The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was the government of Afghanistan between 1978 and 1992. It was recognised diplomatically by only eight countries which were allies of the Soviet Union. It was ideologically close to and economically and militarily dependent on the Soviet Union, and was a major belligerent of the Afghan Civil War.Anthony Hyman, Afghanistan under Soviet domination, 1964–91 (Springer, 2016).
April 1978 revolution In 1978 a prominent member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Mohammed Akbar Khaibar, was killed by the government of President Mohammed Daoud Khan.Bradsher, Henry S. Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Durham: Duke Press Policy Studies, 1983. p. 72–73 The leaders of the PDPA apparently feared that Daoud was planning to exterminate them all, especially since most of them were arrested, including Taraki, and Karmal, while Amin was put under house arrest where he gave instructions to his son to carry to his army which initiated the Saur Revolution,Hilali, A. Z. “The Soviet Penetration into Afghanistan and the Marxist Coup.” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 18, no. 4 (2005): 673–716, p. 709. Hafizullah Amin a number of military wing officers of the PDPA managed to remain at large and organized.
On 27 April 1978 the PDPA, led by Nur Mohammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal and Amin overthrew the regime of Mohammad Daoud, who was killed the next day, along with most of his family.Garthoff, Raymond L. Détente and Confrontation. Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994. p. 986. The uprising was known as the Great Saur Revolution ('Saur' means 'April' in Dari). On 1 May, Taraki became Chairman of the Revolutionary Council, Chairman of the Council of Ministers and General Secretary of the PDPA. The country was then renamed the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), and the PDPA regime lasted, in some form or another, until April 1992.
The PDPA had split into several factions in 1967, soon after its founding. Ten years later the efforts of the Soviet Union had brought back together the Khalq faction of Taraki and the Parcham faction of Babrak Karmal. The "Saur Revolution," as the new government labeled its coup d'etat, after the month in the Islamic calendar in which it occurred, was almost entirely the achievement of the Khalq faction of the PDPA. This success gave it effective control over the armed forces, a great advantage over its Parchami rival. Khalq's victory was partially due to Daoud's miscalculation that Parcham was the more serious threat. Parcham's leaders had enjoyed widespread connections within the senior bureaucracy and even the royal family and the most privileged elite. These linkages also tended to make their movements easy to trace.
Khalq, on the other hand, had not been involved in Daoud's government, had little connection with Kabul's Persian speaking elite, and a rustic reputation based on recruitment of students from the provinces. Most of them were Pashtuns, especially the Ghilzais. They had few apparent connections in the senior bureaucracy, many had taken jobs as school teachers. Khalq's influence at Kabul University was also limited.
These newcomers to Kabul had seemed poorly positioned to penetrate the government. Moreover, they were led by the erratic Mohammed Taraki, a poet, sometime minor official, and a publicly notorious radical. Confident that his military officers were reliable, Daoud must have discounted the diligence of Taraki's lieutenant, Hafizullah Amin, who had sought out dissident Pashtun officers. The bungling of Amin's arrest, which enabled him to trigger the coup ahead of its planned date, also suggests Khalq's penetration of Daoud's security police.
The organisers of the coup had carried out a bold and sophisticated plan. It employed the shock effect of a combined armored and air assault on the Argor palace, the seat of Daoud's highly centralized government. Seizure of the initiative demoralized the larger loyal or uncommitted forces nearby. Quick capture of telecommunications, the defense ministry and other strategic centers of authority isolated Daoud's stubbornly resisting palace guard.
The coup was by far Khalq's most successful achievement. So much so, that considerable literature has accumulated arguing that it must have been planned and executed by the KGB, or some special branch of the Soviet military. Given the friction that soon developed between Khalq and Soviet officials, especially over the purging of Parcham, Soviet control of the coup seems unlikely. Prior knowledge of it does appear to have been highly likely. Claims that Soviet pilots bombed the palace overlook the availability of seasoned Afghan pilots.
Political leadership of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was asserted within three days of the military takeover. After thirteen years of conspiratorial activity, the two factions of the PDPA emerged in public, refusing at first, to admit their Marxist credentials. Khalq's dominance was quickly apparent. Taraki became head of state, head of government and General Secretary of the PDPA, Hafizullah Amin as deputy prime minister. Parcham's leader, Babrak Karmal was also named deputy prime minister. Cabinet membership was split eleven to ten, with Khalq in the majority. Khalq dominated the Revolutionary Council, which was to serve as the ruling body of the government. Within weeks purges of Parcham began and by summer Khalq's somewhat bewildered Soviet patrons became aware of how difficult it would be to temper its radicalism.
