Babrak Karmal (1979-1986)

Although born into a wealthy Tajikid family of Kashmir origin in the village of Kamari east of Kabul, Babrak Karmal lived in hardship following the death of his mother. After graduation from the Nejat High School, Karmal enrolled at the College of Law and Political Sciences in 1951. The next year he was arrested for holding rallies in support of Abdul Rahman Mahmudi, the well-known revolutionary figure of the 1950s. In prison Karmal was befriended by a fellow inmate, Mier Akbar Khybar. A third inmate, Mier Mohammad Siddiq Farhang, initiated both to pro-Moscow leftist views. Karmal then broke off relations with the imprisoned Mahmudi because the latter had turned pro-Beijing. Following his release in 1955, Karmal resumed his studies at the university. After graduation he entered the Ministry of Planning, keeping in close touch with those who had special knowledge on communism, among them Mier Mohammad Siddiq Farhang and Ali Mohammad Zahma, a professor at Kabul University; in the 1960s Karmal addressed Farhang as ustad (master). Farhang then introduced him to the royal court. Both played a leading role in influencing the youth in adhering to communism (Sharq, Memoirs, 234). After he was raised to power, Karmal appointed Farhang as his adviser, promising him that the Soviet troops would leave Afghanistan within months and that “as economic adviser Farhang would have real power” (Hyman, Afghanistan under Soviet Domination, 194).

On 1 January 1965 the PDPA was founded in Kabul, with Karmal serving as one of its twenty-eight founding members in its founding congress. Karmal was appointed its secretary. In 1967, when the PDPA split into the rival Parcham and Khalq factions, Karmal headed the smaller, and more cosmopolitan, Parcham faction. When Daoud overthrew the monarchy and instituted a republic, Karmal’s faction shared power with him, although Karmal himself did not hold an official position. But the honeymoon did not last long. After he felt secure in his position, President Daoud dismissed Parchamis from the presidential cabinet and tried to distance Afghanistan from the Soviet Union. Under pressure from Moscow the Parcham and Khalq factions reunited in 1977, but the alliance was superficial. After the PDPA usurped power, Karmal held the posts of vice president of the Revolutionary Council and deputy premier, but he had no real power. Soon he was demoted to the post of ambassador to Czechoslovakia. Afterward the Khalqi government implicated him in a conspiracy, expelling him and his associates (who were at the time abroad as ambassadors from the PDPA) and depriving them of Afghan citizenship. The outcasts took refuge in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The Soviets resurrected them after the invasion of Afghanistan and promoted Karmal to the posts of president of the Revolutionary Council, prime minister, supreme commander of the armed forces of Afghanistan, and general secretary of the PDPA. The Soviets let him assume the lofty titles but denied him the power that went with them. They let him serve only as a figurehead.

Babrak Karmal was popular with his followers, particularly the urbanized Parchamis, some of whom were emotionally attached to him. To them he was the symbol of defiance to social injustice and absolutism as well as a comrade of the downtrodden and the impoverished. His followers looked on him as the leader of the new-style pioneers who felt they had liberated themselves from the shackles of religion, tribe, region, and social customs, which restricted individuals in every corner of life. Karmal’s career of political struggle, his years of imprisonment, his perseverance in the hard profession of politics, his polished manners and convincing reasoning—all these endeared him still further to his followers. It was the force of their attachment that twice won for him seats in parliament in the constitutional decade. But all this is an incomplete picture of his personality and his social standing.

Karmal’s loyalty to the Soviet Union was well known. He would say even in the presence of non-Parchamis that he wished to make Afghanistan the sixteenth republic of the Soviet Union He was in the pay of the Soviet Union. He had been accused of this by Soraya Baha, a Parchami woman activist who had become disillusioned and who was therefore under investigation by some members of the central committee, including Karmal. She told him to his face that he was paid 35,000 rubles a month in the name of the party.

Karmal was widely believed to be a man without scruples. Following the death of his mother, he left home and lived with his widowed maternal aunt. He was said to be living in disregard of the society’s moral values. Karmal’s father, a general in the Afghan army, had disowned him, apparently for his leftist viewsIn his mature life, too, there was talk about Karmal’s debauchery. To his critics Karmal would say, “Among us these issues have been resolved.” Karmal resembled Mulla Zakki, whose licentious views permeated the court of Shah Mahmud Sadozay in the early years of the nineteenth century. Zakki’s actions led to a commotion that resulted in the overthrow of the monarch. Afghan society was no longer as rigid as it had been during the previous century, but it was not so liberal as to accept as its ruler a commoner with such a record.

Karmal’s behavior created a problem for his faction, despite the fact that some urban Parchamis were “loose.” Karmal’s behavior intensified a rift between himself and Mier Akbar Khybar, the number two man in the faction. Khybar once slapped Karmal in his face because Karmal had tried to seduce the unwilling wife of their host comrade. Khybar said to him, “You aspire for Afghan rulership, but do such base thingsThe incident had wider—and, for Khybar, fatal—implications. All this lowered the status of the Parchamis in the public eye.

