Khybar, Mier Akbar (1925-78)

A Hussaynkhel Ghilzay Pashtun from the province of Logar, Mier Akbar Khybar along with two others was arrested after he graduated from the Military Academy in 1951. According to one source, he was arrested for having turned communist; according to another, he was arrested for having plotted to assassinate the prime minister. Neither story seems convincing. In prison Khybar met leftist inmates, including Babrak Karmal. After release from the prison in 1953, he and Karmal were stated to have found “the common faith and the only way toward the leadership of the people of Afghanistan” (Sharq, Memoirs, 234). Khybar could not trace his wife and children after he was released from the prison; the Intelligence Department was said to have kidnapped them. Khybar then married a sister of Sulaiman Laweq and taught at the Police Academy. Afterward he held other posts as a police officer in the Ministry of Interior. Reading Marxist literature in the English language, he also contributed articles to journals. Among the growing circle of his educated followers from different ethnic and linguistic groups, he came to be known as master (ustad) for his knowledge of Marxism as well as his unpretentious and guileless personality.

Khybar did not participate in the founding congress of the PDPA in 1965: because he was a police officer, the future Khalqis did not trust him. Afterward he resigned his official post to work full-time in promoting party activities and editing its newspaper, Parcham. Among his major contribution was the recruitment of police officers, who became an asset to the Parcham faction. In the second half of the 1960s, when the university campus was in turmoil and the probability of confrontation between the police and students was always there, Khybar—mainly through Najibullah, a student of the College of Medicine skillful in oratory—forestalled clashes without at the same time discouraging Parchami activists. Opposed to violence, he once told me that he wanted to prove that educated Afghan youth were capable of conducting politics without resort to force.

What role Khybar played during the coalition of the Parchamis with President Daoud is unclear, but he was one of those who urged Karmal to fuse with the Khalq faction in 1977. Karmal was reluctant to do so, insisting that the Khalqis accept Khybar in the joint politburo; Khybar considered Karmal’s insistence on this point to be insincere. By this time differences had crystallized between them. On the one hand, Khybar considered Karmal’s licentious behavior harmful, and once he even slapped him for seducing the unwilling wife of a party comrade, as noted in chapter 3. On the other hand, Karmal considered Khybar a threat to his leadership. More important, Khybar did not think the reunited PDPA would be able to rule the country even if it took power. At this time he confided in one of his friends that he was “first and foremost an Afghan, and then what you may think.” In this atmosphere, in the late afternoon of 17 April 1978, he was shot dead from a passing jeep while strolling along the street near the Printing Press in Kabul.

Some Muslim fundamentalists claimed responsibility for the incident. The PDPA leaders accused certain “circles” of the government, while some Parchami leaders claimed that Hafizullah Amin had engineered the killing. The first Parchami minister of the interior, Nur Ahmad Nur, has been quoted as saying that Khybar’s assassins were members of the Islamic Party of Hekmatyar, who were executed. From circumstantial and other evidence, I have concluded that the KGB directed the killing, which was carried out through agents of Karmal and Nur. (See also Sharq, Memoirs, 161.) The incident provoked the PDPA to stage a rally that led ultimately to the overthrow of the government and the coming to power of the PDPA.