Khalq
The Khalq was a far-left faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Its historical de facto leaders were Nur Muhammad Taraki, Hafizullah Amin It was also the name of the leftist newspaper produced by the same movement. The Khalq wing was formed in 1967 after the split of the party due to bitter resentment with the rival Parcham faction which had a differing revolutionary strategy.
It was made up primarily of Pashtuns from rural backgrounds. Its leaders preferred a mass organization approach and advocated class struggle to overthrow the system to bring about political, economic and social changes. They would rule the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan that was formed as a result of the Saur Revolution in 1978. The Khalqists introduced radical reforms and carried out brutal crackdowns on dissent turning Afghanistan into a police state run by the AGSA. The Khalqist crackdowns encouraged the rebellion of the religious and ethnic minority segments present in the Afghan society, which led more people joining exiled Islamist parties in Pakistan, however these rebellions did not pose an existential threat to their rule due to Khalq's large support base within the Armed Forces and the rebellion not being nationwide with provinces such as Helmand having no rebel activity. Khalqist rule would be ended following Soviet military intervention in December 1979 overthrowing Hafizullah Amin and starting the Soviet-Afghan War.
Early political history
The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan held its First Congress on 1 January 1965. Twenty-seven men gathered at Nur Mohammed Taraki's house in Kabul, elected Taraki PDPA Secretary General, Babrak Karmal as Deputy Secretary General, and chose a five-member Central Committee.In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hafizullah Amin who was involved in training teachers, used his position to raise the political conscious of these teachers and students, producing dramas and political sketches which he published under a pyspdonym. Amin also held conferences where he could directly talk to participants. In 1961 he was involved in a teachers conference in Kandahar which gave him direct access to the men and women responsible for education in the province. This laid the ground work for Khalq's support base in rural areas aswell as in Kabul among Amin's former students. Amin believed that radicalization of Afghan teachers was the first step to radicalize the youth of the rural masses into supporting the Khalqist cause. Using his position he was able to radicalize a generation of Afghan teachers. Finally, Hafizullah Amin was the only Khalqi member of the PDPA to be elected to Parliament in 1969.
Khalq – Parcham division of the PDPA
The party was divided by bitter, and sometimes violent, internal rivalries. The Khalq faction was more tribal and militant, whereas the Parcham had more support among the urban population and middle classes. Especially on the ideological level, Karmal and Taraki differed in their perceptions of Afghanistan's revolutionary potential:- Taraki believed that revolution could be achieved in the classical Leninist fashion by building a tightly disciplined working-class party.
- Karmal felt that Afghanistan was too undeveloped for a Leninist strategy and that a national democratic front of patriotic and anti-imperialist forces had to be fostered in order to bring the country a step closer to socialist revolution.
The Republican coup of 1973
Khalq was excluded from the new government because of its lack of good political connections and its go-it-alone policy on noncooperation. Taraki did advocate a united front briefly after former Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan's takeover in an attempt to gain places in the government for his followers, but this effort was unsuccessful. The Khalqists claimed to be more leftist and more independent of the Soviet Union than Parcham, but their base of support was not strong within Kabul, and much stronger in the military and rural areas. Because of this, Khalq sought to build his own power base within the officer corps. Khalq's influence at Kabul University was limited.In 1973, the Khalq faction energetically began to encourage military personnel to join them. Taraki had been in charge of Khalq activity in the military. In 1973 he passed his recruitment duties to Amin. This move was highly successful: by the time of the communist coup, in April 1978, Khalq outnumbered Parcham by a factor of two or three to one. The Moscow-sponsored union of Parcham and Khalq may have been in preparation for his peaceful passage from the scene in the near future. The merger of Parcham and Khalq rapidly became unglued. However, Mir Akbar Khyber, a prominent leftist, was killed by the government and his associates. Although the government issued a statement deploring the assassination, the PDPA leaders feared that Daoud was planning to exterminate them all.
On the eve of the communist coup, Hafizullah Amin was the only member of the Central Committee that was not arrested. The police did not send him to immediate imprisonment, as it did with Politburo members of the PDPA on 25 April 1978. He was the last person to be arrested, his imprisonment was postponed for five hours, during which time Amin, without having the authority and while the Politburo members were in prison, instructed the Khalqi army officers to overthrow the government.
The Khalqist Army cells prepared for a massive uprising. On 27 April, the Khalqist military leaders began the revolution by proclaiming to the cells in the armed forces that the time for revolution had arrived. Khalqist Colonel Mohammad Aslam Watanjar was the Army commander on the ground during the coup, and his troops gained control of Kabul. Colonel Abdul Qadir, the leader of the Air Force squadrons, also launched a major attack on the Royal Palace, in the course of which President Mohammad Daoud Khan and most of his family, including women and children, were assassinated.
