Mike Stein would like the ICC to have the moral and political courage to lead a multilateral boycott
Two additional points come to mind. First, England acted alone in 1968 in cancelling their tour to South Africa after the prime minister, John Vorster, banned the team for including the “mixed-race” player Basil D’Oliveira. England’s decision put pressure on the International Cricket Council, which introduced a moratorium on all international tours in 1970, resulting in South Africa’s exclusion from international cricket until Nelson Mandela walked free from prison in 1990.
Second, as Liew suggests, India is the key player, holding both the cricketing and economic cards that represent major barriers to effective action: the former as a consequence of the individualisation and privatisation of cricket through the Indian Premier League, weakening players’ country ties, and the latter as a result of India’s economic self‑interest in Afghanistan.
The only hope would be if the ICC had the moral and political courage to lead a multilateral boycott, as it did in 1970, and the member states were prepared to back them. But that seems unlikely, as the England and Wales Cricket Board and other participants are refusing to take part in a boycott of an international competition. Gender apartheid remains unchallenged by cricket in 2025.
Mike Stein Pudsey, West Yorkshire
Cricket must challenge gender apartheid in Afghanistan
Afghanistan’s mineral resources harbour great untapped potential. The country sits on an estimated 2.2 billion tonnes of iron ore, 60 million tonnes of copper, 183 million tonnes of aluminium, and vast reserves of rare earth elements such as lanthanum, cerium and neodymium. In a world where access to these minerals is a matter of national security, there is a geopolitical race to secure control of critical mineral supply chains. While China currently leads, the US, EU, and others are seeking to establish and secure independent mineral supply chains.
Afghanistan is one of the theatres in which this race is being played out. The country’s resources are not just a matter of foreign economic interest – they are a potential for domestic economic development and growth. But they can also become a source for conflict and repression, depending on whether they are managed with the long-term welfare of the Afghan people in mind. The mining sector in Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban, and it is unclear where the revenues end up.
Undermined
The new Taliban de facto authorities sought to capitalize on Afghanistan’s mineral resources after their return to power in 2021. Since then, they have awarded at least 205 mining contracts to more than 150 companies, and in September 2023 they announced new mining deals worth more than US$6.5 billion. In May 2024, the Taliban-controlled Ministry of Mines and Petroleum (MoMP) said that the group had secured investments worth more than US$7 billion from China, Qatar, Turkey, Iran and the UK. The details of these contracts remain undisclosed.
The Taliban inherited many of the Republic-era challenges in the country’s extractives sector, particularly the lack of a comprehensive regulatory framework and an effective oversight body. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, these challenges also include the country’s inability to reform mineral policies and regulations, corruption, unregulated artisanal and small-scale mining, and lack of infrastructure and security. The Taliban are navigating through outdated institutional structures, making changes along the way, while working on a complete overhaul of the extractives policy.
Although the MoMP claims to have taken steps to curb illegal mining, these measures lack a formalized structure with independent oversight. Workers can be subjected to exploitation in mining operations, including child labour. In addition, unregulated mining is often carried out in unsafe working conditions and can cause serious environmental damage.
Afghanistan’s suspension from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative in June 2024 points to the problems around transparency and accountability mechanisms in the country’s extractives sector. Failure to follow clearly defined mining regulations prevents the equitable distribution of the country’s mineral wealth. With limited transparency around international mining contracts, the international community should consider the risks these pose for Afghanistan’s mineral sector, ranging from exploitation to monopolization by foreign actors.
Geopolitical relevance
Afghanistan’s reserves of copper and lithium, among other minerals, are crucial to the global shift towards renewable energy and reliance on digital technologies. China has shown a keen interest in securing access to Afghanistan’s resources and has invested heavily in its mining industry, signing multi-billion-dollar contracts for projects such as the Mes Aynak copper mine, one of the largest copper deposits in the world.
The investment is not only driven to secure critical minerals, but also by Chinese strategic considerations linked to its Belt and Road Initiative designed to enhance the country’s global influence and project its power. Taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the collapse of the previous government and the US withdrawal, China is becoming a valuable partner to the Taliban. China’s contracts and investments in Afghanistan’s mining sector are a sign of how it is seeking primacy in the region, which could deter other international actors from entering the sector. Afghanistan’s economic future could become increasingly tied to Chinese interests, reducing the country’s bargaining power and making it more difficult to establish trade relations with other countries.
Although China is leading the race, other countries, including Russia, are jockeying for access to critical minerals. The recent visit to Kabul by Sergei Shoigu, secretary of Russia’s National Security Council and former defence minister, sends a clear signal to the G7+ countries about which bloc has the most influence in the country.
An opportunity not to be missed
For Afghanistan to truly benefit from its resources, there needs to be a multilateral approach to mining, involving different international actors to ensure transparency and fair competition. Investment in Afghanistan’s mining sector could help develop the country’s infrastructure, creating roads, railways and facilities that would benefit the economy and enable resource extraction. This could provide jobs and strengthen capacities of Afghan workers, as well as a more stable revenue stream for the country.
The UN-led engagement with the Taliban in Doha is a potential opportunity to shed light on the sector and strategize on how the extractives sector could improve the economic situation for Afghans. The talks are designed to help Afghanistan integrate into the global community, with a focus on fostering dialogue between the Taliban and international stakeholders. So far, however, the process has yielded little other than a commitment by all countries to continue such discussions and the appearance of the Taliban on the international stage. While discussions have touched on security and political stability, the issue of natural resource management, particularly mineral extraction, has not been addressed. As natural resources play a central role in financing the Taliban, shaping power dynamics and post-conflict rehabilitation, linking resource management to social and economic development seems a potential area of mutual interest.
As the country navigates an uncertain path forward, its mineral resources should be treated as key elements in a broader strategy for stability, ensuring that resource wealth benefits all Afghans. If critical economic assets such as minerals are ignored in ongoing engagement strategies, they can become a force driving conflict or obstructing post-conflict rehabilitation. If left unaddressed, this pattern risks being replicated in Afghanistan. The country’s resources need to be more than just assets buried in the ground – they need to be an active part of the dialogue about Afghanistan’s future.
Why is Afghanistan part of the great extractives race?
Pakistan’s restive western border and Delhi’s outreach invited comment and analysis in the country’s press Aakash Joshi
Afghanistan, once seen by the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment as an instrument of its “strategic depth” against India, has become an albatross around Rawalpindi’s neck. For long, it propped up the Taliban in the hope of a proxy regime in Kabul.
The recent cross-border attacks by Pakistan – ostensibly to target the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP) infrastructure – in which civilians, including women and children, were killed show just how far ties have soured. The Taliban regime in Kabul reportedly responded to the strikes as well.
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In this context, the meeting between Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and Amir Khan Muttaqi, acting foreign minister of the Taliban regime, has invited both comment and concern. Beijing, too, seems to be trying to open avenues with Kabul.
Dawn, in its editorial on January 11, writes, “The Indians have reacted cautiously with the Taliban, but matters are proceeding nonetheless. The Taliban also maintain significant links with China and Russia.”
“These developments,” the editorial argues, “should concern Pakistan, and make its policymakers revisit their Afghan strategy. The stark fact is that while the Afghan Taliban may be difficult customers, Pakistan cannot afford a hostile neighbour to its west.” It suggests a practical engagement with the Taliban, including the leaders in Kandahar, from where the “real power flows.”
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“The Taliban are welcome to keep the TTP, as long as they pose no harm to Pakistan,” Dawn says, and concludes, “As others are making diplomatic inroads with the Afghan Taliban, including unfriendly governments, Pakistan must reassess and readjust its strategy.”
Shazia Anwar Cheema, writing in The Express Tribune on January 10, writes, “We [Pakistan] used to blame (former Afghanistan president) Ashraf Ghani for being a stooge of New Delhi… while the Afghanistan Taliban had been called ‘brothers and friends’.” She argues that the situation seems to have reversed now and that Washington and New Delhi are acting in concert to make their presence felt in Kabul.
If this scenario is indeed coming to pass, argues Dr Cheema, Pakistan must act. “The reports of Pakistan’s first-ever friendly contact with the so-called Northern Alliance, which is made up of non-Pashtun Afghans can be a step towards this. Pakistan has been blamed for the fall of Panjshir Valley and its handover to the Afghan Taliban as well.”
Najm us Saqib, a senior Pakistani diplomat, takes a broader view of his country’s external orientation in an opinion article for The Nation: “The recent wave of terrorism—Afghanistan’s adamant stance on the Khawaraj (TTP) and the like; Washington’s total neglect of its erstwhile ‘strategic’ partner’s economic and security concerns; the region’s volatile predicament, particularly in the face of the ongoing Middle East crisis; and the West’s overall policy of leaving Afghanistan to its own devices—paints a grim picture for Pakistan.”
His argument, in essence, is that Pakistan now seemingly lacks a foreign policy and the country’s economic woes make matters worse. Unfortunately, “The economic crunch and the ongoing political uncertainty do not leave the present government with many options. Crisis management—as opposed to conflict resolution—seems to be the order of the day.”
aakash.joshi@expressindia.com
View from Pakistan: Discomfort over India’s meeting with Afghan Taliban
Dr. Stern is a research professor at Boston University and an author of “ISIS: The State of Terror.”
The New York Times
On New Year’s Day, a confused, disgruntled and indebted veteran drove into a crowd of joyful celebrants in New Orleans, killing 14 and injuring 35 more. The assailant said shortly before the attack that he had joined the Islamic State, the brutal terrorist movement that at one point controlled an area in the Middle East the size of Britain.
In its heyday, ISIS marketed itself as offering what one fighter called a “five-star jihad,” promising recruits a paradoxical mix of religious authenticity and material rewards, from free housing to a glamorous new identity to access to wives. At its height, it was the wealthiest terrorist organization in modern history.
Today, while the ISIS caliphate is gone, the group has cells and affiliates scattered across Africa, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Syria. It maintains an active online presence and is still a threat: With the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, the authorities are concerned about a potential resurgence by ISIS there, while an offshoot in Afghanistan, ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for a significant attack last year in Russia and is believed to be behind another in Iran.
But the twisted heart of the utopia ISIS was trying to build, and all that it claimed to offer, no longer exists. So why would the group’s extreme ideology — rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims — appeal to a down-on-his-luck American veteran five years after the caliphate’s fall?
For 20 years, I’ve been studying Western recruits to domestic and transnational terrorist organizations. I’ve interviewed jihadis, white-nationalist terrorists and eco-terrorists to understand their motivations and to prevent future violence. In my view, the appeal of some of the most crucial elements that ISIS offered to vulnerable or confused Western recruits — doctrinal certainty, identity, redemption and revenge — is as strong as ever and will continue to resonate with people who can find it online.
