Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [48]
Needless to say, Pakistanis do not see Afghanistan’s claim upon their territory as legitimate, and Pakistan welcomed and trained radical Islamists from Afghanistan as soon as Daud came to power. Beginning in 1973, Pakistan supported Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his party Hezb-i-Islami. This later became an anti-Soviet, Pakistani-based mujahideen force and has been allied with the Taliban since about 2005.
Since its inception, the Pakistani officer class has sought to keep Afghanistan weak so as to provide “strategic depth,” or fallback room, in case of a major land war with India. On both sides of the border live Pashtuns. In Afghanistan, Pashtuns have always been the ruling ethnicity, but in Pakistan they are a large, poor, restive minority, making up about 16 percent of the population. The last thing Pakistan wants is for the Pashtun minority within its borders to link up with, or become tools of, a strong neighboring Afghanistan ruled by Pashtuns and allied with India.
Daud’s new republican government included opposing elements of both the communists of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and politically active Islamists. Both of these Red and Green revolutionary tendencies had gestated on the campus of Kabul University. In a fateful pattern reminiscent of Kasim in Iraq and other developmentalist strongmen, Daud tried to play the opposition forces off against each other, using a mix of political co-optation and repression. The PDPA had positions in government, but Daud also repressed them. The balancing act did not last for long.
Saur Revolution
In April 1978 a faction of the PDPA overthrew Daud in a coup, beginning the so-called Saur Revolution, named for the month of April in which it happened.
Afghanistan’s Communist Party was dysfunctional, divided, and intoxicated by ideology. Almost immediately, the PDPA started attacking its own cadre. It also implemented well-intentioned but poorly planned land reform, which abolished bazaar moneylenders but did not provide farmers with an alternative credit structure. Other new laws enforced gender equality, universal education, and workers rights, but the headlong rush toward modernity proved too much for Afghanistan’s deeply conservative rural culture. In April 1979, the military garrison in Herat rose in rebellion. By that autumn, the Afghan army had essentially fallen apart.
Since the 1950s Afghanistan had been the fourth-largest recipient of Soviet aid. The Soviets had fought Muslim rebels who had used a weak Afghanistan as their base until the mid-1930s.22 After World War II, the USSR saw stability in Central Asia as hinging on stability in, and cordial relations with, Afghanistan. So, they pumped large flows of aid into their neighbor south of the Amu Darya. Watching the Afghan meltdown of 1979, the Soviets faced the loss of a client state and the possibility of renewed Islamic insurgency infecting their own Central Asian republics. Whether the Soviet Union invaded or was invited in, it then killed Hafizullah Amin, the extremist PDPA president who had summoned them, putting in his place the more moderate Babrak Karmal. Still, the war had begun.
The United States saw the intervention as a major Soviet blunder, and thus, as an American opportunity. The United States and Saudi Arabia were soon giving $8 billion in aid to the Pakistan-based and -supported mujahideen, who were fighting to overthrow the PDPA government.23
When the mujahideen finally won power in 1992, they immediately set to fighting among themselves, destroying half of Kabul in the process. Out of