Amin period. Estimates for the number executed at Pul-e-Charkhi prison between April 1978 and December 1979 run as high as 27,000.

• 6. Soviet Intervention and Parcham Rule

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  In December 1979, Soviet special forces carried out Operation Storm-333, storming the Tajbeg Palace and killing Amin. Babrak Karmal became the new General Secretary and Afghan head of state. The Soviet-Afghan War had begun.

  Karmal's tenure was defined by internal rivalry as much as external war. The Khalq-Parcham split continued inside the party; clashes between factions sometimes ended in fatalities, with rival gangs firing on each other. Moscow grew frustrated. Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, said of Karmal: "The main reason that there has been no national consolidation so far is that Comrade Karmal is hoping to continue sitting in Kabul with our help."

  In May 1986, Karmal was replaced as party General Secretary by Mohammad Najibullah. Six months later he lost the presidency as well. His successor as head of state was Haji Mohammad Chamkani. Karmal moved to Moscow, though accounts differ on whether he left voluntarily or was effectively exiled. Between 1982 and 1992, the number of people recruited by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence to join the insurgency topped 100,000. The Soviet Union withdrew in 1989 but continued providing military assistance worth billions of dollars until the USSR collapsed in 1991.

• 7. The Homeland Party's Last Years

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  Najibullah made a series of dramatic pivots. After National Reconciliation talks in 1987, the country's official name reverted to the Republic of Afghanistan. In June 1990 he renamed the party the Homeland Party, dropped the Marxist-Leninist ideology entirely, and removed much of the party's old symbolism.

  The collapse came from multiple directions at once. In March 1990, Defense Minister Shahnawaz Tanai attempted a coup. It failed, and Tanai fled the country. Then in 1991, the USSR dissolved and all Soviet support stopped after Boris Yeltsin came to power. In April 1992, the regime fell after the mass defection of non-Pashtun military commanders, triggered when Najibullah dismissed ethnic Tajik General Abdul Momin in favor of General Rasul, an ethnic Pashtun. General Abdul Rashid Dostum was among those who defected. Interim leader Abdul Rahim Hatif agreed on the 22nd of April 1992 to a rebel-led state.

  The Homeland Party was formally banned on the 6th of May 1992 by the predominantly Tajik-led Jamiat-i Islami Government. Some officials joined the new government, some joined militias, and others simply left. Pro-Najibullah supporters later relaunched the Hezb-e Watan in 2004 and again in 2017.

• 8. Membership and Organization

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  When the PDPA seized power in 1978, it had somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 members. That number was always small relative to the country it now governed. After the Soviet intervention, Moscow pressed the party to recruit heavily. The probationary period for new members was cut from one year to six months in 1981, and fewer party sponsors were required.

  By 1984, official membership claims ranged between 20,000 and 40,000, while party leaders made public claims of 62,820 at the 1st PDPA Conference. In 1983 Karmal claimed 90,000 members; the following year he claimed 120,000. These figures were widely regarded as inflated.

  A persistent structural problem ran through the whole organization. Of the 10,000 mid-level cadres in the mid-1980s, 5,000 lived in Kabul rather than the provinces they were supposed to administer. In Faryab province, local residents reportedly still believed that Mohammad Daoud Khan, the president the party had overthrown in 1978, was still in power. The party was organized in roughly 2,000 of Afghanistan's estimated 25,000 villages. By the end of the 1980s, the Social Science Institute of the PDPA had granted degrees to over 10,000 individuals in an attempt to improve cadre quality, but the gap between Kabul and the countryside never closed.