Afgantsy

It took the Russians two hundred and fifty years to get to Kabul. The British started later, but got there sooner.

Both were driven by the same imperial logic. The Russian Foreign Minister, Prince Gorchakov (1789–1883), set it out in December 1864: ‘The position of Russia in Central Asia is that of all civilised states which are brought into contact with half-savage nomad populations possessing no fixed social organisation. In such cases it always happens that the more civilised state is forced, in the interests of the security of its frontiers and its commercial relations, to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whose turbulent and unsettled character makes them undesirable neighbours.’ In their turn these newly pacified regions had to be protected from the depredations of the lawless tribes beyond them. The Russian government therefore had to choose between bringing civilisation to those suffering under barbarian rule and abandoning its frontiers to anarchy and bloodshed. ‘Such has been the fate of every country which has found itself in a similar position.’ Britain and the other colonial powers, as well as Russia, had been ‘irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this onward march’. The greatest difficulty, Gorchakov rightly concluded, lay in deciding where to stop.¹

Gorchakov’s defence of Russian policy was of course self-serving, though his analysis was plausible. The Russians soon resumed their southward movement. This provoked a hypocritical outrage among other imperial powers engaged in much the same pursuit in other parts of the world. The British, in particular, were incensed: in the last part of the nineteenth century they created the romantic myth of the ‘Great Game’, brilliantly fuelled by Rudyard Kipling in Kim, in which gallant British officers rode into the Himalayan mountains and the desert lands to their north, and risked their lives to frustrate the knavish tricks of sinister Russian agents seeking to subvert the Indian jewel in the Imperial British Crown.

Afghanistan in the Modern Era

Afghanistan, the country on which the Russians and the British had both set their eye, is one of the oldest-inhabited places in the world, a crossroads between the Central Asian empires to the north, the Indian subcontinent to the south, Persia to the west, and China to the east. Alexander the Great ruled there briefly. Buddhist and Persian empires followed, until all were swept aside by Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227) and Tamberlane (1336–1405) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Babur (1483–1530), a descendant of both men, established the Mogul empire in the sixteenth century. Delhi was its capital, but he chose to be buried in Kabul. Despite successive wars, ‘the bulk of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage remains intact (albeit under threat): it is still one of the greatest cultural storehouses of all Asia’.²

The people of Afghanistan are divided by race into Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other lesser ethnic groupings. Each of these is subdivided into clans defined often by the accidents of geography, as so often in mountainous regions. And each clan is further divided into often mutually hostile families. All are ruled by an ethic of fierce pride, martial valour, honour, and hospitality, mediated by the institution of the blood feud. At all levels, from the local to the central, politics and loyalties are defined by conflicts and deals between these groups, and even between individual families. There is thus little sense of a national entity on which to build a functioning unitary state.

Most Afghans are Sunni Muslims. The Pushtuns make up two-fifths of the population and their language, Pushtu, is one of the two official languages of the country. Most of them live in the southern part of the country, and in neighbouring Pakistan on the other side of the ‘Durand Line’, the artificial frontier drawn by the British at the end of the nineteenth century. But substantial numbers live in the north, where they were settled at the end of the nineteenth century to reinforce Kabul’s control over the non-Pushtun inhabitants. The Pushtuns used to consider themselves, and were considered by outsiders, to be the true Afghans. Some still do, which is not well taken by the rest.

The next largest groupings—the Tajiks (27 per cent), who live in the north and west, and the Uzbeks (9 per cent), who live in the north—are related to the peoples across the border in what used to be Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many Tajiks and Uzbeks fled into Afghanistan when the Bolsheviks were imposing their regime in Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. The Tajiks speak Dari, the Afghan form of Persian, the second official language.

The Hazaras (9 per cent) live in the central mountains and are said to be descended from the Mongols. They are Shias, and the rest of the country despises them as infidels. They are often found in menial positions and they have often been persecuted. But when occasion calls, they too are effective warriors.

Afghanistan’s modern history was shaped by three remarkable rulers: Ahmad Shah Abdali (c. 1722–73), Dost Mohamed (1793–1863), and Abdur Rahman (c 1840–1901). They and their successors have always had to tackle four main tasks. The first has been to preserve a semblance of national unity, despite ethnic divisions, local lawlessness and violence, the arrogance of provincial satraps, and the determination of most Afghans to preserve their independent way of life whatever the plans and intentions of the government in Kabul. Any Afghan government has to try to negotiate a compromise where it can, and to suppress dissent and rebellion—often by the most ruthless means—where it cannot. Only the most exceptional rulers have succeeded.

The second task has been to preserve the independence of the state from the depredations of outside powers. Afghan foreign policy has usually combined a precarious neutrality with a willingness to distance itself from one predatory rival in return for a guarantee of security and a large bribe from the other. This policy has often failed, and Afghanistan has often been successfully invaded. But invaders have always found it even harder than its own native rulers to manage the country. Sooner or later they have preferred to cut their losses and pull out, and that has always been Afghanistan’s ultimate defence.

In the twentieth century Afghanistan’s rulers set themselves a third and equally difficult task: to modernise their country—its army, its communications, its economy, its governmental apparatus, its educational system. Most have tried to do something about the subordinate status of women. But reform has always come up, and often been shattered, against the conservatism of the people and their religious and traditional local rulers. Reform in Afghanistan has been a matter of two steps forward and one—sometimes two or even three—steps back.

The fourth task of any Afghan ruler, and the precondition for tackling the first three, has been to remain alive. Afghanistan’s rulers have succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, often for very short periods. Between 1842 and 1995 seven of them fell victim at an accelerating pace to family feud, palace coup, mob violence, or outside intervention. Between 1878 and 2001 four more were forced into exile. Others prudently abdicated while the going was good.

Ahmad Shah Abdali was a Pushtun who was elected king in 1747 by a loya jirga (consultative assembly) at Kandahar. In a flamboyant and symbolic gesture, he is said to have shown himself to the people dressed in the Cloak of the Prophet, which was reverently kept in its own mosque in the city. The state of Afghanistan, within roughly its present border, takes its beginning from that event.

By the time Ahmad Shah died in 1772, he had reconciled the turbulent Pushtun tribes, subdued most of present-day Afghanistan, extended his empire to Delhi and into Persia, and earned the name of Father of his People. Under his successors, however, many of these achievements were undone. The Pushtun tribes resumed their quarrels and the empire crumbled. In 1775 Ahmad Shah’s son moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul, where it remained. His grandson Shah Shujah (1785–1842), signed Afghanistan’s first treaty with a foreign power in 1809, when he and the British agreed to support one another in the event of aggression by the Persians or the French. Shah Shujah was deposed a few weeks later. He fled to India, was brought back to Kabul in the baggage train of a British army during the First Anglo-Afghan War, and was murdered when the British cut their losses and left.

Dost Mohamed, who first came to power in 1823, was deposed by the British in favour of Shah Shujah, but returned to power after the British departed, and successfully ruled the country for the next nineteen years. For most of this time he was on good terms with the British. But after his death in 1863, the country collapsed back into civil war.

A battle lost in that war left Abdur Rahman Khan without an army and without funds. He was forced to seek exile under the protection of the Russians in Tashkent, where he remained for eleven years. He emerged as ruler of Afghanistan in 1880 in the wake of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Grim, sardonic, barely literate but highly intelligent, he was determined to fit his country for survival in the modern world. His brutal methods of government earned him the name of ‘The Iron Amir’. His power, like that of many of his successors, was fortified by a ruthless and omnipresent secret police. His methods worked. He set up the rudiments of a modern state bureaucracy, modernised and financed his army with the help of the British, and struck a skilful balance between them and the Russians.

Abdur Rahman’s successors attempted to push Afghanistan further along the path of modernisation. His son Habibullah (1872–1919) was assassinated in 1919 and succeeded by Amanullah (1892–1960), who took advantage of British weakness at the end of the Great War to invade India. The British bombed Kabul and Jalalabad and drove the invaders back. Neither side had much stomach for the war, and it fizzled out after a month. The British ceased both their subsidies and their control of Afghan foreign policy. Amanullah promptly opened a fruitful relationship with the new Bolshevik government in Moscow—the first foreign government to do so.

He then embarked on an ambitious programme of reform in imitation of the secularising reforms of Atatürk in Turkey. He established a Council of Ministers, promulgated a constitution, decreed a series of administrative, economic and social reforms, and unveiled his queen. His plans for the emancipation of women, a minimum age for marriage, and compulsory education for all angered religious conservatives and provoked a brief rebellion. Tribesmen burned down the royal palace in Jalalabad and marched on Kabul. In 1929 Amanullah fled into exile in Italy.

Nadir Shah (1883–1933), a distant cousin of Amanullah, seized the throne, reimposed order, but allowed his troops to sack Kabul because he had no money to pay them. He built the first road from Kabul over the Salang Pass to the north and continued a cautious programme of reform until he was assassinated in 1933.

His son Zahir Shah (1914–2007) reigned from 1933 to 1973. This was the longest period of stability in Afghanistan’s recent history, and people now look back on it as a golden age. Reform continued. A parliament was elected in 1949, and a more independent press began to attack the ruling oligarchy and the conservative religious leaders.

In 1953 Zahir Shah appointed his cousin Daud (1909–78) as prime minister. Daud was a political conservative but an economic and social reformer. For the next ten years he exercised a commanding influence on the King. He built factories, irrigation systems, aerodromes and roads with assistance from the USSR, the USA, and the German Federal Republic. He modernised the Afghan army with Soviet weapons, equipment, and training.

In 1963 Zahir Shah got rid of Daud to appease conservatives infuriated by his flirtations with the left and the Soviets. But the King continued with the policy of reform. He introduced a form of constitutional monarchy with freedom of speech, allowed political parties, gave women the vote, and guaranteed primary education for girls and boys. Women were allowed to attend the university and foreign women taught there. Ariana Airlines employed unveiled women as hostesses and receptionists, there were women announcers on Kabul Radio, and a woman was sent as a delegate to the United Nations.

During all these years, the educational system was systematically developed, at least in the capital city. Habibia College, a high school modelled on an elite Muslim school in British India, was set up in Kabul in 1904. Amanullah sent many of its students to study in France and elsewhere in Europe. A School of Medicine was inaugurated in 1932, followed by faculties of Law, Science, Agriculture, Education, and Engineering, which were combined into a university in 1947. Most of the textbooks and much of the teaching were in English, French, or German. A faculty of Theology was founded in 1951 linked to the Islamic University of Al-Azhar in Cairo. In 1967 the Soviet Union helped establish a Polytechnic Institute staffed largely by Russians. Under Zahir Shah’s tolerant regime student organisations were set up in Kabul and Kandahar.

Daud rapidly expanded the state school system. Between 1950 and 1978 numbers increased by ten times at primary schools, twenty-one times at secondary schools, and forty-five times at universities. But the economy was not developing fast enough to provide employment for the growing numbers of graduates. Many could find jobs only in the rapidly expanding government bureaucracy. Salaries, already miserable, lost half their real value in the 1960s and 1970s. The good news—though not for conservatives—was that about 10 per cent of this expanded bureaucracy were women.

The American scholar Louis Dupree called Kabul University ‘a perfect breeding ground for political discontent’. It was in the universities that Afghanistan’s first political movements were created. A Communist Party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, was set up in 1965 by Nur Mohamed Taraki, Babrak Karmal (1929–96), and Hafizullah Amin, all of whom were to play a major role in the run-up to the Soviet invasion. A number of students who were later to become prominent in the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet struggle also fledged their political wings there: Rabbani (1940–), Hekmatyar (1947–), Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (1946–), and Ahmad Shah Masud (1953–2001) all studied together in Kabul University. Students rioted in 1968 against conservative attempts to limit the education of women. In 1969 there were further riots, and some deaths, when high school students protested against the school management. The university was briefly closed.

Social and political dissatisfaction increased with the return of young Afghans who had been sent abroad for technical or military training. Between 1956 and 1978 nearly seven thousand Afghan students attended Soviet academic and technical institutions. An agreement with the Soviets in 1955 provided for military training in the Soviet Union: about a hundred young men went to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia every year.³

All these institutional changes, admirable as they were in principle, had little support among the Afghan people. The number of educated and reform-minded Afghans grew in Kabul and some of the other towns. But they had very little influence in the villages, which remained under the sway of tribal leaders, landlords, and mullahs. Time and again reform and the emancipation of women by liberals in the cities fell foul of the religious conservatism of the villages and the mountains. And when push came to shove, it was the views of the countryside that prevailed and derailed the best efforts of the reformers.

Imperial Russia Moves South

From the eighteenth century onwards new predators began to circle round the struggling Afghan state. Once the Russians had secured their western frontiers against their European neighbours, and their eastern and southern frontiers against the nomads and the Tatars, the logic of empire—the search for security and the search for trade—led them into the forests of Siberia and into the vast and underpopulated southern steppes and deserts.⁴

Their expansion was not unopposed. They clashed with the Turkish and Persian empires, and soon came to see the less sophisticated states of Central Asia as a threat, an opportunity, and a barrier to any ambitions they had towards Afghanistan and the riches of India beyond.

Peter the Great’s imagination was fired by reports of gold to be found along the Amu Darya, the river which was eventually to become the boundary between Afghanistan and Russia. The local ruler, the Khan of Khiva, was said to be willing to become Peter’s vassal in exchange for Russian protection from his rebellious subjects. Peter ordered Alexander Bekovich, a captain in the Life Guards and a converted Muslim prince from the North Caucasus, to find out more. He gave Bekovich a force of over six thousand men—horse, foot, guns, and a clutch of merchants—to build fortresses along the Amu Darya, to persuade the Khan of Khiva to help find the gold, and to open the trading route to India. Bekovich reached Khiva in the summer of 1717. After an initial welcome, the Khan treacherously slaughtered him and his men, stuffed his head with straw, and sent it to the Khan of Bukhara. A few years later, in 1728, the Russians collided for the first time with the Afghans, when their troops encountered an Afghan army which had invaded Persia. The Russians prevailed.⁵

By the middle of the century the Russians became aware that they were facing another adversary, one whose imperial ambitions matched their own. In Peter’s day, the British in India had been mere tradesmen. But the Russians began to take them more seriously as the East India Company consolidated its position after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, annexing native Indian states by force, imposing its hegemony on nominally independent Indian rulers, and driving out its French, Dutch, and Portuguese rivals.

Over the coming decades, anxious to get revenge for their defeats in India, the French proposed to the Russians a number of ill-considered schemes for the invasion of India through Persia or Afghanistan.⁶ In 1791 a French adviser to Catherine the Great suggested that she send her troops to march on India via Bukhara and Khiva, ‘announcing as they advanced that they had come to restore Muslim rule under the Moguls to its former glory [and thus] foment mass uprisings against the British within India as word of their coming spread’.⁷ Catherine’s confidant and former lover, Potemkin, dissuaded her from pursuing this hare-brained scheme.

Another Franco-Russian scheme emerged in 1801. Even though their two countries were still technically at war, the Russian emperor Paul I proposed to Napoleon that they should mount a joint attack on India. Without waiting for an answer, Paul ordered General Orlov, the commander of the Don Cossacks, to take thirteen regiments ‘by one or all of three routes through Bukhara and Khiva to the English possessions in India which lie beyond the River Indus’. Orlov could take the riches of India as his reward. Worryingly, Paul added, ‘My maps go only as far as Khiva and the Amu Darya. Beyond that it is up to you to get information about the English possessions and the Indian peoples who are subject to them.’

Orlov set out in the depths of winter, with over twenty thousand men. In the first month his force, hungry and ill-provided, lost a fifth of its horses and an uncertain number of men. He had not even left imperial territory before he was ordered to turn back after Paul was assassinated on 11 March, strangled by his ministers with the connivance of his son and (so Russians believe) the active complicity of the British Ambassador.⁸

Hare-brained schemes continued to be bandied around by hotheads in St Petersburg for some decades. But sober opinion agreed with General von Bennigsen, the Baltic German aristocrat who commanded the Russian army in 1807. The British, he argued, had created a European-style military system in India funded by local taxpayers. This army, ‘formed on the same lines as our European regiments, commanded by English officers, and excellently armed, manoeuvres with the precision of our grenadiers’. In the past Asiatic cavalry armies had invaded India over its north-west frontier and conquered the subcontinent, but these had no chance against the Anglo-Indian infantry and artillery. Meanwhile no rival European army could reach the subcontinent because the British dominated the sea routes and the logistical problems of getting a European-style army across Persia or Afghanistan were insurmountable. Having himself campaigned in northern Persia, Bennigsen spoke with authority.⁹

But as the nineteenth century advanced, the Russians became increasingly suspicious of the predatory intentions of the British in northern India. British merchants were competing with increasing success in Central Asian markets. British agents were popping up all over Central Asia. All this, the Russians considered, was directly contrary to their own legitimate interests. So they began to prepare more systematically for a renewed move south.

This time there was no question of despatching troops without maps on the basis of rumour. The main agency for conducting relations with Russia’s neighbours in Central Asia and for collecting intelligence about them was the Frontier Commission based in Orenburg in Siberia. From 1825 to 1845 the Commission was headed by General Grigori Fedorovich Gens (1787–1845), a distinguished Orientalist and scholar. In 1834 Gens sent one of his young officers, a naturalised Frenchman called Pierre Desmaisons, disguised as a mullah, to discover what he could about the Emirate of Bukhara. The following year he sent Jan Witkiewicz (1798–1839) on a more substantial mission. Witkiewicz (known in Russian as Ivan Viktorovich Vitkevich) came from Polish Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire. He had been conscripted into the army and exiled to Orenburg at the age of sixteen for participating in an anti-Tsarist underground organisation. A gifted linguist, he was noticed by his superiors, promoted, and appointed to the Frontier Commission.

Unlike Desmaisons, Witkiewicz made no attempt to pretend he was not a Russian officer and travelled in full uniform. He learned to his dismay that a British officer, Alexander Burnes (1805–41), had got to Kabul before him. But he remained there for four months, attempting to negotiate a trade agreement with the Emir Dost Mohamed, and returned to Orenburg with an Afghan emissary carrying a request from the Emir for Russian financial and diplomatic support against British interference in Afghanistan.

The Governor of Orenburg, General Perovski, welcomed the proposal, arguing to his superiors that if the British succeeded in establishing themselves in Kabul ‘it would be only a step for the British to reach Bukhara; Central Asia would be subjected to their influence, our Asian trade would be ruined, they might arm… our Asian neighbours against us, and supply them with powder, weapons and money’.¹⁰ The Russian government agreed and sent Witkiewicz back to Kabul bearing gifts, and with secret instructions to collect intelligence. He arrived in Kabul to find that Alexander Burnes had once again beaten him to it. But Burnes’s negotiating position was fatally undermined when the Governor General of India, Lord Auckland (1784–1849), sent an arrogant and ill-judged ultimatum to Dost Mohamed, threatening that if he allied himself with the Russians or anyone else, he would be forcibly deposed.

Not surprisingly, Dost Mohamed received Witkiewicz with every mark of favour. Witkiewicz offered a Russian alliance and a guarantee of Afghanistan’s independence and territorial integrity. But on his return to St Petersburg, the offer was repudiated by the Tsar’s government, perhaps in order not to provoke the British. Witkiewicz committed suicide, and the documents he brought back with him disappeared. The background to this bizarre turn of events has not been satisfactorily explained.¹¹

By now British spies and agents were moving ever further northwards, penetrating deep into Central Asia, into Bukhara, Khiva, Kokand, places of particular interest to Russia for more than a hundred years. The government in St Petersburg agreed with General Perovski that the valuable trade through Central Asia could only be protected by force of arms.

In 1839, as the First Anglo-Afghan War was getting into its stride, General Petrovski was sent to bring the Khan of Khiva to heel. His force consisted of three battalions of infantry and three regiments of Cossacks, together with twenty guns and ten thousand camels. The force was well supplied and the winter season had been deliberately chosen to avoid the heat of the desert. Unfortunately the winter turned unusually savage, the temperature fell below thirty degrees centigrade, and men and camels melted away. The last remnants of the expedition got back to Orenburg in June 1840.

But the Russians did not give up. Military defeat following the Anglo-French invasion of the Crimea (1853–6) had clipped their wings in Europe, so they turned their energies to the east and the south. In 1854 the Faculty of Oriental Languages was set up at St Petersburg University, marking the beginning of a distinguished tradition of Oriental studies in Russia. Rumours and agents’ reports now told of British plans to advance from Persia or through Afghanistan to the Caspian Sea and beyond. In 1857 Prince Baryatinski, commanding the Russian forces in the Caucasus, warned that ‘the British are preparing in detail for war, and will attack from two directions: from the Persian Gulf in the south and from the east through Afghanistan… The appearance of the British flag on the Caspian Sea would be a mortal blow not only to our influence in the east, not only to our external trade, but to the political independence of the empire.’ Schemes were once again bandied around among Russian officials for an incursion into India; they were not taken up.¹² A more sober paper, ‘On the Possibility of Unfriendly Clashes between Russia and England in Central Asia’, by two senior staff officers, sensibly concluded that the British would hardly risk their armies so far from the oceans they commanded. They might, however, seek to inflict political damage through ‘secret intrigues in our Muslim provinces and among the Caucasian mountaineers’ and interfere in the affairs of ‘our neighbouring regions’. The authors went on to reject categorically any idea of an Indian campaign: the flanking route through Herat was too difficult to supply and the direct route through Afghanistan could too easily be fortified against an invading Russian army. For the time being the Russian attitude should be purely defensive. These conclusions, which were in part conditioned by the need not to provoke Britain without good cause in the aftermath of defeat in the Crimean War, were strongly endorsed by the Foreign Minister, Gorchakov.¹³

A defensive policy did not exclude—indeed, in the eyes of some soldiers and policymakers it explicitly justified—a further move south for the protection of trade and the exclusion of the British. After 1857 the Russians, and in particular the well-informed Asiatic Department of the Foreign Ministry, stepped up their collection of intelligence on the region through agents, scientific expeditions, and diplomatic missions. One of the most important was led by Nikolai Ignatiev, an ambitious young officer who had been military attaché in London. On his return, he became head of the Asiatic Department. He was on good terms with the hawkish War Minister, Dmitri Milyutin, and like him he believed that Foreign Minister Gorchakov was insufficiently robust in his promotion of Russian interests. His influence in favour of an active Russian policy in the east was to grow substantially over the decades.¹⁴

In the light of all this new intelligence, one confidential analysis after another argued that the British were aiming at establishing control over Central Asia and driving out the Russian trade; and that it was essential for the Russians to pre-empt them. Whether the British ever had any such intention is not so important. The belief affected and distorted policymaking in St Petersburg and Orenburg, just as policy-making in London and Delhi was affected and distorted by the belief that the Russians intended to come through Afghanistan into India. Paranoia affected judgement in all four cities.

