Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (48 page)

By the fall of 1978, it was clear to astute observers that the PDPA ruled in name only. Afghanistan was actually under the control of the Khalq. Nur Mohammed Taraki, the Khalqi leader, stood at the head of the party and the country, but those in the know—including the increasingly anxious Soviets, who had always preferred the Parchamis’ more cautious approach—understood that it was his deputy, the thrusting Amin, who was busily concentrating power in his own hands.

In the course of 1979, it became increasingly clear that the government’s efforts to impose its authority on the population were failing. The rebellions in Herat and the Pech Valley were only part of a bigger picture. By the spring there were large swaths of the country to which the government writ did not extend. Within the army, the tempo of desertions was accelerating; entire units defected en masse. The government in Kabul fought back as best as it could, deploying hundreds of tanks and helicopter gunships recently delivered by the Soviets. Taraki used much of this matériel in an offensive aimed at Kunar Province, where the Pech rebellion was still boiling along.

By the summer of 1979, the malaise had spread to Kabul itself. Shootings and arson attacks were commonplace. Assassinations occurred. Government troops were thin on the streets. Most of the violence involved rebels attacking representatives of the government, but some of it reflected feuding between Khalqis and Parchamis. (Many of the latter had gone into hiding.)
³
In June, government troops opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in Kabul, killing dozens of unarmed people. In August came a mutiny at the Bala Hissar fortress on the outskirts of the capital. For a moment, until the uprising was suppressed, the very existence of the regime seemed in question. The same month, an entire infantry brigade defected to the rebels in Kunar.
⁴

The factional rivalry within the ruling party was not the only problem that it faced; there was also the issue of the rising antipathy between Taraki and Amin.
The collapse of the government’s authority in the countryside aggravated the rift between the president and his prime minister. It is hard to imagine that Amin, a man visibly consumed by ambition, would have been content to leave Taraki in charge over the long term. It was, after all, Amin who had organized the April coup, and from the very first day of the Khalqi regime, he had worked to expand his personal power, carefully cultivating his network of supporters throughout the military and the security services. Amin was named prime minister only in March 1979, after the revolt in Herat, but many had suspected long before then that he was the real force in the government.

Taraki, however, was no fool, and he had many powerful allies of his own—including four key leaders (predictably dubbed “the Gang of Four” by their opponents) who regarded Amin’s maneuverings with intense suspicion. Though the Gang was hardly squeamish about the use of violence, they criticized the harshness of the measures Amin was employing against the rebels. In at least one place, he ordered that the villagers in rebellious districts be buried alive. The prisons and the interrogation centers of the secret police were bursting with inmates. All this provided fuel for his opponents, who were busily exploiting their own ties to the many Soviet advisers working in Kabul.

As the situation in the countryside deteriorated, these differences between the two party leaders flared into open conflict. In a Politburo meeting in Kabul in July 1979, Amin blamed Taraki for everything that was going wrong. Taraki responded by accusing his subordinate of nepotism. The collapse of the Communist experiment was bringing matters to a head.
⁵

At the end of August, Taraki left Kabul to attend the Non-Aligned Summit in Havana. On his way back, he stopped over in Moscow to discuss matters with Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin. The Soviet leader and his colleagues had, by now, become deeply distrustful of Amin. The KGB kept careful track of the internal feuding in Kabul, and their reports on the prime minister’s maneuvers added to the Russians’ worries about the mounting instability. Soviet spies also blamed Amin for many of the radical policies that were intensifying popular discontent. Brezhnev warned Taraki about Amin and urged him, in veiled terms, to fire his deputy. In subsequent talks with KGB officials after the meeting, Taraki, who apparently didn’t entirely understand what Brezhnev was trying to get across at first, tried to calm his hosts’ fears, assuring them that he was entirely in control of events in Afghanistan. “Nothing can happen without my knowledge,” he boasted to the Russians.
⁶

Needless to say, this wasn’t entirely true. The man who was then the chief KGB officer in Kabul, Vladamir Bogdanov, later told a story about what Amin was up to
during Taraki’s absence. According to Bogdanov, Amin had invited all thirty-odd members of the PDPA Central Committee into his office, one by one. Amin then asked each one whom he supported, Amin or Taraki—while Amin’s nephew held a pistol to their heads.
⁷

