Word: taraki
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...radio proclaims the birth of the People's Republic of Afghanistan. Tanks are wreathed in flowers, "doubtless following the prescription of some revolutionary handbook," my father writes home. The portrait painter down the street begins churning out likenesses of Afghanistan's new President, Marxist-Leninist Nur Mohammed Taraki. (See pictures of hidden Afghanistan...
...Later, Taraki will boast that his coup took both superpowers by surprise. The Americans certainly were: it's rumored, though never confirmed, that the coaches of our Little League game that afternoon were CIA agents who missed the biggest news from their patch for years. All summer, my father cycles to his office at the Ministry of Justice in the sumptuous Darul Aman Palace. He's there to help the ministry frame a written legal code from tribal law, but as the summer wears on, the work dries up. The ex-minister remains in jail. Soviet advisers hustle through...
...exile. Importing foreign ideologies or language can create bitter historical ironies. The nuclear program that the Shah championed as a symbol of his Westernization and modernization is now, in the hands of the Ahmadinejad regime, a symbol of precisely the opposite sentiment: defiance against the West. Ever since the Taraki government changed Afghanistan's official title to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, many Afghans have been skittish about the term democracy, associating it with the communist regime...
...that changed in April 1978, when Noor Muhammad Taraki, a Soviet-supported Marxist, seized power in Kabul. It would be 20 months before Moscow would send the first of some 100,000 troops to occupy the country, but Soviet advisers were already leading the Afghan army in search-and-destroy missions across the countryside. The residents of Dobanday first became alarmed when they heard that the new regime was attacking religious leaders and traditions. The authorities then arrested two local elders and decreed that all houses in the settlement be thrown open for inspection...
...Hafizullah Amin emerge "from nowhere." Long the No. 2 man in the Khalq faction of the Communist party, Amin was the key man in organizing the 1978 coup and immediately emerged as the strongman of the Taraki regime. These and other questionable assertions would not have escaped the attention of any high-ranking KGB officer specializing in the area. One is forced to wonder about Mr. Kuzichkin's motives in making these statements. Rosanne Klass, Director Afghanistan Information Center New York City