Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century Read Online Free

communist. A stint in Europe in his youth had sharpened his awareness of the technological superiority of the West; his long career in the military had given him a deep-seated respect for the realities of power of home. He harbored the conviction that the only hope for his country lay in a secular, modernizing despotism that would wrench it out of its medieval stagnation into the twentieth century. For Daoud, like so many Third World autocrats, Marxism-Leninism was attractive less as an ideology per se than as a blueprint for ruthless national mobilization. In just a few decades, the Bolsheviks had seemingly thrust their backward, overwhelmingly agrarian society into the ranks of the world’s industrialized nations; surely, that was worth emulating. There were also more personal reasons for Daoud’s interest. A wily intriguer, Daoud understood that Soviet backing—including the support of the many Kremlin sympathizers among Afghan military officers and intellectuals—could provide him with a secure base for taking power.
    In 1973, Daoud put his plans into action. He launched a bloodless coup that enabled him to seize control of the government while Zahir Shah was away on an Italian vacation. But instead of proclaiming himself king in his cousin’s place, Daoud abolished the monarchy altogether. He declared Afghanistan to be a republic with himself as its president. He received crucial support for his takeover from the homegrown communist party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), whose members recalled his tilt toward Moscow during his term as prime minister under the deposed king.
    Daoud soon demonstrated, however, that he was unwilling to let Afghanistan become just another East-bloc satellite. Although he was happy to continue receiving as much Soviet aid as he could get, he also signaled that he was determined to retain Afghanistan’s formal status as a “nonaligned country,” one that had no official alliances with either of the main parties of the Cold War. He maintained cordialrelations with the Americans and expanded Afghanistan’s ties with the countries of the Islamic world, especially Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. During his term as prime minister, he had soured Kabul’s relations with Islamabad through his support for Pashtun nationalism, aggravating the Pakistanis, who had a large Pashtun population on their own side of the border to worry about; that he was willing to soften his policies as president demonstrated his determination to avoid the trap of excessive dependence on the Soviets. The Afghan communists looked on this hedging strategy with skepticism; they felt that salvation could only come from closer ties with Moscow.
    But Daoud was also unpopular with many conservative elements in this deeply traditional society. He wanted to build a strong activist state in a country where officialdom’s writ had never extended far beyond the capital. He wanted equal rights and educational opportunity for women. And, in keeping with the overwhelming majority of the other nationalist rulers who ruled in the Middle East and South Asia at this time, he wanted to structure Afghan society along secular lines. This meant the gradual removal of Islamic scholars and clerics from the educational and justice systems. Needless to say, not everyone was happy about this. But the mullahs and rural notables, fragmented and backward, proved ill-equipped to formulate an adequate response to Daoud’s policies. (In contrast to Iran, Afghanistan had no monolithic and powerful religious institutions that could pose a credible counter-weight to the power of the government.) Ironically, it was the rising intelligentsia, emerging from the state-sponsored schools and universities of the new Afghanistan, who would figure out how to fight back more effectively.
    It took time for this growing discontent among the faithful to find an effective form of resistance. In 1975, a group of Islamic radicals tried