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197 19 AFGHANISTAN: FORMULATING A RESPONSE On Christmas morning in 1979, Moscow began to airlift soldiers to Kabul, Afghanistan claiming to “put down the rebellion of conservative Muslim tribesmen.” In the early evening, Soviet troops seized key locations in Kabul, including the radio station. By the next day, Radio Kabul announced that the“repressive” Communist President Hafizullah Amin had been deposed. Former Deputy Prime Minister Babrak Karmal, who had been exiled and reportedly stashed away in an Eastern European capital as a strongman in reserve, was installed as head of the Afghan government. Moscow would later claim that their move into Afghanistan was at the request of the Karmal government under the terms of a twenty-year friendship treaty signed in late 1978.1 But they made no attempt to disguise the fact that the airlift began before the coup that brought Karmal to power, thus making a mockery of their rationale. By December 29 there were an estimated 30,000 Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan.2 At Camp David, where Jimmy Carter and his family were spending Christmas, the president was more upset than he had been by any other event on his watch.“There goes SALT II,” he exclaimed. As Rosalynn Carter later explained,“In a sense it was a negation of one of the major missions of his presidency. He had worked hard for this treaty and had been sure it was gaining support in the Senate. Now the chance for ratifying it would be gone.”3 Carter himself would later note that the failure to ratify the SALT agreements, and to secure other arms control agreements, was the greatest disappointment of his presidency.4 The depth of his frustration was also evident in a phone conversation with his Chief of Staff, Hamilton Jordan, who was in Atlanta at the time. As Jordan later recalled, I put in a call to the President and asked simply if there was anything I could do.“No,” he said,“Unless you can get the Soviets out of Afghanistan.” I thought for a second he was kidding, but his tone made it clear he was frustrated. I offered to go back to Washington immediately but he said no, it would take several days for the Afghanistan conflict to be clarified. “As if we didn’t already have our hands full with the hostages,” I said. “This is more serious, Hamilton. Capturing those Americans was an inhumane act committed by a bunch of radicals and condoned by a crazy old man. But this is deliberate aggression that calls into question détente and the way we have been doing business with the Soviets for the past decade. It raises grave questions about Soviet intentions and destroys any chance of 198 CRISES AND CONFRONTATIONS getting the SALT Treaty through the Senate. And that makes the prospects for nuclear war even greater.” I was chilled when I heard his analysis.5 A few days later, Carter told Frank Reynolds of ABC News that the Soviet action “has made a more dramatic change in my opinion of what the Soviets’ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time I’ve been in office.”6 Distressed Senior Advisor Hedley Donovan wrote Carter that this statement opened him up to charges of political naïveté and that Carter had only become tough on foreign policy matters after December 1978.7 Carter should not have been that surprised by the Soviet move. The USSR had been involved in Afghanistan’s politics since the end of World War II, trying to draw that country into the Soviet sphere of influence and make it a showcase for Soviet aid projects in the third world. From 1953 to 1978 noncommunist national leaders in Afghanistan cooperated with Moscow in a variety of economic and political undertakings . When one of these leaders sought to steer a course of greater independence from Moscow, the communist-oriented People’s Democratic Party (PDP) took over the government in a coup. The new government, however, embraced radical policies that lost it the support of the traditional Muslim population, and the mujahideen, or holy warriors, began a guerilla war against the government. When the government proved incapable of restoring order, Hafizullah Amin, the leader of the pro-Soviet faction of the PDP, seized the government in yet another bloody coup. A rather unsavory character, he was unable to restore order. More than that, he had been educated at Columbia University, fanning Soviet suspicions that he...

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