The Abortive ‘Saur Coup’ in Afghanistan

 A Political Disaster Engineered by Stalinists

- Rajesh Tyagi/ 1.6.2026

Afghanistan provides yet another tragic example of the many political disasters that have resulted in the last century, from sectarian, and nationally driven policy and program of Stalinists, in South Asia.

For about half a decade after the rise of the dictatorship of Prince Daoud who took to power through a palace coup in 1973, the Stalinist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had tailed behind it sheepishly. As Kremlin supported Daoud, so did its stooge- the Afghan PDPA.

Stalinist PDPA was deeply divided between the ‘Khalq’ and ‘Parcham’ factions, both of whom were closely bound up with Daoud regime in power, and vied each other for proximity to it.

But Daoud had other plans. By 1978, Daud had set out for a major purge of leftist influence and interference in his government. He started repression on PDPA leaders.

On 17th April 1978, Mir Akbar Khyber, a senior member of the Parcham faction was murdered. Many in Kabul suspected a government hand in his murder. Daoud personally was accused by PDPA leaders.

As a protest broke out at Khyber’s funeral, Daoud Government anticipating a revolt, responded with harder hand and arrested many PDPA members.

Getting alarmed by government action, many PDPA leaders suspected that President Daoud Khan was preparing to eliminate them also.

PDPA leader Hafizullah Amin of Khalq faction, who was put under house arrest by Daoud, took the opportunity and ordered a coup, roping in the army officers sympathetic to PDPA and connected to Kremlin.

The coup started on 27th April and by the evening, the state-owned radio in Kabul announced that the Daoud government was overthrown by the Khalq faction and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was established.

During the coup, soldiers had surrounded the Presidential palace and had asked Daoud to surrender. As defiant Daoud Khan and his brother fired at the soldiers outside the Palace, both were shot dead by the soldiers.

Masses, in general, welcomed the end of the hated Daoud dictatorship. Once in power, PDPA had attempted to reform the bourgeois regime from above and in the process had implemented many changes in the Afghan society. Besides the land laws, other reformative modern laws were put in place replacing the old Islamic codes. Equality for women was proclaimed by law in education, security and health.

These progressive measures but invited opposition from the conservative sections of Afghan society- rural landlords, Mullahs and rentiers. Despite evoking a positive response in urban areas of the country, to its actions and measures adopted and implemented by it, PDPA rapidly lost popularity in rural Afghanistan where it had mainstay of its support base.

As this opposition, getting support from US and Western imperialists and their local stooges, turned to active resistance, the PDPA government was forced to suppress it with brute force. Severe discontent among the people was manifest in no time. Next two years of PDPA regime thus witnessed many uprisings in rural regions of Afghanistan.

The overthrow of Daoud regime brought the Khalq and Parcham factions of PDPA together for a short period, but this unity was not to last long. Soon, there was rift among the two, resulting once again in deep hostility with each other. This hostility had nothing to do with any ideological or programmatic disputes, but was driven purely and simply by the longings of their leaders for control over the state power.

As leader of the Khalq faction, Nur Muhammad Taraki, became President of Afghanistan on takeover of power by PDPA, by August that year, he launched a murderous campaign against the leaders of the rival Parcham faction and started ousting or executing them one after another, pretending the discovery of a political plot against his government.

Taraki was overthrown on September 14, 1979, and executed on October 8 on the orders of Hafizullah Amin, another leader of Khalq faction, who had succeeded Taraki.

The bloody factional infight inside the PDPA, presented an opportunity for the local elites ousted from the power and their western allies to destabilize the PDPA government.

This political instability prompted the USSR to directly intervene in December 1979.

The Soviet intervention, however, led to the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan War. The civil war that followed between Mujahideen groups, later organised into Taliban, trained and supported by the West on one side and the USSR and the PDPA on the other, lasted more than nine years. This conflict, dragged the country back in terms of development. A huge humanitarian crisis brewed up inside Afghanistan, leaving millions dead or displaced, fleeing to other lands, particularly Pakistan, to seek refuge from bloodshed and devastation.