And so the Russians concluded that their interests in Central Asia could not be finally secured by diplomacy alone. In the years that followed they annexed or took into their protection all the independent states of Central Asia, city by city: Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873 and the remaining lands east of the Caspian Sea in 1881–5.

The Russian colonial regime which was then installed was, in the view of one recent British historian, less burdensome than the British regime in India: the Russian were more corrupt and less efficient; the British taxed more heavily and were more prone to impose their will through violence.¹⁵ The most notorious event in the Russian record in Central Asia—General Skobelev’s massacre of the garrison and people of Geok Tepe in 1881—pales by comparison with the slaughter inflicted by the British in India after the Rising (or Mutiny) in 1857.

Things changed after the First World War. The British began to prepare—reluctantly—to depart from India, and to leave workable institutions behind them. It was a comparatively peaceful withdrawal, though the British cannot escape responsibility for the horrors of Partition in 1947. In Central Asia the Soviets, according to their very different lights, also tried to create modern social and economic institutions. But hundreds of thousands of people died and many more fled the forcible imposition of a ruthless new regime and a collectivised agriculture. In 1991, four decades after the British, the Russians abandoned their empire as they too ran out of imperial steam.

Imperial Britain Moves North

The British, deploying the same arguments as the Russians, and using the same tactics of armed force, diplomacy, guile, bribery, deceit, and treachery, were meanwhile continuing their advance towards the north. They too wished to promote their trade and the security of their imperial frontiers. They too concluded that mere diplomacy was insufficient, and they too swept aside the obstacles to their forward march with considerable violence. By 1801 they were on their way to taking over the whole of northern India, and they had reached the border with Afghanistan. They soon began to nibble away at the Afghan border territories; particularly painful for the Afghans was the loss of Peshawar, which the British first handed to their Sikh ally Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) and then took for themselves when they annexed the Sikh territories in 1849.

Hitherto the British had worried about a possible French invasion backed by the Persians. With the final defeat of Napoleon, they concluded that the main threat to their expanding Indian empire now came from the Russians. They argued among themselves about whether this threat was best countered by bribing the Afghan rulers to keep the Russians at bay or by imposing their own representative in Kabul, by force if necessary, and exercising a direct control, as they had done in India.

The war party prevailed on two occasions. Before the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42) the British manufactured the evidence they needed to justify their overthrow of the Afghan ruler, Dost Mohamed, doctoring and publishing the reports they received from their agents in Kabul to represent him as determinedly anti-British.¹⁶ They launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) with a brutality almost as cynical, though this time without resorting to forgery. The murders of their representatives in Kabul, Alexander Burnes in 1841 and Louis Cavagnari in 1879, were both the consequence of British bullying and the final British excuse for war.

The British advance was opposed not only by the Afghan army, which they could deal with, but also by a widespread insurgency, which they had not expected and to which they could find no satisfactory answer. They suffered some spectacular reverses: the destruction in 1842 of an entire army and the defeat of part of the Kandahar garrison at Maiwand in June 1880. Both wars nevertheless technically ended in a British military victory followed by a salutary revenge. In the autumn of 1842 a British ‘Army of Retribution’ hanged the city’s notables in the centre of Kabul and burned the seventeenth-century bazaar, ‘one of the great crossroads of Central Asia where one could buy silk and paper from China in the north; spices, pearls and exotic wood from India in the east; glass, pottery, silver and wine from Persia and Turkey in the west, and slaves bought from both directions… flames were said to have still filled the sky two days later when the troops left’.¹⁷ Among the other villages and towns they also destroyed with fire and the sword were the beautiful village of Istalif, famous for its pottery, and the provincial capital of Charikar, where a company of Gurkhas had been wiped out the previous year. A British officer who was there wrote to his mother, ‘I returned home to breakfast disgusted with myself, the world, and above all, with my cruel profession. In fact we are nothing but licensed assassins.’¹⁸ The devastation of Kabul in 1879 was less extensive, though the British did dismantle part of the city’s Bala Hissar fortress and hanged forty-nine Afghans on a gallows set up in the ruins of Cavagnari’s residence for their alleged part in his murder.¹⁹

But these were pyrrhic triumphs, and the British eventually realised that they could not achieve their original ambition of adding Afghanistan to the Indian empire. Nor could they sustain their own candidate in Kabul: they had to accept the reinstatement of Dost Mohamed after the First Anglo-Afghan War and the installation of the untried and possibly pro-Russian Abdur Rahman after the Second. At a high cost in blood and treasure, the British did achieve their most important objective: to keep Afghanistan out of the orbit of Russia and within that of India. By means of bribes, threats, and guarantees of support against their neighbours, they were able to persuade Afghanistan’s rulers to remain—reluctantly perhaps—on their side. They remained responsible for Afghanistan’s foreign policy for eight decades, until the agreement which ended the brief Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919.

This relative success did not relieve the British of their exaggerated fear of the Russian threat. Charles Marvin, a correspondent from the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, interviewed many senior Russian generals and officials in the late 1880s. He complained that ‘Most of the English writers on Central Asia are personally unacquainted with Russia, and have no knowledge of the Russian language… they know nothing of the Russian aspect of the problem, except what they derive from the exaggerated and distorted intelligence appearing in the newspapers.’ The language used by some British politicians was as intemperate, and as lacking in a sense of the logistical realities, as any used by the Russian hotheads. Concerned that the Russians might seize Constantinople in the course of their war against the Turks, Disraeli (1804–81) wrote to Queen Victoria on 22 June 1877 that ‘in such a case Russia must be attacked from Asia, that troops should be sent to the Persian Gulf, and that the Empress of India should order her armies to clear Central Asia of the Muscovites, and drive them into the Caspian. We have a good instrument in Lord Lytton [1831–91; Viceroy of India, 1876–80], and indeed he was placed there with that view.’²⁰ But the more sensible British officials realised that it would be hard for a modern army to maintain itself through the treacherous mountain passes and deserts of Central Asia. A more realistic danger was that foreign meddling could spark off an uncontrollable revolt among the Indians themselves: the British still remembered the Indian Rising of 1857 and its bloody suppression.

Herat became their key strategic concern. Controlled sometimes by the Persians, at others by the Afghans, Herat was, in the eyes of British officials, ‘the Gateway to India’, through which Alexander, Genghis Khan and the first Mogul emperor Babur had all passed on their way south. The British feared the Russians might be next. Twice the British and the Russians came close to war over the control of Herat. In 1837 the Russians supported a Persian move on the city. The siege lasted for four months and was conducted, according to a contemporary historian, ‘in a spirit of unsparing hatred and savage inhumanity’.²¹ It was lifted when British forces were deployed in the Persian Gulf to intimidate the Shah.

In 1885 a crisis over the remote oasis of Pandjeh, which lies on the Amu Darya river between Merv and Herat, also nearly led to a war. The Afghans maintained that Pandjeh—which was called Kushka by the Russians and is now Serhetabat in Turkestan—belonged to them. The Russians nevertheless took Pandjeh, with considerable loss of Afghan life. The British warned that any further advance towards Herat would mean war. On British advice, the Afghan defenders of Herat demolished several of the glorious buildings of the fifteenth century in order to provide a clear field of fire. In the event the Russians never attacked and the crisis fizzled out, thanks primarily to the good sense of Abdur Rahman.

Anglo-Russian rivalry in the high mountains to the east of Afghanistan continued into the 1890s, with armed skirmishes continuing there between the Russians and the Afghans as late as 1894.²² But as tensions in Europe grew with the rise of Germany, both sides decided it made more sense to curb their territorial ambitions in Asia. An Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission agreed that the frontier between Afghanistan and the Russian empire should lie along the Amu Darya. As a buffer between India and Russia the British insisted in 1891 that Abdur Rahman should accept sovereignty over the Wakhan Corridor, a thin sliver of land—in places less than ten miles wide—high up on the borders of China, Afghanistan, and the Russian empire. Both these borders were strategically important during the Soviet war.

But the boundary which carried the most burdensome implications for Afghanistan’s future international and strategic position was the Durand Line, the artificial frontier drawn in 1893 by a senior British official of the Indian government. This drove straight through the middle of the Pushtun tribal areas in the borderland between the Punjab and southern Afghanistan. Successive Afghan governments resented the loss of territories, including Peshawar, which they regarded as rightfully theirs: Afghanistan was the only country to vote against the admission of Pakistan to the United Nations when it became independent in 1947. Prime Minister, later President, Daud backed the cause of ‘Pushtunistan’, which called for the recovery of the Pushtun lands on the Pakistan side of the Durand Line. The Pakistanis retaliated by doing all they could to destabilise and control their smaller neighbour. The hostility between the two countries was to have a most negative effect on Afghanistan’s affairs into the twenty-first century.

The local people took no notice of the Durand Line except when they were compelled: they feuded, smuggled, traded, and fought indifferently on both sides of the border. The British attempted to control the border in the 1920s and the 1930s by a policy of ‘butcher and bolt’, with punitive raids against errant tribesmen, including the destruction of their villages from the air. Soviet attempts to seal the border during the war of 1979–89 were almost a total failure.

The Soviet Union Becomes Afghanistan’s Best Friend

In August 1907 Russia and Britain reached an agreement to regulate their affairs in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The Russians took advantage of this more relaxed state of affairs to improve their knowledge of the country. General Andrei Snesarev, a professor at the Academy of the General Staff, spent much of his life studying and travelling in Central Asia, and ruminating on the significance of Afghanistan in the wider geopolitics of the area. He concluded that Afghanistan was a military nightmare for a foreign invader, that it could not justify the resources needed to dominate it, but that it was indeed, as some of his British predecessors had believed, the gateway to India. His book about the geographical, ethnic, cultural, and military aspects of Afghanistan was published in 1921. It rapidly faded from the public consciousness after he was arrested in 1930, sentenced to be shot, released, and then died at home in 1937. But it was republished after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and Snesarev has since become something of a cult figure among Russians interested in the country.

As soon as the British relinquished their control of Afghan foreign policy, Amanullah signed a Treaty of Friendship with the infant Soviet Union in 1921, under which the Russians agreed to give Afghanistan financial support, to build a telegraph line between Moscow and Kabul, and to supply military specialists, weapons, and aircraft. A Non-Aggression Treaty followed in 1926. In 1928 the first regular air route was opened between Moscow and Kabul, and Soviet consulates were set up in Herat and Mazar-i Sharif.

By the 1930s the Soviet Union was Afghanistan’s most important commercial and political partner. There were occasional irritations. Fugitives from the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics regularly sought refuge in Afghanistan, followed by detachments of the Red Army in hot pursuit. In the spring of 1929 the Russians invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to restore Amanullah Khan to his tottering throne. Stalin sent about a thousand men, disguised in Afghan uniform and commanded by the former Soviet military attaché in Kabul, General Vitali Primakov (1897–1937), who was himself disguised as a Turkish officer. The Russians captured Mazar-i Sharif, Balkh and other places after heavy fighting. But they rapidly lost the sympathy of the local people and Stalin recalled the force when he heard that Amanullah had fled into exile. In 1937 Primakov was shot, yet another victim of Stalin’s purges. But on the whole Russia’s relations with Afghanistan flourished well enough.

In the years immediately before the Second World War, the Germans tried with some success to increase their influence in Afghanistan through economic assistance and military training—the Presidential Guard was still wearing German helmets at the time of the Soviet invasion. During the war itself, Zahir Shah steered a skilful path between the British and the Russians, who found themselves cooperating with one another to frustrate German intrigues. In 1943 Zahir Shah expelled German agents operating in Afghanistan who had been identified by the intelligence agencies of the two wartime allies.²³

Zahir Shah and his prime minister, Daud, were equally skilful at playing off East and West against one another as the Cold War developed. In 1953 John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, came up with the idea of a ‘Northern Tier’ of Muslim states in the Middle East, including Afghanistan, which would act as a barrier to Soviet Communism. He tried but failed to get Afghanistan to join the Baghdad Pact when it was set up in 1955. President Eisenhower visited Kabul in 1959. The Americans constructed the concrete highway which linked Herat to Kabul via Kandahar, and promoted a number of educational and economic schemes, including a major irrigation project in Helmand province. The Americans’ interest in Afghanistan waned in the 1960s as they were increasingly distracted by their growing involvement in Vietnam.

Even so, the Americans did not give up. The Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (1923–), visited Kabul in 1974 and 1976, and with the rapid decline of British influence after 1945, it was fear of American rather than British meddling that became endemic in Soviet thinking about Afghanistan. Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1970), the First Party Secretary of the Soviet Union, visited Kabul in 1955 and concluded that the Americans were doing all they could to draw Afghanistan into the American camp, because they intended to set up military bases there.²⁴ Such beliefs played a part in the Soviet government’s decision to intervene in Afghanistan in 1979.

After Khrushchev’s visit the Soviets announced a $100 million development loan,²⁵ and thereafter continued to provide loans, grants, training, and technical and military assistance. They also developed their links with the small but fractious Afghan Communist Party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The PDPA quickly split into two viciously rival factions: Parcham (Banner), which had its main support in the cities, and Khalq (People), which drew its main support from the countryside. Throughout the 1970s the Russians devoted much energy to trying to dissuade these two factions from destroying one another. They were to have little success and the feud was to poison Afghan politics for the next twenty years.

The violent events which were now to convulse Afghanistan’s domestic politics presented the Russians with great opportunities and even greater headaches.

Daud had been waiting in the wings since Zahir Shah had sacked him in 1963. In July 1973, while Zahir was on holiday in Italy, Daud deposed him in a bloodless coup, supported by leading members of the PDPA and a group of Communist officers whose names will crop again in this story: Kadyr, Watanjar, and Gulabzoi. Those of Zahir’s relatives who were still in Kabul—one of the princesses was halfway through her wedding—were bundled unceremoniously out of the country. The Soviet Union recognised the new regime two days later. Despite their connections with the Communists, the Russians claim, reasonably convincingly, that they had no part in Daud’s coup.

Zahir Shah’s constitution prohibited members of the royal family from holding a government ministry. So Daud abolished the monarchy and declared himself President and Prime Minister. He denounced the previous decade as a period of ‘false democracy’ and promised ‘revolutionary reforms’. His new government contained members of the PDPA.

More forceful than Zahir, Daud ruled with a rod of iron. The freedom of the parties and the students was curtailed. A former prime minister died mysteriously in prison. There were hundreds of arrests and five political executions, the first in more than forty years. In 1977 Daud pushed through a new constitution which turned Afghanistan into a presidential one-party state, in which only his own party, the National Revolutionary Party, was allowed to operate.

Soon Daud’s spies started to tell him that the Muslim youth organisations and extreme factions among the Communists were plotting his overthrow. He began to move against both. Moscow did its best to get the Communists to support Daud, and warned Daud against pushing his repressions too far. Neither the Communists nor Daud took much notice.

In the summer of 1975 Hekmatyar and other Afghan Muslim leaders, backed by the Pakistani prime minister, Zulfikar Bhutto, launched a series of risings, which were easily suppressed by the government. The leaders were executed, imprisoned, or fled to Pakistan, where they were taken under the wing of the Pakistani Intelligence Service. Many of the survivors—Rabbani, Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Masud—had studied together at Kabul University. They later played a major role in the struggle against the Russians. This did not stop them manoeuvring and occasionally fighting viciously against one another, a conflict which broke out with such violence after the Russians left Afghanistan in 1989 that it practically destroyed the country and persuaded the war-weary people that anything—in this case the Taliban, the radical young Islamic fundamentalists who emerged in the early 1990s—would be preferable to a peculiarly murderous civil war.

Daud’s main aims were to build up the internal power of the state at home and its international position abroad. The instrument of both was the army, which he took great pains to strengthen. The Americans refused to help him, so he reinforced the previous practice of seeking arms and training from the Russians. Thousands of Afghan officers and military specialists studied in establishments scattered across some seventy Soviet cities.

But Daud was well aware that a small country should try not to rely too heavily on any one source of outside assistance: he is reputed to have said that his aim was to light his American cigarette with a Russian match.²⁶ He strengthened his relations with the Shah of Iran, who offered him $2 billion on easy terms. The Saudis said they would help him only if he reduced his links with the Soviet Union. He increased his surveillance on the leftist parties, closed several of their publishing houses, purged leftist officials from the government, and released from prison some of the conservative politicians who had languished there since the coup of 1973. Outbreaks of armed opposition from the right, not always distinguishable from banditry, nevertheless occurred in several provinces.

Meanwhile the Soviets continued to increase their support for Daud. Afghan-Soviet trade trebled. There were many more high-level exchanges between Kabul and Moscow. Nikita Khrushchev visited Afghanistan again in 1960, his successor Leonid Brezhnev (1906–82) in 1964. The Treaty of Neutrality and Non-Aggression was renewed for another ten years.

In April 1977 Daud visited Moscow, where he signed a twelve-year agreement for the development of bilateral Soviet–Afghan economic and trade relations. But his meeting with Brezhnev ended in a row. Brezhnev told him to stop leaning towards the West and said he should expel the numerous Western advisers in Afghanistan. Daud stormed out, saying that he was the President of an independent country and would part with his foreign advisers only when he himself decided they were no longer necessary.

He now began to look for ways out of his dependence on the Soviet Union. The US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, met Daud in Vienna in October 1977 and invited him to visit the United States. The Americans began to increase their credits and grants to Afghanistan. In January 1978 the US Embassy in Kabul reported that the relationship with Afghanistan was excellent. Daud had accepted Vance’s invitation. Finance for the US military training programme had been doubled to offset—at least in part—Soviet assistance to the Soviet armed forces. And the Afghan government was cooperating, so the embassy said, in the struggle against narcotics.

This rising trend was reversed by the Communist coup of 1978, which brought to power a government determined to turn Afghanistan into a modern socialist state in a matter of years using the techniques perfected by Stalin in Russia and Pol Pot in Cambodia.

Paradise Lost

By the 1970s Afghanistan had many of the rudiments of a modern state. It was reasonably secure, and you could travel and picnic and see the sights with comparatively little risk. Foreigners who lived in Kabul in the last days before the Communists took over—diplomats, scholars, businessmen, engineers, teachers, aid workers, hippies—later looked back on that time as a golden age. So did many of the very thin crust of the Afghan middle class who lived in Kabul and some of the big cities.

In the 1970s much of old Kabul still stood, a rabbit warren of streets, bazaars, and mosques, still dominated by the great fortress of Bala Hissar, a place, the Emperor Babur said more than four hundred years earlier, with ‘the most pleasing climate in the world… within a day’s ride it is possible to reach a place where the snow never falls. But within two hours one can go where the snows never melt.’²⁷

In the centre of the city was the imposing Arg, the fortified palace build by Abdur Rahman, the scene of one violent turn in Afghan politics after another. Amanullah, Abdur Rahman’s grandson, commissioned European architects to build him a monumental new capital, a vast palace, the Dar-ul Aman, on the south-western edge of the city; and a summer resort in Paghman, a village in the nearby hills, complete with Swiss chalets, a theatre, an Arc de Triomphe, a golf course, and a racecourse for elephants. Across the road from the Dar-ul Aman palace stood the Kabul museum, which was opened in 1924 and contained one of the richest collections of Central Asia art and artefacts in the world: flint tools forty thousand years old from Badakhshan, a massive gold hoard from Bagram, glass from Alexandria, Graeco-Roman statuary, ivory panels from India, Islamic and pre-Islamic artefacts from Afghanistan itself, one of the largest coin collections in the world, and more than two thousand rare books. A grandiose British Embassy, built in the 1920s as a symbol of British power, lay on the northern edge of the city. An equally large Soviet Embassy lay in the south-west on the road to the Dar-ul Aman.

‘Kabul’, said a guidebook sponsored by the Afghan Tourist Bureau, ‘is a fast-growing city where tall modern buildings nuzzle against bustling bazaars and wide avenues fill with brilliant flowing turbans, gayly [sic] striped chapans, mini-skirted school girls, a multitude of handsome faces and streams of whizzing traffic.’²⁸

Those were the days when Kabul was on the Hippie Trail and thousands of romantic, adventurous, and often improvident young people poured along the road from Iran through Herat and Kabul to India, driving battered vehicles which regularly broke down and had to be repaired by ingenious local mechanics, seeking enlightenment, drugs, and sex, living on nothing and sometimes dying on the way.

But behind that fragile façade lay the real Afghanistan, a land of devout and simple Muslims, where disputes between individuals, or families, or clans and tribes, were still settled in the old violent way, where women were still subject to the absolute authority of their menfolk, where the writ of the government in Kabul barely ran, and where the idea of national rather than family or local loyalty was barely formed.

Andrew Abram travelled to Kabul in 1975 and described what he saw: ‘Plane loads of young American and European tourists with their carefully shampooed waist length hair, wearing “ethnic” Afghan costume (which I haven’t yet seen any Afghans wearing), custom made Afghan boots, sequinned waistcoats, and custom made leather money pouches on each custom made leather belt. All looking pretty much identical and wandering around Chicken Street [the tourist shopping bazaar] looking for expensive souvenirs to show Mom and Pop at the country club before they jet off to their next sanitised travel experience. In the evening they return to their hippie style hotels to eat Western food from an extensive Western, misspelled, menu and smoke Hashish supplied by the smiling management… What a wasted opportunity to see how another culture lives. If they were to take a walk past the miles of export carpet shops and camel burger stalls they would reach the old city on the banks of the Kabul River and see part of the real Afghanistan. The old part of the city, which extends half way up the sides of the surrounding hills, is just like Herat, bazaars and filth, teeming with people. Shops selling anything and everything, factories making shoes and buckets from old car tyres, stalls with real, and good, Afghan food at low prices.’²⁹

The hippies departed with the arrival of the Soviets in 1979. But apart from the influx of foreign soldiers and some incidental damage during the fighting, life in Kabul continued comparatively unchanged in many ways. ‘Even at that time,’ one woman wrote, ‘we still went to school. Women worked as professors and doctors and in government. We went for picnics and parties, wore jeans and short skirts and I thought I would go to university like my mother and work for my living.’³⁰ Jonathan Steele, a British journalist who was there at the time, later wrote, ‘In 1981, Kabul’s two campuses thronged with women students, as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras and music centres. The Russians did nothing to stop this vibrant private enterprise.’³¹

A few months after the Russians left, one journalist reported that Kabul, ‘although still a city at war, had almost a festive air. It was June, the wedding month, flowers and blossoms perfuming the air, the Kabul River swollen with molten snows, and I had sat in the sunshine licking ice-creams in the University café with lively young women in high heels, some with dyed blonde hair, one even wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “I’m not with this idiot” tightly pulled across her large breasts. At the apartment of a bureaucrat I had met, I had danced at a party where a well-known singer called Wajiha had strummed at her guitar in between puffs of her cigarette. The only real signs of war, apart from the large number of men—and women—in uniform and the drone of planes, had been the dawn queues at the bakers as people waited for the daily rations of five pieces of nan per family and the music and ideological commentary blaring from the loudspeakers hung in trees around the city which bizarrely sometimes included work-out classes and the theme from Love Story.’³²

But by then paradise was already doomed. Kabul was reduced to ruins by the civil war which broke out after the Russian departure and the old life was swept away by the arrival of the Taliban, which brought the civil war to an end. The palaces and the hotels were destroyed, the museum looted, music, dancing, and women’s education all brought to nothing.