Most of us, as adults, live in a state of spiritual confusion and uncertainty. We rarely get to choose between good and evil but often face a frustrating choice between actions that lead to marginally better or worse consequences. Rewards for good behavior are often ephemeral, and punishment for bad decisions is mostly of our own making.
To some, ISIS offered a seductive alternative: moral certitude, backed by brutal enforcement. From 2013 to 2019, an estimated 53,000 fighters from 80 countries traveled to ISIS-held territories in Syria and Iraq to be a part of what the group sold as an idealized Islamic state. An estimated 300 individuals from the United States either made their way to ISIS-held territory or tried to. Some foreign fighters became notorious for perpetrating the caliphate’s worst atrocities.
For sympathizers unable to make the journey, the chief spokesman for ISIS,’ Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, called for supporters around the world to attack nonbelievers at home. In a September 2014 speech, Mr. al-Adnani said that if you were unable to bomb or shoot the enemy disbeliever, you should “smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car.” ISIS sympathizers began undertaking such vehicle attacks, including a truck assault in Nice, France, in 2016 that killed 86 people and injured 450. It was followed by many others.
In the last few hours before his suicidal rampage in New Orleans, the attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, posted about his plans on Facebook. Perhaps the most telling recording was his confession that he had considered harming his family. “I don’t want you to think I spared you willingly,” he said. But Mr. Jabbar apparently worried that if he hurt only his family, news headlines might not focus on the “war between the believers and disbelievers” that he thought was taking place.
In my work, I have found that self-recruited, lone-actor terrorists are often motivated at least as much by personal grievance as their claimed ideals. In one recent study, many former violent extremists said that underlying social and emotional distress was as strong a factor in their radicalization as intellectual or religious adherence to extremist ideologies. Most reported having a history of mental health problems, such as depression, and suicidal ideation was common.
Obviously, most people experiencing a mental health crisis do not become lone-actor terrorists. But there is often so much distress in individuals carrying out attacks on their own that it is reasonable, in my view, to think of lone-actor terrorism as a crime of despair.
There is no single pathway into violent extremism, but many of the risk factors I’ve observed in my research seem to apply to Mr. Jabbar. He was a veteran who appeared to be having difficulty adjusting back to civilian life. He had been divorced for the third time. He had run-ins with the law. He may have been deeply distressed over his financial burdens. Revenge against his family — and a world that had disappointed him — appears to have been a significant part of his underlying motivation, with his allegiance to ISIS providing a perverse spiritual gloss.
The persistent appeal of ISIS in America was evident in a disturbing series of alleged plots in the last year alone: the arrest of an Afghan in Oklahoma accused of conspiring to commit an attack on Election Day; the arrest of an Arizona teenager accused of planning an attack on a Pride parade using a remote-controlled drone armed with explosives; the indictment of a Houston man on charges of attempting to provide material support to ISIS; and the arrest of an Idaho teenager accused of plotting to attack churches on behalf of ISIS. In December, the F.B.I., the National Counterterrorism Center and Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement that pro-ISIS messages were calling for attacks at large holiday gatherings, pointing out the previous use of vehicles to ram victims.
Years after its zenith, ISIS has demonstrated remarkable adaptability. As an organization, it may yet grow stronger. After its territorial defeat in 2019, stated U.S. military strategy shifted its focus from counterterrorism in the Middle East toward nation-state adversaries, notably China and Russia. But the underlying conditions that first enabled ISIS’ rise in the region persist: Weak states, unstable governments, large populations of underemployed youth, and religious and ethnic conflicts all continue to create fertile ground for extremism.
No single solution exists for preventing terrorist attacks. But actions can be taken to reduce their impact, as well as their frequency. For cases like New Orleans, prevention is critical.
Perpetrators of targeted violence often “leak” their intentions ahead of time to family, friends, social media and even to the authorities, creating the opportunity for communities to step in to help people who are at risk. One approach to preventing violence like the attack in New Orleans builds on public health models that aim to reduce the rates of suicide, domestic violence and drunken driving. For it to prevent terrorist attacks, the authorities have to educate the public about the importance of bystander reporting and “off ramps” from violent radicalization.
The New Orleans attack serves as a grim reminder that the ISIS digital caliphate is still able to transform personal crises into public tragedy. The alarming reality is that many other people remain vulnerable to similar paths of radicalization.
2024 was another busy year for AAN as we tried to make sense of developments in Afghanistan. Our 51 publications ranged from snapshots of daily life – the Helmand labourer who, with his wife, took in an impoverished widow and her children, or the female student coming home for the holidays for the first time since the fall of the Islamic Republic – to in-depth reports, such as the effect of Pakistan’s fencing of the Durand Line on cross-border communities, or the place of poetry in Islamic Emirate propaganda. We also have exciting plans for 2025. Here, AAN’sKate Clark looks back at 2024 – what we wrote and what you read – and introduces some of our research agenda for the coming year.
What we wrote in 2024
In 2024, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) pushed onwards with consolidating its rule over Afghanistan, with new rules governing the lives of its citizens, women and girls in particular, and efforts to manage the economy and improve relations with the neighbours. We followed all these trends, often taking a sideways look at developments. So, for example, we fleshed out a major report on the macro-economy with interviews with businessmen and women on how they were navigating what the World Bank called a “stagnant economy.” We used the IEA ministries’ own reporting on their work to delve into how the Emirate wants to be perceived. In a report on the hugely consequential subject of remittances, we ended with a look at the social ramifications of younger men from Loya Paktia earning such good wages in the Gulf that it gave them greater power within the family, helping drive progressive change. We looked at the Emirate’s limiting of employment for female teachers through the lens of one district in Badakhshan, poor and isolated Shughnan. Its decades-long export of male and female teachers and literacy to other districts and to provinces is now severely curtailed, with huge consequences for the district’s economy and the well-being of many of its women.
Part of what we hope to bring to any research on Afghanistan is context, including providing a ‘long view’. In 2024, we marked a hundred years since the Khost Rebellion, when Pashtun tribes and mullahs sought to overthrow Amir Amanullah in what became a bloody contest between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernisers’ that continues to this day. Our first publication of 2025 partly followed the same theme with a look at the PDPA, founded 60 years ago, and how that same contest of ideas spawned a decades-long armed conflict, which was internationalised by the Soviet invasion and Western and other support to the mujahedin.
In 2024, we surveyed the various accountability mechanisms which could give some satisfaction to the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity that all governments and armed opposition groups have perpetrated since the PDPA’s 1978 coup d’état. We also looked at the various international legal instruments women’s rights activists hope to deploy against the Emirate (for example, in this report).
Also notable in 2024, was the publication of an updated edition of the Afghanistan Analyst Bibliography, compiled by Christian Bleuer. This is an invaluable resource for those studying and researching contemporary Afghanistan, particularly the post-1979 period. It now covers some 8,000 titles.
What sort of reports were prominent in 2024?
Individual researchers at AAN generally focus on what interests them in the hope that this keeps our publications lively and fresh. At the same time, we try to cover a broad range of topics, aiming to cover eight thematic categories:
Culture and Context
Economy, Development and the Environment
International Engagement
Migration
Political Landscape
Regional Relations
Rights and Freedoms
War and Peace
As can be seen in the table below, which shows how many reports in 2024 fell into each of our eight categories, War and Peace – which topped the list in 2021, when two out of every five reports fell into this category, as did 14 of our 20 most-read reports that year – has quite fallen away as a topic. We published nothing in this category in 2024. Instead, reports about Rights and Freedoms and those tackling the Economy, Development and the Environment were at the fore.
Publications by Thematic Category
Rights and Freedoms
12
Economy, Development, Environment
10
Context and Culture
8
International Engagement
6
Migration
6
Political Landscape
5
Regional Relations
2
War and Peace
0
Resources (a bibliography of Afghanistan)
1
Dossier (of reports on international relations and aid)
1
Total
51
What you were reading in 2024
As to what you, our readers, were interested in, publications on women’s lives and possible international legal actions against the Emirate featured strongly in the list of AAN’s twenty most-read reports (see below). Also in our top-twenty were reports that delved into IEA thinking: ‘New Lives in the City: How Taleban have experienced life in Kabul’, by Sabawoon Samim from 2023, was again among the most-read reports. His interviews with five former fighters now living in the capital were a surprisingly positive read. They liked the modern facilities and cleanliness of the capital, its ethnic diversity and people’s devotion to Islam, but found office life dull. They longed for the freedom of the ‘jihad’.
Scrutiny of the Emirates’ international relations, including the various meetings and summits aimed at, but typically failing, to strengthen engagement, were widely read (for example here and here), as were some important reports on climate change, including a detailed and practical look at how to mitigate the risk of flooding. Publications from previous years have also proven evergreen: two reports on the cultural history of hashish in Afghanistan, on its production and consumption, both published in 2019, were in our top twenty, as were two reports from 2016 – on the origins of ISKP and the Afghan practice of ‘paying’ for wives.
As for readers of our reports in Dari and Pashto, a rare look at the portrayal of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks again topped that most-read list (English version: ‘From ‘Slavers’ to ‘Warlords’: Descriptions of Afghanistan’s Uzbeks in Western writing’), while a scholarly article on Afghanistan’s largest standing Buddhist stupa, at Topdara just north of Kabul, was popular with both Dari and English readers (again, see the list at the end of this report).
The year ahead
Readers wanting to better understand Taleban thinking will (hopefully) be pleased that we will be publishing a full translation of the Emirate’s 45,000-word-long Law to Promulgate Virtue and Prevent Vice (a basic translation was one of the twenty most-read publications in 2024), as well as a commentary by Islamic scholar John Butt. His 2023 report, the IEA’s Chief Justice’s theory of jurisprudence, about the key Emirate text (written in Arabic), Al-Emarat al-Islamiya wa Nidhamuha (The Islamic Emirate and its System of Governance), was our seventh most-read publication last year. We also hope to publish a review of Taleban narratives about themselves, writings in Pashto about their fight with the foreign forces and Afghan army, their time in prisons and the impact of the insurgency on fighters’ families.
We will continue to carry out research on the lives of women and girls, including publishing a major report about what Afghan men think of IEA restrictions on women and a new dossier bringing together all our reports on women since July 2021. That 2021 dossier, published three weeks before the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate, topped our 2024 list of most-read publications – interest in Afghan women is undoubtedly still strong, and we hope to keep exploring new developments. One current piece of research, for example, is on women’s inheritance rights, which are explicitly laid out in the Quran and promoted by the Emirate, but blocked by cultural norms which consider it shameful for a woman to ask for her rightful inheritance.