As soon as he was back in Kabul, the elderly president confronted Amin, who denied all the accusations but said that he would be happy to resign as long as the move was approved by the majority of the Central Committee. (He had already prepared for just such an eventuality, as Bogdanov’s story shows.) Taraki, bolstered by the assurances of support he had received in Moscow, was undeterred. During a cabinet meeting, he announced, “There’s a cancer in the party, and it needs to be cut out!” Everyone understood whom he had in mind. This cued a dramatic escalation.

Amin responded by pressing Taraki to fire the members of the “Gang of Four” he viewed as his chief enemies within the government. Taraki refused to comply—and, just to be on the safe side, he sent his four allies into hiding. Amin announced that they had been fired. Publicly, he claimed that the order for their ouster had been given by Taraki. Privately, he accused Taraki of planning to assassinate him.

The Soviets had had enough. They decided to intervene directly. On September 14, a Friday, the Soviet ambassador to Kabul, Alexander Puzanov, offered to guarantee Amin’s safety if he came to the presidential palace to meet with Taraki. Amin agreed. At five thirty in the evening, he arrived at the palace in the company of four armed guards. The atmosphere was unbearably tense—just the sort of situation where a nervous trigger finger can touch off catastrophe.

Inside the palace, one of the president’s bodyguards told Amin’s security detail to surrender their weapons. They refused. One of Taraki’s men opened fire, killing the head of Amin’s bodyguard instantly and wounding another. Amin was grazed by a ricocheting bullet. He and the three surviving guards beat a hasty retreat to the nearby general-staff building.
⁸

Soviet diplomats desperately tried to tamp down the crisis. A hastily dispatched delegation pleaded with Amin to restrain from retaliating, insisting that it was all just a misunderstanding. But the prime minister was not to be mollified. It was clear that, as far as he was concerned, he had just escaped an assassination attempt, and he was not about to make amends with Taraki. Although he denied seeking power for his own purposes, he made sure the Russians understood a political reality: the armed forces, he told them, no longer followed Taraki’s orders. They would listen only to him.
⁹

Amin was done with cohabitation; now he was determined to become the man in charge. He quickly issued orders to his followers in the military and the security
apparatus, and the extent of his real power within the Afghan government soon made itself manifest. Soldiers surrounded the presidential palace and took Taraki prisoner. Amid rumors of ministerial dismissals and the mysterious shooting, news agencies reported several explosions around Kabul and noted that security forces had taken up positions around the radio station. On Saturday, the government announced that four men had been shot dead the day before; the circumstances were left unexplained. The message the next day was somewhat different: using the doublespeak preferred by Communist governments, state-controlled radio announced that Taraki had “resigned” from office because of a nervous condition. (Foreign journalists pointed out that he had appeared to be in perfectly good health during the Havana summit.) The official statements made no use of Taraki’s accustomed title of “Great Leader.”
¹⁰

On Monday, September 16, Amin assumed sole power in Afghanistan—but without really giving anything away about the fate of the man he was replacing. From one moment to the next, Taraki was relegated to the Orwellian status of an unperson. Amin announced that he was assuming the posts of party general secretary and president, both jobs that had been held by Taraki until the day before, even while he retained his post as prime minister and his control over the army and security organs. The speech contained only a single elliptical reference to his predecessor: “Those people who saw their greatness in the oppression of the people have been eliminated.” Perceptive observers noted that that same verb had been used to report the assassination of Daoud in the April coup of the year before.
¹¹

Amin clearly hoped that he could use his seizure of power to reboot the Khalqi regime. In the speech, he promised to release political prisoners who had been imprisoned “unnecessarily” (which seemed to imply that the government of which he had been an integral part was guilty of jailing innocents) and promised an end to the “personality cult” that had surrounded Taraki since the day of the August coup (a cult that existed thanks in large part to Amin’s own efforts). “Industrialists and big businessmen will be given help in rebuilding the economy of the country,” Amin declared. He tried to burnish his Islamic credentials by launching a program to refurbish mosques.

