panied by public warnings from the White House against direct Soviet intervention
on behalf of the Kabul government.
In mid-September 1979, however, Amin ousted Taraki as head of the Kabul gov-
ernment. This angered Soviet officials, who blamed Amin for the decrees that had led
to the insurgency, which by this time was gaining in strength and threatening the com-
munist government’s hold on Afghanistan. In response to Amin’s takeover, Moscow
began boosting its already sizable military presence in the country in late November
- By mid-December three battalions of the Soviet army (totaling more than 5,000
troops) were in Afghanistan, and U.S. intelligence agencies observed heightened activ-
ity at Soviet military bases in Central Asia.
The level of Soviet intervention suddenly jumped on December 24, 1979, when
several thousand Soviet paratroopers began landing in Kabul for what was called a mil-
itary exercise. Two days later, Soviet special forces troops took control of Kabul, killed
Amin, and installed Babrak Karmal as prime minister. A much larger invasion of Soviet
ground forces began on December 27, reaching at least 40,000 troops by early Janu-
ary 1980 and more than double that number by the end of 1980. (Their numbers
would continue to grow.) In a statement delivered over Kabul Radio on December
27, Karmal made no mention of the Soviet presence and insisted that a wide range of
Afghan people had risen up against Amin and his fellow “agents of United States
imperialism.”
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the Kremlin appeared to be satisfied
with the outcome. On December 31, four senior officials sent their fellow Politburo
members a secret memorandum reporting that “broad masses” of the Afghan people
had greeted the overthrow of Amin with “unconcealed joy.” The memo—made pub-
lic in the early 1990s—also offered a detailed justification for the invasion, stating that
under Amin, “dictatorial methods of running the country, repressions, mass execu-
tions, and disregard for legal norms have produced widespread discontent in the coun-
try.” These events made it necessary for Moscow “to render additional military assis-
tance to Afghanistan,” the memo said.
International Reaction
To much of the world, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at first appeared to be a
mystifying event involving the replacement of one communist government with
another. It quickly became apparent, however, that officials in the Kremlin had acted
to avert increasing instability in Afghanistan that might lead to the collapse of the pro-
Soviet government there. In a January 12, 1980, interview with TASS, the Soviet news
agency, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev said that a “well advanced plot by external forces
of reaction created a real threat that Afghanistan would lose its independence and be
turned into an imperialist military bridgehead on our country’s southern border.”
Kremlin officials probably believed that they were acting at an opportune moment:
the taking of American diplomats as hostages in Iran the previous month continued
to occupy Washington’s attention in December 1979. With President Carter and his
administration focused intently on events in Tehran, which directly threatened U.S.
interests in an important part of the world, officials in Moscow may have assumed
that the invasion of Afghanistan would not cause a major international uproar. In his
TASS interview, Brezhnev insisted that the United States and its allies should not be
570 AFGHANISTAN