The Afghani Saga
by M. Hassan Kakkar

• April 27, 1978 - The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) takes control.Nur Mohammed Taraki is named President and General Secretary of the PDPA. Amin and Babrak Karmal are named deputy prime ministers. The country is renamed the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA).
• Spring 1978 - Traditional tribal resistance begins.
• Late spring 1978 - Soviets discuss possible removal of Taraki with Amin.
• December 5, 1978 - PDPA signs a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union.
• February 15, 1979 - US Ambassador Adolph Dubs is abducted by insurgents and killed during a rescue attempt ordered by Amin. The U.S. accuses the Soviet Union of initiating the gunfight leading to his death.
• March 1979 Soviet Union - begins massive military aid to Afghanistan, including 500 military advisors arriving to provide assistance.
• March 10, 1979 - Afghan military units located in Herat mutiny, killing 350 Soviet citizens. By March 20, the mutiny is quelled, with great loss of life.
• May 1979 - Soviet advisors begin taking over operations at Bagram air base from Afghan government technicians. Diplomatic dispatches and articles in Pravda begin referring to Afghanistan as a “member of the socialist community”. Many take these public statements to mean that Afghanistan is under the Brezhnev Doctrine.
• August 1979 - General Ivan Pavloskiy, commander of Soviet ground forces arrives in Afghanistan with a staff of over 50 officers.
• September 1, 1979 - Taraki attends the Conference of Nonaligned Nations in Havana, Cuba.
• September 11, 1979 - Taraki returns to Kabul.
• September 12, 1979 - Taraki is forced out of power by Amin and resigns his government and PDPA posts.
• September 14, 1979 - An assassination attempt on Amin in the Presidential palace, held to be directed by Taraki.
• September 16, 1979 - Amin assumes Taraki's offices in the government and the Afghan Communist Party.
• September 18, 1979 - Some elements of the previous government and military officers resist, and are killed by those loyal to Amin. Speculation abounds that Taraki has been killed in the fighting.

Towards Intervention

• October 1979 - General Pavloskiy and his staff depart from Afghanistan. The Soviet Union begins mobilization of Category 2 divisions in southern Soviet Socialist Republics.
• October 10, 1979 - The Kabul Times reports that Taraki has died due to an illness. Other reports suggest death in a shootout, by strangulation, or execution; none can be proven.
• November 7, 1979 - In an issue celebrating Soviet National Day, the Kabul Times reports Afghanistan's role in the “continuation of the Great October Revolution”. Many view this statement as acceptance by the PDPA of the Brezhnev Doctrine in regards to Afghanistan.
• November 28, 1979 - Lt. General Viktor Paputin, the Soviet Union's deputy minister of interior, arrives in Kabul for a meeting concerning “mutual cooperation and other issues of interest”. Many speculate he is the top KGB official responsible for coordinating invasion.
• December 1979 - Several Tashkent based Soviet airborne battalions with heavy weapons are deployed to Bagram air base.
• December 17, 1979 - The head of the Afghan intelligence service, Assadullah Amin – Amin's nephew, is seriously wounded in an assassination attempt and leaves the country to receive medical aid in Tashkent.
• December 18, 1979- Airborne units stationed in Bagram move to cover the Salang Pass. This move supports the upcoming border crossing of the 357th Motorized Rifle Division, based in Tashkent.

• December 25, 1979 - The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.

“The Brezhnev Doctrine was a Soviet policy doctrine, introduced by Leonid Brezhnev in 1968, which stated:

"When forces that are hostile to socialism and try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries."

The Brezhnev Doctrine was superseded by the Sinatra Doctrine in 1988. The Sinatra Doctrine was the name that the Soviet government of Mikhail Gorbachev used jokingly to describe their policy of allowing neighboring Warsaw Pact nations to determine their own internal affairs. The phrase was coined by Gorbachev's Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. This doctrine, named after the Frank Sinatra song "My Way" because it allowed these nations to go their own way, contrasted with the earlier Brezhnev Doctrine, which had been used to justify the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 9681.”

“On the one side were men predominantly from the Slav republics of the Soviet Union and their communist Afghan allies; on the other were patriotic Muslim Afghans and their distant, external supporters. They warred against each other for opposite reasons. The former believed that the tide of time had commissioned them to clear the Afghan land of weeds, to create a paradise where its people could live in happiness forever. They also believed that since the reactionaries had misled the warring Afghans, there was no alternative but to make the reactionaries accept what was “good” for them. This belief justified their paternalism and the violence they directed against those Afghans whom they thought had gone astray. In short, the Soviets and their Afghan allies believed that they knew what was good for the Afghans, and the Afghans themselves were incapable of comprehending it. The patriotic Afghans held the opposite view and opposed the invasion. There was then no common ground that could constitute a basis for accommodation. The issue was left to be settled by the sword. As a result, many thousands of Afghans perished, and their centuries of accomplishment were destroyed. Common sense persuaded the Kremlin decision makers to stop the destruction and let the Afghans live the way they pleased only in 1989, after almost ten years of war. By that time every ninth Afghan had died, every seventh (or eighth) had been disabled, and every third had fled abroad. The Soviet foreign minister, Edward Shevardnadze, put the cost of war to the Soviets at 60 billion rubles. Afghanistan lay in ruins, and the Soviets had not accomplished the war objective of a superpower (with 280 million people) against a small country (with 15.5 million people).”

(The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982)