a house divided, 1933–73was at the best poor. The majority of households in Kabul still used water
from heavily polluted shallow wells or the Kabul river for drinking, cooking
and ablutions, while household waste was dumped on vacant lots or in the
river, where it was left to rot or be eaten by wild, pi dogs, which roamed the
streets. The ussr may have laid Kabul’s pavements, but no Afghan town had
even a rudimentary waste disposal or treatment plant. Many middle-class
houses had cesspits that were regularly emptied, but most people who had
toilets used long drops, which discharged their effluent onto the streets.
Early every morning donkey carts full of night soil could be seen heading
up the Dar al-’Aman road, where it was spread on the fields and vegetable
plots that fed the city’s population. The government also failed to address
the problem of landless sharecroppers and the indebtedness of the rural
poor, absentee landlordism, nepotism, and reform of the civil service and
bureaucracy. For ethno-political reasons Afghanistan was also one of the
few nations in the world not to have had a nationwide census.
President Taraki and the Saur RevolutionDa’ud’s death ended the brief experiment in Monarchical Republicanism
and ushered in what the pdpa called ‘the Glorious Saur Revolution’. This
new administration too was an uneasy coalition, this time of the two rival
pdpa factions, Khalq and Parcham, though Khalq was the dominant part-
ner. The pdpa modelled its version of the One Party State model on that of
Stalin. Nur Muhammad Taraki became the new President and Chairman
of the Revolutionary Council of what was now the Democratic Republic of
Afghanistan, with Babrak Karmal of Parcham as Deputy Chairman. Hafiz
Allah ’Amin, another Khalqi, became foreign minister and later prime
minister, while General ‘Abd al-Qadir, the Khalqi army officer who had
led the coup, became minister of defence. One of Taraki’s first moves was
to establish a new internal security agency, known by the acronym agsa,
which was later renamed khad. 31 It was modelled on, and supervised by,
the kgb as an agency that was entrusted not just with intelligence gathering
and internal security, but enforcing ideological conformity and suppressing
all forms of political dissent.
Despite the new government’s Marxist–Leninist credentials, Taraki
tried to convince Western ambassadors and Afghans in general that his
administration was neither Communist nor a puppet regime of the ussr.
The usa and its allies were not fooled and, although Western nations
eventually accorded diplomatic recognition to the government, there was
serious concern as pdpa officials flaunted their Communist ideology: