Free Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

the task of educating the rural poor. So it relied, as Communistregimes so often had in the past, on a mixture of mobilization and brute force to fill the gap. Zealous young schoolteachers dispatched to the villages, invariably without proper textbooks or teaching materials, often ended up haranguing the locals on their backwardness. What particularly inflamed the locals was the newcomers’ insistence that women should take part in the courses, in classrooms that mingled both sexes. Mobs drove the arrogant outsiders away. In some cases the do-gooders then returned with escorts of government troops, and literacy classes then proceeded at bayonet point.
    The land-reform program similarly ignored the complex skeins of social relations that bound Afghans together in the countryside in a million site-specific ways. Given its extreme topography, hybrid civilizations, and ethnic and social pluralism, Afghanistan has never been a country about which useful generalizations can be made. But this is precisely what the land reform of 1978 entailed. It attempted to impose a one-size-fits-all template on a messy array of situations. It is true that Afghan landlords acted as exploiters—but they were also important organizational centers of society who played religious or social roles as well as economic ones. And there were massive problems with implementation as well. Plots of land awarded to previously landless peasants could not be cultivated without money for seed and fertilizer—yet the reforms had failed to provide for supporting changes in the financial system, like the creation of agricultural banks. Instead, they stripped away traditional sources of finance without replacing them with new ones.
    What all of this showed, of course, was that the April Revolution (as the new government referred to the coup against Daoud) failed to root itself in Afghan society. Its leaders essentially admitted as much. Taraki’s official speeches stressed that the April Revolution was advancing a dramatically new theory of Marxist revolution—one driven by a progressive, antifeudal military elite rather than an industrial working class or a militant peasantry. (Afghanistan had no industrial class to speak of, and the peasantry was largely quiescent.) Marx would have probably interpreted this view as a form of “Bonapartism.” The keepers of the faith in Moscow—people like the Kremlin’s chief ideologue, Mikhail Suslov—ought to have regarded this as a perversion of orthodox Marxist-Leninism. But by this point they had spent so many years trying to stir up Third World revolutions in places with little or no signs of “proletarian consciousness” that they don’t seem to have noticed.
    In the developing world, indeed, the word revolution had long since devolved into code for just this sort of brute-force modernization. Starting in 1975, the Cambodian Maoist off shoot known as the Khmer Rouge adopted a bizarre amalgam of Communism, primitivist nostalgia, and militant ethnonationalism that involveddriving all city dwellers into the countryside, where they would be forcibly reeducated at the hands of zealous revolutionaries. (In practice this meant that you could be killed for wearing a pair of glasses.) An estimated 2 million people died. The Communist military junta that seized power in Ethiopia unleashed a Red Terror in 1977 that took a half-million lives. The rhetoric as well as the actions in both cases represented ominous precedents for Afghanistan. 2
    What stood out for many Afghans was, simply enough, that the new government consisted of Communists, and Communism, by definition, is an atheistic ideology. Though Taraki and his ministers never tired of proclaiming their respect for Afghanistan’s Islamic society, their actions consistently undercut that message. One of the new government’s first actions was to change the Afghan flag from the black, red, and green tricolor that had survived from the monarchy into Daoud’s republic