Word: karmal
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...Czechoslovakia in 1968. In a lightning series of events last week, Afghanistan's President Hafizullah Amin was overthrown, and subsequently executed, in a ruthless coup mounted by the Soviet Union and carried out with the firepower of Soviet combat troops. In Amin's place, Moscow installed Babrak Karmal, a former Deputy Prime Minister long considered to be a Soviet protégé, but not before Russian troops were forced to fight a sporadic series of gun battles in the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital...
...Thursday the real motive of the intervention was clear: Radio Kabul suddenly announced that President Amin, a tough, repressive Communist who had seized power only last September from former President Noor Mohammed Taraki, had been deposed. The new President, the broadcast said, was former Deputy Prime Minister Karmal. A later announcement specified that Amin had been convicted of "crimes against the people" and executed, along with members of his family. Radio Kabul failed to mention that in the upheaval, Soviet military units had entered combat for the first time since their border clashes against China...
...rebel command, represented nothing more than "a change in pawns." The Japanese embassy said that gunfire could still be heard along the road leading from the Soviet embassy to the old royal palace. Nonetheless, as soon as word reached Moscow that the coup was successful, the Soviets quickly broadcast Karmal's denunciation of the Amin dictatorship as an agent of "American imperialism...
...armed forces in a state outside the Warsaw Pact. It seemed an ominous extension into Asia of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserts that Moscow has the right to assist any socialist state in trouble. Moscow, of course, claimed that it intervened only at the request of the Karmal government under the terms of a 20-year friendship treaty signed in December 1978. The Russians made no attempt to disguise the fact that the airlift began two days before the coup that brought Karmal to power, thus making a mockery of their rationale...
...Soviet choice to replace him was a Marxist intellectual little known in the West (see box). Karmal thus became the third Afghan leader to seize control of the government in the 20 months since the Communists first came to power in April 1978. As the new strongman, following the April coup, Taraki at first denied there had been a Communist takeover. But in the months that followed, internal struggles dangerously narrowed the government's base. As he attempted to keep the revolution on course, Taraki turned increasingly to Russian advisers to fill a shortage of trained manpower. The number...