Rather, in the context of strong preexisting norms of social soli-
darity, it simply led to an intensification of resistance to the regime
(Maley, 1991b).
The Soviet view of Afghan developments
The first truly acute crisis of the regime came with the Herat upris-
ing in March 1979, and this caused the Soviet leadership to begin
to focus more carefully on the events occurring on its doorstep.
The Soviet reaction to events in Afghanistan at this time was one
of growing alarm, initially muted by a well-grounded caution.
The mass uprising began in Herat with a mutiny in the 17th
Division of the Afghan Army on 15 March, in response to the bru-
tality of the Khalqactivists. One of the leaders was Major Ismail
Khan, whose name figures prominently in the subsequent history
of the Afghanistan war. Khalqisand Soviet advisers were attacked,
and the city rocked with the sound of residents chanting Allahu
Akbar(‘God is Great’) from the roofs of their houses. While sol-
diers brought from Kandahar ultimately restored the regime’s con-
trol, a request from Taraki for Soviet troops to put down the
uprising triggered a major discussion in the Politburo of the
Afghanistan situation. The record of this discussion is of very con-
siderable historical interest. Memoirs from Soviet politicians and
generals must be treated with due caution: Count Ciano’s famous
comment that victory finds a hundred fathers, but defeat is an
orphan (Muggeridge, 1947: 502) highlights the kind of bias of
which it is necessary to be wary. By contrast, to the Soviet leader-
ship in 1979, it would have seemed almost inconceivable that
records of their discussions would ever be published, and while
their observations must still be construed in the light of their indi-
vidual purposes and strategies, they offer a much less distorted
image of their thinking at the time than memoirs do.
On 17 March, Foreign Minister Gromyko presented a grim
picture of the situation, stating that the number of insurgents
was ‘thousands, literally thousands’, and asserting as a ‘fun-
damental proposition’ that ‘under no circumstances may we lose
30 The Afghanistan Wars