In 2025, as in 2024, it seems inevitable that reports falling into the categories of Economy, Development and the Environment, and International Engagement (or non-engagement) will feature in our attempt to make sense of Afghanistan. Global warming is increasingly endangering Afghan lives and livelihoods, while Afghanistan is shut out of much of the help available to mitigate the climate crisis for the poorest countries. At the same time, the level of international aid – so crucial to many families, as well as the macro-economy – is only likely to diminish further and to remain focussed on humanitarian needs. A new American president comes into office this month. Whether Donald Trump turns out to be active or indifferent to Afghanistan, there will be consequences – for good or ill. Analysis of internal dynamics, such as how the Emirate raises and spends revenue, will also remain crucial to understanding the impact of the Afghan government on its citizens’ lives.
However complex the subject, we will continue to try to present topics, at least partially, through the experiences of individuals, whether via the first-person accounts of The Daily Hustle series, or as integral elements of our longer, in-depth research. Watch out for forthcoming reports on blood feuds, mining, the Emirate’s ban on begging and how the lives of village mullahs have changed over recent decades.
Finally, at the start of January, we wish all our readers – and Afghanistan – a very happy 2025.
The Taliban uses the success of its men’s team as propaganda – cricket’s powerbrokers should pursue a collective boycott
“There’s all types of lines you can draw. We’ve drawn a line.” So explained Mike Baird, the chair of Cricket Australia, last month in explaining the governing body’s stance on playing against Afghanistan, the country that has just banned women from looking out of windows.
According to a new decree from the Taliban government, new buildings must not be constructed with windows through which women can be seen. Existing buildings with windows must be walled up or covered. “Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesperson for the government.
ECB urged to boycott Afghanistan game in Champions Trophy by UK politicians
At present Cricket Australia – in common with the England and Wales Cricket Board – are refusing to schedule bilateral series against Afghanistan out of concern for “the deterioration of basic human rights for women in Afghanistan”. But, confusingly, both countries are perfectly happy to play them in global competitions – Australia at last year’s Twenty20 World Cup, England at next month’s Champions Trophy.
Which, however you square it, is a weirdly precise place to draw your moral line. Our concern for the women and girls of Afghanistan apparently kicks in at 1.5 cricket matches. Two or more games in a single sitting: an unconscionable act of collusion in a murderous, misogynist, medieval death cult. Fewer than two: all right lads, crack on.
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At which point, we run into the equivocation and realpolitik of the cricketing establishment, arguing against a sporting boycott of Afghanistan on the grounds that it would extinguish the hope and joy generated by the men’s team over the past two decades, while achieving little tangible benefit.
“I don’t think it would make a jot of difference to the ruling party there to kick them out,” the outgoing International Cricket Council chair Greg Barclay said last month. Which, you have to say, is a pretty high bar to set for sporting activism. Fair enough, wave your banners. But until you’re actually capable of literally overthrowing the Taliban, then stop wasting our time.
We are warned not to punish the richly gifted men’s team for the sins of their government, as if the dignity and humanity of 20 million Afghan women were simply acceptable collateral damage against the wider backdrop of Rashid Khan’s availability for the next T20 World Cup. We are reminded that Afghanistan had little culture of women’s cricket before 2021 in any case, with the implication that – basically – the erasure of an entire international team is no great loss in the grander scheme of things.
To be blessed with this kind of benign adult wisdom! And yet, even to address this argument on its own terms is to subject it to greater strain than it can remotely handle. The very existence of the men’s team – pretty much the only representative side given official blessing – is evidence enough of its propaganda value.
High-ranking Taliban officials have posted photos with the team at official functions, called senior players to congratulate them after wins, allowed games to be shown on big screens in public parks to a grateful male-only audience. This is politics: how could it not be? Cricket is uniquely popular among the young Pashtun men who form the backbone of the Taliban’s appeal. This is the only reason the fun police have allowed it to continue: this team is now essentially a client outfit, a PR offensive, a form of cricketing diplomacy.
And of course the easy targets here are the empty shirts at the ECB, Cricket Australia and the ICC, trapped between two forms of countervailing cowardice. Cancelling a loss-making bilateral tour costs nothing. Boycotting a big tournament game has significant implications for broadcasters, sponsors and future commercial value.
But of course the ICC is basically an events management company now, a governing body that has largely given up on governance. The ECB and Cricket Australia are peripheral figures here, merely underlined by the response from the former’s chief executive, Richard Gould to calls for a full boycott. The centre of gravity in this issue, as with pretty much everything in cricket these days, is India. And so the relevant question here is less what “should” happen than: what is the realistic range of possibilities that Jay Shah, the new ICC chair and acolyte of Narendra Modi, will allow to happen?
Officially, the Modi government does not recognise the new Afghan regime. In reality, the past couple of years have seen a pragmatic rapprochement, in defiance of the cultural and religious divides between the two countries. Diplomatic ties were restored in June 2022. Meanwhile, the Afghan embassy in Delhi and its two consulates in Mumbai and Hyderabad are said to have passed quietly into the control of pro-Taliban officials.
Driven by an ever-present fear of Chinese influence, and encouraged by a slight frosting of relations with Pakistan, the Modi government has spotted an opportunity to build bridges. Naturally, cricket has played a prominent role in diplomatic ties: Afghanistan play their home matches in Greater Noida just outside Delhi, India invited them to play a white-ball series in January, and when Afghanistan reached the T20 World Cup semi-finals last summer they issued a statement thanking India for their “continuous help in capacity-building of the Afghan cricket team”.
And so, if India are overly perturbed by the disappearance of women’s rights under the Taliban, let’s just say it’s not immediately apparent. Afghan players continue to staff the Indian Premier League. Afghan men’s teams continue to be welcome to tour India, to use Indian facilities and draw on Indian expertise. The Afghan economy has collapsed since 2021 and is in desperate need of new trade partnerships. Anyone want to connect the dots here?
None of which is to argue against the power of the sporting boycott. But to focus on unilateral gesture at the expense of collective action is essentially to acquiesce to the status quo. To oppose the iron age misogyny of the Taliban must also be to oppose the structures of capitalist power that keep it in place, from the commercial cowardice of sporting administrators to the cynical collaboration of the Modi government. Too much? Too hard? Too radical? Then, like the factotums who run the game, you’ve also chosen to draw your line in an entirely pragmatic place.
Dignity and humanity of Afghan women must be worth more than game of cricket
Shabana Basij-Rasikh is co-founder and president of School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA).
The Washington Post
January 6, 2025
Especially for girls, hope is difficult to come by. But it has not been extinguished.
This past December marked two years since women could attend college in Afghanistan. March will mark three years since girls could go to school past sixth grade. And only a few weeks ago, the Taliban barred women from studying to become midwives or nurses.
For a long time, Afghanistan was the country with the highest rate of maternal mortality. That’s no longer the case — that awful distinction is now held by South Sudan. But Afghanistan’s rate remains the highest of any nation outside Africa. And that’s only on the national level. Certain remote regions of Afghanistan see a maternal mortality rate that’s much higher than the national one, particularly regions such as Badakhshan in the northeast.
A few weeks ago, I talked to a 13-year-old girl in Badakhshan over Zoom.
She was telling me about her parents. Both are nurses. Her mother was no longer permitted to work in a clinic, but she could see patients at their home, and she saw many of them. These home visits inspired the girl.
“I want to be an OB/GYN,” she told me. “Women die here when they give birth. So many women die here. If I become a doctor, I can serve my people and I can change that.”
“If I don’t find a way to study, I’ll have a dark future here,” she said. “I’ll keep trying. Failure is a part of life. I have lots of plans. I will make them happen. I’m going to build a clinic in this village someday.”
“I want to study. I want to go to school. I’m living in a place that is two seasons under the snow,” she said. She’s right. Winters last a long time in Badakhshan.
Two days after the girl and I spoke, the Taliban issued their decree forbidding women to become nurses like the girl’s mother.
A different 13-year-old girl told me that she dreams of leaving Afghanistan to study. She said she sees many girls her age hoping to find some way out of their homeland, too, though via a different path. They are looking to find Afghan men living overseas to whom they can offer themselves as wives. Thirteen-year-old girls.
Some girls reach for the humor in anger. They bitterly mock the Taliban in private. One girl told me how proud she was to already be a graduate, which means she made it through sixth grade. What an accomplishment. And now a whole world of opportunity awaits.
Others keep working to get out despite the obstacles. One girl told me she was taking online classes to learn to code when she realized they wouldn’t help her get into any international university, as she still lacked some sort of widely accepted credential. Which is why she and a small group of her friends are working with a teacher online to get their GEDs, the U.S.-based high school certification.
I’ve spoken to girls who climb up on the roofs of their homes every day to get a usable cellular signal. One girl from the provinces would even climb into the hills so that she could be alone and speak freely.
As parents of older teens in the United States will know, it’s early decision and early action season for college acceptances. Recently, an Afghan high school student I had come to know, a girl enrolled outside of Afghanistan, invited me to virtually join her and her family on the morning she would learn whether she had been accepted to the college of her choice. There was a lot of excitement and plenty of nerves. The morning came and there I was online with this girl and her family who were dialing in from Badakhshan.
I saw her father, mother and siblings by the illumination of a solar-powered light. They were gathered near a sawdust-burning stove. There was a little girl there who looked quite young. I learned later that she’s 4, and she’s the student’s little sister. The sisters have seen each other in person only once ever.
We all watched as the student — their sister, their daughter — opened the message she’d received from the school she wanted so badly to attend.
Silence for a moment and then jubilation. She was laughing. We all were. I saw her father’s and her mother’s faces so clearly: They were crying. Happiness. Pride. She’d gotten in. She’d done it.
It’s easy to say there’s not much hope to be found in Afghanistan today. And there’s not. But hope is not extinct. It exists only in small bursts, in hidden places, under the snow. It exists in the relentless spirit of girls on winter rooftops. It exists in the faces of a father and mother in the Badakhshan cold, sitting by a sawdust stove, warmed and illuminated by a girl and a dream that she made real.
It’s rare and precious. But it exists.
A long time under the snow for the women of Afghanistan
For two decades, they were close allies. Why are relations between Pakistan and the Taliban so tense now?
When the Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed delivered a triumphant news conference at the Torkham crossing with Afghanistan.
He claimed that the Taliban’s swift ascendance to power would create “a new bloc” and the region would reach great global importance. Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister at the time, equated the Taliban’s return to power with Afghans having “broken the shackles of slavery”.
For nearly 20 years, the Afghan Taliban fought a sophisticated and sustained revolt, confronted – at one point – by a United States-led coalition of more than 40 countries in Afghanistan. In that period, Taliban leaders and fighters found sanctuary inside Pakistan across the regions bordering Afghanistan. Taliban leaders also formed a presence in, and links with, major cities in Pakistan such as Quetta, Peshawar and later, Karachi.
