a house divided, 1933–73to reinforce the perimeter defences of the Taj Beg palace, where ’Amin and
his inner circle had gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of
the pdpa. In the north, engineers threw pontoon bridges across the Amu
Darya and Soviet armoured units rolled into Mazar-i Sharif and Qunduz,
where they met with only token resistance. Indeed, the only serious oppo-
sition the Soviet army faced was from the mujahidin, who ambushed the
convoys as they passed through the Salang Pass and along the Talaqan
road to Faizabad.
On the afternoon of 27 December, ’Amin’s chef, who was in the pay of
the kgb, poisoned the food, incapacitating President ’Amin and the rest of
his party, while outside the kgb assault forces sealed off all access routes
to Taj Beg. It was only when the storming party opened fire on ’Amin’s
Afghan guards that he realized he had been tricked. A bloody battle ensued,
despite heavy losses, the kgb stormed the palace, killing ’Amin and his
eight-year-old son and badly wounding his daughter. When the firing
finally ended, around 150 Afghans lay dead, while most of the storming
party who survived the assault were wounded.
That evening Babrak Karmal, in a broadcast from Dushanbe,
announced the ‘execution’ of ’Amin and claimed that Soviet forces had
entered Afghanistan at the invitation of the government. The following day
Babrak flew to Kabul where he was installed as President. A few days later
the surviving members of ’Amin’s extended family were executed, along
with dozens of Khalqis. On 1 January 1980 the first edition of the Kabul
Times to be published since the invasion attacked the ‘fascist’ ’Amin as the
‘bloodthirsty agent of American Imperialism’ and a ‘demagogic tyrannical
dictator’. The article then justified the Soviet intervention citing Article
51 of the un Charter and the Afghan-Soviet Mutual Defence Treaty and
claimed that the ussr had intervened because Afghanistan was threat-
ened by ‘foreign aggression and intervention’ (that is, Pakistan and the
usa). The Orwellian nature of this declaration continued with an article
entitled ‘On the Threshold of Liberation’, under the slogan of ‘Forward
towards Peace, Freedom, National Independence, Democracy, Progress
and Social Justice.’ 40
Political and military fallout from the Soviet occupationLike Britain, the Soviet Union quickly discovered that while it was rela-
tively easy to occupy Afghanistan and place a quisling on the throne, it was
quite another matter to sustain the government in power. Babrak’s claim to
have widespread popular support was soon shown to be a delusion and all