On 27 April 1978 President Daud was bloodily overthrown by the Afghan Communists, the innocuous-sounding People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The victors called it the ‘April Revolution’, the beginning of a new age which would transform their country. More than a decade later Russians were still arguing whether it had been a proper revolution or only a coup. But General Lyakhovski, the chronicler of the war that followed in which he himself served for five years, had a starker name. For him the April coup was the beginning of tragedy not only for Afghanistan, but for the Soviet Union as well.¹

Several accounts maintain that the PDPA leaders were closely linked to the Soviet KGB from the start and that most of them were directly under Soviet control.² But reliable evidence that the Russians were behind the coup is lacking. Vladimir Kryuchkov was in charge of the KGB’s external operations at the time and was a leading figure in the formulation of Soviet policy on Afghanistan until he was arrested after the unsuccessful coup in 1991 against President Gorbachev (1931–); he claimed that the KGB had nothing to do with it.³ Kryuchkov was perhaps not the most obviously reliable witness, but other Russians in some position to know back him up.

Whatever the truth—and until the KGB archives are opened nothing can be said for certain—the Afghan Communists were a growing nightmare for the Russians almost from the beginning. Though they had only fifteen hundred members in 1968,⁴ the Russians could not ignore them. They proclaimed their devotion to Marxism and their loyalty to the Soviet Union, and they should have been a great asset inside the complicated politics of Afghanistan. But their political views were crude and unsophisticated. Their Marxist theories, which they propounded at length in writing and on the tribune, had little application in a country which lacked the theoretically essential attribute of an urban proletariat and was about as far from a classical revolutionary situation as it was possible to be. Their solution was to sweep theory aside. They concentrated instead on the seizure and exercise of power.

Even worse, almost from the beginning the party was riven, sometimes murderously, by the feud between its two wings, Parcham and Khalq.

Parcham was made up mainly of urban intellectuals. It was led by Babrak Karmal, a Pushtun and the son of an army general. Karmal studied law at Kabul University and was imprisoned for several years for his part in student politics. He later worked in the ministries of Education and Planning. He helped found the PDPA in 1965 and later became a member of parliament. The Russian military, who kept profiles of the Afghan leaders, said of Karmal that he was ‘emotional, inclined to abstraction to the detriment of concrete analysis. He has little knowledge of or interest in economic matters. He speaks English fluently and knows some German.’⁵

Khalq drew its supporters from the countryside and the Pushtun tribes. Its leaders were Nur Mohamed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin. Taraki learned English while working as a clerk in Bombay as a young man and studied political economy at Kabul University. Amin also studied at Kabul University, spent some time at Columbia University in New York as a postgraduate, and on his return worked as a teacher.

There was some theoretical basis for the division between the factions. Both believed in the goal of a socialist Afghanistan. But the adherents of Parcham thought that Afghanistan was not yet ripe for socialism. That target would have to be achieved gradually, in alliance at least at first with other nationalist and progressive forces. Khalq thought, on the contrary, that the urgent task was to seize power by force. Thereafter socialism could be imposed on Afghanistan in short order, using the methods that Stalin and Mao had applied so successfully in their own backward countries.

Each faction set up its own organisation to work among the military. In 1974 Colonel Kadyr, who had played a significant role in getting rid of the King the previous year and was a firm supporter of Khalq, set up a secret United Front of Afghan Communists within the army, where Khalq became a significant covert force.

Because the Soviet government valued its relationship with the Daud government, the Ambassador and the Chief Soviet Military Adviser were instructed to have no dealings with the PDPA leaders. Relations with them were conducted instead through the KGB representative in Kabul. In January 1974 he was instructed to see Taraki and Karmal separately, and express the Soviet government’s ‘deep alarm’ about the continuing mutual fighting between the leadership of Parcham and Khalq. This, he was told to say, only played into the hands of domestic and foreign enemies. The PDPA should instead ‘combine their efforts at giving comprehensive aid to the republican regime’ of President Daud.⁶

Daud himself was worried about the intrigues of the PDPA within the army and the bureaucracy. In April 1977 he told the Russians that he was concerned ‘about information given him by security agencies of plans supposedly hatched by leftist forces to remove him from power. He stepped up the arrest of activists on left and right, who were incarcerated in the notorious Pul-i Charkhi prison on the eastern outskirts of Kabul. This had been built by Germans according to a Czech design. It was in the form of a ‘snowdrop’: there were eight blocks radiating out like spokes from the centre. The ends of the spokes were joined in a circle by a stone wall. There were guard towers where the spokes joined the wall. From the air the prison looked like the wheel of a wagon. The roofs of the spokes were covered with copper sheeting, which glowed in the evening light with a bloody colour. The prison was guarded by a battalion of three hundred soldiers and four tanks. Executions were carried out in a small square in the central part of the prison; the victims were shot lying face down on the ground, so there were no traces of bullets on the walls. Built to hold five thousand prisoners, by the time of the Soviet invasion it was holding at least twelve thousand.⁷

Under continued Russian pressure, the two factions of the PDPA eventually agreed to reunite. In July 1977 they met in Jalalabad, their first joint meeting in ten years. They elected a new Central Committee and Politburo, and appointed Taraki as their General Secretary and Babrak Karmal as Taraki’s deputy. But the candidacy of the other leading Khalq leader, Amin, was contested. Some of his opponents accused him of having had links with the CIA while he was studying in New York. He replied that he was short of money at the time and that he had merely been stringing the CIA along. The Russians got hold of a transcript of the meeting.⁸ They made much of the accusation when they decided to move against Amin two years later.

Daud’s worries were perfectly justified. By now the PDPA were indeed plotting a coup: Colonel Kadyr was one of the main advocates. On 17 April Mir Akbar Khaibar, a leading ideologist from Parcham, was murdered in suspicious circumstances—some said by the government, others that it was a provocation by Amin. Either way, this was the trigger. Khaibar’s funeral became the occasion for a massive demonstration by tens of thousands of people. The demonstration was roughly put down by the police. Daud ordered the arrest of a number of leaders of the PDPA. Taraki, Karmal, and others were taken in on the night of 25 April. Amin avoided arrest for long enough to pass the signal for a coup to his people in the army through Mohamed Gulabzoi, a young air-force lieutenant who figured largely in the politics leading up to the Soviet invasion and for many years thereafter.

The Communists Take Power

The Khalqists in the army acted the next day. The first to move was the 4th Tank Brigade, which was stationed by the Pul-i Charkhi prison. The brigade was commanded by an officer fiercely loyal to Daud. But the Chief of Staff, Mohamed Rafi, and two of the battalion commanders, Mohamed Aslam Watanjar and Shirjan Masduriar, were key members of the PDPA and central to the plot. Watanjar persuaded his commander that in view of the unrest in the city his ten tanks should be armed, so that they could go to support Daud if necessary.

At about midday the first column of tanks arrived outside the Arg, the presidential palace in the centre of the city. It was constructed like a fortress and guarded by two thousand soldiers with tanks. Watanjar ordered the first shell to be fired at the palace at twelve o’clock exactly. Daud was holding a cabinet meeting. He told his ministers to save their lives and leave. The ministers of Defence and Internal Affairs slipped out the back to organise resistance. But troops loyal to the Khalq were already seizing key points throughout the city and by evening the 4th Brigade had been joined by commando units. Troops loyal to Daud were neutralised, the arrested PDPA leaders were liberated, and aircraft from the base at Bagram began bombing the palace.

The large Soviet Embassy on the southern edge of the city was caught in the crossfire. The women and children were safely shepherded into the cellars, even though bullets were already flying around the embassy compound, where one anti-tank shell hit a tree. But no one was hurt.⁹

That evening a group of commandos broke into the palace and demanded that Daud lay down his arms. Daud shot and wounded their commander. In the ensuing firefight—or, according to some reports, cold-bloodedly after the fight was over—Daud and all the members of his family were killed. The Minister of Defence was killed when the division he was leading into the city to oppose the insurgents was dive-bombed. After a good deal of further fighting elsewhere in Kabul, resistance had ceased by the following morning. Power passed to the PDPA at the cost of forty-three dead among the military and others among the civilian population. One of those wounded was Mohamed Gulabzoi. It was the bloodiest so far of the twentieth-century changes of power in Afghanistan.

Though the Soviets have been accused of standing behind the coup, it is not clear how much if anything they knew about it. Despite their worries about Daud’s flirtations with the West, the Soviets’ policy of friendship with the Afghan government currently in power had paid off in the past, and there was no particular reason to assume that it could not be satisfactorily managed in the future. The coup came like a bolt from the blue to Soviet officials in Kabul, including the KGB representative. The PDPA leaders had neither informed nor consulted them, since they believed that their plans would not be approved by Moscow.¹⁰ Brezhnev’s diplomatic adviser, Andrei Aleksandrov-Agentov, later claimed later that Brezhnev had learned of the coup through foreign press reports. General Gorelov, the Chief Soviet Military Adviser, said that the first he knew of the coup was when he came into his Kabul office that morning, heard shooting, and rang the Soviet adviser with the 4th Tank Brigade to ask what was going on.¹¹ Others say that the KGB had been working with people in the PDPA to bring about a coup, but had assumed it would not take place until August. It may be that, once again, the Soviet right hand did not know what the left hand was up to. In the end it did not matter much. Once the coup had taken place, the Soviet government had little choice but to give the new Communist government their full support.

The new leaders immediately set up a Revolutionary Council as the supreme political organ of the new Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Taraki was named Head of State and Prime Minister, Karmal became his deputy, and Amin the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Watanjar, Rafi, and Kadyr were all given government posts. Although the portfolios were evenly distributed between Khalq and Parcham, Amin retained his influential links in the army.

On 9 May the new government issued a radical programme of social, political, and economic reform. ‘The Main Outlines of the Revolutionary Tasks’ proclaimed the eradication of illiteracy; equality for women; an end to ethnic discrimination; a larger role for the state in the national economy; and the abolition of ‘feudal and pre-feudal relationships’—code for the power of landowners, traditional leaders, and mullahs, especially in the countryside. As for Islam, when Kryuchkov visited Kabul on a fact-finding mission in July 1978, the new President, Taraki, told him to come back in a year, by which time the mosques would be empty.¹² It was all a measure of how far out of touch the new regime was with the realities of their own country.

A woman was appointed to a top political position for the first time in modern Afghan history. Anakhita Ratebzad (1930–), a doctor by training, was one of four women members of the Afghan parliament in 1965, a founding member of the PDPA, and a member of Parcham. Her first husband had been Zahir Shah’s personal physician. Now she was the partner of Babrak Karmal. In the Kabul Times on 28 May, immediately after the coup, she stated firmly, ‘Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country… Educating and enlightening women are now the subject of close government attention.’ A striking person in her own right, she succeeded in charming some of the most senior Soviet officials in Kabul, and they took care to remain on good terms with her as long as Karmal was in power.

The Soviet authorities were distinctly uneasy about what had happened. The Soviet Ambassador, Alexander Puzanov, attempted at the end of May to draw the threads together in a letter to Moscow. He argued that the failed politics of the Daud regime had led to ‘an abrupt sharpening of the contradictions between the Daud regime and its class supporters and the fundamental interests of the working masses, the voice of which is the PDPA’. The actions of the PDPA had been ‘met with approval by the popular masses’. This crude piece of Marxist analysis was characteristic of much of Moscow’s thinking about a country where it was almost totally inapplicable, a cast of thought which underlay some of the Russians’ later policy mistakes.

Puzanov nevertheless conceded that the continuing friction between Khalq and Parcham was already undermining the effectiveness of the new regime. This was a crucial weakness, and he and his specialist party advisers had told the new leadership that they must eliminate their differences. This, he admitted, had not yet happened. Nevertheless, he optimistically concluded that the overall situation was stabilising as the government took measures against the domestic reaction.¹³

His optimism was misplaced. The new government’s programme was a mixture of typical Communist nostrums and some admirable aspirations. The new men had little or no practical experience in government. Whatever attractions the programme might have had in theory, it was not thought through and the people, especially in the villages, where most Afghans lived, were almost entirely unprepared for it. The promotion of women’s liberation and education for girls, laudable as it was in principle, came up against the same fiercely conservative prejudices which had plagued Afghanistan’s reforming kings. Revolts against the new regime began straight away, in both the towns and the villages. The countryside began to slip out of control.

The new government was nothing if not determined, however, and when persuasion failed it used ruthless measures of repression. It targeted not only known members of the opposition but also local leaders and mullahs who had committed no crime. Several generals, two former prime ministers, and others who had been close to Daud—up to forty in all—were executed immediately. Nine months after the coup, ninety-seven men from the influential Mojadedi clan were executed. The Islamists who had been imprisoned by Daud in the Pul-i Charkhi prison in Kabul were executed in June 1979.¹⁴

In their fanaticism, and in their belief that a deeply conservative and proudly independent country could be forced into modernity at the point of a gun, the Afghan Communists resembled the Pol Pot regime. Unlike in Cambodia, however, in Afghanistan the people were not prepared to be treated in this way by their government. Previous rulers, such as Abdur Rahman, had imposed their authority throughout the country—more or less—by the most brutal methods. But they could make a plausible claim to be good Muslims, after a fashion. The Afghan Communists made the fatal mistake of underestimating the power of Islam and its hold on the people.

The Soviet Leaders Devise a Policy

The shocking news of the Herat rising on 15 March 1979 reached the embassy in Kabul and the Soviet leadership in Moscow in a fragmentary form, and was further confused by the self-interested accounts they were fed by the Afghan authorities. Valeri Ivanov, a senior Soviet economic advisor in Kabul, spent most of that day trying to get through to the Soviet experts in Herat. He managed to speak to the boss of the twenty-five Soviet construction workers there, a Georgian whose name was something like Magradze. The telephone kept on breaking down, but Ivanov could get a clear enough idea of what was happening. The mob was on the rampage, armed with pikes, staves, and knives. They were out for blood and, as they got closer, Magradze kept repeating, ‘Help us!’

There was little enough that Ivanov could do. But the men and their families were rescued by the senior Soviet military adviser in Kabul, Stanislav Katichev, and Shah Navaz Tanai, an Afghan officer who later became Minister of Defence. They sent an Afghan special forces unit with an old T-34 tank, a lorry, and a bus to evacuate the specialists and their families. The tank broke down on the way to the airport. By then, however, the crowd had been left behind and the refugees were flown to Kabul, wearing only what they stood up in. They were housed in the embassy school until they could be sent home. Ivanov’s wife, Galina, helped collect clothes for them.¹⁵

Not everyone was so lucky. A Soviet wool buyer called Yuri Bogdanov lived with his pregnant wife, Alevtina, in a villa. When the crowd attacked, Bogdanov threw his wife over the wall to his Afghan neighbours. She broke her leg, but was hidden by the Afghans and survived. Bogdanov was butchered. A military adviser with the 17th Afghan Division, Major Nikolai Bizyukov, was also torn to pieces when part of the division mutinied. A Soviet oil expert was killed by a stray bullet when he went out into the street to see what was going on. Although the Western press and some Western historians continued to maintain that up to a hundred Soviet citizens were massacred, the total number of Soviet casualties in Herat seems to have been no more than three. They appear to have had no influence on the decisions which the Soviet government then took.¹⁶

On hearing the news of the rising Andrei Gromyko (1909–89), the elderly Soviet Foreign Minister (he was seventy and had been in the job since 1957), telephoned Amin to find out what was going on. Amin claimed that the situation in Afghanistan was normal, that the army was in control, and that all the governors were loyal. Soviet help would be useful, he said, but the regime was in no danger. Gromyko found his ‘Olympian calm’ irritating. A mere three hours later, the chargé d’affaires in Kabul and the Chief Soviet Military Adviser, General Gorelov, rang through with a quite different and much less optimistic picture. The government forces in Herat, they said, had evidently collapsed or gone over to the rebels, who were now said to be backed by thousands of Muslim fanatics, and by saboteurs and terrorists trained and armed by the Pakistanis, the Iranians, the Chinese, and the Americans.

The Politburo met on 17 March. Neither the Soviet Union nor its elderly leadership were in a good shape to cope with the crisis that was now thrust upon them. By the 1970s the Soviet Union was already decaying from within. Its institutions were essentially the same as those which Stalin had forged, but they were ill-adapted to an increasingly complex world. Perceptive observers, even inside the Soviet government, could see the extent of the decline only too clearly. But few people drew any far-reaching conclusions. In 1979 the Soviet Union looked to the West as though it would remain a serious military and ideological threat for a long time to come.

The leaders were gloomy, cautious, and hampered by the fact that they had little idea what was actually happening. The main opinions were voiced by Gromyko, by the Prime Minister, Aleksei Kosygin, by the Defence Minister, Dmitri Ustinov (1908–84), and by the Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov (1914–84). These were all able men. But they were of Gromyko’s generation, they too had begun their careers under Stalin, and their thinking was still locked in the orthodox Marxist-Leninist stereotypes of the day. They were not to be looked to for innovative solutions.

Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, did not join in the initial discussions, although several of the participants consulted him individually. He had been in power for fifteen years and more. His health was already failing, and towards the end he became a figure of fun, in private of course, to the wits of the Moscow intelligentsia. But whatever the state of his health in the last year or two of his life, at this stage he still retained his authority and his word was in the end decisive.

For four long days the leaders worried away at some almost intractable problems. What was the real Soviet interest in Afghanistan? What could the Russians do about the deviousness, brutality, and incompetence of their Communist allies in Kabul? How should they react to Kabul’s increasingly desperate pleas for Soviet troops to help put down the insurgency?

And all the time they had in their minds the Cold War background which in so many ways underlay and distorted the policymaking process in Moscow, just as it did in the capitals of the West. Brezhnev had hoped that détente, the relaxation of tension with the West, would figure as one of the great achievements in his historical legacy. Things had started well enough. The Helsinki Treaty of 1975 seemed to offer a way of reducing tension and regulating the East–West relationship in Europe. The SALT II negotiations for further limitations on US and Soviet stocks of intercontinental ballistic missiles were moving towards completion. But then things had started to go wrong. The likelihood that the Senate would ratify SALT II was receding. The row over the deployment by the Russians of SS-20 medium-range missiles in Europe was growing, as the Americans sought with increasing success to persuade their European allies to allow the matching deployment of their Pershing II missiles.

More pertinently, the Americans would surely not take lying down their humiliation in Iran, where their close ally the Shah had been ousted. Might they not see Afghanistan as some kind of substitute for Iran as a base from which to threaten the Soviet Union? Might they not move into Afghanistan if the Soviets moved out? They had sent a carrier battle group into the western Indian Ocean, ostensibly in case of more trouble in Iran; but might the ships not be equally useful to further American intentions in Afghanistan as well? The Russians did not of course know that the Americans had been considering how to support the Afghan rebellion against the Communists even before the Herat rising. But the logic of the Cold War meant they were in any case bound to react to American moves on their sensitive southern border, just as the Americans had been bound to react when the Russians put offensive missiles in Cuba. The Russians could no more abandon Afghanistan than the Americans had felt able to abandon Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s. These painful parallels did not make it any easier for the Russian leaders to reach decisions in a situation which risked ending badly whatever they did.

The men in the Politburo were in no doubt that the Soviet Union would have to stick with Afghanistan come what may. The two countries had been close for sixty years and it would be a major blow to Soviet policy if Afghanistan was now lost. The trouble was that, as they started their discussions on that March day, they still had little idea what was happening on the ground. The Afghan leaders were not being frank about the true state of affairs, complained Kosygin. He demanded that Ambassador Puzanov should be sacked, and suggested that Ustinov or General Ogarkov, the Chief of Staff, should go to Kabul immediately to discover exactly what was happening.

Ustinov sidestepped the proposal. Amin, he said, had abandoned his earlier optimism and was now demanding that the Soviet Union should save the regime. But why had it come to that? Most of the soldiers in the Afghan army were devout Muslims and that was why they were deserting to the rebels. Why had the Afghan government not taken sufficient account of the religious factor earlier?

Andropov added a devastatingly bleak analysis. The main problem was the weakness of the Afghan leadership. They were still busy shooting their opponents and then had the cheek to argue that in Lenin’s day the Soviets had also shot people. They had no idea what forces they could rely on. They had failed to explain their position either to the army or to the people at large. It was perfectly clear that Afghanistan was not ripe for socialism: religion was a tremendous force, the peasants were almost completely illiterate, the economy was backward. Lenin had set out the necessary elements of a revolutionary situation. None were present in Afghanistan. Tanks could not solve what was essentially a political problem. If the revolution in Afghanistan could only be sustained with Soviet bayonets, that was a route down which the Soviet Union should not go.

Gromyko was beginning to boil over. The lack of seriousness with which the Afghan leaders treated complicated matters was like something out of a detective story. The mood of the Afghan army was still unclear. Suppose the Afghan army came out against the legitimate government and against any forces the Soviet Union might send in? Then, as he delicately put it, ‘the situation would become extremely complex’. Even if the Afghan army remained neutral, the Soviet forces would have to occupy the country. The impact on Soviet foreign policy would be disastrous. Everything the Soviet Union had done in recent years to reduce international tension and promote arms control would be undermined. It would be a splendid present for the Chinese. All the non-aligned countries would come out against the Soviet Union. The hoped-for meeting between Brezhnev and President Carter (1924–) and the forthcoming visit of the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, would be put in question. And all the Soviet Union would get in exchange was Afghanistan, with its inadequate and unpopular government, its backward economy, and its insignificant weight in international affairs.

Moreover, Gromyko confessed, the legal basis for any Soviet military intervention was shaky. Under the UN Charter, a country could ask for external assistance if it had been the victim of aggression. But there had been no such aggression. What was going on was an internal struggle, a fight within the revolution, of one group of the population against another.