Many Taliban leaders and many fighters are graduates of Pakistani Islamic religious schools, including the Darul Uloom Haqqania, where Mullah Muhammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement, reportedly studied. In Pakistan, the Taliban found an ecosystem fostering organic relationships across the spectrum of Pakistani society, enabling the group to reorganise and initiate a lethal uprising that began around 2003. Without Pakistan’s support and sanctuary, the successful uprising by the Taliban would have been highly unlikely.
Given this background, what explains the recent deterioration of bilateral relations, with the Pakistani military conducting air strikes inside Afghanistan this week – only the latest evidence of the tensions between Islamabad and the Afghan Taliban?
Historical and current factors
Afghanistan has a complicated history with Pakistan. While Pakistan welcomed the Taliban in Kabul as a natural ally, the Taliban government is proving to be less cooperative than Pakistan had hoped, aligning itself with nationalist rhetoric to galvanise support from the wider Afghan society. Taliban leaders are also eager to transform from a fighter group to a government, ostensibly an ongoing endeavour, and forging relations beyond heavy reliance on Pakistan.
The Durand Line, a colonial-era boundary dividing the regions and communities between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan, has never been formally recognised by any Afghan state after Pakistan’s establishment in 1947. The Durand Line is internationally recognised as a border between the two countries, and Pakistan has fenced it almost entirely. Yet, in Afghanistan, the Durand Line has become an emotive issue because it divides Pashtuns on the two sides of the border.
The Taliban government in the 1990s did not endorse the Durand Line, and the current Taliban regime is following its predecessors. In Pakistan, this is seen as a nuisance and a challenge to the doctrine of Pakistan’s ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan.
With the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan, the armed rebellion arena has seemingly shifted to Pakistan. There has been a significant spike in militant attacks on Pakistani security and police forces since 2022 – particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces.
Most of the attacks are claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the so-called Pakistan Taliban. TTP and Afghan Taliban carved symbiotic relations for years, sharing sanctuary, tactics and resources, often in Waziristan and other Pakistani regions bordering Afghanistan.
Pakistan treated the Afghan Taliban as ‘friends’ after 2001, partly to weaken any sense of cross-border Pashtun nationalism and hoping to leverage its influence on the Taliban in developments within Afghanistan and in relations with the US. In 2011, Michael Mullen, the US military chief at the time, stated that the Haqqani Network – a key component of the Afghan Taliban – was a “veritable arm” of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency. Analysts predicted, as it was feared, that Pakistan’s support for the Taliban to seize power in Afghanistan would lead to a ‘Pyrrhic victory’ with Pakistani fighter groups and other violent nonstate actors feeling emboldened, not weakened, as a result.
The significance and implications of tensions
It is unlikely that the Taliban would accept any Pakistani demands for action against TTP leaders in Afghanistan’s border areas with Pakistan. Crucially, such action would disrupt the Taliban’s equilibrium with TTP and open space for other more extreme groups such as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). The Taliban leaders are deploying the same logic that Pakistan used for nearly two decades, dismissing demands by the former Afghan government and the US to curb Taliban activities inside its territories. Like Pakistan then, the Taliban now argue that the TTP is an internal Pakistani issue and that Islamabad must resolve its problems domestically.
The Pakistani army will most likely continue bombing the Afghan territory with impunity, faced only with minor international condemnation. There is a growing international precedence, unfortunately. Countries such as Israel conduct cross-border air strikes, claiming security threats. In addition, the Pakistani army, as the long-term guardian of security in the country, is under tremendous pressure to demonstrate tangible action in countering militancy and protecting the country’s infrastructure, including Chinese-invested economic projects in Balochistan. Attacking Afghan territory allows for political messaging to the Pakistani population to centre on an externally enabled ‘enemy’. It also insulates the state from engaging with the growing domestic demands for political and socioeconomic empowerment, especially by Pakistani Pashtuns.
Meanwhile, the Taliban government in Afghanistan lacks resources, an organised army and any meaningful international partnerships to push back against Pakistan’s assertiveness. In March 2024, a senior Taliban military leader stated that the US maintained control over Afghan airspace, explaining the occasional appearance of US drones in Afghan skies.
While the Taliban leaders have promised ‘retaliation’, it is unclear how they can do that against a militarily powerful neighbour that also happens to be their long-term strategic supporter. Pakistan also maintains other levers of influence against the Taliban: Most trade into landlocked Afghanistan flows through Pakistan, and Pakistan has hosted millions of Afghan refugees for decades.
However, Pakistan’s military action inside Afghanistan will fuel anti-Pakistani sentiments among the Afghan population and further alienate Pakistani Pashtuns. As the Afghan case demonstrates, insurgencies feed on societal resentment, deprivation and youth disillusionment.
Solutions require leaders to illustrate boldness to address long-term grievances. A reactionary show of force might make newsworthy momentary gestures, but achieving peace is usually an art of wisdom and patience. Ironically, Pakistan and Afghanistan offer workable pathways for regional economic integration, connecting Central Asia and South Asia regions. Sadly, the lack of political will and vision among leaders for a generation and the securitisation of bilateral relations have hindered prosperity for more than 300 million people in both countries.
Source: Al Jazeera
Analysis: Why have Pakistan’s ties with the Afghan Taliban turned frigid?
Mr. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012.
The New York Times
January 2, 2025
The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.
As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.
In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks.
As our own agency winds down and we prepare to release our final report this year, we raise a fundamental and too rarely asked question: Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise? For two decades, officials publicly asserted that continuing the mission in Afghanistan was essential to national interests, until, eventually, two presidents — Donald Trump and Joe Biden — concluded it was not.
The incoming Trump administration, Congress and the long-suffering American taxpayer must ask how this happened so that the United States can avoid similar results in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and other war zones.
We should start with what “success” in Afghanistan was ever supposed to mean. I believe many Americans who worked there over the years wanted to not only achieve important U.S. strategic interests — such as eliminating a haven for terrorists — but also secure a better future for the Afghan people.
But a perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.
They also aren’t good business for the contractors on which the U.S. mission relied to manage and support programs and projects. For contractors, claiming success, whether real or imaginary, was vital to obtaining future business. So spending became the measure of success. (The same, of course, is true in Washington, where unspent allocations are tantamount to failure, leading to budget cuts.) Accountability for how money was spent was poor. One general told us that he faced a challenge: How to spend the remaining $1 billion from his annual budget in just over a month? Returning the money was not an option. Another official we spoke to said he refused to cancel a multimillion-dollar building project that field commanders did not want, because the funding had to be spent. The building was never used.
As one former U.S. military adviser told my office, the entire system became a self-licking ice cream cone: More money was always being spent to justify previous spending. Old staff departed, new staff arrived with “better” ideas, and new iterations of the same old solutions were repeated, for years. At the same time, many of the problems the U.S. programs faced were simply beyond our control. The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban showed that the United States could not buy favorable Afghan perceptions of the country’s corrupt leaders and government, or of America’s intentions.
Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility.
Our final report will detail what many experts and senior government officials now say to us, with hindsight: that these entrenched, fundamental challenges doomed any real possibility of long-term success. Some argued that decisions made as early as 2002 — such as partnering with warlords and refusing to include the Taliban in discussions about Afghanistan’s future — set a course for inevitable failure. Others blamed poor interagency coordination, rampant Afghan corruption, ignorance of local culture and the distance between U.S. goals and Afghanistan’s realities.
There were key moments when American officials could have come clean. Before the United States began, in 2014, to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghans, a succession of U.S. generals and officials made optimistic claims that Afghan forces would be effective in fighting the Taliban, that corruption and human rights abuses were contained and that Afghan elections were democratic and fair — assessments that did not align with my agency’s reporting to Congress or basic reality. In 2013, one senior official even suggested that Afghanistan might prove to be the most successful reconstruction effort over the last quarter-century.
The fall of Kunduz in 2015 — which represented the first time since 2001 that the Taliban regained control of a major city — should have punctured the delusion that Afghan forces could hold their own. But building those forces had been the cornerstone of the U.S. reconstruction effort, whose success would pave the way for eventual U.S. withdrawal. The rosy narrative had to be maintained.
The reality was that Taliban fighters with Cold War-era rifles and dirt bikes often outperformed Afghan government forces with state-of-the-art equipment and backing from U.S. air power. The Taliban were religiously motivated to rid the country of foreign invaders and what they perceived as a puppet government installed by Washington. The members of the Afghan military — beset by low morale, chronic logistical problems and pervasive corruption — were often motivated solely by their salaries, though they, of course, also suffered hugely in the fight.
Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue. Just six days before the Afghan government collapsed, the Pentagon press secretary declared that Afghanistan had more than 300,000 soldiers and police officers, even though the special inspector general’s office had been warning for years that no one really knew how many soldiers and policemen were available, nor what their operational capabilities were. As early as 2015, I informed Congress that corrupt Afghan officials were listing “ghost” soldiers and police officers on rosters and pocketing the salaries.
Important information for measuring the success of initiatives was — at times deliberately — hidden from Congress and the American public, including USAID-funded assessments that concluded Afghan ministries were incapable of managing direct U.S. financial assistance. Despite vigorous efforts by the U.S. bureaucracy to stop us, my office made such material public.
Special interests are a big part of the problem. President Dwight Eisenhower once warned of the growing influence of a “military-industrial complex.” Today, there are multiple complexes: development and humanitarian assistance, anti-corruption and transparency, protection for women and marginalized people, and many others. These are all good and noble causes, to be sure. But when it came to Afghanistan, organizations under these umbrellas, whether because of altruism or more selfish motivations, contributed to the overly optimistic assessments of the situation to keep the funds flowing. Self-serving delusion was America’s most formidable foe.
That delusion continues today. According to data provided to my office by the Treasury Department, since 2021 the United States has funneled $3.3 billion to Afghanistan through public international organizations, mainly United Nations offices, for humanitarian purposes. Some of this money helps the Afghan people, and some goes to the Taliban. In response to a congressional request, my office reported this year that between the American withdrawal in August 2021 and this past May, U.S.-funded partners paid at least $10.9 million in taxes and fees to Taliban authorities. In July, we reported that two out of five State Department bureaus were unable to show that their contractors working in Afghanistan in 2022 had been vetted sufficiently to ensure their work was not benefiting terrorist organizations.
Today, most aid to Afghanistan and other war-torn countries flows through United Nations offices that my agency has identified as having weak oversight. If we are to continue providing taxpayer dollars to these organizations, it must be made conditional on U.S. oversight agencies having full access to their projects and records to make sure funding reaches the people it is intended to help.
