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 presenc
e 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 super
powers. 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
– FOUR –
The Storming of the Palace
Afgantsy Page 9