Andropov weighed in forcefully. If Soviet forces went in, they would find themselves fighting against the people, suppressing the people, firing upon the people. The Soviet Union would look like aggressors. That was unacceptable. Kosygin and Ustinov agreed. Ustinov went on to report that the Soviet military were already doing some prudent contingency planning. Two divisions were being formed in the Turkestan Military District and another in the Central Asian Military District. Three regiments could be sent into Afghanistan at short notice. The 105th Airborne Division and a regiment of motorised infantry could be sent at twenty-four hours’ notice. Ustinov asked for permission to deploy troops to the Afghan frontier and carry out tactical exercises there to underline that Soviet forces were at high readiness. He was, he nevertheless reassured his listeners, as much against the idea of sending troops into Afghanistan as everyone else. Anyway, the Afghans had ten divisions of troops, and that should be quite enough to deal with the rebels.

As for the Afghans’ demand for Soviet troops, the more the Soviet leaders thought about it, the less they liked it. No one had entirely ruled it out. But when they put the arguments to Brezhnev, he made it clear that he was opposed to intervention, remarking sourly that the Afghan army was falling to bits and that the Afghans expected the Soviets to fight their war for them. You

And so the final conclusion was that the Soviet Union should send military supplies and some small units to ‘assist the Afghan army to overcome its difficulties’. Five hundred specialists from the Ministry of Defence and the KGB would reinforce the five hundred and fifty who were already in Afghanistan. The Russians would supply 100,000 tons of grain, increase the price paid for Afghan gas, and waive interest payments on existing loans. They would protest to the Pakistani government about its interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Two divisions should go down to the border. But no Soviet troops should be sent to Afghanistan itself.¹⁷

The next day Kosygin rang Taraki to tell him of the Politburo’s conclusions. By now the initial complacency of the Afghan leaders had given way to panic. Five thousand men of the Herat garrison, said Taraki, had gone over to the rebels with their weapons, ammunition, and supplies. The government forces now numbered only five hundred men, who were defending themselves at Herat airfield. If Soviet troops and weapons were not forthcoming, Herat would fall within twenty-four hours, and the rebels would march on Kandahar and on Kabul itself.

Naively arguing from Marxist first principles, Kosygin suggested that the government should arm the workers, the petty bourgeoisie, and the white-collar workers in Herat. They should emulate the Iranians, who had thrown out the Americans with no outside help. Could the Afghan government not raise, say, fifty thousand students, peasants, and workers in Kabul, and arm them with additional weapons supplied by Moscow?

Taraki pointed out drily that there were very few workers even in Kabul. The rest were under the influence of Islamic propaganda, which denounced the government as heathen. The Afghan army simply did not have enough trained crews to man more tanks and aircraft, even if the Soviets supplied them. He suggested that the Soviets place Afghan markings on their own tanks and aircraft, man them with Central Asian soldiers who could speak Afghan languages, airlift them to Kabul, and advance from there on Herat. Kosygin said the subterfuge would become known immediately; the Politburo would have to discuss all this. Taraki responded that, while the Politburo talked, Herat would fall.

Taraki was summoned to Moscow for talks and arrived on Monday 20 March. That morning Afghan government forces recaptured Herat, so the immediate pressure was off. His first meeting was with Kosygin, Ustinov, Gromyko, and Ponomarev, the long-standing head of the International Department of the Central Committee. Kosygin emphasised the deep, continuing, and unconditional nature of the relationship between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. But the Afghan government should not give the impression that it could only solve its problems by calling in Soviet troops. That would undermine its authority in the eyes of the people, spoil relations between Afghanistan and neighbouring countries, and injure the country’s international prestige. If Soviet soldiers came to Afghanistan, they would find themselves fighting Afghans, and the Afghan people would never forgive them. The Vietnamese had defended their country against the Americans and the Chinese without relying on foreign soldiers; Afghanistan could do the same. The Russians would help by providing military supplies and massive political support against the country’s foreign enemies: Pakistan, Iran, China, and the United States.

Taraki agreed that politics were key. He claimed—against the evidence—that the mass of the people supported the government and its reforms. But this had incensed the reactionaries in Iran and Pakistan, who had accused the Kabul government of betraying Islam, and had stirred up a campaign of subversion against it.

What the Afghan army needed urgently, said Taraki, was armoured helicopters, armoured vehicles, communications equipment, and the people to operate and maintain them. Ustinov replied that the Russians would supply twelve helicopters. But they would not supply pilots and crews. Kosygin pointed out that the Vietnamese had managed to operate the equipment they received on their own. Unfortunately, countered Taraki, many of the Soviet-trained officers were politically unreliable: ‘Muslim brothers’ or Chinese sympathisers.

That, said Kosygin, was something Taraki would have to sort out for himself. He gave Taraki a word of friendly advice: the Afghan government should broaden its political base. In a coded reference to the massive shootings and torture which had so exercised the Politburo, he added, ‘In Stalin’s time, many of our officers were put in jail. And when the war broke out, Stalin was forced to send them to the front. These people showed themselves to be true heroes. Many of them rose to high rank. We are not interfering in your internal affairs, but we want to express our opinion regarding the necessity of behaving solicitously toward cadres.’

Taraki did not pick up this point, but concluded sourly that it looked as if the Russians would give his government every assistance, short of a guarantee against aggression. If an armed invasion of Afghanistan took place, Kosygin countered, a completely different situation would arise. He then hurried Taraki off to his meeting with Brezhnev.¹⁸

Brezhnev described that meeting to his colleagues two days later. Taraki had arrived in Moscow ‘in a somewhat excited condition, but during the discussion he gradually cheered up and towards the end he behaved calmly and sensibly’. Brezhnev had told him firmly that the government must broaden its political base and stop shooting people. He had emphasised yet again that in the present circumstances the Soviets would send no troops. So far, the Politburo agreed, so good.¹⁹

On 1 April Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov and Ponomarev submitted a policy document. For the most part it simply summarised the arguments and conclusions which had already been adopted. Although it was overlaid with a heavy dose of orthodox Marxist jargon, the analysis was sober and realistic enough. The problem, it said, was primarily political. Afghanistan had not been ripe for a full-blown socialist revolution in the first place. The leaders of the new regime were not up to their tasks. They were inexperienced and prone to excess. They were bloodily divided among themselves; they had alienated the Islamic clergy, the party, the army, and the administration by their ruthless repression of real and imagined dissent; and they had pressed ahead too fast with half-baked socialist reforms which had backfired among the very people they were supposed to benefit. They should now broaden their political base: they should allow religious freedom except to those who worked against the government; they should observe the rule of law even when suppressing subversion; they should draw up a constitution to strengthen democratic rights and regulate the activities of the state organs. These thoughts remained a consistent part of Soviet policy. Gorbachev picked them up in 1985, and the last Communist leader of Afghanistan, Najibullah (1947–96), tried to implement them with the Policy of National Reconciliation which he launched in January 1987. By then it was too late.

The paper recommended that the Soviets should continue to supply military weapons and equipment, and train the Afghan army and security organs to use them properly. They should help the Afghans to develop a viable economy. But the government should remain firm in its refusal to send Soviet military units to Afghanistan—even if there were further unrest in Afghanistan, which could not be ruled out.

This was not a bad policy as far as it went. But it came under increasing pressure throughout the summer of 1979. The Kabul government entirely failed to mend its ways. Internecine strife festered on within the PDPA, and arbitrary arrests and executions continued on a massive scale. In June Taraki and Amin moved decisively against Parcham, a number of whose leaders were sent into honourable exile as ambassadors: Nur to Washington, Wakil to London, Anakhita Ratebzad to Belgrade, Najibullah to Tehran. Lesser figures such as Keshtmand, Rafi, and Kadyr were arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death, though the sentences were commuted to imprisonment when the Soviets protested.²⁰

And though there was nothing on the scale of the Herat rising, unrest continued to spread throughout the country. At the end of April, Afghan soldiers loyal to the government massacred hundreds of men in the village of Kerala in Kunar province following guerrilla attacks in the area. Unconvincing rumours said that the soldiers were under the command of Soviet advisers in Afghan uniform. On 9 May there were massive risings in six provinces, including the province of Kabul. On 23 June there was a rising for the first time in the capital. Several thousand people demonstrated against the regime, many from the minority group of Hazaras armed with knives, rifles, and machine guns. On 20 July rebels attempted to occupy Gardez, the capital of the province of Paktia: two Soviet advisers were killed. On 5 August, a commando battalion mutinied at Bala Hissar, the ancient fortress on the outskirts of Kabul. The rebels were stopped in their tracks by forces loyal to the government.²¹ On 11 August a government infantry division suffered heavy losses when it was attacked; some of the survivors went over to the rebels.

These rebellions were put down more or less successfully by government forces. But by midsummer the government controlled perhaps no more than half the country.²²

Taraki had barely got back to Kabul after his meeting with the Politburo in March before the stream of requests from the Afghan government started up again: requests for attack helicopters, requests for fighting vehicles, requests for guns and ammunition. These all fell within the limits of agreed policy and the Soviets did their best to meet them.

But other requests certainly did not. The Afghans began yet again to plead with the Soviet government to send its own troops, disguised if necessary in Afghan uniforms. On 14 April they asked for up to twenty helicopters with crews. On 16 June they asked for armoured troops to guard government buildings and the airports at Bagram and Shindand. On 11 July they asked for Soviet special forces battalions to come to Kabul. On 19 July they asked for a couple of divisions. The requests continued and multiplied throughout August.²³

During these months the Soviet military were divided. Some senior officers were opposed to intervention. But others, including Ustinov, were not. In the circumstances the general staff did what general staffs do: they made plans, they raised troops, they began training appropriate to the conditions that the troops would face if they were ever sent to Afghanistan, and they started to deploy resources to the border. In May General Bogdanov, a senior staff officer, tried his hand at a plan for the introduction of Soviet forces into Afghanistan. He concluded that six divisions would be needed. A colleague who saw his plan advised him to lock it away: ‘Otherwise we’ll be accused of violating the sovereignty of a neighbouring state.’ The plan was brought out of the safe at the beginning of December. But instead of six divisions, the Russians at first sent three, then later added one more.²⁴

The first troops had already arrived. In February 1979 the American Ambassador, Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped by terrorists, imprisoned in a Kabul hotel, and killed in a botched attempt by government forces to release him. The Russians sent KGB protection squads to Kabul to protect their own senior officials there.²⁵

Following the Politburo’s decisions in April, elements of the 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division and the 108th Motor-rifle Division began moving towards the Afghan frontier under the guise of training exercises. General Yepishev, the Chief of the Main Political Administration of the Soviet Defence Ministry, who had helped prepare the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, visited Kabul to give advice and promise military supplies. Taraki and Amin again asked for Soviet troops and were again turned down. The numbers of Soviet transport aircraft flying in and out of Bagram sharply increased. Soviet military and civilian advisers continued to pour into Afghanistan. Rumours persisted that Soviet servicemen were flying helicopters and operating tanks on combat missions. Soviet frontier troops were increasingly involved in clashes with rebel groups along the Afghan border.²⁶

Another military delegation followed in August under General Pavlovski, who had commanded the force which invaded Czechoslovakia. Pavlovski’s main task was to review the state of the Afghan army and its operation against the rebels, and to make recommendations to Amin. On the eve of his departure Pavlovski asked Defence Minister Ustinov if it was planned to introduce Soviet forces into Afghanistan. ‘In no circumstances!’ the minister answered categorically.²⁷ Pavlovski remained in Kabul until 22 October and was a close witness of the events which led to the overthrow of Taraki by Amin.

Many of the Afghan requests for troops came through the Soviet representatives in Kabul—the ambassador, Puzanov; the Chief Soviet Military Adviser, Gorelov; and the KGB representative, Ivanov. As often happens, the people on the spot were sometimes more sympathetic to their clients’ predicament than to the views of their principals, and often supported the Afghan requests, or at least forwarded them without comment. Within a week of Yepishev’s visit, Amin asked Gorelov to forward a request for helicopters with crews. Ogarkov, the Chief of Staff, minuted on Gorelov’s report: ‘That should not be done.’ The Politburo agreed, and Gorelov was told to remind the Afghans of the reasons why the request had been turned down. When Pavlovski arrived, Amin asked him if the Russians could send a division to Kabul. It would not be expected to take part in combat, but it would free an Afghan division to tackle the rebels on the ground. This request, too, was turned down. A month later Gorelov, Puzanov, and Ivanov came up with an idea of their own. The Soviets should set up a military training centre near Kabul on the lines of the one they had in Cuba—a somewhat disingenuous proposal, since everyone knew that the ‘training centre’ in Cuba consisted of a brigade of combat troops.²⁸

Military Preparations

For its part the Soviet Ministry of Defence had already quietly begun to take measures directly related to the possibility of combat in Afghanistan. In April 1979 its Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie, or GRU) ordered the creation of a special battalion, based in Tashkent in Turkmenistan, to consist of Tajik, Uzbek, and Turkmen soldiers from the Central Asian republics who spoke the same languages as the people on the other side of the Afghan frontier. Major Khalbaev was appointed to command the battalion and given two months to complete its formation.

The unit, soon to be known as the ‘Muslim Battalion’, consisted of some five hundred men selected from across the Soviet Union. The main requirement was that they should know the relevant languages and be in good physical shape. Each was expected to have two specialities: radio operator and mortar specialist; medical orderly and driver, and so on. The battalion was equipped with two mobile anti-aircraft guns, known as Shilkas, which could also fire at ground targets. These were manned by Slavs, since no Central Asian specialists were available.²⁹

The KGB now set up two small detachments of SpetsNaz (special purpose) forces, drawn from the force later known as the Alfa group. This was originally set up by Andropov in July 1974 to deal with terrorism and the release of hostages, taking the British SAS among others as its model. Its members were all officers, selected for their fitness and intelligence.

The first detachment of forty men was code-named Zenit. It was sent to Kabul under the command of Colonel Grigori Boyarinov, who had fought in the Second World War and since 1961 had lectured on low-intensity warfare at the KGB Academy. At first Zenit was housed in the school of the Soviet Embassy in Kabul. Its immediate task was to protect the embassy itself and the senior members of the Soviet community. At Amin’s request, the group also provided training in counterterrorism for its Afghan opposite numbers.

Boyarinov’s group returned to Moscow in September. But it was replaced by a similar group, known as Zenit-2, under Colonel Polyakov. Polyakov and his officers systematically reconnoitred and mapped the main Afghan administrative and military buildings in Kabul: invaluable intelligence when the time came for the forcible takeover of Kabul in December.

In June Ustinov sent an air assault battalion to protect Soviet transport aircraft and their crews based in Bagram, and if necessary to cover the evacuation of Soviet advisers in an emergency. The troops were to travel as ‘technical advisers’ under the command of Colonel Vasili Lomakin, and their officers were to wear sergeants’ insignia of rank to disguise the provenance and structure of the unit. The paratroopers flew to Bagram early in July.³⁰ The movement was picked up by the Americans, who concluded that the soldiers were indeed intended to protect Bagram and that the Russians had no intention of committing them to combat elsewhere in Afghanistan.³¹

Thus by the late summer of 1979 several of the military units that were to play a significant role in the first days of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan were already in place. The denouement was now to be driven forward at ever greater speed by dramatic political events in Kabul itself. Step by step, with great reluctance, strongly suspecting that it would be a mistake, the Russians slithered towards a military intervention because they could not think of a better alternative.

Now there began a period of plotting and counterplotting. Throughout the summer and autumn Taraki and Amin pursued their separate and contradictory intrigues, which ended in mutual betrayal and tragedy. The Soviet role in all this is still shrouded in ambiguity, and even those who were involved disagree about who was responsible for what. But whatever the truth, Soviet agencies were by now deeply involved in the domestic politics of 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.

The Crisis Explodes

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 been brought by the KGB to Moscow. The two men discussed ways of restoring party unity and getting rid of Amin. News of this meeting apparently leaked to Amin, perhaps through Major Tarun.

That evening, at his lodging on the Lenin Hills overlooking Moscow, Taraki met Alexander Petrov, a KGB officer who had previously worked in Afghanistan. Petrov warned him that Amin was plotting against him. Taraki replied, ‘Don’t worry. Tell the Soviet leadership that for the time being I am in complete control of the situation, and that nothing happens without my knowing about it.’⁷ He repeated this optimistic assurance to Brezhnev as he left Moscow for the onward flight to Kabul.

The Russians were by no means so sure. That same night, Colonel Kolesnik (a code name adopted for the purpose of this operation: his real name was Kozlov), the GRU staff officer who was later to plan and direct the storming of Amin’s palace in Kabul, briefed Major Khalbaev, the commander of the Muslim Battalion, to join his men in Tashkent and prepare them to fly to Kabul to protect Taraki. He showed Khalbaev a picture of Taraki and said, ‘The order to protect that man comes straight from Brezhnev himself. If he dies, then you and your battalion had better not come back alive.’ The men of the Muslim Battalion were ordered to hand in all their documents and don Afghan uniform, ready to move at a moment’s notice. But Andropov was already considering various covert ways of removing Amin, including kidnapping him and taking him to the Soviet Union. He persuaded Brezhnev and Taraki that the Muslim Battalion should stay where it was, at least for the time being.

On 11 September Taraki flew back to Kabul. Amin had already begun to take his own measures. Taraki’s aircraft was made to circle over Kabul for a whole hour while Colonel Yakub, the Chief of the General Staff, completely revised the security arrangements to ensure that they were under the control of Amin’s men.⁸ As soon as he had landed, Taraki demanded that Amin tell him what had happened to the four ministers, the Gang of Four. ‘Don’t worry, they’re all safe and well,’ replied Amin. The two men then drove together to the Central Committee in town, where Taraki reported on his trip to Havana.

The next morning the row over the four ministers continued. Amin claimed that the four men had been behind an attempt to assassinate him while Taraki was away. They should be sacked and punished. Taraki asked Amin to accept their apologies, then reinstate them. Amin retorted that if the ministers did not go he would refuse to follow any of Taraki’s further instructions.

Meanwhile the four ousted ministers were operating out of the presidential palace, Abdur Rahman’s Arg, which the Communists had renamed the House of the People. Watanjar rang round all the commanders of the Kabul garrison to find out which of them was loyal to Taraki. They immediately reported these approaches to Colonel Yakub, who told Amin. Gulabzoi suggested to Taraki that he ask for the Soviet battalion stationed in Bagram to be sent to Kabul to guard him. Taraki told him that was unnecessary. The quarrel had been settled. In any case it was inappropriate for him to hide behind Soviet bayonets.⁹ Gulabzoi told him that there had been a shoot-out that morning at the Ministry of Security when Amin’s men had come to arrest Sarwari. Two people had been killed. Gulabzoi again asked Taraki to act. Again Taraki calmed him down, saying all was going according to plan. Tarun faithfully reported these goings-on to Amin.

By now the Russians were getting far more deeply involved, though this brought them no greater influence on events. On the evening of 13 September the four ousted ministers came to the Soviet Embassy. In the name of Taraki they asked for Soviet help to arrest Amin. Less than two hours later, Tarun rang from the palace to say that Amin had arrived there. He and Taraki were both asking the Russians to join them.

The Russians judged that the situation had become critical. ‘The possibility that H [Hafizullah] Amin might order the military units loyal to him to take up arms against Taraki,’ they later telegraphed to Moscow, ‘could not be excluded. Both groups were trying to enlist our support. For our part we were sticking firmly to the line that the situation in the leadership must be normalised along party lines, i.e. collectively. At the same time we were trying to restrain both groups from acting in haste and without thinking.’¹⁰

Hoping they might calm things down, Puzanov and his three senior colleagues went to the palace. Taraki and Amin were waiting for them. The Russians read out another appeal for unity from Brezhnev. Taraki welcomed the appeal in fulsome terms. Amin followed suit, asserting in even more sycophantic language that he was honoured to serve under Taraki: if service to Taraki and the revolution required his own death, he would be happy to make the sacrifice.¹¹ The four Russians left, satisfied by the appearance of reconciliation.

Later they heard (and reported to Moscow—incorrectly) that Amin and Taraki had reached some agreement. They did not know the details. But they congratulated themselves that their visit, and the appeal from Comrade Brezhnev, had calmed things down: ‘Amin did not resort to extreme actions, as he was convinced that the Soviet side would not support any actions which might aggravate the situation in the Afghan leadership and work against the unity of the PDPA.’¹² This massive misjudgement was a measure of how far the Soviet representatives were out of touch with what was actually going on.

The following morning Puzanov and his three senior colleagues called on Taraki once again. At last Taraki spoke openly about his difficulties with Amin. Dmitri Ryurikov, a Soviet diplomat acting as Puzanov’s executive assistant and interpreter, recorded the conversation in the diary he was keeping for his ambassador.

‘I noticed long ago,’ Taraki told the Russians, ‘that Amin has the tendency to concentrate power in his own hands but I did not attach any particular significance to this. However, recently this tendency has become dangerous.’ He went on to complain about Amin’s refusal to accept criticism, the way he was building up his own public position, the authoritarian way he treated his ministers, and the way he had placed his relatives in key government and party posts. ‘One family is ruling the country just as it was in the times of the King and Daud.’

Reversing the assurances he had given to Brezhnev, Taraki now confessed that he had had doubts about Amin even before he left for Havana. Since his return Sarwari had informed him of three separate conspiracies launched by Amin, who had aborted them once he realised that they had been uncovered.

He went on to tell the Russians that his talks with Amin the previous day had not (as they had thought) resulted in agreement. Amin had again demanded that the four ministers be sacked. Taraki had accused Amin of persecuting them and forcing them into hiding. He, Taraki, was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and Amin must obey his orders. Amin had smiled and said that, on the contrary, it was he who commanded the troops. Now, said Taraki, open conflict could not be ruled out. He was prepared to go on working with Amin, but only if Amin abandoned his present policies of repression.

The Russians suggested that Amin be invited to join the discussions, and Taraki telephoned him accordingly. As they were waiting, the KGB representative, General Boris Ivanov, remarked that there were persistent rumours of a plot to kill Amin when he got to the palace. Taraki pooh-poohed the idea.

Taraki’s aide Tarun then went out to meet Amin. A few minutes later, there was a burst of automatic fire on the other side of the door. Gorelov went to the window and saw Amin running towards his car. There was blood on the sleeve of his shirt.

Ryurikov was sent out to see what had happened. Tarun was lying halfway down the stairs. He had bullet wounds in his head and chest. A sub-machine gun was lying on the floor. There was still gun smoke in the stairwell. Taraki’s wife was there too: she had come out of the bedroom to see what was going on.

Taraki’s bodyguard came in and reported with a crisp military salute that, when Amin had begun to walk up the staircase, Tarun had told Taraki’s guards to leave and threatened them with his pistol. When they refused he fired at one of them and they killed him immediately.

Taraki then rang Amin to tell him that what had happened was the result of a misunderstanding with the guards. But after he put the receiver down he told the Russians that it had been a deliberate provocation. He agreed that the Russians should go to see Amin straight away.