In Afghanistan, the office of the special inspector general was often the only government agency reliably reporting on the situation on the ground, and we faced stiff opposition from officials in the Departments of Defense and State, USAID and the organizations that supported their programs. We were able to do our work only because Congress granted us the freedom to operate independently. Inspectors general for the military, State Department and USAID, however, do not enjoy such autonomy. If we are going to fix a broken system that puts bureaucrats and special interests ahead of taxpayers, the first step is to make all federal inspectors general as fully independent as my office has been.
Ultimately, however, if we do not address the incentives in our government that impede truth-telling, we will keep pursuing projects both at home and overseas that do not work, rewarding those who rationalize failure while reporting success, and burning untold billions of dollars. American taxpayers deserve better.
John F. Sopko has served as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012; he was appointed by President Barack Obama and served under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. He has been a prosecutor, congressional counsel, law partner and senior federal government adviser.
America, Afghanistan and the Price of Self-Delusion
The leftist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) irrevocably altered the country’s trajectory with its coup d’état in 1978, setting off a chain of events that would have lasting repercussions. The debate surrounding the extent of the Soviet Union’s influence on the party prior to this, as well as Moscow’s desire to see its rise to power, continues to this day. What is clear, however, is that the PDPA’s takeover of power and the subsequent Soviet military intervention in December 1979 touched off a shift of seismic proportions not only in Afghanistan’s political landscape but also in the lives of ordinary Afghans. Along with Western support for the mujahedin who opposed the party, the PDPA internationalised Afghanistan’s internal conflicts over modernisation and governance that would last four decades, marking it as the last ‘hot war’ in the context of the Cold War. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig looks at the party’s history, drawing from earlier AAN reports, as well as adding details from lesser known sources.
On 1 January 1965, 27 men[1] (apparently there were no women present) established the Hezb-e Demokratik-e Khalq-e Afghanistan as it was called in Dari, or De Afghanistan de Khalqo Dimukratik Gund in Pashto (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in English) during a meeting in a modest house in Sher Shah Mena, in the Karte-e Chahar neighbourhood, just south of Kabul University’s sprawling campus.[2]
The PDPA was one of the groups that took advantage of the political opening that followed the adoption of a new constitution in 1963. This constitution had transformed Afghanistan from a semi-absolute into a more constitutional monarchy that included elements of parliamentarianism – although not for the first time.[3] In principle, the new constitution allowed the formation of political parties for the first time in Afghanistan’s history. However, the law on political parties, which was passed by parliament, was never ratified by King Muhammad Zaher Shah. This left the emerging parties, including the PDPA, in legal limbo – and led some of them – not only those on the left but also Islamists – to contemplate violent means of taking power.
When parliamentary elections were held in 1965, none of these parties could field candidates under their own names, although their political affiliations were widely recognised due to their increased public activism.
Most, if not all, of PDPA’s 27 founding members belonged to clandestine leftist study circles, or the so-called mahfels, most of which had sprung up in the early 1960s, with at least one mahfel dating back to 1956. There were 10 to 12 such circles in Kabul, with less than 70 members collectively, according to Tajik author Qozemsha Iskandarov.[4] Some of them counted military officers in their ranks, a fact that would prove to be significant in later coups.
Several of these circles aligned themselves with Marxism-Leninism, choosing the Soviet Union as their ideological guide. Some had more social democratic, non-revolutionary outlooks. There were also Maoist groups inspired by the People’s Republic of China, which were known locally as Sholayi, a nod to their publication Sho’la-ye Jawed (Eternal Flame), but they generally maintained their distance from the other groups.[5]
Among the reported PDPA founding members, only two came from the working class, as noted by Iskandarov – Muhammad Alam Kargar and Mulla [sic] Muhammad Isa Kargar – neither was elected to the party’s Central Committee, which was comprised of seven full and four alternate members – mainly of intellectuals, often school or university teachers. There were also several students present at the PDPA founding congress, according to one of the author’s sources, but the source could not remember whether they were ‘guests’ or party members.[6]
The host of the party’s founding congress, Nur Muhammad Tarakay,[7] was elected as the party’s leader. Born into a poor Pashtun family in 1917 in the Muqur district of Ghazni province, Tarakay was a schoolteacher with a background in social activism, mainly in rural Afghanistan. Babrak Karmal, a former student protest leader and son of a lieutenant general in the Afghan Army with ties to a branch of the monarchy and who was 12 years younger than Tarakay, was seated as his deputy. Both men would later become head of state, the latter directly instated by Soviet troops (more on this later).
From the outset, the party had ambitious goals. It published its first party programme in its short-lived newspaper, Khalq(The People), in 1966. The programme defined its primary political aim as the “establishment of a national democratic government” composed of “the national progressive democratic and patriotic forces, ie the working class, peasants and the national bourgeoisie.”[8] It clearly saw itself as part of, if not leading, this government. In Marxist-Leninist theory, a ’national democratic’ revolution constituted the first ‘stage theory’ of revolutionary change toward socialism. This was underscored by Tarakay when he described the PDPA as “the Party of workers and peasants,” representing “95 per cent” of the Afghan population, in his inaugural speech at the Party’s founding congress.[9]
While the PDPA avoided using Marxist-Leninist terminology in public and did not call itself Marxist or communist, there was little doubt about the party’s driving ideology internally. As Tarakay, in his 1965 speech at the congress, alluded: “Our party is the party of the working class … [it] struggles in conformance with the epoch-making ideology of the workers.” Furthermore, the PDPA defined itself in its 1966 programme as being part of the “struggle between world socialism and world imperialism, which was started by the [1917] Great Socialist October Revolution” in Russia.
At the time, none of the founders could have imagined that, 13 years later, the PDPA would be in power, shaking Afghanistan’s political and social foundations. While the 1978 coup d’état that brought the PDPA to power was not the first successful coup in Afghanistan’s history, it is the one that plunged the country into turmoil, setting into motion a series of events that reshaped Afghanistan’s future and fashioned its relations with the rest of the world for decades to come.
The PDPA’s early years – two factions and two coups
The PDPA did not arrive out of the blue on Afghanistan’s political landscape. The 1963 constitution opened the way for various political groups across the spectrum to engage in public activities, ranging from pro-royalist to leftist movements and from Islamists to ethno-nationalists. The rapid growth of the educated class resulted in profound changes in Afghanistan’s social fabric, which in turn resulted from Amanullah’s reforms in the 1920s. These reforms, which were not adequately embedded due to the stagnating, corrupt state bureaucracy that dominated until 1964 by the extended royal clan, led to the country’s educated youth turning into a fertile recruitment ground for political activism.
Some of these groups, particularly those on the left, saw themselves in the tradition of earlier modernists and reformists. The PDPA later referred to Afghanistan reclaiming its full independence under Amanullah in 1919 as the beginning of the struggle for the country’s “dispossessed and downtrodden” against “despotism and reactionary forces.” The elder statesman among those activists was historian Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghobar, a former official in Amir Amanullah’s government. Tarakay and Karmal were activists in the Wesh Zalmian/Jawanan-e Bedar (Awakened Youth) movement, which was active during a brief period of guarded political liberalisation during the premiership of Shah Mahmud Khanbetween 1947 and 1952.
The Wesh Zalmian movement had been motivated by the country’s “poverty and backwardness.” These two terms came up again in the 1966 PDPA party programme, where they were attributed to the “feudal system” the party vowed to abolish.[10] Poverty and backwardness were the two major domestic factors underpinning the mobilisation of reformist political groups (see also AAN’s report How It All Began: A short look at the pre-1979 origins of Afghanistan’s conflict).
A few years after the Wesh Zalmiyan movement was suppressed, the reformists who had not been incarcerated began to cautiously regroup. An “initial nucleus” emerged in 1963 from the mahfels, which soughtto set up a broad-based United National Front of Afghanistan, Lyakhovsky noted. In addition, Iskandarov writes of a meeting that took place on 17 Sunbula 1342 (8 September 1963) in the house of writer R.M. Herawi,[11] with the participation of Tarakay, Karmal, Mir Akbar Khaibar, Taher Badakhshi, Karim Misaq, Muhammad Seddiq Ruhi, Ali Muhammad Zahma and Ghobar. This meeting, he writes, resulted in the establishment of a provisional committee (komita-ye sarparast) for the Front. At this time, there was also contact with the social democrats led by historian Mir Muhammad Seddiq Farhang and Hadi Mahmudi’s Maoist group, he notes.[12]
Ultimately, the Front fell victim to “the differences between Karmal and Ghubar about political and organisational matters,” according to Iskandarov. Ghobar wanted to continue to act within the framework of the new constitution and the constitutional monarchy, and feared a party that would base itself on openly “communist ideology” (as Karmal seemed to prefer) would soon face “terror” from the government’s side, he wrote. This position seemed to have been shared by the social democrats, who dropped out of discussions, while the Maoists remained.[13]
When the Front failed, a narrower, more revolutionary-minded group, including Tarakay, Karmal, Khaibar, Badakhshi and the Maoists, came together to establish the PDPA, but the latter two soon dropped out – the Maoists left the group during the congress and Badakhshi, who prioritised the ‘national [ethnic] question’, above the PDPA’s class question, as being the main fault line in Afghanistan also left and went on to establish his own organisation, Settam-e Melli ([Against]National Oppression), in 1968.[14]
The PDPA’s unity proved to be fragile, and in 1967, only two years after it came into existence, the party split into two main factions – Khalq (The People) and Parcham (The Banner) – named after the party’s short-lived newspapers.[15] Analysts attribute the split to either ethnic factors, suggesting that Khalq was dominated by Pashtuns, while the Parchamis were mainly Tajiks or Farsi/Dari speakers; or to tactical or personal differences between the leaders of both factions. In reality, it was a combination of all three, with the ‘ethnic’ factor being more of a social one. Notably, many Parcham leaders (such as Karmal and later Najibullah) were Pashtuns, too.[16] But they belonged to a more urban milieu, some even with links to the regime, both the monarchy and later to Daud’s republic (1973-78). The teacher-dominated Khalq, in contrast, was based in a more rural milieu.[17]
PDPA members, including Babrak Karmal, Mir Akbar Khaibar and Suleiman Layeq, stood before a banner bearing the names of both PDPA factions, Parcham and Khaq. Source: Afghanwrites via Wikimedia Commons
Both Parcham and Khalq separately infiltrated the military and built clandestine networks. Initially, Parcham proved to be more successful, with officers linked to it playing key roles in Afghanistan’s first military coup, led by Sardar (Prince) Muhammad Daud, who belonged to the monarchy and served as prime minister from 1953 to 1963. During his decade-long premiership, Daud initiated vast modernisation programmes, but his political ambitions were disrupted by the 1963 constitution, which excluded members of the royal family from holding political positions. By 1973, the monarchy had manoeuvred itself into a legitimacy crisis because of its inadequate response to the drought of 1969–72, the country’s first large-scale environmental crisis. The Daud-led coup succeeded without much resistance from the armed forces or the public.
