Hoover Institution - Hoover Digest

Secret documents show how the Kremlin persuaded itself to invade Afghanistan in 1979 against its own best advice. By Paul R. Gregory.

On Christmas Day 1979, U.S. intelligence detected waves of Soviet military aircraft flying into Afghanistan. Two days later, KGB troops dressed in Afghan uniforms staged a nighttime attack on the palace where Moscow’s former protégé Afghan President Hafizullah Amin was hiding, executed him, and occupied strategic locations throughout Kabul in a 45-minute operation. A radio broadcast, purporting to be from Kabul but actually coming from Uzbekistan, announced that Amin’s execution had been ordered by the Afghan People’s Revolutionary Council and that a new government had been formed, headed by Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal. Soviet ground forces and paratroopers invaded the same evening, and, within five weeks, five divisions were in place. So began the Soviet Afghanistan war.

This is the story behind the decision to invade, as told by Politburo documents preserved in Fond 89, an extraordinary collection of Soviet records in the Hoover Archives. The leaders who took that fateful act—Stalin’s second generation of party leaders, replacements for the “Old Bolsheviks” he annihilated during the Great Terror—were aging and ill, and they would not be around to deal with the long-term consequences of their actions. Those consequences were many and profound: the Soviet Union’s international isolation and weakened prestige; the deaths of 15,000 Soviet soldiers and the wounding of 54,000 more; and an Afghanistan ravaged by civil war for another decade, with the eventual victory of the Taliban. The Afghan war also brought to life a human rights movement in the USSR and filled Soviet cities and towns with disenchanted veterans, many plagued by chronic illnesses or drug abuse.

Soviet leaders, moreover, had emphatically ruled out such an invasion eight months before it took place.

The report of a special Politburo commission in April 1979 had come out unequivocally against the use of ground troops. In a sober assessment, garbed in Marxist language of class struggle and counterrevolutionary forces, it concluded that the socialist revolution of the Soviet Union’s Afghan client state was in trouble: foundering in a primitive country without a strong working class and being challenged by religious fanatics, foreign interventionists, tribal warlords, and bourgeois elements. Worse, the Afghan Communist Party was divided along tribal lines and locked in a power struggle.

Afghanistan had first sought Moscow’s help the year before, after the revolution of April 27, 1978, brought a pro-Soviet government to power. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), led by Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin and President Nur Muhammad Taraki, asked its Soviet patrons for help fighting insurgents and warlords. Afghanistan received Soviet economic assistance, military equipment, and advisers—but not ground troops, despite repeated requests. The Politburo did not want to fight Afghanistan’s battles while its clients sat safe in their fortified offices in Kabul.

The Soviet leaders who took that fateful act were aging and ill, and they would not be around to deal with the long-term consequences.

In March 1979, President Taraki made two panicked calls to Moscow, begging for ground troops to put down a mutiny in the western town of Herat. Two Soviet advisers already had been killed. The Politburo created a commission to assess the Afghanistan problem: on it were Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister; Yury Andropov, head of the KGB; Dmitry Ustinov, minister of defense; and Politburo member Boris Ponomarev. In a telephone conversation with Taraki, Politburo members, led by head of state Aleksey Kosygin, made it clear that the Afghan government, like that of North Vietnam, was expected to solve its own internal problems:

Instead, the Politburo recommended the Afghans engage in diplomacy “to remove the excuse of Iran, Pakistan, and India to meddle in your affairs.” Another request by Taraki—for Soviet attack-helicopter pilots and tank crewmen—was also met coldly: “The question of sending our people to man your tanks and shoot at your people is a very controversial political issue.”

Any remaining hopes for Soviet troops were dashed later in the day by party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. He told Taraki in a meeting:

After these conversations, Afghan forces quelled the Herat mutiny without Soviet ground troops, and the Politburo commission went about preparing its position paper on Afghanistan. This report was discussed and its recommendations accepted three weeks later at an April 12 meeting of the Politburo. Soviet troops, it said, should not be committed:

Political and military training, however, was to continue, along with shipments of grain and military equipment and advice on “strengthening and raising the effectiveness of organs of state security.”

During the eight months between the Kremlin’s firm decision not to commit troops and the December invasion, the commission continued to oversee policy on Afghanistan. As it monitored events, it saw few encouraging signs. In a June 28 report, the four members complained about the follies and missteps of the increasingly dictatorial Afghan government. Ominously, they recommended that in addition to senior specialists to advise the Afghan army, special KGB troops disguised as technicians be sent in to protect the Soviet embassy. A detachment of paratroopers, disguised as maintenance personnel, was to protect key government facilities. The disguises presumably were meant to conceal from Afghan government officials a covert Soviet military buildup (indeed, it was such clandestine KGB forces that were soon to execute President Amin).

