needed a cohesive and legitimate state bureaucracy, as well as a
groundswell of support for their ideas. They lacked both. Their
regime began as a coercive one, and by the eve of the Soviet inva-
sion had been substantially repudiated. The shortage of skilled
cadres meant that the party’s ambitious plans had no prospect of
being comprehensively implemented, and for this reason the
Parchamactivists preferred a more gradualist approach. This cut
no ice with the Khalqis, who constituted not so much a vanguard
party of the Leninist variety as a ‘movement of rage’. For them,
smashing the old order was an end in itself. The ‘backwardness of
past centuries’, proclaimed the party platform published in the
Khalqnewspaper in April 1966, was to be eliminated ‘within the
lifespan of one generation’ (cited in Arnold, 1983: 140).
The Khalqapproach to politics had two dimensions: a promul-
gation of radical policies, and an assault on those who found the
policies offensive or unpalatable. Ruling by decree, the regime
sought to implement wide-ranging land reforms, and a reordering
of gender relations. The land reform package was totally unrealis-
tic in that it ignored both the needs of nomads and the importance
of water and seed supplies; while the decree relating to women
was seen as atheistic meddling in key Islamic rituals. None of
these areas was immune to well-designedand carefully imple-
mentedreforms: it was above all the ‘Big Bang’ approach of the
Khalqisthat raised a storm, combined with the underlying reality,
emphasised by Rubin, that ‘the choice the peasants were given was
not between domination and exploitation on the one hand and
freedom and equality on the other. Their choice was between lead-
ers whom they knew, with whom they shared much, and leaders
whom they did not know, who believed in an alien ideology and
who showed by their actions that they could not be trusted’ (Rubin,
1995a: 119). The regime was utterly ruthless in its use of force: in
the village of Kerala in the eastern province of Kunar, on 20 April
1979, government forces massacred all the male inhabitants in cold
blood. In a grim foretaste of coming years, Soviet advisers were
reportedly present during the slaughter (Girardet, 1985: 107–10).
However, this coercion did not fragment opposition to the regime.
The Road to War 29