since shortly after the April 1978 coup. Seeking to defend their homeland against the
foreign invaders, thousands more Afghans flocked to the rebel groups. Starting in 1980,
the United States and an unlikely coalition including China, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi
Arabia provided money, weapons, and logistical support to the guerrillas, who called
themselves the mujahidin,or freedom fighters. Most of this aid flowed through Pak-
istan’s military intelligence service. The effectiveness of the guerrillas increased mark-
edly after May 1985, when seven diverse groups, all based in Peshawar, Pakistan,
agreed to coordinate their anti-Soviet activities in Afghanistan (Soviet Withdrawal from
Afghanistan, p. 580).
Following are a memorandum, dated December 31, 1979, from four senior Soviet
officials—Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov, For-
eign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and Central Committee International Department
chairman Boris Ponomarev—reporting on events in Afghanistan on December
27–28, 1979; a televised speech delivered on January 4, 1980, by U.S. president
Jimmy Carter on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and an interview of Com-
munist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev conducted by the Soviet Union’s
news agency, Tass, on January 12, 1980, on the invasion.DOCUMENT
Soviet Memorandum on the
Invasion of Afghanistan
DECEMBER31, 1979After a coup-d’etat and the murder of the CC PDPA [Central Committee of the Peo-
ples Democratic Party of Afghanistan] General and Secretary and Chairman of the
Revolutionary Council N. M. [Nur Muhammad] Taraki, committed by H. [Hafizul-
lah] Amin in September of this year, the situation in Afghanistan has been sharply
exacerbated and taken on crisis proportions.
H. Amin has established a regime of personal dictatorship in the country, effec-
tively reducing the CC PDPA and the Revolutionary Council to the status of entirely
nominal organs. The top leadership positions within the party and the state were filled
with appointees bearing family ties or maintaining personal loyalties to H. Amin. Many
members from the ranks of the CC PDPA, the Revolutionary Council and the Afghan
government were expelled and arrested. Repression and physical annihilation were for
the most part directed toward active participants in the April revolution [a coup that
brought Taraki to power the previous April], persons openly sympathetic to the USSR,
those defending the Leninist norms of intra-party life. H. Amin deceived the party
and the people with his announcements that the Soviet Union had supposedly
approved of Taraki’s expulsion from party and government.
By direct order of H. Amin, fabricated rumors were deliberately spread through-
out the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan], smearing the Soviet Union and
572 AFGHANISTAN