All the Afghans involved in the shoot-out on the staircase died then or soon afterwards. None of the Russians actually saw what happened. This has left room for two alternative explanations. The first is that it was a put-up job by Amin designed to give him the excuse to arrest Taraki. The second is that there really was an attempt to get rid of Amin that went wrong. Ryurikov later inclined to the former view: assassination was not Taraki’s style, whereas Amin came from a family which was notorious for the bloody way in which it conducted its feuds and its political intrigues.¹³

Amin himself fled to the Ministry of Defence, and ordered his troops to surround the Palace, disarm the guard, and arrest Taraki. Two hours later Kabul Radio announced that Taraki and the four ministers had been relieved of their posts. That night many of Taraki’s people were arrested and some were shot, including the two guards who had opened fire on Amin. Taraki told his wife that Amin would not touch him: the Soviet comrades would not allow Amin to make a fool of himself. But the couple were soon taken under guard to a room in a smaller building within the palace complex. The room had not been used for some time and was thick with dust. Taraki comforted his wife: ‘Everything will be all right. I know this room. Soldiers used to be quartered here. Now it’s our turn.’ She immediately set to work to clean it up.¹⁴ Later she was taken to a separate building. The rest of Taraki’s family and his personal staff were moved from the presidential palace to the Pul-i Charkhi prison a couple of days after Amin took power.

That evening the Soviet officials called on Amin to express their regret at the shooting and their deep sympathy at the death of Tarun, whom they ‘had known to be a true friend of the Soviet Union’. Amin then gave his version of the story and concluded, ‘I am convinced that it was me whom they wanted to kill. More than a hundred shots have been fired at me before this. Now you can see for yourselves what Taraki wanted. I knew that an attempt on my life was being planned and was ready for this when I met Taraki at the airport on his return from Havana. Today Taraki wanted to kill me. He clearly did not plan to do this in the presence of Soviet comrades, but he must have forgotten to cancel his orders and his people began to shoot.’

The Russians again expressed their regret, emphasised the need for restraint, and repeated Brezhnev’s call for unity: a split in the Party would be ruinous for the Afghan revolution. Amin said that the revolution could survive without him, provided it had Soviet support. But the reality was that the army would now obey only him, not Taraki; an attempt the previous day by Watanjar to bring the army over to Taraki had failed. Amin had nevertheless sacked the commanders of the 4th and 15th Armoured Brigades as a precaution.

The Central Committee would now meet to relieve Taraki of his posts, said Amin, though he claimed that he personally was against that. The Russians replied that the Soviet leaders firmly believed that Taraki should remain as head of state and that Amin should keep his current posts. They would not understand it if Amin stripped Taraki of his position.

Amin said that he himself was ready enough to take Soviet advice. But things had gone too far. Blood had been spilled (he showed them the stains on his shirt). His comrades in the army were angrily demanding vengeance. The Russians forcefully reiterated their view that unity must be preserved within the leadership and between Taraki and Amin. They appealed to Amin to prevent the demonstrations against Taraki which were planned for the following day.

Throughout that night the soldiers of the Soviet parachute battalion in Bagram sat in their aircraft with their weapons, awaiting the order to fly to Kabul to rescue Taraki. Neither the paratroopers nor the Muslim Battalion ever received the order to move. Amin had meanwhile given instructions that any aircraft landing or taking off from the airfield should be shot down.¹⁵ Early on the following day, 15 September, Moscow ordered the special forces soldiers from Zenit to stand by for an operation against Amin. They assembled in the courtyard of the embassy, where they were briefed in detail. At about eleven o’clock the embassy security officer, Colonel Bakhturin, put them on fifteen minutes’ notice to move. But they too were never ordered to act: the Russians had sensibly decided that the balance of forces in Kabul was overwhelmingly against them.¹⁶

The four went into hiding. Mazduryar found his own refuge. Watanjar, Gulabzoi, and Sarwari took themselves to the villa of one of their KGB contacts. The officer’s wife found them in the sitting room when she came home from work. Colonel Bogdanov, the head of the KGB office in Kabul, had them taken to a KGB safe house on his own responsibility and then phoned Moscow to ask what he should do next. To his relief Moscow endorsed what he had done. The three men were dressed in SpetsNaz uniform, and they were put to live on the second floor of the villa.

The Party Plenum and the Revolutionary Council of the PDPA met on 16 September in a building surrounded by tanks and soldiers. The office of the Soviet Military Adviser was in the same building; the Soviet officers could hear the cheers as the meeting passed the resolutions expelling Taraki and the four ministers from the party, and electing Amin to the posts previously held by Taraki, the General Secretaryship of the party and the Chairmanship of the Revolutionary Council.¹⁷ The public was told that Taraki had asked to be relieved of his posts on grounds of ill-health and that Amin had been elected to succeed him. In a public broadcast the following day Amin attacked the excesses of the secret police and promised that the rule of law would prevail in future. He did not once mention Taraki. When he told the story later, Ambassador Puzanov said bitterly, ‘Amin made fools of us all.’¹⁸

The day after the shoot-out, 15 September, the Soviet Politburo met in Moscow to consider what to do. They had before them a memorandum prepared by Gromyko, Ustinov, and the KGB. This described the course of events in Kabul reasonably accurately. Taraki had failed to act decisively. Amin had ruthlessly exploited the situation. Now all the organs of power were in his hands. The pleas of the Soviet Politburo had been ignored.

Gromyko recommended that the Soviet government accept the accomplished fact and deal with Amin, while seeking to dissuade him from punishing Taraki and his associates. Soviet officials and military advisers should continue with their duties as before, but should not get involved in any of Amin’s repressive measures. Supplies of arms to Amin’s government should be somewhat reduced, except for spare parts and ammunition needed for operations against the insurgents. Public statements by the Soviet government should be purely factual and avoid all comment.

The Politburo agreed with these proposals and Gromyko cabled appropriate instructions to Kabul.¹⁹ The Russians were not, however, prepared to take their reverse entirely lying down. Their first move, on 18 September, was to mount Operation Raduga (Rainbow) to rescue the three Afghan ministers who had taken refuge with the KGB in Kabul. Two aircraft—an Il-76 and a An-12—flew into Bagram, carrying a lorry with three boxes inside it, and a make-up artist whose job was to make the three men look like the photographs in the Soviet passports prepared for them. Colonel Bogdanov was put in charge of the operation.

Lieutenant Valeri Kurilov, of the Zenit group, described what happened: ‘We prepared three containers at our Moscow base at Balashikha: three wooden boxes, like the ones used for transporting arms. We put mattresses on the bottom and bored holes in the top and sides so that the ministers would not suffocate.

‘Once the boxes had been delivered to Bagram airport, we took them in a covered lorry with local number plates to the villa where the ministers were hidden. We blocked the entrance to the villa with a bus while the ministers crawled into the boxes, each with a weapon and a water bottle. Then we nailed down the lids.

‘We dragged the boxes—now much heavier than before—to the lorry and piled cardboard boxes on top of them. Our boys, some in civilian clothes, sat in the back of the covered lorry. Each had a submachine gun, a pistol, grenades, and a double supply of ammunition.

‘We’d taken care to provide backup: two other vehicles were travelling with us, a Zhiguli and a UAZ, with seven of our boys on board. There were six men in the bus and another six in the lorry. If anything had happened, we would have reacted and taken down a pile of people. But that was the last thing we needed. Our task was to get to Bagram without incident and load the three boxes on to the aeroplane…

‘At the checkpoint on the way out of Kabul the Afghans tried to inspect our vehicles. We got ready for a fight. Our commander, Dolmatov, told us not to shoot unless he gave the order. A tall young officer with a carefully trimmed moustache spoke to the driver in our lorry and then tried to open the canvas cover. Although the interpreter told him that there was nothing there except boxes with the personal belongings of the Soviet specialists, the officer tried to climb in. At that point Dolmatov’s heavy boot came down on his hand and the officer looked up to see Dolmatov’s Kalashnikov pointing straight at his head. The officer backed down and the convoy was allowed to proceed. We travelled the seventy kilometres to Bagram without further incident.

‘A huge Aeroflot transport plane was waiting for us. A guard of SpetsNaz was set up around it, the ramp was lowered, and the lorry drove straight into the belly of the aircraft. After take-off I took out my bayonet and levered off the tops of the boxes. All three men were alive and well, but bathed in sweat.’

The three men were then smuggled through to Bulgaria, where they went into hiding in a villa on the Black Sea. To put the Afghans off the scent, the KGB spread the rumour that they had sought sanctuary in Iran. Gulabzoi later maintained that he had never left Afghanistan and never travelled in a box. But the Russian participants in the operation all insisted that he did.²⁰

By now the Soviet government was getting increasingly worried by KGB reports that Amin was turning towards the Americans. These suspicions were not idle. On 27 September Amin told Bruce Amstutz, the American chargé d’affaires, that he hoped for an improvement in relations. His new Foreign Minister, Shah Wali, said much the same to David Newsom, the US Under Secretary of State, in New York. Amstutz reported to Washington on 30 September that a senior official in the Afghan Foreign Ministry had expressed interest in improving relations with the US government.²¹

Amin’s people were also beginning to criticise the Soviet Union directly. On 6 October, at a meeting of socialist ambassadors to which the Soviet Ambassador was not invited, Shah Wali openly accused the Soviet Union, and Ambassador Puzanov in particular, of involvement in the attempted assassination of Amin on 14 September. Wali claimed that Puzanov had assured Amin on the telephone that he could come to Taraki’s office safely, and pointed out that Puzanov had been there throughout the shooting.

Moscow was infuriated by the accusation. Three days later Puzanov and his colleagues conveyed the Soviet government’s protest to Amin. His reaction, they later reported, was ‘brash and provocative. He sometimes contained his fury with difficulty.’ For most of the meeting he barely allowed the Russians to get a word in edgeways. Wali, he shouted, had merely repeated what Amin had told him to say. The interpreter who had translated Puzanov’s remarks could confirm his version of events. So could the Afghan officials who had been in his office at the time.

The Russians insisted that they had not telephoned until after the shooting, when they had asked Amin if they might call on him. He calmed down and spoke in a more conciliatory manner: he evidently did not want to ruin his relationship with the Russians entirely. But he absolutely refused to put out a public retraction of his story, or to accept that his memory might have been confused by the shock of events. A retraction, he said, would be interpreted in the party and in the country as a sign that he had succumbed to Soviet pressure.

As the Russians left he made a partial apology: ‘Maybe I have been speaking too loudly and too quickly during our conversation but, you know, I was brought up in the mountains and that is how we speak in the mountains.’

In private Amin was unreconciled. In his own entourage, in the most colourful language, he repeatedly accused Puzanov of lying to him directly: ‘I do not wish to meet him or talk to him. It is difficult to understand how such a liar and tactless person has been ambassador here for so long.’ All this was reported back to the Russians.²²

The Death of Taraki

By the time the Soviet representatives had that meeting with Amin on 9 October, Taraki was already dead, though Amin did not see fit to tell them as much. He had been murdered, in an intrigue worthy of Shakespeare’s Richard III. A key role was played by the commander of the Presidential Guard, Major Jandad, who had studied in the Soviet Union and spoke reasonable Russian. Although his task was to protect the President, he was by now closely associated with Amin.

On the evening of 8 October Jandad summoned three of his people to his office: Lieutenant Ekbal, the head of counter-intelligence in the Presidential Guard, Captain Vadud, its communications officer and Lieutenant Ruzi, the head of its political department.

Jandad said, ‘There’s trouble brewing.’ Ekbal thought that he was talking about some imperialist plot. Instead, Jandad went on, ‘The Central Committee and the Revolutionary Council have decided that Nur Mohamed Taraki is to be executed. You have been entrusted with the task of carrying out this order.’ Ekbal replied, ‘As far as I know, the orders of the Central Committee and the Revolutionary Council are given in writing. I think that we need the appropriate document before we carry out this order.’ Jandad said, ‘Don’t be stupid. What do you mean, you need a document? The Central Committee Plenum expelled him from the Revolutionary Council and the Central Committee. He’s as good as dead already. There’s nothing secret about the decision.’ Ekbal and Vadud mentioned a rumour that Taraki was to be sent to the Soviet Union. Jandad said the Russians had refused to receive him. The two men objected that if Taraki had committed a crime, then the facts should have been broadcast over the radio. Jandad assured them that there would be a broadcast in due course. ‘But the party has its secrets which are none of your business. Do what you’ve been ordered to do.’ He then sent Ekbal out to buy nine yards of white cotton cloth for a shroud.

Yakub ordered that Taraki was to be buried next to his brother. Ekbal and Ruzi found the grave with some difficulty, made the necessary preparations, and then joined Vadud in the palace.

Taraki was in his dressing gown when the three men came for him. Ruzi said, ‘We’ve come to take you to another place.’ Taraki gave him some money and jewellery to pass on to his wife. Ruzi told him to leave his belongings behind—they would be returned to him in due course.

The party went downstairs to another small room, in which there was a dilapidated bed. Taraki handed over his party card and his watch, which he asked should be given to Amin. Ruzi told Ekbal to bind Taraki’s hands with a sheet and ordered Taraki to lie down on the bed. Taraki did so without protest. Ruzi put his hand over Taraki’s mouth and told Vadud to bind his legs while Ekbal sat on them. Ruzi then covered Taraki’s head with a pillow and when he removed it Taraki was dead. The whole business lasted fifteen minutes. Not bothering with the cotton shroud, they rolled Taraki’s body in a blanket and took him in their Land Rover to the cemetery, where they buried him. They were in tears when they reported back to Jandad.²³

Later that evening it was officially announced that Taraki had died of ‘a brief and serious illness’.²⁴

The Mood Shifts in Moscow

The murder of Taraki was the crucial turning point in the Soviet decision-making process. Brezhnev took the news particularly badly. He had promised to protect Taraki. ‘What a bastard, Amin, to murder the man with whom he made the revolution… Who will now believe my promises, if my promises of protection are shown to be no more than empty words?’²⁵ Andropov, mortified by his department’s failure to keep control of events, was now determined to get rid of Amin and install a more malleable Afghan leader.

But the debacle was not merely a personal matter. Though much is confused about these events, one thing is not. Despite the numerous Soviet advisers attached to Afghan military and civilian organisations, despite all the economic, military, and political assistance they had given, the Soviet government in Moscow and its representatives in Kabul had been powerless to influence events in Kabul, and had been left looking impotent. Their man Taraki had been outmanoeuvred and had paid with his life. Soviet influence in Kabul was now practically non-existent. Amin, the victor in the power struggle, was mishandling the domestic situation in Afghanistan with disastrous brutality. It was a challenge that the Soviets could hardly leave unanswered. One of the driving forces in Soviet policymaking over the next three months was a determination to recover from humiliation and reassert control over events.

The mood in Moscow now shifted towards the possibility of replacing Amin, if necessary through armed intervention. The contingency arrangements that had been made earlier in the year began to be looked at more urgently. The Chief Soviet Military Adviser in Kabul, General Gorelov, was called back to Moscow for discussions in September and again in October to meet his military superiors, Ogarkov and Ustinov, and also to meet Andropov, Gromyko, and Ponomarev. On the second visit Gorelov was accompanied by General Vasili Zaplatin, who since 1978 had been adviser to the head of the Political Department of the Afghan army. Asked about Amin, Gorelov described him as a man of strong will, a very hard worker, an exceptional organiser, and a self-proclaimed friend of the Soviet Union. He was, it was true, cunning, deceitful, and ruthlessly repressive. But both he and Zaplatin believed that Amin was nevertheless someone whom the Russians ought to be able to work with. Asked about the Afghan army, Gorelov said that it could deal with the rebels, even though it was not up to modern standards. Asked whether the Afghan army would fight the Soviet army he replied, ‘Never’—correctly as it turned out. But it was only later that he realised the purpose of the question.

Inevitably Moscow now looked for scapegoats to blame for the collapse of its policies. The obvious candidates were the Soviet representatives in Kabul. In the course of November, Gorelov was replaced by Lieutenant General Magometov and the Chief Interior Ministry Adviser, General Veselkov, was replaced by General Kosogovski. Ambassador Puzanov’s usefulness was in any case at an end, given the hostility that Amin now bore towards him. He was recalled to Moscow ‘in accordance with his oft-repeated requests’ and pensioned off. Although he was a senior Party member, with a distinguished diplomatic career behind him, and had spent seven years in Afghanistan—longer than any other Soviet ambassador before or after—no one in authority bothered to debrief him or ask his opinion. He was replaced by Fikryat Tabeev, the first secretary of the Tatarstan Party Committee, who arrived in Kabul on 26 November. He had been posted in such a hurry that he was almost wholly ignorant of the situation in Afghanistan: he was not even aware that the Afghan Communist Party was split into two factions. He spent his first days in Kabul planning for a visit by Amin to Moscow. Nobody warned him that Moscow was already thinking of a different way of dealing with Amin. Amin himself was still smarting over Puzanov, that ‘Parchamist’ as he called him, and said to Tabeev at one of their first meetings, ‘I hope you’ve drawn the right conclusion from the fate of your predecessor.’

General Zaplatin was not recalled until 10 December, as the final decisions were being taken. Once again he told Ogarkov and Ustinov that the Afghan army was up to the job. Amin, he said, had given not the slightest sign of wavering in his loyalty to the Soviet Union. Ustinov said irritably, ‘You people in Kabul keep on coming up with differing assessments. But we here have to take decisions.’ There was no mention of sending in the troops, though Ogarkov did mutter something about the possibility of military action. Zaplatin said roundly that he saw no need for any such thing.²⁶

And so those senior Soviet officials who had doubts about the use of military force were sidelined or ignored. Only the KGB representatives in Kabul seem to have argued consistently in favour of getting rid of Amin. When the crisis peaked, the senior Soviet officials in the Afghan capital were men with little or no experience of the country.

The Decision

The situation in Afghanistan continued to deteriorate. In an attempt to place the blame for the excesses on his predecessor, Amin published in November an official list of twelve thousand people who had been liquidated since the coup in April 1978. But he nevertheless stepped up his own use of terror against his opponents. He kept a portrait of Stalin on his desk and brushed off Soviet remonstrations with the remark, ‘Comrade Stalin showed us how to build socialism in a backward country: it’s painful to begin with, but afterwards everything turns out just fine.’ According to one foreign scholar, in the period between the Communist coup and the Soviet invasion twenty-seven thousand people may have been executed in the Pul-i Charkhi prison alone. After the invasion, mass graves were discovered at Herat and Bamyan. Other estimates put the number of people killed in the course of 1979 at fifty thousand or more. Many Afghans sought refuge in exile in Pakistan or Iran. As usual there can be no certainty about the figures.²⁷

Despite the repressions, the unrest continued. In mid-October there were mutinies in the 7th Infantry Division, which was based on the outskirts of Kabul. Amin used regular forces and air strikes to discipline tribes that failed to obey his commands. The measures were insufficient. Amin controlled only 20 per cent of the country, and the proportion was steadily shrinking.

The Soviet leadership was still wavering over the decision to mount a major military action. Nothing had happened to alter their basic assessment, now eight months old, that the involvement of Soviet troops in Afghanistan would have damaging consequences for Soviet interests. But events were now accelerating beyond their control and preparations for a forceful change of government in Kabul began to take concrete form.

At the beginning of November the KGB brought Babrak Karmal and other potential members of an alternative Afghan government to Moscow.

The first military deployment directly connected with a possible operation against Amin was not authorised until 6 December. On that day the Politburo endorsed a proposal by Andropov and Ogarkov to despatch a detachment of five hundred men to Kabul, without any attempt to disguise their membership of the Soviet armed forces. After all, Amin had repeatedly pressed for the Russians to send a motor-rifle battalion to protect his residence.

On 8 December Brezhnev met Andropov, Gromyko, Suslov (1902–82), and Ustinov to discuss the situation at length, and to weigh the pros and cons of introducing Soviet forces. No record of this meeting has yet surfaced.

On 10 December Ustinov called Ogarkov into his office and told him that the Politburo had taken the preliminary decision to send troops into Afghanistan on a temporary basis. He ordered Ogarkov to devise a plan to deploy 75–80,000 troops. Ogarkov was surprised and angered. He was against sending any troops, because it made no sense. A force of seventy-five thousand was too small to do the job anyway. Ustinov ticked him off sharply. Ogarkov’s job was not to teach the Politburo its business but to carry out its orders.

Ogarkov was called into Brezhnev’s office later the same day. Andropov, Gromyko, and Ustinov were already there. Ogarkov reiterated his arguments: the Afghan problem had to be settled by political means; the Afghans had never tolerated the presence of foreigners on their soil; the Soviet troops would probably be drawn into military operations whether they liked it or not. His arguments fell on deaf ears, though he was assured that the executive decision to send the soldiers had not yet been taken.

That evening Ustinov told a meeting of senior officials in the Ministry of Defence that a decision to use force in Afghanistan would be taken shortly. From then onwards he issued a stream of verbal directives which the general staff converted into written orders.²⁸ The forces on the Afghan frontier were mobilised, and parachute and other elite units were sent to Turkestan from their bases all round the country.

The crucial meeting of the Politburo took place on 12 December. Those present included Brezhnev, Suslov, Andropov, Ustinov, and Gromyko. Others were also present, though the story has got around that they were excluded.²⁹ The meeting had before it a note from Andropov which said that following the murder of Taraki the situation in the party, the army, and the government apparatus had become more acute as a result of the mass repressions carried out by Amin.

Andropov made particular play with the stories of Amin’s increasing contacts with the West. There was evidence, he said, that Amin had had contacts with the CIA, who may have recruited him while he was studying in the United States in the 1960s. The CIA were attempting to set up a ‘New Great Ottoman Empire’ to embrace also the southern republics of the Soviet Union. Soviet anti-aircraft defences were inadequate to defend targets in the southern republics, such as the cosmodrome in Baikonur, if the Americans installed missiles in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s uranium resources might become available to the Iranians and Pakistanis. The Pakistanis might successfully attempt to detach the southern provinces of Afghanistan. If Amin were indeed to shift Afghanistan’s foreign policy decisively towards the West, it would be a serious setback to the long-standing Soviet aim—which went back to Khrushchev and beyond—of keeping Afghanistan orderly and friendly as a buffer on the southern border of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile anti-Soviet sentiment in Afghanistan was on the increase. Babrak Karmal and other Afghan exiles were asking the Soviets to help change the political situation in Afghanistan, if necessary by force of arms. The Soviet Union should act decisively to replace Amin and shore up the regime.

