Civil war, communist phase (1978–92)

Nur Mohammad Taraki was elected president of the Revolutionary Council, prime minister of the country, and secretary-general of the combined PDPA. Babrak Karmal, a Banner leader, and Hafizullah Amin were elected deputy prime ministers. The leaders of the new government insisted that they were not controlled by the Soviet Union and proclaimed their policies to be based on Afghan nationalism, Islamic principles, socioeconomic justice, nonalignment in foreign affairs, and respect for all agreements and treaties signed by previous Afghan governments.

Unity between the People’s and Banner factions rapidly faded as the People’s Party emerged dominant, particularly because its major base of power was in the military. Karmal and other selected Banner leaders were sent abroad as ambassadors, and there were systematic purges of any Banner members or others who might oppose the regime.

The Taraki regime announced its programs, which included eliminating usury, ensuring equal rights for women, instituting land reforms, and making administrative decrees in classic Marxist-Leninist rhetoric. The people in the countryside, familiar with Marxist broadcasts from Soviet Central Asia, assumed that the People’s Party was communist and pro-Soviet. The reform programs—which threatened to undermine basic Afghan cultural patterns—and political repression antagonized large segments of the population, but major violent responses did not occur until the uprising in Nūrestān late in the summer of 1978. Other revolts, largely uncoordinated, spread throughout all of Afghanistan’s provinces, and periodic explosions rocked Kabul and other major cities. On February 14, 1979, U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs was killed, and the elimination of U.S. assistance to Afghanistan was guaranteed.

Hafizullah Amin became prime minister on March 28, although Taraki retained his posts as president of the Revolutionary Council and secretary general of the PDPA. The expanding revolts in the countryside, however, continued, and the Afghan army collapsed. The Amin regime asked for and received more Soviet military aid.

Taraki was overthrown in mid September and, under orders from Amin, was killed three weeks later. In a plot hatched in Moscow, Amin was to have been removed, largely in the belief that he bore major responsibility for sparking the rebellion. But Amin learned of the plan and preempted his would-be assassins. Amin then tried to broaden his internal base of support and again to interest Pakistan and the United States in Afghan security. Despite his efforts, on the night of December 24, 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Amin and many of his followers were killed on December 27.

Babrak Karmal returned to Afghanistan from the Soviet Union and became prime minister, president of the Revolutionary Council, and secretary-general of the PDPA. Opposition to the Soviets and Karmal spread rapidly, urban demonstrations and violence increased, and resistance escalated in all regions. By early 1980 several regional groups, collectively known as mujahideen (from Arabic mujāhidūn, “those who engage in jihad”), had united inside Afghanistan, or across the border in Peshawar, Pakistan, to resist the Soviet invaders and the Soviet-backed Afghan army. Pakistan, along with the United States, China, and several European and Arab states—most notably Saudi Arabia—were soon providing small amounts of financial and military aid to the mujahideen. As this assistance grew, the Pakistani military’s Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISI) assumed primary responsibility for funneling the money and weapons to Afghan resistance groups. Pakistani authorities were determined to exercise tight control over all such groups, and upwards of 40 separate resistance and refugee organizations coalesced, under Pakistani influence, around seven resistance parties. These parties, in turn, came together into two rival alliances, one dominated by traditional Islamic conservatives and the other by Islamic radicals. In 1985, under pressure from Pakistan and outside supporters, as well as from guerrilla commanders inside Afghanistan, these two alliances set aside their differences and formed a single coalition represented by a Supreme Council, which was responsible for making major decisions. Pakistan’s exclusion of secular groups from any role in the struggle fit the ideological temper of the military regime of General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq—which played heavily on Islamic symbols for legitimacy—but also suited Pakistan’s determination that no aid would go to Afghan nationalists who might harbour long-standing territorial designs on Pakistan.

Recruits to the mujahideen came in large numbers from young Afghan men living in refugee camps in Pakistan. They were joined throughout the 1980s by thousands of volunteers from across the Muslim world, especially from Arab countries. (A young Saudi Arabian, Osama bin Laden, was among them, and, while he saw little military action, his personal wealth enabled him to fund high-profile mujahideen activities and gain a widely favourable reputation among his colleagues.) The bulk of the fighting was undertaken by small units that crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistan and engaged mostly in brief hit-and-run operations. One of the most persistent and often most effective militant groups, however, was under the command of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who instead fought the Soviets from a redoubt in the Panjanshīr River valley (commonly Panjshēr valley) northeast of Kabul. Massoud was among those commanders affiliated with the Islamic Society (one of the most influential mujahideen groups), then headed by an Azhar-trained scholar, Burhanuddin Rabbani. Among the other Peshawar-based parties were Abd al-Rasul Sayyaf’s militant Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan (Ettiḥād-e Eslāmī Barā-ye Āzād-e Afghānistān), which derived its support largely from foreign Islamic groups, and three parties headed by traditional religious leaders, including the most pragmatic of the mujahideen parties, the National Islamic Front (Maḥāz-e Mellī-ye Eslāmī), led by Ahmad Gailani. But the party receiving the most material support from the ISI was the extremist and virulently anti-American Islamic Party (Ḥezb-e Eslāmī; one of two parties by that name) loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Separate from the Peshawar front of Sunnite parties was an ethnic Shīʿite resistance group among the Ḥazāra, which received strong support from Iran.

Other than the Afghan fighters themselves, few had faith that the mujahideen could prevail in a military conflict with the Soviet Union. The movement’s Western sponsors viewed resistance operations as an opportunity to keep the Soviet army bogged down and to bleed Moscow economically. However, the mujahideen remained convinced that they ultimately would liberate their country from the foreign invaders. After years of bedevilment by the Soviet military’s use of helicopter gunships and jet bombers, the mujahideen’s prospects improved greatly toward the end of 1986 when they began to receive more and better weapons from the outside world—particularly from the United States, the United Kingdom, and China—via Pakistan, the most important of these being shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles. The Soviet and Afghan air forces then began to suffer considerable casualties.

In May 1986 Najibullah, former head of the secret police, replaced Karmal as secretary-general of the PDPA, and in November Karmal was relieved of all his government and party posts. Friction among the Banner and People’s parties continued. A national reconciliation campaign approved by the Politburo in September, which included a unilateral six-month cease-fire to begin in January 1987, met with little response inside Afghanistan and was rejected by resistance leaders in Pakistan.

In November 1987 a new constitution changed the name of the country back to the Republic of Afghanistan and allowed other political parties to participate in the government. Najibullah was elected to the newly strengthened post of president. Despite renewals of the official cease-fire, Afghan resistance to the Soviet presence continued, and the effects of the war were felt in neighbouring countries: Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran numbered more than five million. Morale in the Afghan military was low. Draftees deserted at the earliest opportunity, and the Afghan military dropped from its 1978 strength of 105,000 troops to about 20,000–30,000 by 1987. The Soviets attempted new tactics, but the resistance always devised countertactics.

During the 1980s, talks between the foreign ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan were held in Geneva under UN auspices, the primary stumbling blocks being the timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the cessation of arms supplies to the mujahideen. Peace accords were finally signed in April 1988. Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev subsequently carried out an earlier promise to begin withdrawing Soviet troops in May of that year; troops began leaving as scheduled, and the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan in February 1989. The civil war continued, however, despite predictions of an early collapse of the Najibullah government following the withdrawal of the Soviets. The mujahideen formed an interim government in Pakistan, steadfastly resisting Najibullah’s reconciliation efforts, and disunity among the mujahideen parties contributed to their inability to dislodge the communist government.