Communism in Afghanistan

Abstract

Two decades ago, two men met in Kabul, in the living room of a minor writer, impecunious translator and political dreamer named Nur Mohammad Taraki. What resulted was celebrated in January 1985, by lengthy statements and anniversary articles in Afghan and Soviet media, as the beginning of a political party which now claims to have 120 000 members and to run Afghanistan. The membership claim is probably a gross exaggeration, and the claim that the party runs Afghanistan is true only in the narrow sense that it is the local link in the transmission of control from elsewhere. The basic significance of that meeting is that it was a step toward the establishment of Russian authority in Kabul and the present Soviet effort to crush Afghan resistance to alien domination. It was a naïve, possibly idealistic, beginning of what has become a savage guerrilla war that is destroying the Afghanistan which those men professed to want to improve.