Word: karmal
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...Moscow faced with the prospect of an open-ended drain on its resources and ongoing embarrassment in its foreign policy. It also presents the U.S. with a dilemma. Should the U.S., in exchange for a Soviet pullout, press for a diplomatic settlement that might involve the formal recognition of Karmal's puppet regime and an end to outside support for the mujahedin? Or should Washington keep the covert military heat on and insist on unconditional withdrawal...
When TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott arrived at the Presidential Palace in Kabul last week, he found President Babrak Karmal as affable in manner as he was doctrinaire in his pronouncements. At the beginning and the end of a 90-minute interview, the first Kar mal has had with an American journalist, the President and party leader kissed Talbott on both cheeks in the traditional Afghan greeting, urging him to "come back some time and hunt Marco Polo sheep in our beautiful mountains." Karmal spoke mostly in English, which he said he learned in King Zahir's prisons during...
...Karmal, 52, is a revolutionary of un abashedly pro-Soviet leanings. In the mid-'60s he formed a faction of the People's Democratic [Communist] Party that hewed closely to Moscow's line. After the 1978 coup that brought rivals in a more in dependent party faction to power, he was sent off into diplomatic exile as Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. In December 1979, when the Soviets invaded and killed his predecessor, Hafizullah Amin, Karmal emerged as the new leader...
Western observers are convinced that Karmal was in the U.S.S.R. at the time of the invasion, that he broadcast his inaugural address as President from Tashkent, and that he was flown into Afghanistan only after the Soviet occupation force was in place. "Lies and fabrications," said Karmal, adding that he had been living secretly in Afghanistan for a few months during the previous regime, and that it was he who "requested" the So viet intervention on instructions from the Afghan party central committee...
...Karmal insisted that the war is going well: "We have defeated the counterrevolutionary bandits even though we have not yet completely destroyed them." Most of the fighting, he said, is handled by the Afghan armed forces, not by the Soviets: "The limited contingent of our Soviet friends is to be held in reserve, as a potential force to be used against the massive outside aggression in this undeclared war that is being waged against us by terrorists operating from some 80 bases in Pakistan...