Daud, however, sidelined his erstwhile Parchami allies in 1975 and 1976,[18] and the PDPA set out to remove him from power through their surviving networks in the military. In 1977, prompted by the Soviet Union and with mediation by the Iraqi and Indian communist parties and leaders of the leftist, mainly Pashtun, National Awami Party (NAP) in Pakistan,[19] Parcham and Khalq formally reunited (although their military networks remained separate).
These military networks played a decisive role when, on 17 April 1978, Mir Akbar Khaibar, Parcham’s main ideologue and a military officer himself, was assassinated.[20] The question of who Khaibar’s assassins were is hotly debated to this day. Some claim it was Daud’s intelligence services, while others point to Amin himself, who, they argue, hit two birds with one stone: getting rid of an influential, popular rival and taking over both factions’ PDPA military apparatus.[21]
The party was able to mobilise large crowds for his funeral procession, which turned into powerful protests. Daud’s regime cracked down, arresting almost the entire PDPA leadership. Only one leader, the leader of Khalq’s military wing, Hafizullah Amin, would initially escape. This gave Amin time, according to the Party’s account, to trigger the 7 Saur 1357 (27 April 1978) coup d’état, with support from a group of young PDPA-aligned military officers, some of them trained in the Soviet Union, who had also been involved in Daud’s 1973 coup.[22]
Frontpage of Kabul Now newspaper after the 1978 Saur Revolution. Source: Thomas Ruttig’s archive
Although the 1978 military coup was not triggered, or accompanied, by a popular uprising, the PDPA dubbed it the ‘Saur Revolution’, so named after the month in the Persian solar calendar in which it occurred. On 27 April, troops based at Kabul International Airport started an assault on the city, including an air raid on the Presidential palace (Arg), seizing control of state institutions and communication infrastructure. Daoud was executed the next day along with most of his family. Two days after the coup, the ruling Revolutionary Military Council handed power over to Tarakay and the PDPA, who established a civilian government. Tarakay called the coup a shortcut to “the people of Afghanistan’s destiny,” circumventing the ‘national-democratic’ stage and going directly to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ under the leadership of its party to which the PDPA claimed to be.
This was echoed in the lyrics of the national anthem written by Suleiman Layeq, who had himself had several tenures in the PDPA leadership, even though he had been repeatedly sidelined. Verse 2 of the anthem, which was in use in use from 1978 to 1992, reads:
The military takeover initially succeeded without much resistance from the armed forces and with little bloodshed. In fact, there had been some public outpouring of support, at least in Kabul. (The PDPA, on occasion, had proven capable of mobilising public rallies, for example, at the annual 1 May Labour Day.)
Encouraged by this, the PDPA established a one-party state, imitating the countries of the Soviet bloc, dropping its rhetorical commitment to a ‘broad front of all progressive forces.’ It embarked on a radical reforms programme to abolish feudalism, including land reform, the cancellation of debt, equal rights for women and coeducation. It began to use Marxist terminology more openly and replaced the country’s tricolour flag with the red flag of its party. At Kabul International Airport, a signboard greeted visitors with the slogan: “Welcome to the country of the second model revolution” (only preceded by Lenin’s 1917 October Revolution in Russia), proclaiming the PDPA government nothing less than the model for revolutionary change in the Third World.
All this was deemed as ‘anti-Islamic’ in parts of the still overly religiously conservative population, leading to – apparently – at first spontaneous local uprisings, when revolutionary cadres suppressed resistance against the practical implementation of reform measures with violent means. Cadres, often teachers, were killed by rebels, and schools burned down. It is difficult to gauge who started the violence, but it quickly escalated and the regime carried out mass repressions.
A new outbreak of factionalism fuelled the PDPA leadership’s paranoia. The Khalqis accused the Parchamis of plotting against them in the summer of 1978. By November that year, their most important leaders had either been imprisoned or sent abroad as ambassadors (most of whom quickly abandoned their positions to go into exile). Some were arrested and put in Kabul’s Pul-e Charkhi prison, and some were sentenced to death. The PDPA officially declared five political groups as enemies: Parchamis, the Islamists, the Maoists and Settamis, the Pashtun ethno-nationalists of the Afghan Mellat party and independent intellectuals. Many people who belonged to those categories – or were perceived to do so – were arrested, killed or ‘disappeared’, sometimes with their whole families. Torture and massacres of civilians in rebel areas were widespread. All the former elites – mullahs, landlords, and intellectuals – became targets. Even school children were killed and arrested when they participated in, or even watched, street protests.
Photographs of some of the 5,000 victims forcibly disappeared by the PDPA government placed close to Pul-e Charkhi prison in Kabul where many mass graves have been discovered. Photo: Maina Abbasi, December 2016
Some PDPA cadres seemed to have been inspired by the Khmer Rouge (or Stalin) playbook, trying to physically ‘eliminate’ the ‘oppressor class.’ An elder from Uruzgan province related to the author in 2008 how local PDPA cadres invited local tribal elders to a jirga to discuss matters, arrested and tied them up with ropes, and flew them out by helicopter, never to return (read more about in this AAN report by AAN guest author, Patricia Gossman).
Splits also emerged among the Khalqis, driven by Hafizullah Amin, who had not been among the PDPA founders but had cultivated a close relationship with Tarakay after returning from studies in the US. After the April coup, he became deputy party leader and deputy prime minister. In mid-September 1979, Amin sidelined Tarakay and took over as the head of the party and the state. He had Tarakay assassinated three weeks later, on 8 October. Whether this was about political differences or pure ambition for power is unclear. Initially, Amin accused Tarakay of being responsible for the mass arrests and murders, but the repression only increased under Amin’s rule and the resistance spread and coalesced into various factions of the mujahedin. The Islamists were able to secure more and more funding and arms from the West, Arab countries, Pakistan, Iran and China, while the secular factions were sidelined. Whole army units and garrisons mutinied and joined the rebels.
In the context of the ongoing Cold War, which had reached a peak in the 1970s with the US defeat in Vietnam, the success or at least progress of liberation movements and leftist coups in Africa, the Middle East and Central America (the Soviet Union even tried to embrace the ‘anti-imperialist’ Islamic revolution in Iran), Afghanistan’s internal conflicts, which were basically about modernisation, were internationalised. For more than four decades now, Afghans have endured repeated cycles of internal conflict and war.
The Soviet invasion
Over the Christmas period in 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, apparently to rescue the troubled PDPA government. It was ‘rescued’ (for another 13 years) and was significantly altered in the process. The Soviets overthrew and killed Amin on 27 December. They installed the Parcham faction in his place as part of an alliance with some former Khalqi officers that Amin had sidelined, with Karmal as head of party and state.
The Soviet Union, although initially wary of the notoriously divided PDPA, had nevertheless become its key backer. It usually only recognised one communist party per country, and bilateral party relations remained low-key. Several analysts have suggested that while Moscow was ready to live with the Daud regime despite some bilateral hiccups, the PDPA presented the Soviets with a fait accompli when it took power in the 1978 coup. Moscow did not want to see its allies fail. Additionally, then-party leader Leonid Brezhnev had apparently developed personal sympathies for Tarakay. When Amin had him killed, the Soviets’ patience with Amin, who had also proven himself a turbulent ally – with rumours that he was about to make a deal with the militant Islamist opposition and Pakistan, his possible CIA links and his outreach to the US embassy in Kabul – ran out.
Nur Muhammad Tarakay meets with Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in 1978. Source: Janet Geissmann via Pintrest
The Soviet leadership believed Parcham to be closer to their own interests, less radical and possibly – with Moscow’s support – capable of ensuring that instability could be contained at the USSR’s southern border. As it turned out, Soviet troops did not leave after a short time, as had apparently been the initial plan, rather they remained and were increasingly actively drawn into counter-insurgency operations, contributing to the further escalation of fighting and further internationalisation of Afghanistan’s internal woes, with Western, Arab, Pakistani, Iranian and Chinese support for the insurgents, and drawing in thousands of foreign jihadists who established a worldwide movement active to this day.
Initially, in the last days of 1979 and the first ones of 1980, there were jubilant scenes – reminiscent of what we have recently been able to observe in Syria – when the new government opened prison doors and thousands of incarcerated enemies, real or imagined, of the previously ruling Khalq faction were set free (the government-controlled media of the time reported that 15,000 people had been released).[23]
After the Soviet invasion, the Parchamis reciprocated internal purges of the party that the Khalqis had carried out. They even executed Tarakay and Amin’s alleged killers, whom they claimed had been sentenced to death by a military court. (In fact, Amin was shot dead by Soviet special forces.)[24]In contrast, most Parchami leaders had survived jail under the Khalqis. This perpetuated the split between the two factions.
Soviet support and troops, initially moving in for only a short mission, were unable to quell the resistance and became increasingly involved in their own version of ‘mission creep’, taking over more and more fighting and governance functions. The intelligence state, with sham trials and executions, became more systemic. Both Soviet and Afghan government forces carried out indiscriminate bombings in the countryside, resulting in mass casualties and forced displacement of five million Afghans to Iran and Pakistan. Soviet troops stayed for ten years. The mujahedin did not shy away from using the most egregious forms of violence against civilians who sided with the regime.
Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Najibullah: withdrawal
By the mid-1980s, the Soviet leadership – particularly under Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-91) – realised they were fighting an unwinnable war. The country’s involvement in Afghanistan had impacted the ailing Soviet economy and stood in the way of disarmament and its détente with the West. Then-Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, called the Soviet war in Afghanistan a “festering wound.”
Gorbachev replaced Karmal with Najibullah as Afghanistan’s head of state and party, and in 1985 and 1986, compelled him to introduce his own versions of perestroika and glasnost.[25] The overarching aim was to put the Kabul regime on its own feet economically and militarily, withdraw Soviet troops and cut costs at home. Attempts were made to end the war through negotiations with the mujahedin under the title of siasat-e ashti-ye melli (policy of national reconciliation). Among other measures, in 1990, Najibullah renamed the PDPA Hezb-e Watan (Homeland Party), dropped most of the party’s leftist symbols and politics and established a half-baked multi-party system and (still heavily manipulated) elections (see AAN’s backgrounder). According to Najibullah, it had been “a historic mistake” to come under “a specific ideology.” In its new programme, Hezb-e Watancommitted itself to a “democracy based on a multi-party system.” However, almost all the PDPA leadership was transferred to the new party.