These arguments were not entirely specious. In 1979 CIA experts looked at the possibility of moving to Afghanistan the electronic intelligence facilities in Iran that had been closed down by Khomeini.³⁰ At the beginning of November American diplomats had been taken hostage in Tehran, and US policy had become more unpredictable. Soviet fears about the impact of events in Afghanistan on the security of Central Soviet Asia turned out retrospectively to have some justification when first the mujahedin and then the Taliban began to operate in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan alongside the Islamist opposition.³¹

Western and even Russian historians have tended to argue that the Russians were being paranoid, or that they were inventing reasons to justify their invasion. There may have been an element of that. But in the overwrought atmosphere of the Cold War each side was prone to exaggerate the threat from the other, and to engage in worst-case analysis—so much safer than simply hoping for the best. Later commentators have made much of the coincidence that NATO’s decision to deploy Pershing II missiles in Europe was taken on the same day as the Politburo took its fateful decision on Afghanistan. Given the complex and confused way in which decisions are taken by most governments, it is unlikely that the news would have had much effect on the Politburo, even if it had reached them in time.

Whether Amin was ever recruited or even contacted by the CIA is unclear, and perhaps a red herring. Early in 1979 Ambassador Dubs had asked his CIA station chief whether it was true that Amin was a CIA agent and had been assured that he was not.³² The Russians knew that Amin had met with Amstutz, the acting head of the US Embassy after Dubs’s assassination, five times since February 1979. They had been unable to discover what had passed between the two men. But it would have been natural for Amin to follow the example of Daud and reinsure with both sides.

It may be, as some Americans have since maintained, that the Americans had no designs on Afghanistan of the kind the Russians attributed to them. But the Russians could not be sure of that at the time. So it was probably inevitable that they should now plan for the worst case: a significant strengthening of their enemy’s position right on their southern border.

Andropov, backed by Ustinov, argued that these considerations were sufficient to justify a military intervention. He went on to note that there were already two Soviet battalions in Kabul. That should be enough for a successful operation: a grossly optimistic judgement with which the Soviet military strongly disagreed. But it would be wise, said Andropov, to have additional forces stationed close to the border, to be used, for example, against rebel groups.³³

The meeting decided unanimously to send in the troops. No proper official note was kept. Instead Chernenko recorded the decision in a brief handwritten document coyly entitled ‘The Situation in “A”’. It read:

1. Approve the considerations and measures set out by Comrades Andropov Yu V, Ustinov D F, and Gromyko A A. Authorise them to make minor modifications to these measures in the course of their execution. Questions which need to be decided by the Central Committee should be brought to the Politburo in good time. Comrades Andropov Yu V, Ustinov D F, and Gromyko A A are charged with the execution of these measures.

2. Instruct Comrades Andropov Yu V, Ustinov D F, and Gromyko A A to keep the members of the Politburo informed as these measures are being implemented.³⁴

The only one of the inner circle of decision-makers who has left a personal account was Gromyko. In his memoirs he wrote: ‘This bloody act [the murder of Taraki] produced a shocking impression on the Soviet leadership. Brezhnev was particularly upset by the murder. It was in that context that the decision was finally taken to introduce a limited contingent of Soviet forces into Afghanistan.

‘After the decision was taken, I looked into Brezhnev’s office and said, “Should we go for a formal governmental decision to send in the troops?” Brezhnev did not answer at first. He reached for the telephone: “Mikhail Andreevich, will you look in? We need to talk.”’

Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo’s influential chief ideologist, came into Brezhnev’s office.

‘Brezhnev told him of our conversation. He added, “In the circumstances we need to take a rapid decision, either to ignore the Afghan request for help, or to save the people’s power and act in accordance with the Soviet–Afghan Agreement.”

‘Suslov said, “We have an agreement with Afghanistan, and we should fulfil our obligations under it quickly, now we have already taken our decision. We can discuss it in the Central Committee later.”

‘During the working sessions before the final decision was taken to invade, the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Ogarkov, expressed the view that units of the Afghan army might resist. At first it was considered that our forces would simply help local inhabitants defend themselves against armed groups from outside the country, and assist the population with supplies of food and essentials such as fuel, cloth, soap, and so on.

‘We wanted neither to increase the size of our contingent nor to get involved in serious military operations. And indeed our forces were for the most part garrisoned in the cities.’³⁵

The Russians had foreseen all the disadvantages of forceful intervention—bloody involvement in a ferocious civil war, a huge expenditure of blood and treasure, and international pariahdom. They had worried that military intervention in Afghanistan would seriously affect East–West relations. By the end of 1979 this last was no longer such a consideration. Kryuchkov spelled out the background at a highly critical session of the Congress of People’s Deputies in late 1989.³⁶ Détente had been unravelling and the arms race had been accelerating again, he then said. The US Senate had balked at the ratification of the SALT II treaty on the limitation of strategic nuclear weapons, a key element in the building of trust between the two superpowers. The Americans were developing a whole panoply of new weapons—the B-1 bomber and the new MX missile among them—and enforcing their strategic embargo against the Soviet Union with increasing rigour. Kryuchkov admitted that some of these American moves were in response to moves made by the Soviet side. But to the Russians it looked as if the Americans were trying to undermine the principle of strategic parity which for some years had provided a fairly stable framework for the superpower confrontation. The Russians calculated that they had little more to lose.

And after the death of Taraki their options were in any case progressively reduced. Their decision to intervene in Afghanistan, couched in the language of self-defence and aid to a friendly country, was certainly a grave error of policy. But it was not irrational, and by the time the final decisions were taken in December 1979 it had become all but inevitable. The idea that it was no more than an irresponsible move taken in secret by a small clique of gerontocrats—an idea convenient to all the other members of the Politburo of the day, and to all the innumerable civilian, military, and intelligence officials involved in Afghan affairs—does not stand up.

In any case, the consensus-building mechanisms of Soviet power were still working adequately enough. A special Party Plenum was held in June 1980, at which Gromyko delivered a rousing defence of Soviet policy in Afghanistan. The policy was endorsed by all those present. Edward Shevardnadze (1927–), Gorbachev’s future Foreign Minister, was warmly applauded when he said, ‘The whole world knows that the Soviet Union and its leader do not abandon their friends to their fate, that its words are always followed by deeds.’³⁷

Surprisingly, Amin appears to have had no suspicion that the tide in Moscow had turned against him. Right up to the very last minute he continued to ask Moscow to send troops to help him cope with the spreading opposition to his rule.

Practical preparations for his forceful overthrow had already begun even before the final political decision was taken in Moscow. A crack reconnaissance company was sent to reinforce the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment already in Bagram. Another small detachment from Zenit, disguised as technical troops under the command of Colonel Golubev, arrived in Bagram and was attached to the Muslim Battalion. There were now 130 Zenit troops in Afghanistan. The contingent in Kabul was housed in three villas rented by the Soviet Embassy in Kabul.

On 4 December General Kirpichenko, a senior KGB officer, and a group of officers of the Airborne Forces headed by General Guskov, were sent to Kabul to plan for the removal of Amin. On 11 December Guskov issued a preliminary directive for the seizure of Dub (Oak)—the code name for the Arg Palace where Amin was now in residence. The operation was to be carried out by the Zenit troops and a company of the Muslim Battalion. The Russians had no plan of the building, and all they knew of the arrangements for defending it was that the Presidential Guard consisted of up to two thousand men. Smaller squads were to seize the radio and television building, the security service building, and other objectives in Kabul.

At this stage the plan was that the Parchamists led by Karmal should mount a coup against Amin and that Soviet support should be provided by no more than the forces that were already available. Babrak Karmal, accompanied by Anakhita Ratebzad, was secretly flown into Bagram to join Watanjar, Gulabzoi, and Sarwari, who had been brought there a few days earlier. The new arrivals were housed in inadequately heated dugouts and badly fed on kasha, supplemented by cheese, sausages, and canned food bought by their escorts before they left Moscow.

On Thursday, 13 December, the Soviet commanders were briefed on their objectives. They were told that the local people would welcome them and would rise up against Amin, and the soldiers were told to show them every friendliness. Those stationed in Bagram were ordered to stand by to move to Kabul.¹

Yevgeni Kiselev, a military interpreter who later became a well-known TV presenter, was on duty in Kabul that night. There were two other duty officers: a colonel and a junior lieutenant. At about seven o’clock the Chief of Staff to General Magometov, the new Chief Soviet Military Adviser, came to the duty officer’s room for a private talk with the colonel. Afterwards the colonel, puzzled and anxious, told Kiselev and his colleague to go round the homes of all the senior military advisers—about three dozen of them—and tell them to assemble at the headquarters by nine o’clock to await orders. The orders never came, and the officers were allowed to go home. A few days later a young KGB officer told Kiselev that there had been a plan for a coup, but that it had been called off at the last minute.²

What had happened was that General Magometov and other senior Soviet representatives had discovered what was going on. They were appalled. They had not been consulted about the KGB plan. It was worthless, they told Moscow, and could not be carried out with the limited forces available. Without more military muscle, the plan might well fail, and the Soviet position in Afghanistan would be seriously compromised.

The operation was therefore postponed until a bigger force could be put together. Disagreement flared among the Soviet military and the politicians in Moscow about how large a force was needed. In 1968 the Soviet Union had deployed eighteen divisions, backed by eight Warsaw Pact divisions—some five hundred thousand men—to invade Czechoslovakia, a country with a much more forgiving terrain and no tradition of armed resistance to foreigners; a country moreover where, unlike Afghanistan, there was not already a civil war in progress.³ The government and the KGB initially believed that the job could be done with some 35–40,000 soldiers. The generals naturally wanted more. During the planning phase, under pressure from General Magometov in Kabul and others, the number was increased, and the force which crossed the frontier at the end of December consisted of some eighty thousand soldiers.⁴ Even this was nothing like the number that the soldiers believed would be necessary: Russian military experts later calculated that they would have needed between thirty and thirty-five divisions to stabilise the situation in Afghanistan, close the frontiers, secure the cities, road networks, and passes, and eliminate the possibility of armed resistance.⁵

The 40th Army Moves in

As the pace of preparations accelerated, an ‘Operational Group of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR’ was established on 14 December under Marshal Sergei Sokolov, the First Deputy Minister of Defence, a man already over seventy, tall, with a big bass voice and a calm, fatherly manner.⁶ It began work in Termez, the last town on the Soviet side of the Afghan border, but before long moved to Kabul, where it remained. The group set up a new army, the 40th, in the Turkestan Military District, under General Tukharinov, who had arrived in September as the district’s deputy commander. Since its objectives, its size, and the amount of time it spent in Afghanistan were all intended to be limited, the force was publicly referred to as ‘The Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan’ (Ogranichenny Kontingent Sovietskikh Voisk v Afganistane, or OKSVA). This bland name was retained throughout the war for propaganda purposes, sneered at by foreign and domestic critics of the war, and is still often used even today.

The chain of military command which was thus created was riddled with contradictions. The 40th Army operated inside Afghanistan, but was formally subordinated to the Commander of the Turkmenistan Military District in Tashkent, who was himself responsible to the Chief of Staff in Moscow. Much of the military planning for operations within Afghanistan was done by the staffs of these three organisations. But the most senior officer in Afghanistan was the head of the Operational Group of the Ministry of Defence, and he too could and did take on himself the responsibility for managing operations, communicating directly with Moscow without taking too much notice of Tashkent. In addition there was the Chief Soviet Military Adviser to the Afghan government, who headed the large numbers of Soviet military advisers attached to the Afghan army, was responsible for coordinating the operations of that army with those of the 40th Army, and believed that he too had a responsibility for operational management. All this further added to the confusion which already surrounded the Soviet handling of policy in Afghanistan because of the divided counsels in Moscow and among the various Soviet representatives in Kabul. Forceful personalities—Gorbachev; General Varennikov (1923–2009), as head of the Ministry of Defence’s Operational Group the most senior general in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1989; Yuli Vorontsov, the ambassador in the last months of the Soviet military presence—could knock heads together from time to time. But the problems caused by these tortured and contradictory arrangements never entirely went away and they compounded the difficulties which already existed because of the longstanding rivalry between the army and the KGB.

Thanks to some heroic feats of improvisation, the 40th Army was more or less ready to move by the end of 24 December. In his directive to the commanders, Ustinov justified the action as follows: ‘In view of the political and military situation in the Middle East the latest appeal by the government of Afghanistan has been considered positively. It has been decided to introduce a few contingents of Soviet forces, deployed in the southern regions of the country, on the territory of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in order to provide international help to the friendly Afghan people, and also to create favourable conditions for the prevention of possible anti-Afghan actions on the part of neighbouring states…’⁷ This was to remain the Soviet government’s official justification for the war.

At midday on 25 December Ustinov issued the formal order to move: ‘The state frontier of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan is to be crossed on the ground and in the air by forces of the 40th Army and the Air Force at 1500 hrs on 25 December (Moscow time)’.⁸ The Soviet intervention had begun.

What is surprising is not that there was a good deal of chaos, which of course there was; but that the formidable administrative and logistical difficulties were overcome, and the army deployed into Afghanistan on time. Indeed the Soviet general staff had always been very good at moving and supplying very large armies in very difficult situations. The methods were often crude in the extreme. They could cause great hardship to the soldiers themselves. But they had worked in the Second World War. In Afghanistan, despite the last-minute improvisations and the formidable obstacles of terrain and climate, they worked again, though some of the soldiers went hungry because the system had hiccuped.⁹

The main route for the invasion was the great road which runs around the periphery of Afghanistan, avoiding the mountains and linking the country’s great cities, from Balkh, destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1220, through Mazar-i Sharif, with its great shrine devoted to Ali, the cousin and brother-in-law of the Prophet, and onwards anti-clockwise to Herat, Kandahar, and Kabul. This was part of the Silk Road, the road along which trade and armies passed for thousands of years, along which the British feared the Russians—or the Persians, or the French—would burst into their Indian empire. In those days the eastern arc of the circle did not exist; until a new road was built by Nadir Shah over the Salang Pass in the early 1930s, there was no proper road through the mountains of the Hindu Kush from Kabul to Mazar-i Sharif. In the 1950s the Americans and the Russians competed to modernise the road. The Americans built the southern stretch from Kabul to Kandahar, and the Russians built the rest. It became a road along which you could drive cars, lorries, and if necessary tanks. The Soviet soldiers called it the betonka, from the Russian word for concrete.

The plan was that the 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division would enter Afghanistan along the western route through Herat and Shindand. The 108th Motor-rifle Division would cross the Amu Darya at Termez. The 103rd Guards Air Assault Division and the remaining battalions of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment would fly into Kabul and Bagram. The three divisions would be accompanied by the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade, and a number of other units. In the course of the next six weeks they would be joined by another motor-rifle division, the 201st, and further smaller units.¹⁰ The troops would secure the highway and garrison the main administrative centres along it. Tabeev, the Soviet Ambassador, had already informed Amin that the troops were coming. To ensure that their movements were properly coordinated, the commander of the 40th Army, General Tukharinov, met the commander of the operational division of the Afghan general staff, General Babadzhan, to discuss the details at Kunduz, the first Afghan town on the road from Termez.

The move began during the night of 24 to 25 December, when Soviet aircraft landed practically non-stop at Kabul and Bagram airports, carrying the soldiers of the 103rd Guards Air Assault Division from Vitebsk and the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment. Seven thousand seven hundred men, nine hundred items of military equipment, and over a thousand tons of supplies were flown to Kabul in the course of the next forty-eight hours. One aircraft—an Il-76 under the command of Captain Golovin carrying thirty-seven paratroopers—was lost when it crashed into a mountain and exploded as it was making its approach to Kabul airport. The British Embassy had observers at the airport. They were surprised that no attempt was made to disguise what was going on. The airport remained open for ordinary traffic and the British saw six helicopters with Soviet markings there.¹¹

On the following afternoon the troops in Tajikistan began to cross the bridge which sappers had built with some difficulty across the fast-flowing and tricky Amu Darya. The soldiers were told that they were going to support the ordinary Afghan people against the counter-revolution, and that they had to get there before the Americans did. Although some conscripts were disgruntled because their demobilisation had been postponed, most of the soldiers were excited at the prospect of adventure. Though the mission was supposed to be peaceful, one battalion was told by its political officer that they would go through Afghanistan with fire and the sword, and the battalion commander added, ‘If a single shot is fired at you, you should open up with everything you have got.’ Marshal Sokolov, the head of the Operational Group of the Ministry of Defence then still stationed in Termez, came to see the soldiers off as they marched away to the tears of women and the sound of military music.¹²

The fourth battalion of the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade was sent ahead to secure the strategically indispensable Salang Pass, which lay on the route to the troops’ final destinations.¹³ Among them was a conscript sergeant, Sergei Morozov. He and his comrades found that there was no fighting to be done and the only casualties were two men wounded by accident. They lived in buildings without windows originally put up for the workers who had built the road over the Salang Pass. It was very cold at that height in midwinter, but the soldiers had brought their own stoves with them and scrounged the fuel from passing convoys. They had little else to do.¹⁴

Next came the 108th Motor-rifle Division under the command of Colonel Valeri Mironov. The division’s officers had already flown across the frontier in helicopters to reconnoitre the route.¹⁵ After a nasty moment when the column got stuck in the Salang Tunnel,¹⁶ the division reached its position outside Kabul on the morning of 28 December. It was at first welcomed by the local population. The relationship deteriorated sharply when it became clear that the soldiers had come to stay. There was a nasty incident at the beginning of February, when a patrol was ambushed outside Kabul and an officer and eleven soldiers—all reservists—were killed. But on the whole these early months were the calmest the division was to experience during the whole of its time in Afghanistan.

The division got a new Chief of Staff, Colonel Boris Gromov, in the middle of January. He was not best pleased: it was a sideways move, when he had hoped for promotion. In Tashkent, where he stopped on his way down, officers were already saying that there would be a real fight in Afghanistan, though attacks on Soviet troops had barely started. He continued to Kabul in a hospital plane, embarrassed because he was wearing the uniform of a peacetime colonel when all the other officers were in their wartime gear. In Kabul he had to sleep in the freezing aircraft because there was no other accommodation. The next day the plane would not take off because its wheels were frozen to the runway.¹⁷

Planning a Coup

The tangled situation inside Afghanistan itself was still evolving. On 20 December Amin moved from the Arg, the presidential palace in the centre of Kabul, to the Taj Bek Palace.¹⁸ This had previously housed the headquarters of the Central Army Corps. It was situated on the southwest outskirts of the city and Amin may have thought that it would be more easily defensible. Some of the specialists from the Soviet KGB who advised Amin on his security arrangements were stationed inside the palace itself.

The palace was very solidly constructed: its walls were capable of withstanding artillery. Its defences had been carefully and intelligently organised. All the approach roads except one had been mined, and heavy machine guns and artillery were sited to cover the single open road. The inside of the palace was protected by Amin’s personal bodyguard, consisting of his relatives and people he particularly trusted. They wore a special uniform which distinguished them from other Afghan soldiers: forage caps with white piping, white belts and holsters, and white cuffs on their sleeves.

A second line of defence consisted of seven posts, each manned by four sentries armed with a machine gun, a mortar, and automatic rifles. They were relieved every two hours. The external ring of the defences encircling the palace was manned by the Presidential Guard: three battalions of motorised infantry and one tank battalion, around 2,500 men in all. On one of the commanding heights three T-54 tanks were dug in and these could fire directly on the area around the palace with their cannon and machine guns. In addition, not far off there was an anti-aircraft regiment, armed with twelve 100mm anti-aircraft guns and sixteen anti-aircraft multiple machine guns; and also a construction battalion of about a thousand men. In Kabul itself there were two divisions and a tank brigade of the Afghan army.¹⁹

This was a powerful force for the Russians to contend with. Even with the reinforcements they were now bringing in, the forceful destruction by the Russians of Amin and his regime would be a daring military operation, in which the Soviet forces would be heavily outnumbered by well-armed opponents.

Amin and the Taj Bek Palace were the main target. But to secure Kabul as a whole the Russians also needed to control the General Staff building, the Radio and Television Centre, the telegraph building, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the headquarters of the Gendarmerie (Tsarandoi), the headquarters of the Afghan Central Army Corps in the Arg Palace, and the Military Counter-intelligence building. These presented more tractable military problems than the Taj Bek, but would still require substantial forces and careful timing.²⁰

On 18 December Kryuchkov sent General Yuri Drozdov, head of the KGB’s Directorate of Illegal Intelligence, a war veteran, an accomplished linguist, and formerly an illegal agent in West Germany, to Afghanistan to consult with the KGB officers on the spot, see what was going on, and report back.²¹ Drozdov told his alarmed wife that he was off for a few days, then left early the following morning with Colonel Kolesnik of the GRU, who was briefly back in Moscow. Drozdov’s assistant took with him a briefcase for the KGB officer who was to meet them on arrival. The briefcase contained a recording of the speech that Babrak Karmal would broadcast once Amin had been overthrown. The party left it by accident at Bagram after they landed. Luckily it was safely recovered the next day.

That same day, the Muslim Battalion was moved from Bagram to Kabul and stationed on the outskirts of the city, less than a mile from the Taj Bek Palace, in an unfinished building with no glass in the windows. It was bitterly cold and the temperature went down to minus twenty degrees. The soldiers filled the gaps in the windows with waterproof capes, installed wood stoves, and erected bunk beds. The Afghans gave the Soviet soldiers woollen blankets made from camel hair and food was available in the local bazaar.

On 21 December Magometov summoned Kolesnik and Khalbaev, the commander of the Muslim Battalion, and ordered them to draw up a plan for the defence of the Taj Bek Palace in cooperation with Amin’s Presidential Guard. He told them nothing of any more dramatic plans. Kolesnik and Khalbaev accordingly went to call on Major Jandad, the commander of Amin’s Guard. They quickly agreed on where the companies of the Muslim Battalion were to be placed and on the construction of a bridge across an irrigation ditch which formed an obstacle on the approaches to Taj Bek. Jandad gave the Russians a small Japanese radio so that they could communicate directly. The two Soviet officers reconnoitred the approach routes to the palace and the positions of the Afghan units surrounding it, and began drawing up their plans.

Soviet troops continued to arrive in Kabul, including another special forces detachment, code-named Grom. This consisted of another thirty men from Alfa, the KGB’s anti-terror force, put together at one day’s notice under the command of Major Mikhail Romanov. The men told their families that they were going for winter training to Yaroslavl, north of Moscow, and would therefore miss the New Year celebrations. They had no idea that they were about to be involved in some real fighting. As they were getting ready to leave Moscow in Andropov’s personal Tu-134, someone photographed them boarding the plane; he was forced to expose his film.

On arrival in Kabul, they were briefly accommodated in the embassy before moving up to join the soldiers of the Muslim Battalion near the Taj Bek Palace. Here they zeroed in their weapons and were given Afghan uniforms—too small for many of them. They sewed pockets on their uniforms to take extra grenades and magazines; and on their sleeves they sewed white armbands as a recognition signal.

