a house divided, 1933–73supporters tried to engineer ’Amin’s downfall. In mid-September 1979
Taraki called Hafiz Allah ’Amin to the Presidential Palace and dismissed
him, offering him an ambassadorship abroad. ’Amin refused and angrily
told Taraki it was he who ought to leave the country, whereupon Taraki’s
guards tried, but failed, to shoot ’Amin. He fled the palace but a few hours
later he returned, accompanied by Khalqi army officers, who arrested
Taraki and his few remaining loyalists. A few weeks later, the Great Leader
was quietly suffocated.
President Hafiz Allah ’Amin and the Soviet invasion’Amin’s coup was far from welcome in Moscow and when Brezhnev was
told that Taraki, who was a personal friend, had been put to death, he
damned ’Amin as ‘scum’. 36 There were other reasons for the Politburo’s
anger. ’Amin’s coup ended Soviet attempts to unite Khalq and Parcham
and undermined the pdpa’s wafer-thin support base. President ’Amin’s
subsequent actions caused even greater concern as he tried to distance his
government from the ussr and repair relations with Iran, Pakistan and the
usa. Some high Soviet officials were even convinced that Hafiz Allah ’Amin
had been recruited by the cia during his time at Columbia University. 37
President ’Amin made a series of gestures in the hope of winning
popular support for his administration, releasing thousands of political
prisoners, denouncing Taraki as a dictator and offering the prospect of a
new Constitution. He even secured a fatwa from a council of ‘ulama’ that
legitimized his government, met with Gulbudin Hikmatyar and tried to
convince the public that he and his government were good Muslims. Very
few were convinced by this charm offensive, nor was President ’Amin able
to stem the rising tide of rebellion. Shortly after seizing power, the garrison
in Rishkhor mutinied and was only suppressed after heavy fighting, while
an armoured column sent to put down a revolt in Khost was almost wiped
out when it was ambushed by the mujahidin. President ’Amin responded
with another reign of terror, but all the purge did was to increase the exodus
of refugees to Pakistan and Iran, which in turn provided yet more recruits
for the growing Islamist insurgency.
At the end of November 1979 a high-ranking Soviet mission reported
to the Politburo that the military situation in Afghanistan was now critical.
According to their assessment, the Peshawar-based mujahidin had 40,000
men under arms while 70 per cent of the country was out of central govern-
ment control. The mission concluded that without direct Soviet military
intervention an Islamist takeover of Afghanistan was inevitable within