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The new regime was soon confronted with a growing opposition inside the country. In March 1979, there was a violent rebellion in Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city. During this rebellion several Soviet advisers were executed. The PDPA, fearful of losing control, turned to Moscow with a demand for military support. A meeting was arranged in Moscow on March 20, 1979, between President Taraki and four Soviet heavyweights: Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers; Andrey Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Dmitry Ustinov, Minister of Defense; and Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Taraki not only demanded weapons, but also military personnel, including pilots and tank drivers. Although Kosygin refused any direct military involvement of Soviet troops on the ground in Afghanistan, Moscow became more nervous when the KGB hinted at the supposed unreliability of the Afghan prime minister, Hafizullah Amin. Yury Andropov, the head of the KGB, feared that Amin could become an “Afghan Sadat,” turning, eventually, to the West.^[4] “Andropov suspects him to be an agent of the CIA: logical if one knows that Amin has passed four years at Columbia University.”^[5] This suspicion led to dramatic events in the late summer of 1979. KGB agents in Kabul told President Taraki that he should arrest Amin. When, on September 14, Amin was invited to Taraki’s palace to talk with Soviet representatives, Taraki’s guards opened fire and tried to kill him. But Amin escaped. He mobilized his own militia and had Taraki arrested. On October 9, 1979, President Taraki was executed. Hereupon the Soviet Union decided to intervene and replace Amin with its own favorite, Babrak Karmal. Amin was killed by Vympel Spetsnaz troops. These are KGB special forces consisting of multilingual officers specializing in combat and sabotage in enemy territory. “Created in 1979,” wrote J. Michael Waller, “Vympel served as the shock force prior to the invasion of Afghanistan. In its first foreign operation, Vympel commandos stormed the presidential palace in Kabul and assassinated the inhabitants, including Afghan President Hafizullah Amin and seven of his children. This allowed the Soviet protégé, Babrak Karmal, to “invite” the Soviet army to intervene in his country.”^[6] Amin’s assassination took place on December 25, 1979. The next day, Karmal declared himself secretary general of the Afghan Communist Party and prime minister.

The Soviet troops were to stay in Afghanistan for more than a full decade with over a hundred thousand troops permanently involved. In this period at least twenty-five thousand Russian troops were killed. Over one million Afghans lost their lives in the conflict. An important question is who pushed Brezhnev, at that time in poor health, to take the decision to invade Afghanistan. In the politburo meeting of December 12, 1979, in which the decision was taken, Kosygin, who opposed an intervention, was absent. Many point to KGB chief Yury Andropov as the main instigator. Artyom Borovik, for instance, wrote: “Many servicemen and MID [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] workers told me that the script for the events in Afghanistan was written by the KGB. Initially, Andropov was against the idea of an invasion, but eventually he followed the same reflex that he’d learned some twenty years earlier in Hungary, where he served as an ambassador and where troops had to be sent in 1956.”^[7] This interpretation is supported by Svetlana Savranskaya, a political analyst.

The decision to send troops was made on the basis of limited information. According to Soviet veterans of the events, KGB sources were trusted over the military intelligence (GRU) sources. This partly reflected the growing influence of the KGB chairman Yu. V. Andropov, who controlled the flow of information to General Secretary Brezhnev, who was partially incapacitated and ill for most of 1979. KGB reports from Afghanistan created a picture of urgency and strongly emphasized the possibility of Amin’s links to the CIA and U.S. subversive activities in the region.^[8]