But the scenario for the deployment of Soviet troops in Kabul was about to change drastically. On 23 December Kolesnik and Khalbaev went to the embassy to explain their plan for defending the palace to General Magometov and General Ivanov. Out of the blue Ivanov suggested that they should consider an alternative plan, not to defend the palace, but to seize it by force. For that purpose Kolesnik would be given the two special forces groups Grom and Zenit, a company of the Muslim Battalion, and a company of paratroopers from the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment at Bagram commanded by Senior Lieutenant Vostrotin. Three members of the Gang of Four, Watanjar, Gulabzoi, and Sarwari, would take part in the assault to make it appear that it was not wholly a Soviet operation.²²

Given the number of the Afghan troops defending the palace, even this enlarged contingent could hardly hope to prevail by force alone. Surprise and deception would be needed as well. Kolesnik and his colleagues spent the whole night planning. He reported back to Magometov the following morning that the success of the mission could only be assured if the whole of the Muslim Battalion was employed.

Kolesnik’s plan was approved, with the additional forces he had requested. He was appointed to command the operation, which was code-named Storm 333. The plan was for two Shilka mobile anti-aircraft guns to bombard the palace. Vostrotin’s paratroopers and two companies of the Muslim Battalion would prevent reinforcements from coming to the aid of the defenders. An anti-tank platoon under Captain Satarov would take out the three Afghan tanks guarding the palace. One company of the Muslim Battalion and the special forces groups Zenit and Grom would then mount the assault on the palace itself. The operation was originally planned for 25 December, but was postponed until 27 December.

At General Ivanov’s request, Colonel Boyarinov was attached to the operation at the last minute to coordinate the actions of the two KGB groups. He had only returned to Kabul the previous day and was not yet familiar with either the situation or the people.²³

To lull the suspicions of the Afghan guards, the Russian troops around the palace spent their time manoeuvring around their positions, firing flares, and starting up their vehicles. When the flares went off for the first time, the Afghans were naturally suspicious. They illuminated the Soviet positions with searchlights and Major Jandad came to find out what was going on. The Russians explained that they were simply engaged in normal training. The flares were intended to light up the approaches to the palace to guard against surprise attack. The vehicles’ engines had to be kept running so that they did not freeze up. The Afghans’ suspicions were eventually assuaged, though they complained that the noise of the engines was keeping Amin awake. These deceptive manoeuvres continued throughout the next three days.

On 26 December the officers of the Muslim Battalion invited their colleagues from the Presidential Guard to a party. The cooks prepared the pilaff, and the KGB provided the vodka, cognac, caviar, and other delicacies. Fifteen Afghan officers attended, including Major Jandad, the Guard commander, and Lieutenant Ruzi, who had murdered Taraki on his orders. Many toasts were drunk to Soviet–Afghan friendship. The Soviet waiters carefully served generous portions of vodka to the Afghans, but only water to the Russians. In a remarkable fit of indiscretion, Ruzi told one of the Russians that Taraki had been suffocated on Amin’s orders. Jandad had the man taken away, telling the Russians that he was drunk and talking rubbish. The evening passed off without further incident.

The Russians still did not have good information about the internal layout of the palace. The next day therefore—the day planned for the actual assault—Drozdov persuaded the chief KGB adviser to Amin’s personal guard, Yuri Kutepov, to take him, Kolesnik, and Khalbaev to look round. Drozdov was able to draw a sketch plan of each storey of the building. The Russians asked Jandad if his KGB advisers might take that evening off to attend a birthday party in honour of one of the Soviet officers. He agreed—which probably saved their lives.

Major Romanov and Major Semenov, the commanders of Grom and Zenit, set out separately to familiarise themselves with the terrain over which they would have to lead their men. Their expedition ended in farce and almost frustrated the whole operation. Not far from the palace was a smart restaurant much frequented by Afghan officers, from which there was a first-class view of Taj Bek, the approaches to it, and its defensive arrangements. It was closed, but they found the owner and told him that they were looking for somewhere to celebrate New Year’s Eve with their officers. After observing what they needed, the two officers set off for their base. But on the way they were detained at an Afghan security post. The Afghan soldiers found their documents unconvincing and attempted to disarm them. After four hours and the consumption of a great deal of tea, they managed to persuade the Afghans to let them go. But for a moment it had looked as if their men might have had to go into action without their commanders.

Despite all these comings and goings, those Afghans who survived the assault said later that they had not believed that the Soviets were preparing an assault.

To facilitate the seizure of the palace and the other objectives in the centre of Kabul, and paralyse any Afghan response, the Russians planned to sabotage the government communications system. All the main cables ran through a single conduit just outside the communications centre in the middle of Kabul. The conduit was covered with a heavy slab of concrete. Specialists from Zenit reconnoitred the surroundings and laid their explosive charges. The sound of the explosion itself would be the signal to begin the assault.

Drozdov and Kolesnik gathered their commanders for a briefing on the second floor of the barracks where the Muslim Battalion was based. They told them that Amin had betrayed the April Revolution. Thousands of innocent people had been killed on his orders. He was in contact with the CIA. He therefore had to be eliminated.

Each group was then given its specific mission, its call signs, and its recognition signals. Each soldier handed in his personal documents for security reasons and was given the traditional hundred grams of vodka, and some sausage and bread. Most were too keyed up to eat.

No one questioned the orders. But some of the more perceptive—or cynical—wondered why, if Amin had gone over to the Americans, he had invited Soviet rather than American forces to protect him. Some said that the plan was crazy: they would all be killed. Boyarinov was still not entirely familiar with the operational plans and he was visibly nervous.²⁴ Almost none of the others had ever been in action. Some drank vodka to calm their nerves, others took valerian, but it did not help. Some left their cumbersome flak jackets behind so that they could move more freely.

Poison

The KGB had hankered after an alternative to the use of military force: assassination. Attempts had been made, but they had been abortive. KGB snipers had planned to kill Amin on his way to work, but they were frustrated when the Afghans changed their security measures. On 13 December the KGB tried to poison Amin with doctored Pepsi-Cola. Amin was unaffected.²⁵ His nephew Asadullah, the head of the counter-intelligence service, did fall ill. He was sent to Moscow with what the doctors thought was serious hepatitis. There he was arrested and imprisoned in the prison of Matrosskaya Tishina. The Russians returned him to Kabul after the overthrow of Amin. He was interrogated, tortured, and executed.

The KGB did not abandon their attempts to get rid of Amin quietly right up to the very last minute. Hours before the assault was due to begin, Amin organised a lunch party for members of his Politburo, ministers, and their families, in order to show them his splendid new palace and to celebrate the return from Moscow of Politburo member Panjshiri. Amin was in a state of euphoria. He told his colleagues that the Soviets were at last sending troops to support him. They had accepted his version of the death of Taraki and the change in the country’s leadership. Panjshiri’s visit had further strengthened the relationship. ‘Soviet divisions are already on their way here,’ he boasted. ‘Paratroopers are landing in Kabul. Everything is going very well. I am always on the telephone with Comrade Gromyko and we are working together on the line to take with the outside world.’²⁶

But in the course of the meal Amin and several of the guests lost consciousness. Jandad telephoned the Central Military Hospital and the Soviet Embassy polyclinic to get help. The food was sent for analysis and the Afghan cooks were arrested.

It so happened that a delegation of senior Soviet military doctors led by Colonel Alekseev was in Kabul at the time. Colonel Alekseev and Colonel Kuznechkov, a doctor from the embassy’s polyclinic, had been invited to the palace among other things to attend to Amin’s daughter, who had just had a baby.²⁷ They arrived at about two o’clock in the afternoon, accompanied by a woman doctor and a nurse from Kabul. They were subjected to an unusually rigorous search when they arrived, and understood why when they saw people sitting and lying in the vestibule, on the stairs, and in the rooms. Those who had recovered consciousness were doubled up in pain. They had evidently been poisoned, allegedly by a long-standing KGB agent, Mikhail Talybov, who had been infiltrated into Amin’s entourage as a cook. Kryuchkov subsequently maintained that the substance administered was no more than a powerful sleeping draught. If so, they seem to have got the dose wrong.²⁸

The Soviet doctors were summoned to Amin. He was dressed only in his underpants, with his jaw hanging and his eyes rolling. He was in a deep coma and his pulse was very weak. He looked as if he were dying. The doctors immediately set to work to save him and by six o’clock they had succeeded. When he opened his eyes, he asked, ‘What happened? Was it an accident, or was it sabotage?’

Alexander Shkirando, who had been working as a Soviet military interpreter in Afghanistan since September 1978, was also at the palace that day. He too ate whatever it was that had been used to poison Amin and his colleagues. He was taken severely ill, spent six weeks in an Afghan military hospital, and was then evacuated to hospital in Moscow. He did not go back to the military, but returned on many occasions to Afghanistan as a journalist.²⁹

The doctors realised that something very odd was going on, so they sent the nurse and the woman doctor back to Kabul, out of harm’s way. They did not know, of course, that they had frustrated a plan to simplify the whole Soviet military operation by putting Amin out of action before it began.

The Storm

Jandad was greatly disturbed by the incident. He posted additional guards inside and outside the palace and put the Afghan tank brigade on alert.

The time for the assault was altered several times during the day. But at about 6 p.m. Magometov ordered Kolesnik to begin the operation as soon as possible, without waiting for the explosion that was to destroy the communications centre. Twenty minutes later an assault group under Captain Satarov quietly moved out to neutralise the three entrenched Afghan tanks commanding the approaches to the palace. The men covered the last part of the approach on foot through snow up to their waists. The Afghan sentries were rapidly killed by snipers. The tank crews were in their barracks, too far away to get to their vehicles, and the tanks were soon secured.

Now two red rockets were fired to signal the beginning of the assault. It was by then about 7.15 p.m. The palace was fully illuminated inside and out, and the Afghans were sweeping the surroundings with their searchlights. The Soviet Shilka anti-aircraft guns opened fire. The palace walls were so solid that most of the shells simply bounced off, scattering splinters of granite but causing little serious damage.

The 1st company of the Muslim Battalion then moved forward in their armoured fighting vehicles. The KGB special forces groups under the command of Boyarinov travelled with them. They had orders to take no prisoners, and not to stop to aid wounded comrades: their task was to secure the building whatever the odds.

Almost as soon as they started, one of the BMPs (infantry fighting vehicles) from the Muslim Battalion stopped. The driver had lost his nerve, jumped out of the vehicle, and fled. He returned almost immediately: things were even more frightening outside the vehicle.³⁰ The vehicles crashed through the first barrier, crushing the Afghan sentry. They continued under heavy fire, and for the first time the crews heard the unfamiliar, almost unreal, sound of bullets rattling against the armour of their vehicles. They fired back with everything they had and soon the gun smoke inside the vehicles made it almost impossible for the crews to breathe. The safety glass in the vehicles was shot out. A vehicle was hit and caught fire; some of the crew were wounded when they bailed out. One man slipped as he jumped and his legs were crushed under the vehicle. Another vehicle fell off the bridge which the Russians had constructed across the irrigation ditch and the crew were trapped inside. Their commander called for help by radio, and in doing so managed to block the radio link, paralysing the communications of the whole battalion.

The assault force drove as near as they could to the palace walls, disembarked, and threw themselves at the doors and windows of the ground floor. Confusion was increasing by the minute. Unified command had broken down and the soldiers were having to act in small groups on their own initiative. They were pinned down by fire from the defenders of the palace which the artillery had failed to neutralise. There was a moment of panic, and they froze for perhaps five minutes. Then a Shilka destroyed the machine gun which had been firing down from one of the palace windows, and the men picked themselves up and moved forward with their assault ladders.

They burst into the palace in ones and twos. Boyarinov was among them. The entrance hall was brightly lit, and the defenders were shooting and lobbing grenades from the first-floor gallery. The Russians shot out all the light bulbs they could, but some remained burning. They fought their way up the staircase and began to clear the rooms on the first floor with automatic fire and grenades. They heard the crying of women and children. One woman was calling out for Amin. A grenade cut the power supply and the remaining lights went out. Many Russians had already been wounded, including Boyarinov.

The Russians’ distinctive white armbands were by now barely visible under a layer of grime and soot. To make matters worse, Amin’s personal guards were also wearing white armbands. But in the excitement, the Russians were swearing horribly, using the choicest works in the Russian lexicon; and it was this that enabled them to identify one another in the darkness. It also meant that the defenders, many of whom had trained in the Soviet airborne school in Ryazan, now realised for the first time that they were fighting Soviet troops, not Afghan mutineers as they had thought. They began to surrender, and despite the order not to take prisoners, most of them were spared.

‘Suddenly the shooting stopped,’ one Zenit officer remembered. ‘I reported to General Drozdov by radio that the palace had been taken, that there were many dead and wounded, and that the main thing was ended.’³¹

During the fighting, Colonel Alekseev and Colonel Kuznechkov, the two Soviet doctors, had hidden as best they could in the ballroom. There they caught sight of Amin, walking painfully along the corridor in white shorts and a T-shirt, illuminated by the fires that had broken out, covered with tubes and holding up his arms to which the bottles of medical solution were still attached, ‘looking like grenades’. Alekseev left his shelter and removed the tubes and the bottles, pressing the veins with his fingers to stem the blood. He then took Amin to the bar. A child emerged from one of the side doors, crying and rubbing his eyes with his fists. It was Amin’s five-year-old son. Amin and the small boy both sat down by the wall.

Amin still not realise what was happening. He told his adjutant to telephone the Soviet military advisers: ‘The Soviets will help.’ The adjutant said that it was the Soviets who were doing the firing. Amin threw an ashtray at him in a fury and accused him of lying. But after he himself had tried and failed to get through to the Chief of the Afghan General Staff he quietly muttered, ‘I guessed it. It’s all true.’³²

There are various accounts of how he died. Possibly he was killed deliberately, possibly he was caught by a random burst of fire. One story is that he was killed by Gulabzoi, who had been given that specific task.³³ When the gun smoke cleared, his body was lying by the bar. His small son had been fatally wounded in the chest.³⁴ His daughter was wounded in the leg. Watanjar and Gulabzoi certified that he was dead. The men from Grom left, their boots squelching as they walked across the blood-soaked carpets. Later that night Amin’s body was rolled up in a carpet and taken out to be buried in a secret grave.

The battle had lasted forty-three minutes from start to finish, apart from some brutal skirmishes with elements of the Presidential Guard stationed nearby, who were rapidly dealt with. Five members of the Muslim Battalion and the 9th Company of paratroopers were killed and some thirty-five suffered serious wounds.³⁵ The KGB special forces groups also lost five dead. Among them was Colonel Boyarinov, who was killed by friendly fire right at the end of the battle. He seems to have been cut down by Soviet soldiers who had orders to shoot anyone who emerged from the palace before it was properly secured.³⁶

Colonel Kuznechkov, the military doctor who had helped to cure Amin of his poisoning, was also dead, killed by a burst of bullets fired into the ballroom. When his colleague, Colonel Alekseev, tried to load his body on one of the BMPs, he was roughly told by the crew that they were taking only the wounded, not the dead. But Alekseev managed to persuade them to take the colonel nevertheless.

The victorious Soviets took a hundred and fifty prisoners from Amin’s personal guard. They did not count the dead. Perhaps two hundred and fifty of the Afghans guarding the palace had been killed by their erstwhile Soviet comrades in arms.

The Soviet soldiers who had been wounded during the storming of the palace were taken to the polyclinic at the nearby Soviet Embassy. Galina Ivanov, the wife of the economic adviser Valeri Ivanov, had of course known nothing of what was happening until a terrible sound of shooting broke out down the road and vehicles started bringing in the dead and wounded. One of the vehicles was shot up by the embassy guards, who also had no idea what was going on.

All the embassy doctors lived in one of the microrayons, the Soviet-built suburbs on the other side of town, and were unable to get to the embassy. Galina had taken courses in nursing while she was at university and she was called in to help. She worked from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. Apart from Galina, the only other helpers available were the embassy dentist, a woman who had been a nurse in the Second World War, and a couple of other women. There was another medically qualified person around: the wife of one of the Orientalist advisers. She was a neurosurgeon, but when she saw what was going on she spun on her heels and walked off.

First the little team sorted out the living from the dead. Then the dentist had to use his barely relevant skills to operate as best he could, while Galina and the others bound up the wounds. Galina found it an absolutely horrible experience. When she went back to Moscow soon afterwards she could not understand how people could walk around the streets as if nothing had happened.³⁷

Meanwhile the Russians, triggered by the explosion at the communications centre, had moved with brutal speed and carefully focused violence to take over their other objectives in the city.

The most important and difficult target was the General Staff building. Fourteen special forces troops, accompanied by Abdul Wakil, a future foreign minister of Afghanistan, were assigned to deal with it. A deception plan was devised to ease the odds. That evening General Kostenko, the Soviet adviser to Colonel Yakub, the Chief of Staff, took a number of Soviet officers to pay a formal call, including General Ryabchenko, the commander of the newly arrived 103rd Guards Air Assault Division. They discussed questions of mutual interest with the unsuspecting Yakub, a powerful man who had trained in the Ryazan Airborne School and spoke good Russian. Ryabchenko had no difficulty in behaving naturally, since he knew nothing of what was about to take place. Meanwhile other Soviet special forces officers were spreading through the building, handing out cigarettes and chatting to the Afghan officers working there. When the explosion went off, they burst into Yakub’s office. Yakub fled to another room after a scuffle in which his assistant was killed, but then surrendered and was tied up and placed under guard. Ryabchenko, taken wholly by surprise, sat immobile throughout. Kostenko was nearly killed by the Soviet troops.

The fighting lasted an hour. As it died away, Abdul Wakil appeared in Yakub’s office. He talked in Pushtu to the general for a long time, and then shot him. Twenty Afghans were killed. A hundred were taken prisoner, and as they so heavily outnumbered the attackers, they were herded into a large room and tied up with electric cable.

There was an unpleasant moment when a company of Soviet paratroopers, who had arrived forty minutes late, advanced on the General Staff building in armoured personnel carriers and opened up a heavy fire, forcing the Zenit troops inside to take cover as tracer bullets flew across the room glowing like red fireflies. Order was restored and the paratroopers helped to secure the building.

The Russians needed the Radio and Television Centre to broadcast Karmal’s appeal to the people at the earliest moment. They reconnoitred it very carefully throughout 27 December, some of them posing as automation experts to get inside the building. In the assault seven Afghans were killed, twenty-nine wounded, and over a hundred taken prisoner. One Soviet soldier received a minor wound.

No one was killed on either side in the telegraph building, and the defenders in the Central Army Headquarters and the Military Counter-Intelligence building surrendered without a fight. There was no serious resistance at the Interior Ministry building either, though one Russian soldier was wounded and subsequently died. The attackers had orders to arrest the Interior Minister, S. Payman, but he had fled in his underwear and sought refuge with his Soviet advisers.

By the morning the firing had more or less died down. But not quite. As they drove into town in their Mercedes, the senior officers who had directed the attack on the palace were fired on by a nervous and trigger-happy young paratrooper. The bullets hit the car but not the occupants. A colonel jumped out and gave the soldier a sharp clip round the ear. General Drozdov asked the young lieutenant in charge, ‘Was that your soldier? Thank you for not teaching him to shoot straight.’³⁸

Once the fighting in the Taj Bek Palace had stopped, Colonel Kolesnik set up his command post there. The victorious Soviet soldiers were dropping with fatigue. Since it was possible that Afghan troops in the area might try to retake the palace, they set up a perimeter defence, their nerves still at full stretch. When they heard rustling in the lift shaft, they assumed that Amin’s people were launching a counter-attack through the passages which led into the palace from outside. They sprang to arms, fired their automatic weapons, and hurled grenades.

It was the palace cat.³⁹

The inhabitants of Kabul paid little attention to what happened during that dramatic night. They were too used to shooting in the capital and most slept quietly. When they woke up the next day, Afghanistan had a new government, and the small boys were back selling cigarettes around the ruined government communications conduit as if nothing had happened.

Once the city had been secured, Kabul Radio broadcast Babrak Karmal’s pre-recorded appeal to the peoples of Afghanistan. ‘Today the torture machine of Amin has been smashed,’ he announced, ‘his accomplices—the primitive executioners, usurpers and murderers of tens of thousands of our fellow countrymen—fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters, children and old people…’

Karmal himself was not in the studio: he had remained in Bagram under the protection of the KGB. On the evening of 27 December—before the fighting was over—Andropov came through on the telephone ‘to congratulate him on the victory of the second stage of the revolution’ and on his ‘appointment’ as chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, an appointment which had not yet been endorsed by any formal Afghan body. The next morning Karmal travelled to Kabul in a column of armoured fighting vehicles, supported by three tanks, and lived for the first few days with his KGB protection team in a guest villa on the outskirts of Kabul. On 1 January a telegram arrived from Brezhnev and Kosygin congratulating him on the occasion of his ‘election’ to the highest state and party posts.¹

The gates of the Kabul prisons were thrown open and thousands of prisoners now poured out into the streets. One of them was Dr Lutfullah Latif, a Parchamist who had worked in the Health Ministry. He had been arrested in November 1978, interrogated and tortured for ten days, then sent to Pul-i Charkhi. Three days before the Soviet coup, he and the other prisoners could see and hear the Soviet aircraft landing non-stop at the airport. Then one evening there was firing for half an hour, followed by silence. The door to the prison block was broken down, some Afghan and Russian officers appeared, took the guards prisoner and then left again, taking the keys to the cells with them. It took the prisoners a day to force open the locks. There were political meetings going on outside in the prison yard. The prisoners spent the next night in their cells, but the following day buses were sent to take them home. All were freed, whatever their political affiliation.²

But that was not the end of the arrests and the repressions. Karmal’s people began to settle scores with their political enemies. ‘Revolutionary Troikas’ arrested people, sentenced them, and executed them on the spot with a bullet in the back of the neck. Amin’s guards were among the first victims. The commanders of units which had remained loyal to Amin were arrested, and the prisons were soon full again. The Russians protested. Karmal replied, ‘As long as you keep my hands bound and do not let me deal with the Khalq faction there will be no unity in the PDPA and the government cannot become strong… They tortured and killed us. They still hate us! They are the enemies of the party!’³

Taraki’s wife had been imprisoned in Pul-i Charkhi in a separate small building surrounded by a wall and barbed wire. Now her place was taken by the women from Amin’s family (the men had all been killed). They operated on Amin’s eldest daughter—the one who had been wounded when the palace was stormed—and then incarcerated her in the prison with her new baby. Najibullah released the women twelve years after their arrest, two years after the official end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, on the eve of the final collapse of his regime.⁴The large number of Soviet civilians living in Kabul had, of course, no idea of what was going on. Even the new Soviet Ambassador, Fikryat Tabeev, had not been warned what was to happen. He was taken entirely by surprise when the communications conduit exploded and the lights in the embassy went out. His wife was furious that her husband had been left—literally—in the dark.⁵ He called General Kirpichenko for clarification. Kirpichenko replied that he was too busy to talk just then, but would report in the morning.

