Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
Afghanistan’s role in the closing chapters of the cold war began in July 1973, when
Mohammad Daoud mounted a coup against the government led by King Mohammad
Zahir Shah, his cousin. Daoud, who had served as prime minister for ten years before
the king ousted him in 1963, had backing for his coup from army officers trained in
the Soviet Union and one of the two main factions in the local communist party, the
People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). This faction, headed by Babrak
Karmal, was known as the Parcham, or Red Banner. After the coup, Daoud headed a
coalition government that included Karmal and several ministers from the Parcham
faction.
For a variety of reasons, Daoud gradually pushed his communist colleagues from
government and sought to distance Afghanistan from the Soviet Union. At the same
time, in the mid-1970s, Moscow pressured the two competing communist factions in
Afghanistan to unite, presumably to strengthen the possibility of their taking power.
The Soviets’ effort succeeded, at least superficially, when in July 1977 Karmal’s Par-
cham faction united with the opposing Kalq (Masses) faction headed by Mohammad
Taraki, who became the leader of the unified PDPA party. Another central actor,
Hafizullah Amin, the number two figure in the Kalq faction, became head of the
party’s military wing.
On April 27, 1978, the united communist party ousted Daoud’s government. The
exact origins of the coup remain in dispute, but in any case, the Soviet Union moved
quickly to take advantage of the situation by sending several hundred military advi-
sors to Kabul, along with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military supplies.
Moscow later signed a “friendship and cooperation” treaty with the new government
in Kabul.
A split soon developed between the communist factions along old lines, however,
and by the middle of 1978 Karmal and several other leaders of the Kalq faction had
been ousted from power. Karmal was sent into exile as ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
Meanwhile, Taraki’s government faced a rapidly growing insurgency from tribal lead-
ers and other conservative factions in the countryside who had been angered by a series
of decrees that flouted traditional Afghan and Islamic customs on such matters as land
ownership and family and marriage practices. These decrees appeared to be the work
primarily of Amin, the Kalq faction official who by this time had become a senior
leader in Taraki’s government.
In February 1979, antigovernment insurgents kidnapped and then killed Adolph
Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul. The administration of President Jimmy Carter,
accusing the Afghan government of failing to protect Dubs, cut off the limited aid it
had been providing Kabul. Over the summer of 1979, the Carter administration
secretly began providing medical supplies and other nonmilitary aid to antigovernment
insurgents in Afghanistan. Most of this aid flowed through Pakistan and was accom-
AFGHANISTAN 569