We do not have access to the secret reports submitted to the Politburo by KGB and military intelligence during this period, but it was the KGB, under Andropov, that began to detect signs of a vast conspiracy by the United States and its allies. The increasingly suspicious gerontocracy that led the Kremlin grew to accept the KGB’s theory that imperialist forces, headed by the United States, intended to threaten the Soviet Union’s southernmost republics from Afghanistan with the goal of creating a second Ottoman Empire.

In 1978, the Politburo firmly refused to fight Afghanistan’s battles while its clients sat safe in their fortified offices in Kabul.

The KGB’s growing suspicion was fed by a bloody coup. In September 1979, the simmering feud between President (and Party General Secretary) Taraki and Prime Minister Amin boiled over, and Taraki was killed. Amin, who had organized the coup, was now in sole charge, and he began to alarm his watchers in Andropov’s KGB by seeking reconciliation with opposition groups, purging the government of party members, and even making overtures to the CIA.

The decision to invade Afghanistan was taken during a meeting in Leonid Brezhnev’s country house on December 12, 1979, and was recorded by hand to ensure secrecy. It was titled, “About the Situation in ‘A.’”

The turning point came in early December with a memo from Andropov to Brezhnev, warning that Amin’s actions were “threatening the achievements of the April Revolution.” The Afghan situation had taken an “undesirable turn for us,” Andropov wrote, with Amin making a “possible political shift to the West,” including “contacts with an American agent that are kept secret from us” and promises to tribal leaders to adopt neutrality.

Andropov offered a solution to Amin’s treachery. He had been contacted by exiled Afghan Communists, in particular by Babrak Karmal, who had “worked out a plan for opposing Amin and for creating ‘new’ party and state organs.” These exiled Afghan compatriots, according to Andropov, “have raised the question of possible assistance, in case of need, including military.” Clearly, the exiles did not have enough support to overthrow Amin on their own.

Andropov went on to note that the current Soviet military presence in Afghanistan was probably sufficient to render such “assistance,” but “as a precautionary measure in the event of unforeseen complications, it would be wise to have a military group close to the border.” Such military force would allow the Kremlin to “decide various questions pertaining to the liquidation of gangs” (presumably the liquidation of Amin).

The Andropov stance became the policy mantra of the Afghanistan commission, which thenceforth emphasized in its reports that “foreign intervention” and terrorism were threatening to destroy the April Revolution.

It appears there never was a written invasion order. The Kremlin feared that the soon-to-be-deposed Amin would get wind of it. Politburo members began to use code words among themselves, and the few official documents refer to “A” (for Afghanistan) and “measures” to denote the invasion and the associated coup against Amin.

According to the memoirs of Alexsandr Liakhovskii, a knowledgeable Soviet military official, a meeting was held December 8 in Brezhnev’s private office in which Andropov, Gromyko, Ustinov, and party ideologist Mikhail Suslov discussed a possible invasion. Andropov and Ustinov purportedly cited CIA plans to threaten the USSR’s southern flank by placing missiles in Afghanistan, and singled out the danger that Afghan uranium deposits could be used by Pakistan and Iraq. Two options were identified: to remove Amin by using KGB special agents and replace him with the loyal Karmal, or to do the same thing by sending in Soviet troops. An invasion was still up in the air, but it had been decided that Amin must be removed.

The increasingly suspicious Kremlin gerontocracy grew to believe that imperialist forces, headed by the United States, intended to threaten the USSR’s southernmost republics.

Two days later, Ustinov ordered the chief of the general staff to prepare 80,000 soldiers for the “measure,” a number the chief found inadequate. He was told to obey Politburo orders. On the same day, he was summoned to a meeting with Brezhnev and the Politburo subcommittee, where he failed to persuade the Politburo not to use force. That evening, Ustinov ordered the military leadership to get ready, and troops were mobilized in the staging area in Turkestan.

A 1986 Soviet poster, showing an Afghan fighter being driven forward by a hand spilling U.S. dollars, says, “Dirty Work of the CIA in Afghanistan.” Faulty KGB intelligence indicated that the United States had a master plan to use Afghanistan to threaten Soviet republics in Central Asia.