It proved to be too little too late. Aside from splinter groups that had emerged, the mujahedin spurned the talks, preferring not to talk about sharing power with the PDPA but instead opting for an all-out victory.
Najibullah‘s government held out against the mujahedin for another three years after the last Soviet troops withdrew in February 1989. Its downfall came only in 1992 when Yeltsin cut the Soviet Union’s funding and various pro-PDPA militia leaders switched sides to the emerging winners. A Parcham sub-faction toppled Najibullah (himself a Parchami) and handed power over to the mujahedin, who would enter Kabul and take the reins without a fight.
These were not the last words on the PDPA, though. At various times thereafter, there were attempts to revive it by reuniting the diverse parties and factions founded by former members of the disintegrated PDPA/Watan Party in the country or in exile. None of them succeeded, leading to further splits between former Parchamis and Khalqis, between Tarakists and Aminists (who say he was a real patriot because he opposed the Soviets – after all, he was killed by them), between Karmalists and Najibists, the former saying that ‘national reconciliation’ was a betrayal of the ‘revolution’ and the latter insisting that it was the only way to peace. At times, there were at least 25 registered parties – and even more unregistered ones – that went back to PDPA’s origins. The name PDPA itself was never used again, although there was an attempt in the early 2000s to establish a party with a name close to the original one, which was prevented by the Ministry of Justice’s party registration office, saying the ban dating back to the mujahedin times was still valid.
To this day, even though all parties are banned in Afghanistan itself, various groups with roots in or affinity with the PDPA remain active among the diaspora.[26]
The ‘Sovietisation’ of Afghanistan
There is an ongoing, albeit diminishing, debate surrounding the alleged ‘Sovietisation’ of Afghanistan and who the driving force behind it was: the Soviets or the PDPA?
A particular point of view here is the reluctance on the part of the Soviets to engage with the divided PDPA prior to 1978. Sources indicate there were varying approaches among the Soviet intelligence services (KGB, GPU), the party, and various ministries. It is also possible that certain officials acted on their initiative in the Afghan hinterlands that did not seem to be a political priority in Moscow – or that the CPSU or certain Soviet intelligence services used them tactically to maintain a degree of ‘plausible deniability.’
During the Cold War, however, many Western authors broadly agreed that the USSR – after its military invasion in late 1979 – intended to ‘sovietise’ the Afghan regime and incorporate it into its worldwide system. One of them, Anthony Arnold, even considered that “by the close of 1979, the PDPA no longer ruled Afghanistan; the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] did.”[27] Indeed, the Soviet party leadership had established a powerful Afghan task force on the level of its Polit Bureau in October 1979, and had dramatically increased its number of military and civilian advisors.
Artemy Kalinovsky, Professor of Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies and author of a number of books on Soviet engagement in Afghanistan, argued that Soviet advisors tried to caution Afghan party leaders against their revolutionary fervour. This Soviet exercise in nation-building “had little to do with the desire to spread communism [but was rather] … motivated by a desire to stop the deteriorating situation” in Afghanistan and prevent it from aligning itself with the US, he said. It was, he noted, “composed of ‘off the shelf’ components, not a master plan … founded on [Soviet/Marxist] ideas but improvised in practice.”[28]
Clearly, there were ideologues among the Soviets who dreamt of a worldwide victory of socialism. In their view, Afghanistan would be part of this. Others were sceptical about Afghanistan marching toward socialism under the PDPA. They often quoted Lenin, who had warned against exporting it to a southern neighbour. Initially, therefore, there was little Soviet enthusiasm about the PDPA, but after the party’s takeover, the Soviets thought they had to live with the situation. The mood swung when Amin came to power, and the leadership in Moscow made the fateful decision to intervene directly. When mission creep, caused by the lack of Afghan capacity or by corruption, had them take on more and more responsibility, all they knew was how to look at Afghanistan through a lens of ‘Soviet’ Central Asia. Methods employed there, such as coeducation or the unveiling of women, were copied in Afghanistan. (Although the PDPA, taking a page from the Soviet book, had started this before the invasion.)
At the same time, the PDPA had built its own party based on the Soviet model, a hierarchically led mass membership party that, when in power, took over and even largely replaced the structures of the state, including the armed forces. (By 1983, 60 per cent or more of all PDPA members served in the army and police.) When in trouble with the resistance, the PDPA realised it was fully dependent on Soviet support, financially and militarily – and was, therefore, interested in presenting itself as a good student of Marxism-Leninism.[29] When the Soviets stepped in, a ‘Soviet’ framework was already in place and they were left with little choice but to follow its logic.
Many in the PDPA, at the same time, tacitly derided the Soviets, who took over more of the decision-making than they probably expected. They tried to manipulate them for opportunistic reasons, power or pure survival – or even undermined them actively, secretly cooperating with the mujahedin.
Despite the omnipresence of Soviet advisors – many of them ill-prepared to work in Afghanistan or to understand Afghans,[30] Afghan leaders were able to maintain space for independent manoeuvring and decision-making. The room for this was provided by the notoriously segmented Afghan structures, factionalism and political power games as well as the institutional and personal rivalries among the different groups of Soviet advisors. In effect, decision-making on the ground and, subsequently, political responsibility were shared between Afghans and Soviets. There was no Soviet domination.
What emerged was a classic case of a dialectical relationship in the Marxist sense, in which two mutually dependent actors impacted each other and created (often undesired) effects. In the end, it became clear, however, that Afghans were more dependent on the Soviets than the Soviets were on the Afghans. History later repeated itself with other actors.
The Soviet attempt to turn Afghanistan into another ‘Central Asian Republic’ lasted until 1986, when “the failure of their project drove them to prepare the ground for withdrawal and to push for the ‘policy of national reconciliation,’” as French author Gilles Dorronsoro wrote.[31]
In summary, the PDPA can be described as a wannabe communist party that from its establishment – not very openly, but clearly enough – declared its aim of being part of the Soviet-led ‘socialist world system.’ Before 1978, however, it was ideologically kept at arm’s length by the USSR and its allies. After the 1978 coup, however, once it became a ruling party, its overtures forced the USSR, bound to Brezhnev’s doctrine that revolutionary change must be ‘irreversible’, to support its regime.
The 1979 intervention had two contrary effects on the relationship between the PDPA and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU): the PDPA followed a strategy of further expanding its copycat Soviet model to present itself as an indispensable ally while the Soviets, realising the social and political situation in Afghanistan was not ripe for socialist development, cautioned the PDPA in its ‘revolutionary’ development and, under Gorbachev, concentrated on withdrawal, ready to sacrifice their erstwhile ally.
Feminism and the PDPA
Despite the party’s contribution to plunging Afghanistan into four decades of war and destruction, as well as its responsibility for undoubted systematic human rights violations and war crimes, many of its members and sympathisers were driven by a genuine yearning for reform and modernisation. Sulaiman Layeq – who came from a leading religious family – said in a BBC Persian interview that it was the poverty he experienced in the tribal society of his childhood and the injustices during his school years that made him join the party. Soraya Parlika, a staunch feminist and communist PDPA member, hailed from an upper-class family. She was for many years the head of the PDPA-affiliated Democratic Women’s Organisation of Afghanistan (DWOA), which she said she established together with five other women as an independent organisation in June 1965, only six months after the founding of the PDPA. Parlika told the author: “My mother, mainly, often said that not all Afghans lived as comfortably as we did. That motivated me to engage politically.” She did so, despite her prominence after the fall of the PDPA, and stayed in Afghanistan, organising clandestine schools under the Taleban and continuing to do so after 2001.
Women in particular had considerably more rights, at least in urban areas and when not opposing the regime. The DWOA, before the PDPA took over, supported female victims of domestic violence, tried to mediate with families and helped women take their grievances to court. It organised literacy courses and tried to encourage women to seek employment and send their children to school. It mobilised women to take part in the 1965 parliamentary election, which Parlika was actively involved in, going to the countryside to teach women how to read and write. In 1968, she participated in demonstrations against a draft law proposed by conservative Islamic members to ban girls and women from travelling abroad to receive an education without a mahram. After a month of protests, including an occupation of the parliament, the bill was dropped.
During its period in power, the PDPA government – thanks in large part to the DWOA and Parlika’s work – extended maternity leave to 90 days, with an additional 180 days of unpaid leave. Women were legally allowed to retire at the age of 55. When Parlika passed away in December 2020, the Ministry of Justice’s website still showed the 1979 PDPA maternity leave law as still being in force. Parlika’s advocacy also resulted in the establishment of nursery schools and kindergartens in the workplace (see AAN’s obituary for Parlika).
Women marching in support of the PDPA. Source: nee1o via Instagram
These were big achievements, even though for women in the countryside and in mujahedin-controlled areas, these rights remained theoretical – resembling the situation post-2001. Nevertheless, these accomplishments left an indelible mark on the lives of Afghan women and continue to be valued to this day.
Conclusion
The PDPA, along with its predecessor Hezb-e Watan, existed for less than three decades. Few other indigenous political forces, however, have influenced Afghanistan’s modern history as significantly. One notable exception is King Amanullah, whose reforms, although officially halted in 1929, had lasting and sustainable impacts. The other influential forces—the mujahedin and the Taleban—emerged in part as a reaction to the PDPA’s modernist reform programme, which was inspired by the Soviet Union. Their ideological roots can also be traced back to Amanullah’s opponents (see, for example, AAN’s report about the Khost Rebellion of 1924).
The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan not only dealt a final blow to any support the PDPA once had among segments of Afghan society but also led to its demise as a recognisable political force. The debate surrounding the events that unfolded after the PDPA was established 60 years ago continues not only among Afghans but also in academia as people continue to explore the underlying causes of these events and the role the Soviets had in influencing them.
Whether the PDPA’s founding in 1965 and its takeover of power in 1978 were initiated by the Soviet Union with full-fledged support from the CPSU is questionable, at least from this author’s perspective. What is certain is that the PDPA soon ran into resistance, and violence escalated on all sides. Even for those who have been engaged with Afghanistan and its people, it is still difficult to explain where the staggering level of violence – mass killings, institutionalised torture and widespread repression – that emerged on all sides in the conflict originated from.
Many of those involved in the PDPA in key positions, including Layeq and Parlika, never publicly spoke out against the atrocities committed by their party while it was in power. Some former PDPA officials even insisted, officially, that after their time in power, things took an even nastier turn under the mujahedin and the Taleban, particularly when it came to women’s rights. Many regularly quote late-President Najibullah’s warnings against the ascent of Islamists. One former PDPA Central Committee member told the author: “I am proud of my past because I was always in the service of the people.”
