President Taraki and Ambassador Puzanov on 18 June 1978,
Karmal warned that for the sake of ‘unity’ in Amin’s sense of the
term, ‘thousands of honest communists in Afghanistan will be sub-
ject to terror, persecutions, their names will be slandered’. This
was too much for Taraki, who ordered Karmal out (Hershberg,
1996–97: 134). Within three weeks Karmal was posted as Afghan
Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, with his Parcham associates
Anahita Ratebzad, Nur Ahmad Nur, Abdul Wakil, and Dr
Najibullah also receiving diplomatic postings – from which they
wisely disappeared later in the year when summoned home as the
purge of Parchamisintensified. The purge swept up the coup lead-
ers Qadir and Rafi, whose known connections with the Soviets
probably saved their lives. Thousands of other Afghans were not so
fortunate. A climate of profound fear pervaded Kabul, as Taraki’s
secret police AGSA (in Pushto Da Afghanistan da Gato da Satalo
Agara, or ‘Afghan Interests Protection Service’), headed by
Asadullah Sarwari, used torture and killing as means of regime
consolidation. The American anthropologist Louis Dupree, held for
some days before being expelled from Afghanistan in November
1978, has left a chilling portrait of Sarwari and his methods
(Dupree, 1980a; Dupree 1980b). In Pul-e Charkhi prison, large
numbers of prisoners were executed without any semblance of a
trial. Sayid Abdullah, the prison commandant, stated that ‘a million
Afghans are all that should remain alive. We need a million
Khalqis. The others we don’t need, we will get rid of them’ (Barry,
1980: 183). This approach was sanctioned from the top. In
November 1978, Amin attributed to Taraki the remark that ‘those
who plot against us in the dark will vanish in the dark’ (‘Our
Revolution is Secure’, Asiaweek, 17 November 1978: 40). It was
certainly a sentiment that Amin himself shared, as subsequent
events were to show.
A central cause of the rift between Khalqand Parcham, apart
from the well-known personal differences between Amin and
Karmal, was the fact that the leaders of the PDPA were not
remotely ready to rule a country, much less implement the ambi-
tious plans contained in their platform. For this they would have
28 The Afghanistan Wars