Seth Jones - In the Graveyard of Empires - America's War in Afghanistan

By the early 1970s, however, there were signs of growing economic and political instability. In August 1971, Ambassador Robert Neumann held a tense meeting with Zahir Shah. Responding to rising tensions, Neumann “decided to hit him hard re lack of progress in country, particularly deteriorating economic conditions.” He warned Zahir Shah that the political environment was becoming venomous and Afghans were becoming restless. “In my four and one-half years here I had never heard so many exp ressions at all levels of society about a feeling of hopelessness that [the] new government could accomplish any thing.” 17There were also reports of corruption in the government and tribal unrest, which were undermining popular support. 18Public opinion began to turn against Zahir Shah, who was increasingly perceived as overly discrete and out of touch. In his end-of-tour memo, Ambassador Neumann reflected on the king:

The adjectives—indirect, cautious, furtive, clever, et al—which come to mind when one thinks of the King well represent the difficulty which observers here, both Afghan and foreign, face in trying to assess both the man and his creature. He has written no memoirs or autobiography, his public pronouncements are infrequent and generally anodyne, and in his contacts with a wide cross section of Afghan society, he prefers to listen rather than to declaim, a preference which frequently leads to confusion about his views. 19

In 1972, U.S. officials in Afghanistan and their intelligence contacts began hearing about a possible coup. In one meeting, Wahid Abdullah, director of information in the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asked Ambassador Neumann how the United States would respond to a takeover by Muhammad Daoud Khan. Daoud, who had been Afghanistan’s prime minister from 1953 to 1963, was known for his progressive policies, especially in regard to women’s rights. Wahid Abdullah was eager to gauge the U.S. reaction, and he remarked somewhat cryptically that “[Daoud] knows I am here.” 20A takeover seemed imminent. In April 1972, the State Department received word that a possible coup might occur within a “couple of weeks,” possibly led by Daoud. 21Throughout 1972 and 1973, both American and Soviet intelligence services collected information about a possible coup. 22

On June 26, 1973, Zahir Shah was flown to London to be treated for hemorrhaging in one eye caused, one State Department assessment reported, “by a volleyball.” 23After receiving treatment, Zahir Shah then went to Italy for a short vacation. His “vacation” turned out to be far longer than anyone expected. His next trip back to Afghanistan would be in April 2002, three decades later, after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. On July 16, 1973, Daoud engineered a coup d’état with support from the Afghan Army. The United States reaction was mixed. In a report to Henry Kissinger, for example, the U.S. National Security Council concluded that Daoud had provided Afghanistan “with strong leadership” during his tenure in the 1950s, and had “made strenuous efforts to modernize the economy and armed forces.” However, it also noted that Daoud had turned to the Soviet Union for economic and military assistance and warned that he “may well lean a bit more toward the Soviets.” 24

At the time, Afghanistan was mostly a backwater of U.S. foreign policy. “There was little intrinsic U.S. interest in Afghanistan,” acknowledged Graham Fuller, who was the CIA station chief from 1975 to 1978. “But it was a rich opportunity for recruiting Soviet diplomats and KGB personnel, as well as Chinese officials.” Fuller had received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Russian and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University and had studied there with the respected Russian historian Richard Pipes and the future national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. While he had never worked in Moscow or behind the iron curtain, Fuller had become increasingly drawn to the vulnerability of the Soviet Union. “I was interested in understanding the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, which is why I wanted to serve in Afghanistan.” Indeed, over the course of the 1970s, the CIA grew more concerned about Daoud’s ties with the Soviet Union and the Afghan Communist parties. “We knew that Daoud had close connections to the Soviets,” said Fuller. “And Moscow’s involvement in Afghanistan would become progressively more acute.” 25

The Sawr Revolution

Daoud’s coup was a turning point for Afghanistan. After fifty years of relatively stable Pashtun leadership, suddenly the national power structure had been shaken. Governance deteriorated over the next decade as Daoud attempted to impose strong central control, and Moscow, which had been providing military aid since at least 1955, grew increasingly alarmed about intelligence reports of instability in Afghanistan. 26In April 1978, a leading Communist activist, Mir Akbar Khyber, was assassinated. Some 15,000 demonstrators joined his funeral procession, demanding justice, and the security situation intensified. Daoud responded by arresting Marxist leaders, but his crackdown triggered a violent response. Army and air force officers engineered a bloody coup on April 27, 1978, in the Afghan lunar month of Sawr (Taurus); Daoud was assassinated during the coup. On April 30, military officers handed over power to a Revolutionary Council headed by Nur Mohammad Taraki, who promptly signed Decree No. 1 and proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. 27Moscow provided immediate aid to try to stabilize the situation, including armored personnel carriers, combat radios, Kalashnikov rifles, and Makarov pistols. 28

In the United States, there were mixed reactions to Daoud’s overthrow. “One of the first intelligence reports I sent back to Washington was to provide a background of the people who constituted the new government,” recalled the CIA’s Fuller. “They were members of the Communist party, and we had pretty good biographies on them. But the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development hit the roof,” because U.S. laws prohibited them from providing assistance to Communist parties. “They had to stop a lot of their funding to the Afghan government. But I was calling it as I saw it; the Soviets were on the march.” 29

Taraki was born to a poor peasant family in Ghazni Province in July 1917. In the mid-1940s, he founded the left-wing party Weesh Zalmayan (Awakened Youth). In 1953, he left Afghanistan for Washington, DC, where he served as press attaché in the Afghan Embassy. When Zahir Shah appointed Daoud as prime minister, Taraki publicly resigned his post and held a press conference accusing the Afghan government of being “a bunch of feudal lords.” According to one report, the former press attaché was soon called back, and, “upon his return to Kabul, he telephoned the despotic Daoud from the Kabul Cinema, telling him ‘I am Noor Mohammad Taraki. I have just arrived. Shall I go home or to the prison?’” 30Taraki was allowed to go home, but he was kept under police surveillance. In 1965, he helped found the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which split into two groups in 1967: Khalq (Masses), headed by Taraki; and Parcham (Banner), headed by Babrak Karmal.

The Khalq faction advocated an immediate and violent overthrow of the government and the establishment of a Soviet-style Communist regime. The Parcham faction supported a gradual move toward socialism, arguing that Afghanistan was not industrialized enough to undergo a true proletarian revolution such as that called for in The Communist Manifesto. Bitter resentment between the Khalq and Parcham factions would later contribute to the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Sawr Revolution.