The actual decision to invade Afghanistan came during a meeting in Brezhnev’s country house on December 12. The meeting was attended by four of the 15 Politburo members (Brezhnev, Ustinov, Gromyko, and Konstantin Chernenko). Andropov was notably absent, unless the attendance record is inaccurate, but he was well informed about what was about to happen. A resolution was handwritten by Chernenko (to ensure absolute secrecy), titled “About the Situation in ‘A.’ ” It reads:

“The wide public masses of Afghanistan welcomed word of the overthrow of the Amin regime with unconcealed joy,” said Soviet propaganda, “and are prepared to support the declared program of the new government.”

It was not until December 26, the day before the ground invasion commenced, that the plan to invade was presented to the full Politburo. With the “measures” ready to go into operation within 24 hours, it was clear that the full Politburo was only a rubber stamp.

At this meeting, each member was asked to sign the handwritten decree “About the Situation in ‘A’” prepared at Brezhnev’s dacha. According to the dates of the signatures scrawled across the page, some had signed off the day before. Notably, there is no signature of Kosygin, the head of state, who was absent from the meeting and a known opponent of the invasion.

The Politburo subcommittee briefed the Central Committee of the Communist Party, made up of national and regional party leaders, four days after the invasion in a report titled “About the Events in Afghanistan on December 27–28.” The Politburo had told its Afghanistan subcommittee to bring decisions to the Central Committee “on a timely basis.” In this case, “timely” meant after the fact. The Politburo report did not ask the Central Committee for its approval; it was simply a memo designed to give Central Committee members appropriate talking points.

The talking points were that the Amin government had brought Afghanistan to a crisis: It had removed those who launched the April revolution (“murdering 600 party members without court approval”). It had turned to a “more balanced foreign policy,” which included confidential meetings with American agents. It had tried “to simplify its position by compromising with the leaders of internal counterrevolutionary forces,” including leaders of the “extreme Muslim opposition.”

One key talking point was that a reluctant Soviet Union had been invited by an opposition group, united against Amin, to “save the fatherland and the revolution” and had complied by sending a “limited contingent of troops.” These troops would withdraw once the April revolution had been saved. In fact, per the talking points, “the wide public masses of Afghanistan welcomed word of the overthrow of the Amin regime with unconcealed joy and are prepared to support the declared program of the new government.”

The Politburo’s story was full of holes. Its troops and special forces had somehow been invited to help the Afghanistan revolution by puppet leaders appointed only after the coup. Amin had been condemned to death by a fictitious Afghanistan Revolutionary Council. Radio announcements of these events had originated from within the Soviet Union, not from Kabul.

The Soviet propaganda machine offered talking points to 46 “communist and workers parties” focusing on six themes:

• The Soviet Union sent troops at the request of the Afghanistan leadership

• The Afghanistan government requested Soviet assistance only for its battle against foreign aggression

• Foreign aggression threatens the Afghan revolution and its sovereignty and independence

• The request for assistance came from a sovereign Afghan government to a sovereign Soviet government

• The naming of the new leadership of Afghanistan was an internal matter decided by its own Revolutionary Council

• The Soviet Union had nothing to do with the change in government

On January 4, 1980, the wily Gromyko, long the face of Soviet diplomacy, coached the new Afghan foreign minister, Shah Muhammad Dost, on how to present the case to the United Nations Security Council. A memo of that meeting describes a monologue by Gromyko:

Gromyko: I want to share with you, Comrade Minister, some thoughts about the U.N. Security Council and your forthcoming remarks. Of course, these ideas are not final, but they reflect the views of our country about the events in Afghanistan and its vicinity. First. Western powers, particularly the United States, have launched hostile propaganda against the Soviet Union and against revolutionary Afghanistan. Imperialism has decided to “blow off steam.” Second. With respect to the tone of your presentation at the Security Council, you should not act as the accused but as the accuser. I think there are enough facts for this position. Therefore it is extremely important not to defend but to attack. Third. It is essential to emphasize that the introduction of the limited military contingent in Afghanistan was done by the Soviet Union in response to numerous requests of the government of Afghanistan. These requests were made earlier by Taraki when he was in Moscow and by Amin. [U.S. President Jimmy] Carter wants to create the impression that the Soviet Union received this request only from the new government of Afghanistan, but you can decisively refute this notion using exact dates and details. Fourth. You must clearly emphasize that the limited Soviet contingent was introduced to Afghanistan only to assist against unceasingly aggressive forces, particularly from Pakistan, where refugee camps have been converted by the forces of the United States, other western countries, and China into staging areas for foreign fighters. Fifth. The change of leadership in Afghanistan is a purely internal matter. No one has the right to tell Afghanistan what to do or how to act.

