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.
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Notes
Henry S. Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, (Durham, N.C., 1983) p. 43, quoting a 1976 PDPA internal document. For full text of the document,
see Anthony Arnold, Afghanistan’s Two-Party Communism: Parcham and Khalq (Stanford, Calif., 1983) pp. 160–177.
The Mongolian Communist party, known as the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, ostensibly attained power even quicker, within a year of its formation, but in fact Moscow only used local people as a front for its colonial takeover. See Henry S. Bradsher, ‘The Sovietization of Mongolia’, Foreign Affairs, New York, Vol. 50, No. 3, April 1972, pp. 545–553.
A. M. Baryalai, (ed.), Democratic Republic of Afghanistan Annual, 1979, (Kabul. 1979) p. 8.
Leon B. Poullada, ‘Afghanistan and the United States: The Crucial Years’, The Middle East Journal, Washington, DC, No. 35, 1981, pp. 186–187.
Peter G. Franck, Afghanistan Between East and West (Washington, DC, 1960) p. 58.
Tahir Amin, ‘Afghan Resistance: Past, Present, and Future’, Asian Survey, Berkeley, Calif., Vol. 14, No. 4 April 1984. pp. 376–377
Baryalai, Democractic Republic of Afghanistan Annual, 1979, p. 10.
Rostis1av A. Ulyanovskiy, ‘The Afghan Revolution at the Current Stage’, Voprosy Istorii KPSS, Moscow, No. 4, April 1982, in FBIS Joint Publications Research Service, USSR Report, Political and Sociological Affairs, Washington, DC, No. 1279, 20 July 1982, p. 6.
Ulyanovskiy, ‘The Afghan Revolution’, p. 86. The US embassy in Kabul estimated in 1972 only 300 to 500 total Communists among all factions; see US State Department, World Strength of Communist Party Organizations, Washington, DC, 1972, pp. 89–90.
Louis Dupree, ‘Red Flag Over the Hindu Kush, Part V: Repressions, or Security Through Terror Purges, I–IV’, AUFS/Asia, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1980, p. 3.
See Bradsher, Afghanistan, pp. 247–248, and Henry S. Bradsher, ‘Afghanistan’, The Washington Quarterly, Washington, DC, Vol. 7, No. 3, Summer 1984, p. 53.
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© 1987 Hafeez Malik
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Bradsher, H.S. (1987). Communism in Afghanistan. In: Malik, H. (eds) Soviet-American Relations with Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08553-8_16
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