Taking over Kabul in December 1979, Soviet forces immediately removed Hafizullah Amin from power, executed him and replaced him with the ousted leader of ‘Parcham’ faction of PDPA-Babrak Karmal.

As Andropov and after him Gorbachev sought accommodation with western imperialism, so they both directed Karmal to compromise with US supported Mujahideen, taking to retreat on every front but this maneuver failed to break the ice. Finally, in 1986, Gorbachev removed Karmal from power and put Mohd. Najibullah, another leader of Parcham faction of PDPA to office.

Following Babrak Karmal, Najibullah, pushed the reversal of all reforms made by the PDPA in its early days in power, albeit at far faster pace, to completely liquidate even the last vestiges of these reforms. He abolished all progressive legislation, restored the Islamic laws and revived Islam as state religion of Afghanistan. Despite all retreats, Najibullah failed to muster support from Mujahideen.

Yet he clung to power with support of Kremlin bureaucracy under Gorbachev. After Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, he still got economic and military support from Moscow. But the 1991 Moscow coup by Yeltsin that ousted Gorbachev from power and formally dismantled the USSR, triggered crisis for Najibullah in Afghanistan. After takeover of Kabul by Taliban and defection by his trusted general, Abdul Rashid Dostum in 1992, he was forced to resign. In 1996 he was brutally tortured and killed by Talibans in UN headquarters in Kabul where he had taken refuge after a failed attempt to escape to India.

Returning to Afghanistan in 1991 with consent from Najibullah, Karmal became an associate of Abdul Rashid Dostum, fighting Talibans in North Afghanistan.    

After four decades of the war and political instability, the Mujahideen groups and Taliban, that had once got united to fight the Soviet invasion of 1979, turned on each other after withdrawal of the Soviet forces from the country.

In 2002, accusing Taliban government in Afghanistan of creating 9/11 terror plot bombing Twin Towers in New York, the US forces entered Afghanistan and struggled to capture it with the aid of Pakistan Army. Failing in the military mission, US forces formally withdrew in 2015 from Afghanistan.

The 1978 overturn of Daoud regime in Afghanistan, was nothing of the sort of a Revolution, but was pure and simple palace coup that aborted a revolution brewing up in Afghanistan against the hated Daoud regime.

The leaders of Stalinist PDPA, despite of bitter factional rivalry among themselves, hoped to consolidate a progressive bourgeois regime through reforms from above, with the patronage of the Soviet bureaucracy. They had no faith in working class, its internationalism or a revolution led by the working class. They attempted to bind the working and toiling people of Afghanistan behind the illusions of democracy and progress through bourgeois reforms from above. Their whole perspective and program remained based on the maneuvers in tailing behind the ruling elite of Afghanistan and its leaders like Daoud. This, in turn, ensued from the historically discredited Menshevik ‘two stage’ theory of revolution, later embraced by Stalin, that originates from the misplaced belief in a democratic revolution, separated from the socialist one, by decades, if not centuries.

Chasing the illusion of a democratic revolution in Afghanistan, the PDPA leaders, from the very inception, excluded the idea of a workers dictatorship postponing the same for indefinite future and rather promoted the liberal regime of bourgeois reforms. Steeped in sectarian precincts of Afghan nationalism, they were organically incapable of appealing to the workers in South Asia- India, Pakistan and Bangladesh- and the world. They responded to the machinations of US imperialism with political retreats and savage repression, only to suffer a devastating defeat. They grossly underestimated the opposition they would encounter soon from landlords and tribal leaders, other sections of the Afghan elite, and, more importantly, from the neighboring Pakistani ruling class and Western imperialism. In face of this opposition, terrified Stalinists, beat the shameful retreat.

The net result of the application of Menshevik-Stalinist policies in Afghanistan, was the disaster resulting in destruction of the brewing up revolution in Afghanistan, giving stronger than ever foothold to the Western Imperialism in West Asia.