Chapter 2 continues…

Magnus and Naby rightly point out that, ‘the broadest path, and ultimately the most important one, lay not in the ideological appeal to the discontented intellectual that created the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) but rather through economic, educational, and military modernization, some, though not all, achieved with aid from Soviet sources’.

Events took a turn when in 1973 King Zahir Shah was overthrown by military officers under the command of his cousin, Daoud. Those favouring a faster approach to reform found a vehicle in the PDPA which, in 1978, seized power in the second military coup. The following year, in response to increasing fears of Islamic resistance both within Afghanistan and in the newly declared Islamic Republic of Iran, the USSR intervened in the country in support of the PDPA government. Thus Afghanistan, and Central Asia more generally, long subject to imperial designs, came to feature prominently on the world political stage at the height of the Cold War as the Soviet Union became entangled in a conflict between the Marxist regime of the PDPA and the predominantly Islamist rebel forces- the Mujahideen.
The Soviet military intervention (1979) in Afghanistan was marked by a series of interesting developments all over the country. Whether the Soviets were actually invited by the Communist government of HafizullahAminornotisamatterof debate.Howevertheintervention preceeded a series of political developments like the assassination of Mir Akbar Khyber in April 1978 which prompted President Daoud to arrest Marxist leaders triggering violent response and a communist coup which overthrew and killed Daoud. Marxist military officers, thereby, handed over power to the PDPA and Nur Mohammad Taraki (head of the Khalq faction) was made the President (Saur Revolution).

However decisions like replacement of the green flag with the red and the government’s agenda of equal rights and education for women, national language status for Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi and Nuristani, credit reforms and land distribution struck at the very root of the socio- economic structure of Afghanistan’s rural society. After Amin executed Taraki, he gradually realised that things in the country-side of Afghanistan were going out of hand.

To be continued…