Word: karmal
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...storm had been gathering around Party Chief Babrak Karmal for months. In February, at the 27th Communist Party congress in Moscow, the Afghan leader, who first came to power when Soviet troops stormed Kabul in December 1979, was denied a private audience by Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The following month Karmal abruptly disappeared from view, even failing to show up at his country's Revolutionary Day parade--the equivalent, noted a Western diplomat in Islamabad, of "staying away from one's own birthday party." Meanwhile, the Soviet newspaper Pravda ran a front-page story attacking Karmal's failure to build...
Three days after he returned from Moscow, their suspicions proved correct: Radio Kabul announced that Karmal was stepping down to assume the ceremonial position of President. His successor as General Secretary is Major General Mohammed Najibullah, 39, a doctor known for his hard-line fidelity to Moscow and his ruthless efficiency for the past five years as head of Khad, the dread Afghan secret police. Although the transition was managed peacefully--the previous three Afghan leaders had been killed during transfers of power --Soviet tanks took up positions in the hills outside Kabul, and armored units patrolled the city...
Some Western analysts were inclined to downplay the shift. As one Washington official joked, "The puppeteer now has a new puppet." Certainly Najibullah, a loyal protege of Karmal's, seems unlikely to lead his country in any radically new directions. However, having built the secret police into a disciplined, KGB-style network of 60,000 agents, the major general may bring a new intensity to the civil war with the mujahedin rebels. Najibullah is, says a European diplomat in Islamabad, "an efficient killer...
...Unlike Karmal, who is a member of the small, Dari-speaking elite, Najibullah has the advantage of belonging to the country's dominant Pushtu tribe. The new leader is therefore well placed to get fellow Pushtuns in Pakistan to cut guerrilla supply lines and unify the ranks of a regime so sharply divided that it is sometimes referred to as an example of "two-party Communism." If Najibullah can consolidate a solid and loyal Soviet-style government, Moscow may feel secure enough to withdraw its 120,000 troops from Afghanistan...
While the Afghan fighting waxed and waned, the latest round of talks between Pakistan and the Soviet-backed government of Afghan President Babrak Karmal ended inconclusively in Geneva. The United Nations-sponsored talks are the main hope for a political solution to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. As the latest Soviet offensive shows, that possibility seems as far off as ever...