The Russians had to make it appear as though they were on top of the situation. Brezhnev issued a statement congratulating Afghanistan’s new leader: “We express confidence that fraternal relations between the Soviet Union and revolutionary Afghanistan will be further developed successfully.” But foreign news reports, recalling the bear hug that Brezhnev had publicly given Taraki in Moscow just a few days earlier, speculated that it was more likely that the Russians had been caught completely
off guard by this latest turn of events. If this was true, moreover, the PDPA’s patrons in the Kremlin were unlikely to be pleased. The journalists were right.
¹²

In fact, the Soviets were in a state of extreme consternation. The man that they regarded as a political adventurer, an unreliable radical, had seized power. What was to be done? As it happened, they had already started planning for an Afghanistan without Amin. In September, the KGB’s elite special forces unit, the Zenit group, had drawn up a blueprint for kidnapping him and taking him to the Soviet Union. Now, in the wake of Taraki’s disappearance, the focus shifted. The Soviets decided to take charge of the four renegade ministers who had been dismissed by Amin just before his coup and spirit them out of the country. The KGB called it Operation Raduga (Rainbow). The four men were smuggled out of Kabul to the Soviet-operated air base at Baghram. To conceal them from Amin’s forces, the men were hidden in ammunition boxes equipped with airholes and mattresses and driven in trucks to the base. From there they were flown out to the Soviet Union, where they could be kept in safety until they were needed.
¹³

On October 10, Radio Kabul announced that Taraki had died of an “incurable disease.” The reality, as virtually everyone suspected, was entirely different. The day before, Amin had ordered three of his security officers to enter Taraki’s cell and smother him with a pillow. At the same time, he gave instructions for the expulsion of Puzanov, the Soviet ambassador, whom he believed to be plotting against him. After the shoot-out in the palace, Amin’s foreign minister had made a point of telling East-bloc diplomats that the Soviets had guaranteed Amin’s safety during his visit to the presidential palace—tantamount to implicating them in the attempt to kill him.
¹⁴
Puzanov emphatically denied having knowledge of any such plans. Subsequent events would make it hard to take this at face value.
¹⁵

The news of Taraki’s death incensed Leonid Brezhnev. “What kind of scum is this Amin—to strangle the man with whom he participated in the revolution?” Brezhnev fulminated to his colleagues. “Who is now at the helm of the Afghan revolution? What will people say in other countries?”
¹⁶
It was this single event, more than any other, that provoked the Soviet decision to intervene directly in Afghanistan. But the Kremlin had other reasons for its disenchantment. Soon after taking power, Amin began to signal that he was preparing to move Afghanistan away from its one-sided reliance on the USSR. He made moves to replace Soviet-trained officials with Western ones.
¹⁷
He sought meetings with US officials to sound out possibilities for cooperation.

The talks don’t seem to have gone anywhere, but they set off alarm bells in Moscow. The head of the KGB foreign intelligence department, Leonid Shebarshin,
warned that Amin was getting ready to “do a Sadat on us.”
¹⁸
In the early 1970s, after two decades in which his country had received over a billion dollars in Soviet aid, the Egyptian leader had turned his back on his country’s alliance with the USSR and realigned his country with the West. It was one of the most humiliating defeats suffered by the Kremlin during the Cold War, and it obviously haunted the Soviet leadership. The fact that Amin had attended college in New York City reinforced their anxiety.

Meanwhile, the military situation in Afghanistan continued to deteriorate. In mid-October, Amin managed to fend off a coup attempt from an opposition faction within the army. But he could do little against the rebels in the countryside. The turmoil within the leadership had demoralized and confused the leaders of the military, and the mujahideen took advantage of the situation to make further inroads. One Soviet military adviser stationed with Afghan troops in Paktika Province wrote home that the officers were making things worse by antagonizing the local population and selling off Soviet-donated equipment to the rebels.
¹⁹
As far as the Soviets could tell, Amin’s rule was putting at stake all the blood and treasure that Moscow had invested in the country.