Dost’s role in this conversation was to listen and then thank Gromyko for his time.

GORBACHEV ENDS THE DEBACLE

Mikhail Gorbachev, who became general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, inherited a quagmire in Afghanistan. The mission of Soviet troops had changed during the five years from installing and protecting a new government to fighting insurgents, and then finally to air and ground operations. From its earliest days of power, the Gorbachev team, led by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, concluded that the Soviet Union must find a face-saving way out of Afghanistan. The ineffective Karmal was replaced by the former chief of the Afghan secret police, Muhammad Najibullah, who also was unable to negotiate a national reconciliation. In 1988, the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan signed an agreement that called for Soviet troops to withdraw and a U.N. special mission to oversee the accord.

The last Soviet troops—620,000 eventually served in Afghanistan—went home February 15, 1989, but the civil war continued and, in fact, never ended. By 1996, the Taliban had gained control of most of Afghanistan, although hostilities continued, and the Islamist militia ruled from 1996 until its ouster in 2001 by U.S.-led forces.

One of the last documents in the Central Committee files is a position paper prepared by Shevardnadze and five other Politburo members on January 23, 1989, three weeks before the last contingent of Soviet troops left. The downbeat memo illuminates the tension as both sides awaited the February 15 deadline:

The government is holding its positions but only due to the assistance of Soviet troops and all understand that the main battle lies ahead. The opposition has even reduced its activities, saving its strength for the next period. Comrade Najibullah thinks that they are prepared to move after the withdrawal. Our Afghan comrades are seriously concerned as to what will happen. . . . They express their understanding of the decision to withdraw troops but soberly think they cannot manage without our troops.
The current situation raises for us a number of complicated issues. On the one hand, if we renege on our decision to withdraw troops by February 15, there would be extremely undesirable complications on the international front. On the other hand, there is no certainty that after our withdrawal there will not be an extremely serious threat to a regime which the entire world associates with us. Moreover, the opposition can at any time begin to coordinate its activities, which is what American and Pakistan military circles are pushing for. There is also a danger in that there is no true unity in the Afghanistan party, which is split into factions and clans.

The memo concludes that the Afghan government can hold Kabul and other cities, but expresses concern that a siege could starve out these cities. Soviet troops would be needed to keep supply lines open, but there was no way, under existing agreements, to keep them there.

The Soviet decision not to further prop up foreign communist regimes such as Najibullah’s crystallized into the Gorbachev Doctrine of nonintervention in Eastern Europe and East Germany—and contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

LESSONS OF AFGHANISTAN

Countries go to war in different ways. Although the United States fought in Vietnam without a congressional declaration of war, there was widespread debate within government circles, the press, and society before, during, and after the war. The wars against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq also were the subject of debate and discourse by Congress, the United Nations, and the American public.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is remarkable in that it was accomplished by so few people with so little input from government, press, or society. Official Soviet policy, devised by a few Politburo members, at first rejected an invasion either immediately or in the future. The damaging consequences were clearly understood and spelled out. Yet, within a few months, the same individuals had changed their minds, largely because of the influence of a few Politburo members and the notion of an imminent challenge from the United States that did not exist.

The Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan was based on the KGB’s faulty intelligence that the United States had a master plan to use Afghanistan to threaten Soviet republics in Central Asia. Similarly, the U.S. intelligence community at the time viewed the Soviet Afghan invasion as a master plan to fulfill a longtime desire by Moscow to have direct access to the Indian Ocean and the Persion Gulf region. Each side thought it was playing defense to the other’s offense.

Brezhnev’s Politburo made another fundamental mistake. Although it was wary of Islamist militancy, it continued to regard the United States, China, and Pakistan as controlling the levers of the conflict. The prism of Marxist-Leninist thought offered no glimpse of a Taliban, a Mullah Muhammad Omar, or an Osama bin Laden. This lack of insight returned to haunt post-Brezhnev and post-Gorbachev Russia in Chechnya and in the growing restiveness of the Muslim populations of Central Asia. A similar U.S. miscalculation became clear on September 11, 2001.

Adapted from the forthcoming book Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives, by Paul R. Gregory (Hoover Press).

Paul Gregory, a Hoover Institution research fellow, holds an endowed professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, Texas, and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin.