Afghanistan, which they never fully understood and were never able effectively to shape to their own ends.1
As the domestic situation worsened throughout Afghanistan, and violent resistance to the Communist regime continued to spread, the confrontation within the ruling Khalq faction began to turn nasty. Amin gathered ever more power to himself. By the beginning of the summer, he held the key positions in the party and the state. He was a member of the Politburo and a secretary of the Central Committee. He was Prime Minister and Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council of National Defence. He was putting his relatives and trusties into key positions in the army and the security organs. He had manoeuvred his son-in-law Colonel Yakub into the post of Chief of the General Staff. And he was doing all he could to undermine the position of his nominal superior, President Taraki, openly accusing him in the Politburo of dereliction of duty.
On 28 July Amin demoted several members of the cabinet whom he regarded as obstacles to his ambition, including the Minister of Defence, Colonel Watanjar, and the Minister of Internal Affairs, Major Mazduryar. He took over the Defence Ministry himself, and began to post officers and units which he distrusted away from the capital.
A group—Amin later christened it the ‘Gang of Four’—now began to form in opposition to Amin. It consisted of Watanjar, Mazduryar, the previous head of the security service, Asadulla Sarwari, and the Minister of Communications, Gulabzoi. All were former military officers who had been involved in the coups against the King in 1973 and against Daud in 1978. They appealed to Taraki for support, but it was not forthcoming. Amin complained to Taraki about them, accusing them of spreading false rumours about him and trying to discredit him with foreigners. The head of the security police AGSA, Ahmad Akbari, who was also Amin’s cousin, told him at the end of August that Taraki was preparing a terrorist act against him.
It was at this point, on 1 September, that the KGB submitted a memorandum to the Central Committee, with some thoughts on what might be done. The Amin–Taraki government, the analysts said, was losing its authority. The Afghan people were becoming increasingly hostile to the Soviet Union. Taraki and Amin were ignoring advice from Soviet representatives to broaden the political and social base of the regime. They still believed that their domestic problems could be solved by military force and the massive use of terror. Amin was the chief driving force behind this policy, so a way should be found of removing him from power. This seems to have been the first time that the idea of removing Amin was formally articulated at the highest levels of the Soviet government.
Taraki, the memorandum continued, should be persuaded to set up a democratic coalition government. The PDPA—including Parchamists currently excluded from office—should retain the leading role. But ‘patriotic’ clergy, representatives of national minorities, and the intelligentsia should also be brought in. People who had been unjustly imprisoned should be released, including representatives of the Parcham faction. Meanwhile an alternative PDPA government should be prepared and held in reserve; Babrak Karmal, who was still in exile, should be brought into the planning process. This was essentially the plan that was implemented in December.
From now on the Politburo’s Committee on Afghanistan—Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov, and Ponomarev— became the chief policymaking body for Afghan affairs. It met regularly, often with Soviet representatives brought in from Kabul. The pace of decision-making was greatly accelerated.2 Analyses and recommendations prepared by the Foreign Ministry, the KGB, the Ministry of Defence, and the International Department of the Central Committee were put to the Committee, who passed their recommendations on to the Politburo for decision. Needless to say, the arrangements for coordination between departments, like their counterparts in other governments, were fine in theory, but did not work so well in practice. Departments remained at loggerheads, while the careful but sometimes conflicting analyses and recommendations put forward by cautious officials were often ignored or set aside by leaders who had their own ideas.
The KGB had long experience of dealing with Afghanistan, many covert contacts there, and its own ideas of how things should be handled: it was in many ways the lead department. It had invested much of its capital in the Parcham faction, and tended to reflect their views, even though these were a comparatively small proportion of the membership of the PDPA—fifteen hundred out of fifteen thousand.
The rest of the membership was from Khalq. That was also the faction to which most of the Communist officers in the army belonged, men whom Amin had made a special effort to cultivate.3 The result was a growing contradiction between the views of the KGB, who came to favour intervention and the replacement of Amin by their man, the Parcham leader Babrak Karmal, and the views of the Soviet military, who were prepared to live with Amin because they believed that the main thing was to retain the support of the Khalq officers in the army, many of whom had been trained in the Soviet Union and had good professional relations with their Soviet military colleagues. These disagreements were exacerbated by poor personal relations between senior KGB and army officers, and by rivalries between the KGB and the army’s own intelligence organisation, the GRU.
All this had an increasingly negative effect on the formulation and execution of policy, including the decision to invade Afghanistan in the first place, and the management of policy in the nine years after the invasion took place. Afghan government leaders naturally took advantage of these differences to play one faction off against the other.
Artem Borovik, who was one of the first journalists to tell the Soviet public what was actually going on, concluded, ‘One of our problems in Afghanistan, it seemed to me, was that the Soviet Union never had a central office in charge of the various delegations of its super-ministries: the KGB, MID [Ministry of Foreign Affairs], MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs], and Ministry of Defence. The chiefs of these groups acted autonomously, often sending contradictory information to Moscow and often receiving conflicting orders in return. The four offices should have been consolidated under the leadership of the Soviet ambassador. But there were so many different Soviet ambassadors that none of them had enough time to become thoroughly familiar with the state of affairs in Kabul. There was Tabeev, then Mozhayev, then Yegorychev, then Vorontsov—all within a two-year period. Of these four men, only Vorontsov was a professional diplomat with extensive experience in Central Asia. While the rest had enjoyed successful careers within the Party apparatus, they had no background in Central Asia affairs.’4
Such dysfunction was not unique to the Soviet effort in Afghanistan. Fifteen years earlier the US mission in Saigon in 1966 had been in equal disarray, the consequence of a rapid build-up, pressure from above, frequent changes of staff, personal frustration, poor leadership, and fatigue. The Americans had landed themselves with an open-ended commitment which, as one American official said at the time, could ‘lure us unwillingly and unwittingly into a strange sort of “revolutionary colonialism”—our ends are “revolutionary”, our means quasi- colonial’.5 Much the same could have been said of the US-led coalition in Kabul forty years later.
The crisis now exploded. Taraki was due to fly to Havana for a meeting of the Heads of the Non-Aligned Movement. The KGB warned him not to leave Kabul at this time, since Amin might move in his absence. He ignored them and departed on 1 September. His delegation was almost wholly composed of men with confidential links to Amin, notably Major Tarun, Taraki’s personal adjutant, who played an equivocal—and for himself fatal—role in the events of the next two weeks.
In Taraki’s absence relations between Amin and the Gang of Four deteriorated still further. The four men stopped sleeping at home to avoid arrest, and began to circulate leaflets calling for opposition to Amin and the restoration of unity between the party’s two warring factions. Sarwari telephoned Taraki in Havana to warn him that Amin was preparing to take power.
On his way back from Havana Taraki stopped in Moscow on 10 September to meet Brezhnev and Gromyko. Brezhnev spoke in grave terms about the situation in the Afghan leadership, ‘which is causing particular concern not only to your Soviet comrades, but also, according to information we have, to the members of the PDPA… [T]he concentration of excessive power in the hands of others, even your closest aides, could be dangerous for the fate of the revolution. It can hardly be expedient for one person to occupy an exclusive position in the leadership of the country, the armed forces, and the organs of state security.’ Brezhnev clearly had Amin in mind; but if it was a hint that Moscow would support the removal of Amin, Taraki did not pick it up.6 Instead he asked once again for direct military support, and once again the request was rejected. He also met Babrak Karmal, who had