Andrei Greshnov, a military interpreter with the 4th Afghan Tank Brigade, had stolen a small fir tree in preparation for the New Year, set it up in his apartment in the new microrayon, and decorated it with baubles looted from the officers’ mess. On the wall he wrote ‘Happy New Year 1980’. When he looked in on his old apartment nine years later, the inscription was still there. For several days he had heard the aeroplanes flying into Bagram, taking off and landing in a continual distant roar. Like everyone else, he had assumed that these were the aircraft bringing the regiment which the Soviet government had promised to send to defend Amin. In fact they were bringing in not a regiment but the whole 103rd Guards Air Assault Division, as well as the remaining paratroopers from the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment.

After he had finished work on the evening of 27 December, Greshnov took a bottle of Aist vodka round to his Azerbaijani friend Mamed Aliev, who lived in the old microrayon. Aliev had a splendid Japanese television with a built-in radio, which he had acquired in town in exchange for a pistol which was surplus to his requirements. They turned on the radio. Something odd was happening. Several stations were on air, all calling themselves ‘Radio Kabul’. One, broadcasting in Pushtu, was denouncing the enemies of Amin and the April Revolution. Another, broadcasting in Dari and barely audible through the jammers, claimed that power was passing into the ‘hands of the healthy forces in the party’.

Greshnov and Aliev were frying potatoes and arguing about how much salt to put on them when the firing started. The street outside was lit up as if it were daytime. They rushed out on to the balcony—and rushed straight back in again as tracer bullets whistled around them. Tanks started firing further off.

Greshnov set out for home; the Soviet military advisers would be looking for him to interpret. But as he ducked out of the door, he was gripped by a huge figure in an anorak, armed with a foreign-looking machine gun. He stuttered in Dari that he had to go to work to help defend the regime against counter-revolutionary treachery. ‘Work’s over for today, laddie,’ was the quiet reply in pure Russian. ‘Thank your mother that you were born with fair hair, otherwise you’d have been shot outright. Go back where you came from.’ It was a long time before Aliev opened the door in response to his frantic banging: he was terrified that he would be shot because he looked like an Afghan. The two men spent the night watching through the window as soldiers and civilians were rounded up and taken away, Soviet armoured vehicles clattered around the streets and disorganised firing echoed throughout the city.

Greshnov got home early the following morning. Where there had been a flowerbed on the roundabout outside his house, there was now an anti-tank gun, its barrel trained on his apartment block. The wives of some of the Soviet advisers were giving home-made food to the Soviet soldiers. Out on the street he met Latif, a driver from the 4th Afghan Tank Brigade, who told him, ‘Our tanks were destroyed outside the TV station. No one survived.’ Greshnov swore loudly and asked, ‘Who did that?’ Then he realised he was being stupid: it was of course the Russians who had done it. It took him some time to sort out his loyalties, and when Latif told him that one Afghan tank had knocked out a Soviet armoured personnel carrier before it was destroyed he was briefly delighted.⁶

Alexander Sukhoparov had been an adviser to the PDPA since August 1979. He too could not understand what was happening during the night. He had to get his news from the BBC and other foreign radio stations. On the morning of 28 December Soviet paratroopers arrived to protect the hotel where he was staying. They were in a state of high excitement, but they too had no good idea of what had happened or of why they were there. They asked Sukhoparov about Afghan customs, about the layout of the town, about the attitude of the people to their arrival. It was a cold sunny day and people were wandering the streets, congratulating one another that Amin had been overthrown. ‘They greeted our soldiers warmly,’ Sukhoparov wrote later, ‘gave them flowers, and called them friends and liberators.’⁷

Nikolai Zakharov, a Komsomol official, had arrived in May 1979 to help the Afghans create a Communist youth organisation. He was at the airport on 25 December and saw military vehicles being unloaded from a transport aircraft and soldiers mustering alongside.

‘They’re ours,’ cried Zakharov’s interpreter, Abramov.

‘You’re off your head,’ Zakharov said dismissively. ‘How would our soldiers have got here?’

‘They really are ours,’ said the interpreter. ‘Look at the red stars on their fur hats.’

Three days later Zakharov wrote up his diary: ‘Last night, 27 December, at about 18.30, there was an outbreak of automatic and artillery fire which grew until it reached a maximum at 19.30. The sound of gunfire came from the airport, from the House of the People, and at times very close from the nearby residential area.’ And then he solemnly transcribed the official justification for the overthrow of Amin.⁸

It had been a remarkably daring, successful, and—considering the circumstances—cheap affair. Twenty-nine Soviet soldiers had been killed in action, forty-four in accidents (including the paratroopers who were killed when their transport plane crashed into the mountains as it was coming in to land in Kabul), and seventy-four wounded. Afghan military losses were of course higher: about three hundred dead. There were no civilian casualties because the Russians had not used aircraft to soften up their targets. Almost exactly ten years later, in December 1989, the Americans invaded Panama to oust General Noriega. The military casualties suffered by both sides were similar to those suffered in Kabul. But because the Americans used aircraft, there were also civilian casualties, the number of which remains a matter of controversy.⁹

The operation seemed to have been politically successful as well. An oppressive ruler had been removed and one agreeable to the Soviets had been installed. Dmitri Ryurikov and his colleagues in the Soviet Embassy were sent out to canvass opinion. All reported that their Afghan contacts were pleased Amin had gone. But some had added, ‘We are glad to see you. But you will be very well advised to leave again as soon as you can.’¹⁰ As they fanned out through Afghanistan, the Soviet troops heard much the same thing: their arrival was welcomed, sometimes with flowers; but they too were reminded that their early departure would be even more welcome.

Protesters and Doubters

But back in the Soviet Union the first few protests were voiced almost immediately. A handful of dissenters—Yelena Bonner, the wife of Andrei Sakharov, and others—issued a statement on 29 January 1980. They entirely rejected the official version of events and the contention of the authorities that the Soviet people wholeheartedly supported their action. ‘There is a war in Afghanistan, Afghans are dying and our own boys are dying too, the children and grandchildren of those who survived the Second World War and those who did not return from it.’ They appealed to those who remembered the earlier war, those who remembered Vietnam, people of goodwill everywhere, to demand that the Soviet troops be withdrawn in accordance with the resolution which had just received overwhelming support at an emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly.

Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Prize winner who had helped develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb, also demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops and their replacement by UN or neutral Muslim forces. He called for the widest possible boycott of the Olympic Games, which were shortly due to be held in Moscow, and castigated the militaristic thinking which had led first to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and now to the invasion of Afghanistan.¹¹ He was exiled to the provincial city of Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod) for his pains. That summer, Tatiana Goricheva and Natalya Malachuskaya were expelled from the Soviet Union for appealing to conscripts to go to prison rather than serve in Afghanistan.¹²

Even inside the official machine, some were filled from the very beginning with a sense of foreboding, not only for the fate of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, but for the fate of the Soviet Union itself. On 20 January Academician Oleg Bogomolov of the Institute of the Economy of the World Socialist System, one of Moscow’s most prestigious think tanks, sent a stinging analysis to the Central Committee and to Andropov, the head of the KGB. The paper was entitled ‘Some Ideas about Foreign Policy Results of the 1970s (Theses)’ and it contained a substantial section on the consequences of the Afghan adventure. It pointed out that the rebels could now appeal to the Afghan people to fight the foreign infidels as well as the godless Communists in Kabul. The USSR had got itself involved in yet another confrontation, this time on its volatile southern flank. Aid to the rebels from the Americans, the Arabs, and the Chinese was increasing. The Soviet Union’s influence on the Non-Aligned Movement had already suffered. Détente and arms control had been blocked. Even some of the Warsaw Pact countries seemed unhappy. The invasion might even help to reconcile the USA and Iran, despite the crisis in which the two countries were now locked.¹³

All these disadvantages had, of course, been pointed out in the policy discussions which preceded the decision to invade. The paper was too late to influence events and produced no reaction from those to whom it had been addressed. But at least the authors were not punished.

The Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies had carried on the distinguished academic tradition of the Russian Orientalists of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Their Afghanistan department was strongly staffed with scholars who covered every aspect of the country’s political, economic, and social life. Many of the linguists were called up at the beginning of the war to serve as interpreters and specialist advisers. There was no way of hiding what was going on from the staff of the institute, where opinion was almost entirely against the war. But the politicians did not listen to them either.¹⁴

The British Foreign Office presented a Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister who visited them in January 1980 with a historical account of British failures in Afghanistan. He said, ‘This time it will be different,’ as people usually do when they set out to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.¹⁵

Many well-placed officials inside the government machine were appalled. Anatoli Chernyaev, an official in the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat, described in his diary on 30 December how the rest of the world had universally condemned the Soviet action. The Soviet Union’s claims to be promoting détente lay in ruins. ‘Who needed that? The Afghan people? Amin might well have turned the place into a second Cambodia. But was it merely out of a sense of revolutionary philanthropy and charity that we have taken a step that will be classed in world opinion with Finland in 1939 and Czechoslovakia in 1968? The argument that we had to act to defend our frontiers is laughable… I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of Russia, not even under Stalin, when such an important step was decided in such a small circle, without any hint of the slightest consultation, advice, discussion, consideration.’ A few weeks later, as he tried to work out how and why the decision had been taken, he concluded, ‘In a word—the very existence of the state, not only its prestige, is at stake because the whole system and the mechanisms of power have decayed, because of the psychological decay of the supreme leader, and the advanced years of the other leaders whose average age is seventy-five. And there is absolutely no way out.’ Speculation about who was behind the decision to invade was spreading among officials in Moscow. Chernyaev drew what he thought was the obvious conclusion: the KGB had exploited Brezhnev’s incapacity in order to launch this ‘crime’.¹⁶

Early in the New Year Anatoli Adamishin, an up-and-coming official in the Foreign Ministry, wrote even more strongly in his own diary: ‘A few days ago we moved our troops into Afghanistan. What an exceptionally ill-considered decision! What are they thinking about? It’s clear that they are showing one another how tough they are. OK, let’s show our muscle. In reality it is an act of weakness, of despair. To hell with Afghanistan. Why on earth should we get mixed up in a completely lost situation? We are wasting our moral capital, others will stop trusting us entirely. We have not been in such a mess since the Crimean War in the last century: everyone is against us, and our allies are weak and unreliable. If they are incapable of running their own country, then we will not succeed in teaching them anything with our economy in tatters, our inability to manage our political affairs or to organise anything properly and so on. What’s more, we seem to be getting mixed up in a civil war, even though it is being fed from abroad. Did we learn nothing from Vietnam? Why should we try to play the role of a universal saviour, when we need to work out properly what we want in our own external and internal affairs. The terrible thing is that this is not what concerns our leaders. Their concern is to hold on to power, to engage in domestic manoeuvres, to demonstrate their high ideological principles, which incidentally we no longer understand ourselves… The action in Afghanistan is the quintessence of our internal affairs. The economic disorganisation, the fear of the Central Asian republics, the approaching Congress, the habit of deciding problems by force, the ideological dogmatism—what sort of a socialist revolution is that, what sort of revolutionaries are these? There is the same obscurity everywhere. What sort of help can we give them? We were better off with the King [Zahir Shah]: at least he listened to us.’¹⁷

The Outside World Reacts

The Americans had of course been keeping close track of what the Russians were up to in Afghanistan. Their most reliable resource was satellite intelligence, which enabled them to follow the changes in Soviet military dispositions. But they were painfully aware that they had very little idea of what lay behind the Soviet moves. On 17 September 1978 Thomas Thomson, the President’s assistant for national security, sent his boss, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a memorandum entitled ‘What are the Soviets doing in Afghanistan’. His answer was blunt: ‘Simply, we don’t know’.¹⁸ The Americans correctly concluded after the Herat rising that the Russians would be unlikely to send their army to support an unpopular Afghan government.¹⁹ By the autumn they still judged that the forces the Russians were now assembling were sufficient only to protect Soviet citizens, not to subdue the country. They nevertheless began to make contingency plans in case the Russians did invade after all.²⁰ Later the analysts were blamed for not having predicted the invasion earlier. The CIA’s own post-mortem showed that what had gone wrong was quite simple: the Russians themselves had been uncertain until the last minute if, when, or in what numbers to invade, and so there was no basis on which an earlier assessment could sensibly have been made.

With far less intelligence capacity than the Americans, the British were also keeping track of events. The murder of Taraki, they thought, did raise the possibility that the Soviets might move into Afghanistan. One British official wondered towards the end of November 1979, perhaps presciently, ‘Wouldn’t we be better off with a socialist regime rather than a reactionary Islamic type that is giving us problems elsewhere?’²¹

After the invasion had taken place, most British and American analysts tended to agree that the Soviets had undertaken it with reluctance, in order to prevent the crumbling of their position in a country which was within their legitimate sphere of influence. Both before and after the invasion, British analysts specifically rejected the idea—popular in the press at the time—that the Russians were after a warm-water port in the Indian Ocean. And indeed no serious evidence has yet emerged, beyond a couple of remarks reported in one Soviet military memoir, that the Soviet invasion was intended as a first step towards securing a warm-water port or—another theme of Western propaganda—towards incorporating Afghanistan into the Soviet Union.²²

Both themes were, however, to form a telling element in the all-out campaign of public denunciation which was now unleashed by the Americans and the British. The Soviets, they said, had violated international law with their brutal and unprovoked surprise attack on a very small neighbour. The claim that the Soviet forces had been invited in was a transparent fiction, just as it had been before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was another example of the Soviet Union’s insatiable imperial appetite, of their claim that the so-called ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ gave them the right to keep countries in their bloc by force.

The outrage was genuinely felt, but there was also an element of posturing. The Americans were still smarting over their humiliation at the hands of the Iranians, who had just taken American diplomats hostage in Tehran. President Carter was determined to show his mettle and remarked to an aide, ‘Because of the way that I’ve handled Iran, they think I don’t have the guts to do anything. You’re going to be amazed at how tough I’m going to be.’²³ He publicly denounced the Soviets on 28 December, told his cabinet that the invasion was ‘the greatest threat to world peace since the Second World War’ (ignoring the much more dangerous crises around Cuba and Berlin in Khrushchev’s day), called for a world boycott of the forthcoming Moscow Olympic Games, and imposed economic sanctions. The British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher (1925–), enthusiastically followed suit.²⁴ On 23 January, in his annual State of the Union Address, the President accused the Soviet Union of deliberately moving to threaten Western oil supplies and said, ‘Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.’²⁵ This uncompromising language, which soon became known as the ‘Carter Doctrine’, was at least as bad as anything the Soviet leaders had contemplated when they were weighing up the arguments for intervention. All hopes of salvaging détente were dead.

Just as the critics in Moscow had predicted, the non-aligned nations were in uproar. On 14 January 104 countries supported an American resolution in the UN condemning the invasion. A similar resolution was introduced annually, and support for it grew every year.²⁶

Support for the Olympics boycott was more lukewarm. British athletes refused to do what Mrs Thatcher told them, and only China, Japan, the German Federal Republic, and Canada joined the United States in a full boycott. Carter had to buy off American grain producers to compensate them for losing the Soviet market. The Americans’ allies were just as reluctant to support sanctions if their own commercial interests were affected. There was in any case no way that the Soviets could have bowed to the Olympic boycott and the economic sanctions. Soviet policy towards Afghanistan was unaffected.

The Americans and the British turned instead to more practical measures. On 26 December, the day after the Russians crossed the frontier, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, told him that the Russians were on the verge of achieving their age-old goal, access to the Indian Ocean: the moment, perhaps, at which this myth was born. Brzezinski judged that Afghanistan was unlikely to become the Soviet Vietnam, because unlike the Vietnamese the Afghan rebels were badly organised and led, had no organised army, no central government, and negligible outside support. But the comparison with Vietnam was to colour American thinking for the next nine years, as it coloured the thinking of the Russians. Ways should be found, said Brzezinski, to make the Soviets pay.²⁷

It was not as if the Americans had so far been idle. Even before the Herat rising in March 1979, well before there had been any question of Soviet troops entering Afghanistan, the CIA had put forward proposals for helping the growing anti-Communist rebellion. President Carter decided at the end of March that the Soviet presence in Afghanistan must be reversed. American officials were already drawing the parallel with Vietnam. In the summer Carter authorised the CIA to spend $500,000 on helping the Afghan rebels. Brzezinski later claimed that this was not a deliberate move to provoke the Soviets to intervene, but that ‘we knowingly increased the probability that they would’.²⁸

The Saudis and the Chinese looked as if they too would help. But the Pakistani role would be crucial. The Americans were in a dilemma. They were pressing the Pakistanis to rein in their nuclear weapons programme, but the pressures needed to bend the Pakistanis to their will were incompatible with seeking their aid on Afghanistan. Brzezinski persuaded the President to swallow his scruples and give the Afghan project priority over non-proliferation. Within weeks of the invasion, the US covert agencies were meeting their British, French, and German counterparts to discuss practical ways of supporting the mujahedin.

American assistance to the mujahedin was at first comparatively modest. President Reagan (1911–2004) had now taken over from Carter, and his new CIA director, William Casey, a religious man, believed that Christianity and Islam could combine against the godless Soviets. Charlie Wilson, the Congressman who mustered support for the mujahedin, said, ‘There were 58,000 dead in Vietnam, and we owe the Russians one.’²⁹ Casey redefined the objective. The aim should not be to make the Russians bleed, but to drive them out of Afghanistan altogether. The American programme expanded massively. After 1985 the American deliveries of arms multiplied by a factor of ten. The Pakistanis funnelled most of this stuff to the more radical groups. By the time the project ceased at the end of 1991, the Americans had given assistance to the rebels of up to $9 billion, supplemented by very large sums from the Saudis.³⁰

The mujahedin cause began to move out of the executive branch, win patrons in Congress in both parties, and become a major issue in US domestic politics. This made it harder for the American government to negotiate flexibly with the Russians when the time came, established even the least reputable of the mujahedin leaders as heroes, and helped to blind the Americans to the nature of the forces they had helped to unleash.³¹

The Russians knew, of course, that Soviet military deployments were readily visible to Western spy satellites and other intelligence gatherers. Years later the Soviet generals asked themselves why the Americans had made no comment, made no protest, and issued no meaningful warnings. They concluded that the Americans deliberately planned to entrap the Russians in a quagmire.³² It is not much of an excuse. The Americans did warn the Russians on several occasions before the invasion that they could not be indifferent to what the Russians got up to in Afghanistan. And if there was an American trap, the Russians should have had more sense than to fall into it.

The Heroes Go Home

For the men who had captured the Taj Bek Palace none of this mattered too much. They knew that they had taken part in a remarkable feat of arms. But it had been a very confused business, and in later years many of the participants found it hard to remember exactly what had happened. ‘Much has been wiped from my memory,’ remarked Vladimir Grishin of the Muslim Battalion. ‘When veterans of the Great Patriotic War talk, I am surprised at how well they can remember. I have switched off several episodes. Some of it remained there in my memory: for example, for several months I could sense the smell of flesh and blood.’³³ A survivor later remembered that the fight on the staircase was just like the storming of the Berlin Reichstag in April 1945, one of the most celebrated moments of the Second World War. Another was surprised when he revisited the ruined palace some years later how narrow the staircase was: he remembered it being as broad as the Odessa Steps in the film of The Battleship Potemkin. One of them wondered whether the deception that had been practised on the Afghan defenders—ostensibly their comrades in arms—had not amounted to outright treachery. He consoled himself with the thought that the Russian soldiers had had no choice but to win, and that victory could have been achieved no other way.

These men were later to be treated as heroes who had turned a glorious page of Russian military history. But for the time being the authorities in Moscow were determined that the details of the assault on the palace should remain secret, and so they did for nearly ten years. The men were sworn to absolute silence, their heroism was recognised with an absolute minimum of pomp, and no concessions were made in matters of discipline. Lieutenant Vostrotin and his 9th Company of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment did not rejoin their unit in Bagram until New Year’s Eve. They used the time to good effect, collecting bits and pieces lying around the palace: German helmets worn by Amin’s palace guard, television sets, ghetto blasters, pistols, carpets, and a sewing machine. They loaded them on a lorry and took them off to Bagram to improve the limited amenities of their camp. Alas, their regimental commander, Colonel Nikolai Serdyukov, chose—probably with justification under military law—to regard their actions as looting. The soldiers were relieved of their prizes, Vostrotin was threatened with court martial, and his action cost him both the medal and the promotion he had hoped for.³⁴

On 4 January the men from Grom and Zenit were loaded into a slow turboprop plane and flew—endlessly, it seemed—until they finally reached Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. They had no documents of any kind and no money. At the airport they were met by a colonel of the frontier guards, who had heard nothing of their arrival. There was a bad moment until they convinced him who they were. The wounded were then sent to hospital in Tashkent. The rest went on to Moscow. Here they were received with honour, but told that they were in no circumstances to talk about what they had done, and made to sign a secrecy agreement. The secrecy was such that medals—not as many as the men had hoped for—were handed out in hugger-mugger. Colonel Boyarinov, who had been killed by friendly fire, was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Kryuchkov went in secret to his Moscow apartment to give the medal personally to his wife and son.³⁵

The men were then sent off for two weeks to a sanatorium in the countryside, where they were treated for stress. Some dealt with their stress in the traditional way, by drowning their nightmares in vodka. Leonid Gumenny found the adjustment hard: ‘I was tormented by terrible insomnia. I slept no more than two hours a night. My dreams were in colour, and before I could even get off to sleep I could smell shit, gunpowder, and blood—the smell of death. I was only able to get myself back together—more or less—six months later, after treatment in a sanatorium in Sochi.’

The men of the Muslim Battalion flew home on 9 January. Before taking off they too were relieved by the military policemen of the KGB of all the souvenirs they had picked up after the battle—ornamental daggers, a couple of pistols, a transistor radio and a tape recorder. A rumour later circulated that the soldiers had brought home jewellery looted from the palace. But they had no more than their personal weapons and no documents with them at all. They knew that they had done something remarkable. But they also knew that their government was determined that the way Amin had been set aside should remain shrouded in the deepest secrecy. One young officer even believed that their aircraft might be shot down before they got home, to ensure that the evidence was destroyed. It was a bizarre and irrational thought: a sign of the strain they had been under, but a sign perhaps also of the way they saw the state which they had been prepared to serve so loyally.³⁶