Indeed, there is a growing number of non-PDPA Afghans who praise, in hindsight, some aspects of the PDPA government. A sympathiser of the late Ahmad Shah Massud once told the author: “There were only two real leaders in Afghanistan’s history: Sardar Daud and Najib,” alluding to their perceived ability to ‘effect change’. A member of the leftist armed opposition to the PDPA regime told the author that he later ‘regretted’ having taken up arms against it, witnessing the reactionary politics that followed after its overthrow.
Sixty years on, the book on the PDPA and its legacy is still being written. As it currently stands, it is important to reflect on the momentous events that have brought us to this day in Afghanistan’s history, to acknowledge the atrocities that were perpetrated in the name of the Afghan people and the immense suffering they have endured and continue to endure. It is, however, important to take stock of the country’s achievements over the past six decades in the face of enormous challenges, and to consider the Afghan people’s quest for a better future. The PDPA may be gone for good but current developments in Afghanistan indicate that the struggle between the forces of modernism and those who oppose it is far from over.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
References
References
↑1
Most sources name only those seven who were elected full members of the party’s Central Committee: Nur Muhammad Tarakay, Babrak Karmal, Tahir Badakhshi, Ghulam Dastagir Panjshiri, Shahrullah Shahpar, Sultan Ali Keshtmand and Dr Saleh Muhammad Zeray as well as the four alternate members — Dr Shah Wali, Karim Misaq, Dr Abdul Zaher Ufoq and Abdul Wahab Safi. A full list of all 27 founding members is given in Sayed Mohammad Baqer Mesbahzadeh’s book Aghaz wa Farjam-e Jombeshha-ye Siasi dar Afghanistan (The Beginning and End of Political Movements in Afghanistan, Kabul 1384-2005). In addition to the eleven already mentioned, they include: Nur Ahmad Nur, Dr Muhammad Zahir Dzadran, [Muhammad] Akram [or Alam] Kargar, Suleiman Layeq, Sayed Abdul Hakim Shar’i Jawzjani, Adam Khan Dzadzai, Mullah Muhammad Isa Kargar, Engineer Khaliar, Wakil Abdullah Dzadzai, Abdul Qayum Qayum, Atta Mohammad Sherzai, Ghulam Mohiuddin Zarmalwal, Hadi Karim, Abdul Hakim Hilal, Mohammad Hassan Baraq Shafe’i and Sayed Nurullah Kalali.
↑2
According to Soviet/Russian writer and former general, Alexander Antonovich Lyakhovsky, the PDPA founding congress took place “with the direct assistance of the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] CPSU”, see Alexander Lyakhovsky, Tragediya I Doblest Afgana (Afghans’ Tragedy and Valor), Moscow 1995. Many others also have emphasised a Soviet role in this event. It is possible that some people in the Soviet embassy in Kabul were aware of, or even actively supported, attempts to first establish the United Front and later the PDPA. Tarakay, according to Lyachovsky, officially visited Moscow for the first time in December 1965, meeting only mid-ranking officials in the CPSU Central Committee. However, according to the late-Soviet/Russian Afghanistan specialist, Vladimir Plastun, who was an advisor to Najibullah in the late 1980s, Tarakay had in fact reached out earlier, when visiting Moscow as early as in 1962, in his capacity as a writer (which he was). According to Plastun, he also met a Central Committee official. After his visit, an interview with him appeared in a Ukrainian literary magazine, which Plastun was later unable to locate (information from conversations with the author).
↑3
There was also a brief period of political activity between 1947 and 1952, which saw the emergence of opposition groups, a proliferation of media, and even somewhat pluralistic elections before Afghanistan reverted to a more autocratic form of government (for more details, see this AAN report).
↑4
In his book Polititschekie Partii i Dwizhenie Afganistana wo wtoroi polowine XX veka (Political Parties and Movements of Afghanistan in the Second Half of the 20th Century), Dushanbe, 2004, which this author was able to consult in Tajikistan.
↑5
See also this declassified US Department of State Air Gram about “The Afghan Left” available in the George Washington University archives.
↑6
Neither did he remember whether later party chief Najibullah was among them. He was then 17 years old and had just started studying at Kabul University in 1964.
↑7
This is the correct Pashto transliteration. In most non-Afghan literature, his name is spelled Taraki.
↑8
Khalq’s 1966 party programme, from a German translation in: Karl-Heinrich Rudersdorf, Afghanistan – eine Sowjetrepublik?, Reinbek 1980, pp 142-149.
↑9
Quoted from a German translation in: Wolfram Brönner, ‘Afghanistan: Revolution und Konterrevolution’, Frankfurt 1980, pp 165-172.
↑10
Interestingly, in 1971, Jonathan Neale observed a PDPA-inspired student protest in Lashkargah under the slogan ‘death to the khans!’, see the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism.
↑11
Iskandarov did not provide Herawi’s first name.
↑12
According to this author’s information, Ghobar continued to participate in preparations for the PDPA establishment but dropped out later, some say for ideological reasons – he did not want a Soviet-style party. Others cite the fact that he was staying in Germany in 1965 when the PDPA was founded. Plastun told this author that some ‘Maoists’ also attended the congress but withdrew before the PDPA was founded.
↑13
It was not clear whether Ghobar’s and Farhang’s circles were separate or one; both had cooperated with reformist Watan newspaper and its attempt (which led to its ban) to establish a ‘Watan Party’ during the Wesh Zalmian period. In 1990, the Farhang family protested Najibullah’s choice of Hezb-e Watan for the rebranded PDPA.
↑14
This was the group’s main political slogan, not its official name, but the phrase took hold as its public moniker.
↑15
Khalq was the PDPA’s original newspaper, but it was banned after only six issues were published between April and May 1966 as it appeared too closely associated with a political party that had not yet been legalised. Parcham was published between March 1968 and July 1969 (or even 1970, according to some sources).
↑16
Karmal’s ethnicity, as a Pashtun, is a matter of debate, with some sources speculating that his family were Dari-speaking Kabulis who had originally emigrated to Afghanistan from Kashmir, which was once an Afghan possession (see, for example, Hassan Kakar’s book ‘The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982’, on the University of California E-book collection website). Karmal himself was never keen to dwell on his own ethnic background.
↑17
Karmal and Khaibar were personally acquainted with Sardar Daud. In Karmal’s case, this went back to the period of the Wesh Zalmiyan. An association that Daud, for a while, attempted to coopt into his own political vehicle against other factions/branches within the monarchy. Karmal’s father was still a general in Daud’s republic. His unofficial partner (he was married to Mahbuba Karmal) and later education minister, Anahita Ratebzad, even had roots in Amanullah’s family. This probably made them more reluctant to plan to overthrow him. More on the Khalq-Parcham tactical differences and related issues in this interesting 2023 International Research Centre DDR (IF DDR) interview with Matin Baraki, as an early PDPA activist and now a professor in Germany.
↑18
Two cabinet ministers from the Khalq faction, Zeray and Panjshiri, lost their positions. Daud’s decision to weaken the Parchami faction may have been influenced by his desire to form a closer alliance with the Shah of Iran and the United States. Additionally, this decision could have been motivated by increasing suspicions regarding the activities of radical militant groups, particularly due to the growing infiltration of army ranks by PDPA (mainly Khalqi) cells. This situation was further complicated after several Islamist organizations attempted an uprising in the summer of 1975, which ultimately failed.
↑19
The National Awami Party, or NAP (National People’s Party), not to be confused with the Awami National Party (ANP), was a leftwing political party in Pakistan founded in Dakha (present-day Bangladesh) in 1957.
↑20
According to Lyachovsky, a coup was planned for August 1978. Layeq claimed in an interview with ToloNews on 24 April 2018 that a coup had never been discussed or planned within the party, and that this was a personal decision by Amin. Layeq, however, was a Parchami and the faction seemed to have preferred peaceful means, while – again, according to Lyachovsky – the Khalqis generally favoured a coup and went ahead without Parcham.
↑21
Another source told the author that, in a third version, he had later heard Hezb-e Islami claim the killing. Names were even named. Chris Sands also references this in Night Letters, Hurst & Co 2019, p 444, citing a speech given by Hezb-e Islami’s leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to commemorate the eighteenth anniversary of the Muslim Youth’s establishment on April 2, 1987 (available on YouTube).
↑22
Russian author, Nikita Andreevich Mendkovich, of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan (CISA), quotes a Soviet advisor who worked at the Afghan defence ministry in 1978 in a 2010 article: “PDPA functionaries later admitted that they had deliberately concealed information about the planned coup from their Soviet allies, citing the fact that ‘Moscow could have dissuaded them from this action due to the absence of a revolutionary situation in the country.’” He also provides details on how the military officers who implemented the coup had made their decision during a meeting at Kabul Zoo.
Several other Khalqi leaders received long-term prison sentences and were only released by President Najibullah in the second half of the 1980s. Some of them were reinstated to government posts or appointed to roles in the newly established National Fatherland Front – an attempt to broaden the regime’s basis and to appeal to the Khalq membership, which still made up the majority of PDPA members in both the army and the police.
↑25
Despite often being named ‘Muhammad Najibullah’ or ‘Najibullah Ahmadzai’ – the latter version signifying his tribal affiliation – he himself used ‘Najib’ or ‘Najibullah’, or ‘Dr Najib’ or ‘Dr Najibullah’. The author was present in Kabul during part of his rule in 1988-89, and this fact was also confirmed to him by Najibullah’s own family. The story of the change from Karmal to Najibullah was told to the author by the late Suleiman Layeq, a prominent PDPA activist (and, in fact, Hezb-e Watan’s last leader – see AAN’s obituary for Layeq).
↑26
Amin’s supporters, for example, still gather in the diaspora and maintain the ‘Hafizullah Amin Ideological and Cultural Foundation, as The Diplomat reported in 2019, referencing a video of an event to commemorate Amin, which is no longer available online.
↑27
Anthony Arnold, ‘Afghanistan’s Two-Party Communism: Parcham and Khal, California: Stanford University, 1983 p 99.
↑28
Artemy Kalinovsky, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind: Soviet Advisors, Counter-Insurgency and Nation-Building in Afghanistan, Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2010, Working Paper No. 60, January 2010.
↑29
In a 1985 speech on the occasion of the PDPA’s 20th anniversary, Karmal went as far as calling the PDPA “the new [Leninist] typus party of the proletariat and all working people of the country” the aim of which was to build “the Afghan society on the basis of socialism.”
↑30
Kalinovsky, ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’.
↑31
Gilles Dorronsoro, ‘Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present’, New York: Columbia University Press in association with the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales, Paris, 2005, p 173.
Between Reform and Repression: The 60th anniversary of the PDPA
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