The Saur Revolution (April 1978 – April 1992)
The Saur Revolution, as the new government labeled its coup d'état, was almost entirely the achievement of the Khalq faction of the PDPA. Khalq's victory was partially due to Daoud's miscalculation that Parcham was the more serious threat. This success gave it effective control over the armed forces, a great advantage over its Parchami rival. During the first months of the revolution, Cabinet membership was split eleven to ten, with Khalq in the majority.Khalq as Government (April 1978 – December 1979)
Initially, the revolutionary government of Khalq had a period of acceptance from the Afghan populace partly due to its land reform program. Nur Muhammad Taraki brought up the issue of Pashtunistan during his first press conference on May 6, 1978. In May 1979, Pakistani President Zia Al Haq expressed his concerns to US President Jimmy Carter regarding the Khalq Regime's stance towards the Durand Line citing article 8 of the PDPA's manifesto. The new Khalqist leadership in Kabul continued to not recognize the Durand Line as the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, instead Taraki and Hafizullah Amin pushed for the idea of a Pashtun led, "Greater Afghanistan". Taraki would raise the idea of a Greater Afghanistan extending to the sea and training the army to act in this region, against Pakistan to Soviet Premier Lenoid Brezhnev arguing that in doing so the Soviet Union could reach the Strait of Hormuz and gain access to the Indian Ocean through Afghanistan, and that the people of these regions viewed Pakistan as "foreign", stating that“We must not leave the Pashtun and Baluch in the hands of the imperialists, Already now it would be possible to launch a national liberation struggle amongst these tribes and include the Pashtun and Baluch regions in Afghanistan.”
In August 1978, Hafizullah Amin told Soviet Ambassador Alexander Puzanov and Soviet Major General L.N. Gorelov
“We are not parading the question of Pashtunistan and Baluchistan in the press although this question is still on the agenda. The territory of Afghanistan must reach to the shores of the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean. We wish to see the sea with our own eyes.”The initial, moderate, approach to Islam taken by the PDPA was quickly abandoned as the Khalqists sought to consolidate their hold on power. Khalq dominated the Revolutionary Council, which was to serve as the ruling body of the government. The Khalq leadership ran the country by issuing a series of eight edicts. They suspended all laws except those on civil matters and the criminal law of the Daoud period. They also embarked on a campaign of land reform that resulted in the arrest and summary execution of tens of thousands who were viewed as enemies of the state. By putting Afghanistan on the revolutionary road, the Khalq wing of the PDPA stirred reactionaries into revolt.
PDPA general secretary Nur Mohammad Taraki refused to tolerate any Parchamis in the military and insisted that all officers affiliate with Khalq. By June 1978 an estimated 800 Parchami military personnel quit the armed forces in a purge of Parchamis. They accomplished this performing the elimination of the opposition and removal of any restraints posed by the Parchamis. In 1979 under General Secretary Nur Muhammad Taraki the Khalqists regime in Afghanistan changed the official map to include NWFP and Balochistan as new "frontier provinces" of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Hafizullah Amin took over as Chairman of the Ministers Council in March 1979, retaining the position of field marshal and becoming vice-president of the Supreme Defence Council. Taraki remained General Secretary of the People's Democratic Party, Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and in control of the Army, though now he reportedly devoted a lot of his time at the Royal Palace, which had been renamed the People's Palace. In May 1979, Radio Afghanistan started created Anti-Pakistan songs with one song having the refrain "We shall march against Pakistan." while another song contained the lyrics "everyone who wishes to create division between the muslim khalqa of afghanistan and pakistan will be annihilated", "why are these black deeds being done against us from pakistan?", "our soldiers will fight if they are attacked", "the dal-aw-chapatis and the lunatics cannot harm us."
While addressing tribal leaders on 29th July 1979, Amin declared that
"All nationalities from the Oxus to the Abasin are brothers from one homeland. The waves of bravery of the Pashtuns and Baluchis of the whole region is reflected in the revolutionary emotions of the toilers here... our revolution is revered and welcomed from the Oxus to the Abasin... from the mountains of the Pamirs to the beaches of Gwadar in Baluchistan"
Events also tended to sub-divide the protagonists. The intense rivalry between Taraki and Amin within the Khalq faction heated up. In September 1979, Taraki's followers, with Soviet complicity, had made several attempts on Amin's life. The final attempt backfired resulting in the death of one of Amin's close friends. Amin's murder of Taraki allowed him to purge his opponents and fully consolidate power within the Afghan Armed Forces suffering only one mutiny by the 7th Infantry Division at Rishkur on 15–16 October which was done by Anti-Amin elements of his own party. The quick suppression of the rebellion according to American inteligence, demonstrated that Amin maintained the loyalty of key armoured units in Kabul region as well as the airforce. In October 1979, Hafizullah Amin, now the leader of Afghanistan brought up the issue of Greater Afghanistan again saying
“Our task is to direct the officers and soldiers and all the Afghan people to the Durand line which we do not recognize, and then to the valley of the Indus which must be our border. If we do not fulfill this historic task, then one can say that we have been working in vain. We must have an outlet to the Indian Ocean!”In Mid-October, ethnic Hazara rebels briefly sized the town of Bamiyan however it was taken back by Amin's forces after heavy fighting. In late October, Amin made a successful military sweep against the insurgents, driving many of them across the border into Pakistan. At the end of 1979 there were 400,000 Afghan refugees, mostly in Pakistan. According to American intelligence the rebels were poorly equipped and incapable of standing "toe-to-toe" with the Afghan military. Amin's regime was noted at being capable of retaking lost territory from the rebels when it directed its forces in order to do so, allowing Amin to control most of the important parts of Afghanistan by November 1979. The USSR claims it had attempted to temper what it described as "Khalqis' radicalism", urging attendance at mosques, inclusion of Parchamis and non-communists in the government, and a halt to the unpopular land reform movement. The Soviets and their Parchamite allies claim most of this advice was ignored. The last Khalq leader, Hafizullah Amin, was assassinated after Soviet intelligence forces took control of the government and installed Babrak Karmal, a Parchami, in his place.