(noted by Harrison, 1979: C5) that the Soviet Union organised the
coup, no credible direct evidence has surfaced to support this claim
(Allan and Kläy, 1999). The accuracy of bombing proves very lit-
tle: after all, the British before Pearl Harbor had scorned the cap-
acity of the Japanese air force (Weinberg, 1994: 261). A
subsequent decision to reward Soviet personnel for ‘military
actions’ in Afghanistan from 22 April 1978 (‘Dlia tekh, kto voe-
val’, Krasnaia zvezda, 12 October 1989: 2) hints at some low-level
cooperation between Soviet and Afghan communists before the
coup, and eyewitness testimony shows that Soviet personnel threw
their weight behind the coup once it began (Ghaus, 1988: 197–8).
The Soviet Ambassador to Afghanistan, Aleksandr M. Puzanov,
was caught unawares, but this is hardly decisive: while Puzanov
had been sufficiently prominent in the early 1950s to catch Stalin’s
eye, and even served briefly as a candidate member of the Party
Presidium, by 1978 his career was in its twilight – he was born in
1906 – and he could easily have been bypassed. More telling is the
point noted by Garthoff that for the three days after the coup, the
Soviet official newsagency TASS referred to the events in Kabul as
a coup, rather than a popular revolution (Garthoff, 1994: 988).
Coming from a controlled, official medium in a state which
attached great significance to fine ideological distinctions, this was
a notable pointer to Moscow’s limited role in the events in Kabul.
Communist factionalism and policy failures
After a few days of rule by the coup leaders, a new regime was
announced which drew on the key civilian figures of the PDPA.
Taraki was named President and Prime Minister; Hafizullah Amin
became Foreign Minister; Qadir was Defence Minister; and Babrak
Karmal was appointed Deputy Prime Minister. However, this mix-
ing of Parchamand Khalqactivists did nothing to overcome the
smouldering antagonism between the two groups, and within a
matter of months it had resurfaced with a vengeance (Arnold,
1983: 64–73). Declassified Soviet documents provide direct evi-
dence of the depth of the rift (Westad, 1994). In a meeting with
The Road to War 27