Before Taliban

2 Lives of the Party
Between April 1978, when the government of Nur Muhammad Taraki took
office, and December 1979, when the Soviet Union took control of the
Afghan government, a bold attempt was made to transform the Afghan
nation into a different kind of social and political entity. Those responsible
for this transformation envisioned the establishment of a socialist nation in
which class oppression would be wiped out and the productive energies of
the poor mobilized. Spearheading the new Afghan state would be the
People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which was envisioned as
a vehicle for incorporating into the governing structure those previously
excluded from power: low-ranking military officers and bureaucrats, students,
and women. 1 After proper training and indoctrination in the principles
of scientific socialism, cadres would go to the countryside to bring literacy
to the people and, with literacy, an awareness of the economic and
social conditions that consigned the poor to lives of brutal poverty and limited
the economic and social development of the nation. There is little doubt
that Taraki, Hafizullah Amin, and other leaders of the PDPA saw April 27,
1978, as the dawning of a new era, but the era that began was one of violence
and discord rather than of revolutionary promise. Those who flocked to the
party standard were far fewer in number than the tens of thousands who
took up arms against the regime and the millions who chose exile in
Pakistan and Iran over life in the new socialist paradise.
During the early 1980s, many observers came forward to offer their
explanations as to why the Marxist revolution failed in Afghanistan.
Opponents of the regime—especially the exile resistance parties headquartered
in Peshawar—argued that the people saw through the regime’s propaganda
and raised the banner of jihad (struggle in the path of Allah) to preserve
Islam and dislodge the infidel usurpers from power. Supporters of the
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