a house divided, 1933–73convoys and remote, poorly manned outposts. The Soviets responded with
long-distance artillery, high-altitude bombing and strafing by helicopter
gunships, and later resorted to the use of Scud missiles. In an attempt to
prevent infiltration across the Pakistan frontier, Soviet planes scattered
millions of anti-personnel and booby trap mines. Yet despite being rela-
tively lightly armed and suffering a high attrition, the mujahidin refused
to accept defeat.
Opposition to the occupation also came from citizens living within
government-controlled areas. Some six weeks after the Soviet occupation,
on the evening of 21 February 1980, 1 Hut in the Afghan shamsi calen-
dar, and in response to shab namas circulated by mujahidin sympathizers,
hundreds of thousands of Afghans stood on their roofs and called out
repeatedly Allah hu Akbar. Mullahs too broadcast the call from mosque
loudspeakers, until the cities of Afghanistan reverberated with the trad-
itional battle cry of Islamic armies. The following day shopkeepers in Kabul
shut up their shops. Thousands of schoolchildren and students marched
in protest at the Soviet occupation and tried to storm government offices.
As the demonstrations showed no signs of ending, and with police and
some army units refusing to fire on the unarmed demonstrators, President
Karmal called in the Parcham paramilitary forces and the Soviet army,
including tanks, armoured personnel carriers and helicopter gunships,
which fired indiscriminately into the crowds. When the shooting finally
ceased around eight hundred Afghans, including dozens of teenage girls,
had been killed while hundreds more were wounded. In the purge that
followed, thousands more were rounded up and executed. 41 There were
further protests in the summer, but the bloody suppression of the Awal-i
Hut protests forced opposition in government-controlled areas under-
ground. Nonetheless many Afghans, even those in the government and
army, continued passing information to various mujahidin factions.
The Soviet intervention caught the world off guard, since few Western
observers believed the ussr would be foolish enough to invade Afghanistan.
u.s. attention at the time was concentrated on the crisis in Tehran, where
students and Revolutionary Guards had taken embassy staff hostage. Just
ten days before the Soviet intervention, the u.s. Embassy in Moscow asked
the Soviet Foreign Ministry for urgent clarification on the military build-up
along the Afghan frontier. A few days later the cia informed President
Carter that the ussr had ‘crossed a significant threshold’. However, it was
only on Christmas Eve that a National Security memorandum, which dealt
almost solely with the Iranian hostage crisis, mentioned briefly that a Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan was ‘in the offing’. 42