
FOUR decades ago, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was in power. The government was secular not religious and the country a republic.
The advances the PDPA government made in the late 1970s and 1980s for the people of Afghanistan, and for women in particular, were enormous — before the US and its allies, including Britain, Nato, the theocratic dictatorships in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the secret services of Pakistan, together with the most reactionary forces in Afghanistan, so shamefully brought it down in 1992.
Moves to release women from centuries of feudal subjugation and less than human treatment had begun in earnest in the 1920s, profoundly influenced by the 1917 Revolution which replaced the tsar’s Russian empire with a socialist republic, with which Afghanistan signed a friendship treaty in 1921.



