The new regime was soon confronted with a growing opposition inside the country. In
March 1979, there was a violent rebellion in Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city.
During this rebellion several Soviet advisers were executed. The PDPA, fearful of
losing control, turned to Moscow with a demand for military support. A meeting was
arranged in Moscow on March 20, 1979, between President Taraki and four Soviet heavyweights:
Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers; Andrey Gromyko, Minister of
Foreign Affairs; Dmitry Ustinov, Minister of Defense; and Boris Ponomarev, head of
the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Taraki not only
demanded weapons, but also military personnel, including pilots and tank drivers.
Although Kosygin refused any direct military involvement of Soviet troops on the ground
in Afghanistan, Moscow became more nervous when the KGB hinted at the supposed unreliability
of the Afghan prime minister, Hafizullah Amin. Yury Andropov, the head of the KGB,
feared that Amin could become an “Afghan Sadat,” turning, eventually, to the West.[4] “Andropov suspects him to be an agent of the CIA: logical if one knows that Amin
has passed four years at Columbia University.”[5] This suspicion led to dramatic events in the late summer of 1979. KGB agents in
Kabul told President Taraki that he should arrest Amin. When, on September 14, Amin
was invited to Taraki’s palace to talk with Soviet representatives, Taraki’s guards
opened fire and tried to kill him. But Amin escaped. He mobilized his own militia
and had Taraki arrested. On October 9, 1979, President Taraki was executed. Hereupon
the Soviet Union decided to intervene and replace Amin with its own favorite, Babrak
Karmal. Amin was killed by
The Soviet troops were to stay in Afghanistan for more than a full decade with over a hundred thousand troops permanently involved. In this period at least twenty-five thousand Russian troops were killed. Over one million Afghans lost their lives in the conflict. An important question is who pushed Brezhnev, at that time in poor health, to take the decision to invade Afghanistan. In the politburo meeting of December 12, 1979, in which the decision was taken, Kosygin, who opposed an intervention, was absent. Many point to KGB chief Yury Andropov as the main instigator. Artyom Borovik, for instance, wrote: “Many servicemen and MID [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] workers told me that the script for the events in Afghanistan was written by the KGB. Initially, Andropov was against the idea of an invasion, but eventually he followed the same reflex that he’d learned some twenty years earlier in Hungary, where he served as an ambassador and where troops had to be sent in 1956.”[7] This interpretation is supported by Svetlana Savranskaya, a political analyst.
The decision to send troops was made on the basis of limited information. According to Soviet veterans of the events, KGB sources were trusted over the military intelligence (GRU) sources. This partly reflected the growing influence of the KGB chairman Yu. V. Andropov, who controlled the flow of information to General Secretary Brezhnev, who was partially incapacitated and ill for most of 1979. KGB reports from Afghanistan created a picture of urgency and strongly emphasized the possibility of Amin’s links to the CIA and U.S. subversive activities in the region.[8]
