Garrison, Major-General Khalilullah, and had to be hospitalised. In
July 1984, he reportedly shot and wounded his Khalqicolleague
Aslam Watanjar (Les Nouvelles d’Afghanistan, nos 19–20,
October–December 1984: 3), and on 3 December 1984, it was
announced that he had been replaced as Defence Minister by the
Pushtun Khalqi Nazar Muhammad (BBC Summary of World
BroadcastsFE/7818/C/1, 5 December 1984). Qadir survived to
become Ambassador to Poland from October 1986, but was finally
expelled from the party in June 1988; he wisely defected to
Bulgaria (Bradsher, 1999: 322). Obviously not all senior party fig-
ures had as spectacular a career as Qadir, but the interfactional
antagonisms were serious enough for the Soviet commentator
Aleksandr Bovin – in the course of a discussion of Afghanistan in
a Soviet television programme on 15 February 1987 – to refer to
the ‘negative role’ of the ‘dissensions, feuds and bloody clashes
within the ruling party itself’ (BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
SU/8494/A3/3, 17 February 1987).
This weakness of the party at the top undermined any significant
benefit from expanding its membership base. In his famous essay
Chto delat’? (‘What is to be done?’), Lenin had argued a case for
a vanguard party of committed revolutionaries to overcome the
problem of insipid proletarian consciousness. Following the estab-
lishment of the Bolshevik regime, the membership of the Soviet
Communist Party had expanded vastly beyond that which could
justify the label ‘vanguard’; rather, the party discharged a number
of clearly understood functions in a highly institutionalised system.
In Afghanistan, with no institutionalised system, expanding mass
party membership made sense only as part of a strategy of long-
term political education and socialisation. Figures cited by
Giustozzi claimed a party membership of 50,599 full and candidate
members in 1980, rising steadily to 154,853 by March 1986
(Giustozzi, 2000: 253). However, given the scope for inflation of
such figures, and the opportunistic motivations of many of those
who did join, there is much to be said for Giustozzi’s conclusion
that ‘the PDPA found it overwhelmingly difficult to expand beyond
its traditional, restricted areas of influence’ (Giustozzi, 2000: 40).
94 The Afghanistan Wars