of sorts would surely have taken shape in Afghanistan. But at key
points, the history of the movement which did develop was critical-
ly influenced by Soviet pressures, facilitated by the scale of the
Soviet presence in Afghanistan following the Khrushchev-Bulganin
visit. Of course, to speak of a ‘movement’ risks imputing too much
coherence to what was for much of the time a field of battle between
different antagonistic sects or networks divided on lines of ethnicity,
socioeconomic status, or ideology. These divisions, indeed, were
critical in explaining the chaos which was to befall Afghanistan once
the Daoud regime was overthrown.
The Soviet-aligned Afghan communists fell into two broad fac-
tions, which took the names of newssheets which they managed to
publish for a very brief period in the early days of ‘New
Democracy’. One was the Khalq(‘Masses’) faction, prominently
led by Nur Muhammad Taraki (1917–1979) and Hafizullah Amin
(1929–1979), both Ghilzai Pushtuns. This faction was Pushtun-
dominated, with few Kabulis at the top. The other was the
Parcham(‘Banner’) faction, led by Babrak Karmal (1929–1996), a
Persian-speaking Kabuli of Durrani Pushtun background. While
Pushtuns made up the largest single bloc within the faction’s lead-
ership, they remained a minority, and Kabulis played a prominent
role (Rubin, 1995a: 91–2). From 1965–67, these factions united to
form the Hezb-e Demokratik-e Khalq-e Afghanistan (‘People’s
Democratic Party of Afghanistan’, or PDPA). Because of leader-
ship tensions, the alliance proved shortlived. Indeed, an observer of
radical politics in the late 1960s would more likely have been
struck by the vigour of another group, the Maoist Shula-i Javid
(‘Eternal Flame’), founded by Dr Abdul Rahman Mahmudi, which
drew support from long-marginalised Hazaras, and a degree of
inspiration from the revolutionary rhetoric emanating from China
during the Cultural Revolution, notably Lin Piao’s ‘Long Live the
Victory of People’s War’. However, in 1977 the two pro-Soviet
factions reunited, almost certainly at Moscow’s instigation.
Parcham, having been purged by Daoud in 1975, was in an ugly
mood, and the new alliance with Khalq heightened the threat
which Daoud faced, to a greater extent than he realised.
22 The Afghanistan Wars