Reforms and oppression, 1978–79
Once in power, the PDPA implemented a socialist agenda. It moved to promote state atheism. The Soviet–Afghan War: Breaking the Hammer & Sickle Men were obliged to cut beards, women were banned from wearing the burqa, and mosques were placed off limits. It carried out an ambitious land reform, waiving farmers' debts countrywide and abolishing usury – intended to release the poorer farmers from debt peonage.
The government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan moved to prohibit traditional practices which were deemed feudal in nature, including banning bride price and forced marriage. The minimum age for marriage was also raised. Education was stressed for both men and women and widespread literacy programmes were set up.WOMEN IN AFGHANISTAN: Pawns in men's power struggles
Such reforms however were not universally well-received, being viewed by many Afghans (particularly in rural areas) as the imposition of secular western values considered to be alien to Afghan culture and un-Islamic. As had happened earlier in the century, resentment with the government's programme and the manner in which it was imposed, along with widespread repression, provoked a backlash from tribal and Islamic leaders.
The PDPA "invited" the Soviet Union to assist in modernizing its economic infrastructure (predominantly its exploration and mining of rare minerals and natural gas). The USSR also sent contractors to build roads, hospitals and schools and to drill water wells; they also trained and equipped the Afghan army. Upon the PDPA's ascension to power, and the establishment of the DRA, the Soviet Union promised monetary aid amounting to at least $1.262 billion.
The destruction of Afghanistan's former ruling elite had begun immediately after the seizure of power. Execution (Parcham leaders later claimed at least 11,000 during the Taraki/Amin period), flight into exile, and later the devastation of Kabul itself would literally remove the great majority of the some 100,000 who had come to form Afghanistan's elite and middle class. Their loss almost completely broke the continuity of Afghanistan's leadership, political institutions and their social foundation. Karmal was dispatched to Czechoslovakia as ambassador, along with others shipped out of the country. Amin appeared to be the principal beneficiary of this strategy.
The Khalq leadership proved incapable of filling this vacuum. Its brutal and clumsy attempts to introduce radical changes in control over agricultural land holding and credit, rural social relations, marriage and family arrangements, and education led to scattered protests and uprisings among all major communities in the Afghan countryside. Taraki and Amin left a legacy of turmoil and resentment which gravely compromised later Marxist attempts to win popular acceptance.
The human rights violations of the Khalq extended beyond the educated elite. Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan Communists executed an estimated 27,000 political prisoners at Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside. The Khalq leadership introduced to Afghanistan the "knock on the door in the middle of the night", previously little known in that country, where the central government usually lacked the power to enforce its will beyond Kabul.Kaplan, Robert D., Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, New York, Vintage Departures, (2001), p.115
The Government was constructed in classic Leninist fashion. Until 1985 it was governed by a provisional constitution, "The Fundamental Principles of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan." Supreme sovereignty was vested in a Revolutionary Council, originally a body of fifty-eight members whose number later varied. Its executive committee, the Presidium, exercised power when the council was not in formal session. The Revolutionary Council was presided over by the president of the Democratic Republic.
Beneath the council the cabinet functioned under a Prime Minister, essentially in a format inherited from the pre-Marxist era. Two new ministries were added: Islamic Affairs and Tribes and Nationalities. Administrative arrangements for provincial and sub-provincial government were also retained.
In Leninist style, the PDPA was closely juxtaposed with the formal instruments of government. Its authority was generated by its Central Committee, whose executive stand-in was its Politburo. Presiding over both was the party's secretary general. Policy generation was the primary function of the executive level of the party, which was to be carried out by its members serving throughout the government.
On 5 December 1978 a friendship treaty was signed with the Soviet Union and was later used as a pretext for the Soviet invasion. Major uprisings occurred regularly against the government led by members of the traditional establishment who lost their privileges in the land reform. The government responded with heavy-handed military reprisals and arrested, exiled and executed many Mujahideen "holy Muslim warriors". The Mujahideen belonged to a number of different factions, but all shared, to varying degrees, a similarly conservative 'Islamic' ideology.
On 15 February 1979, the United States ambassador in Kabul, Adolph Dubs, was taken hostage by a group of Hazaras and later killed by them when Amin ordered the police to attack the US embassy. As the Hazaras were all eventually killed by the police, their actual motive in invading the US embassy remained unclear. The US did not appoint a new ambassador.
In mid-March the 17th infantry division in Herat under the control of Ismail Khan mutinied in support of Shi'ite Muslims. A hundred Soviet advisors in the city, and their families, were killed. The city was bombed, causing massive destruction and thousands of deaths and later it was recaptured with Afghan army tanks and paratroopers.