subsequently murdered (Westad, 1994: 61–2). Taraki’s associates
Watanjar, Gulabzoi, Sarwari, and Sher Jan Mazdooryar took refuge
in the Soviet Embassy and were later smuggled to Soviet territory
(Saikal and Maley, 1991: 42–3). Given that Taraki had met with
Brezhnev on his way home from a meeting in Havana of the Non-
Aligned Movement earlier in the month, this was a considerable
affront to the Soviet leadership, and to Brezhnev in particular
(Bradsher, 1999: 84; Halliday, 1999: 679). The relationship
between Amin and the Soviets deteriorated sharply. Amin had no
doubt that Ambassador Puzanov had been plotting with Taraki to
secure Amin’s removal: indeed, his Foreign Minister, Dr Shah
Wali, said as much at a meeting on 6 October (Garthoff, 1994:
1006), and Puzanov was shortly thereafter removed and replaced
by Fikrat A. Tabeev. From this point onwards, the slide towards a
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began to gather pace.
The brief period of Amin’s ascendency is widely recognised by
Afghans to have been one of the worst in Afghanistan’s modern
history. Amin was a quite remarkably sinister figure. He had no
strategy for domestic consolidation beyond the application of ter-
ror, and this he pursued with a pathological singlemindedness. On
the one hand, as recorded by the French Dominican scholar Serge
de Beaurecueil, for many years a resident of Kabul, Amin attempt-
ed to blame Taraki for the killings of the Khalqregime, by posting
a list of 12,000 names of persons who had lost their lives (Gille
and Heslot, 1989: 54–8). Yet on the other, his secret police pursued
perceived enemies with fanatical ferocity. By late 1979, he had left
himself with little strategy but the further use of terror, but even
that had ceased to work. Faced with Soviet anger. he had no real
scope to build bridges to other powers such as the United States:
the US Ambassador to Kabul had been killed in a shootout follow-
ing his seizure by unidentified kidnappers in February 1979 – a
bloody outcome for which Washington apparently blamed Amin.
The wider world showed no interest in saving Amin’s skin.
In late 1979, the attention of key foreign ministries was focused
elsewhere. The United States was massively preoccupied with the
occupation of its Tehran Embassy by radical Iranian students on 4
32 The Afghanistan Wars