Read Online Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl - Free Book Online Page A

members of the Communist Party. Ayazi was not, and the new order no longer required his services. He was fired.
    Officially, supreme power in the state now resided with the PDPA and its leader, a former writer by the name of Nur Mohammed Taraki. The new government immediately launched a public relations campaign lauding his modest origins, his grand plans, and his extraordinary talents. Afghans learned that the new ruling party, the heroic vanguard of workers and peasants, was solidly behind the man who was now described as the “great leader,” united like no organization before it in the country’s history. The future was bright, and Afghans were heading straight for it.
    It was all facade. The new rulers grandly dubbed their seizure of power the “April Revolution,” but it was actually a classic palace coup that had been orchestrated by a Taraki aide named Hafizullah Amin. While the other PDPA leaders languished in prison, Amin, for some mysterious reason, had drawn only house arrest. Perhaps Daoud regarded him as a relatively harmless junior. It was a fatal mistake.
    Over the next few months, Amin would prove to be the most relentless schemer in the PDPA, combining thrusting ambition with an easy if somewhat reptilian charm. Unbeknownst to Daoud or even the other Communist leaders, Amin had spent years patiently honeycombing the Afghan military with his supporters, often building on the proto-Communist inclinations of officers who had received much of their training in the Soviet Union. When Daoud made his move against the PDPA, Amin was ready and took advantage of his lax detention to send his armed followers into the field against the president. Once he had heaved Taraki into power, Amin positioned himself as the older man’s most loyal acolyte—the substitute son of the childless leader who had sacrificed his entire life to the cause of the party. None of this, as events would show, altered the fact that the son was really the more powerful of the two and that his feelings toward his father figure were fueled more by Freudian resentment than filial piety.
    As for the party’s unity, this was the biggest lie of all. Far from the monolithic structures of so many Communist Parties elsewhere, the fractiousness of the PDPA was an open secret. It was actually two parties bolted together, a coalition of necessity that reflected the ethnic and sectarian fault lines that ran through Afghan society.
    From their beginnings, back in the 1960s, Afghan Communists had tended to gravitate around two poles. One was the group known as Parcham (meaning “Banner”), led by the imperious Babrak Karmal, a general’s son who never quite lost the aura of his privileged upbringing.
    Karmal and his followers believed that Afghanistan was too backward to fit the orthodox Marxist template of a prerevolutionary society, and even as they railed against the ruling classes, it was clear that their view of social transformation was essentially a gradualist one. While the Parchamis included in their number many Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, their membership drew heavily on the other ethnicities—Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras—who tended to communicate in the Afghan lingua franca of Dari (the local version of Persian). Though Karmal liked to claim descent from a rough-hewn Pashtun clan in order to broaden his appeal, his family actually came from an urban, Persian-speaking milieu.
    Taraki and Amin both belonged to the PDPA’s other faction, known as Khalq (“the People” or “the Masses”). Khalq’s ethnic basis was narrower than Parcham’s: Khalqis were overwhelmingly Pashtuns, and more often than not they hailed from a particular subset of the Pashtuns. Taraki and Amin were both members of a particular Pashtun tribal confederation, the Ghilzais, that had long chafed under the domination of more powerful Pashtun groups—and especially the Durranis, the dynasty that had dominated Afghanistan for centuries, right up