exposed to the threat of Soviet invasion should their internal pol-
itics spin out of control from the Soviet point of view: such inva-
sions occurred in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The local regimes secured at best ‘quasi-legitimacy’ (Pakulski,
1986), since they ultimately depended upon external military pro-
tection for their survival. However, the autonomy of even these
regimes was not entirely illusory: the fact that the point could
twice be reached where a Soviet invasion was necessaryto restore
a situation acceptable to the Soviet leadership highlights the scope
for complex internal politics even within such ostensibly subordin-
ated polities.
The position of the Karmal regime was that of an oddity within
the Soviet sphere of influence. After the December 1979 invasion,
official Soviet sources classified Afghanistan as one of the ‘devel-
oping countries’ (razvivaiushchiesia strany) rather than as one of
the ‘socialist countries’ (sotsialisticheskie strany). However, on a
number of occasions, the Soviets publicly treated Kabul’s ‘sover-
eignty’ with a cavalier disregard, for example on 25 October 1985
when Boris Ponomarev announced that the sentence on the French
journalist Jacques Abouchar, captured in Afghanistan on 17
September 1984, was to be commuted (Maley, 1985: 160). But that
said, while the regime was very significantly limited by its short-
ages of both legitimacy and tax revenues – fully 61 per cent of
reported state expenditure in 1980 was funded by rentier income
(Rubin, 1995a: 113) – and was heavily dependent on Soviet advis-
ers (Bradsher, 1999: 122–4), elements within it retained some
capacity to resist unpalatable Soviet pressures through footdragging,
because the Soviets during this phase did not see it as acceptable
simply to abandon the Afghan regime to its fate. The Soviets under-
standably found their Afghan colleagues difficult to manage.
Factionalism within the Karmal regime and the weakness of the
Party
Factionalism was something which the Soviet model had long
deplored. At the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party
92 The Afghanistan Wars