Ideology and Electricity: The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan

There is a class of urban Afghans for whom the core political question has always been: Does that ideology come with electricity? These are people who have sought to extend the writ of Kabul over the countryside, and ever since the 1920s they have faced violent opposition. Once their vehicle was constitutional monarchy. Then it was a presidential republic, then Soviet-style socialism, and then Najibullah’s last-ditch nationalism. Now it is the deeply flawed experiment in liberal democracy imposed by NATO.

Repression triggered the bloody communist coup of 1978.

The hastily devised People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) reforms were a casualty of an old rural–urban divide in Afghan society. The educated young urban idealists did not understand the rural world they sought to remake, and the world of the mud-walled villages did not understand urban officialdom. That the social and cultural dimensions of the reforms threatened the privileges of the traditional mullahs, maliks (village leaders) and large landowners is hardly surprising. What can be confusing is that the economically progressive aspects of the program were also widely rejected by the deeply religious peasantry. Afghanistan, though poor and unequal, was not marked by the extreme land inequality typical of pre-revolutionary Mexico or China. As Steele explains, peasants were in many ways “linked to their landlord by ties of religion, clan and family and were unready to flout his authority.” Rural society, always somewhat autonomous from Kabul, and feeling threatened at the root by reforms, turned increasingly to armed resistance, linking up with the Islamist parties that had decamped to Pakistan during Daoud’s repression.

Exacerbating the situation for the PDPA were certain technical mistakes. In their haste the urban communists of Kabul redistributed land but not water rights, a blunder that revealed their ignorance of local agriculture. They abolished the oppressive system of bazaar-based money lending but did not establish an alternative credit program to aid cash-poor farmers in planting. (Raja Anwar’s The Tragedy of Afghanistan is another valuable source on the revolution’s reforms and missteps.) For their part, the Soviets repeatedly advised Kabul to abandon or delay the more radical reforms.

The communists were not the first Afghan modernizers to face a rural backlash. The so-called Red Prince, Amanullah Khan, who ejected the British in 1919, was dethroned ten years later by a tribal rebellion that opposed his Turkish-inspired modernization efforts. He had imposed a modicum of land reform, given women the vote and started educating girls. Rural elites would accept good roads, but not the taxes to pay for them; the rural masses would accept agricultural improvements and education, but not an assault on patriarchy. Fifty years later, the PDPA faced the same sort of religious rebellion, and to quell it communist officials began making displays of public piety, praying and traveling to mosques. But it was too little, too late.

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