The incident had wider consequences for Karmal as well. All peoples want to know the identity of their rulers, and that desire is particularly strong among the genealogy-conscious Afghans. When Karmal was raised to power, his background became a subject of inquiry. Karmal was born in 1929 in the village of Kamari to the east of the city of Kabul. He had graduated from the College of Law and Political Sciences of Kabul University. Karmal’s family was believed to be Tajik, the second main ethnic group after the Pashtuns, because linguistically and culturally the family was Tajik and was integrated into the urban community of Kabul. But Karmal’s father did not say so and “would skillfully conceal his Tajik identityIn 1986 Karmal announced that he and his full brother, Mahmud Baryalay, were Pashtuns. He said so because they were the sons of a linguistically Persianized Pashtun mother of the Mullakhel section of the Ghilzays. But in the patriarchal society of Afghanistan, descent is traced only through the patriarchal line. Karmal should have stated that he was a Tajik if he was a Tajik. Karmal’s announcement was political in that he wanted to attach himself to the Pashtuns, but it confounded the issue of his identity. Karmal’s forefathers had immigrated from Kashmir to Kabul, as many Kashmiris had settled there over a long period of time. Kashmir was a part of the Afghan Durrani empire until its dissolution in 1818. This descent is reinforced by the fact that Karmal and his brother’s original names resemble the names of Indian Muslims. Karmal’s first full name was Sultan Hussayn, and his brother’s name was Sultan Mahmud; their father was named Mohammad Hussayn. The brothers changed their names to sound more like Afghan names.

The fact that Karmal’s ancestors had immigrated to Kabul, Karmal’s statement that he was a Pashtun, the fact that his father was not a Pashtun, and his father’s reluctance to admit that he was a Tajik—all these make it doubtful that the family was Tajik originally, although they were integrated into that group. It is a custom in Afghanistan for a person of no ethnic significance to relate himself to the ethnic group into which he has been integrated. Not all Pashto-speaking Afghans are Pashtuns, and not all Persian-speaking Afghans are Tajiks. Karmal went against the custom. This means that, ethnically speaking, the family was insignificant. Among the educated Afghans this was not so damaging to the social standing of Karmal and Baryalay. More damaging was the view that they were the descendants of Hindu ancestors.

Some claimed that Karmal was descended from Hindu ancestors, but no evidence has substantiated the claim. However, it was said that Karmal and his two younger brothers looked like Hindus. Another supportive point can be traced in Karmal’s relationship with the government of India. Before the coup the Indian embassy in Kabul used to invite Karmal to its receptions, whereas it did not invite Taraki, although he, unlike Karmal, had spent some time in India. When Karmal was raised to power, India was, of all the nonaligned countries, the only one to establish full diplomatic relations with the Kabul regime. This is not to suggest that India did so for personal reasons. In maintaining a relationship with Kabul, India intended to promote its own regional interests. But in these relationships Karmal’s personal role was striking.

For the first time in Kabul, the small Hindu and Sikh communities were officially encouraged to hold religious ceremonies openly. Senior officials participated in televised ceremonies. It might have been in line with their communist creed to encourage religious minorities. The Soviet advisers might also have instructed them to please India, their ally in the region. But the fanfare that they made on these occasions irritated the Afghans. In addition to being known as a self-indulgent communist, Karmal was said to be a promoter of Hinduism. Even if nothing else counted against Karmal, these labels were enough for the Afghans to distrust him.

Karmal’s immediate problems were within the party. He was the chosen man of the Kremlin, and no one within the party could openly oppose him. However, scheming men devise ways to oppose even under the strictest of circumstances. Within the closed frame of government, the opposition, in order to seize power, may resort to whatever means available to it. After the fall of Amin and the suppression of his faction, Karmal had new rivals in the persons of Sarwari and Gulabzoy, the heads of the Taraki faction that called itself the “principled Khalqis.” Sarwari and Gulabzoy had endeared themselves to the Soviets by helping them in the invasion. They had done so not for the sake of Karmal but for their own agenda, which was to get rid of Karmal and his faction.[

The scheme was to dispose of the Parchami leaders in their offices by a synchronized action. Since the Parchamis were few in number, since they were not as bold as the Khalqis were, and since the Khalqis had battered them twice before, they did not think much of them. This was what Sarwari thought. He was, however, so naive as to disregard the Soviet factor. In June 1980, before Sarwari was able to put his scheme into operation, he was sent as ambassador to Mongolia. This still did not mean that Karmal became the general secretary of a unified party, as he claimed.

The Soviet Union, by overthrowing the Khalq government and raising the Parcham faction to its place, had split the PDPA into irreconcilable factions. The KGB’s view that the removal of Amin would ensure unity in the PDPA remained dominant in Moscow. But as minister of interior and a leader of the Taraki faction, Gulabzoy acted as if he were the head of a state within a state. He acted on the view that both he and Karmal had gotten their posts from Moscow, thus claiming himself Karmal’s equal.

Because of all these problems, Karmal was raised to the position of head of state without ceremony to legitimize his rule. But in Afghanistan the head of state must gain legitimacy either directly from the constituencies or through their representatives, in accord with social conventions. This approach becomes a necessity when a dynasty is replaced. In the case of Karmal, though, such legitimation was impossible. No attempt was made to convene an assembly of the notables to bestow on him the position of the head of state. Instead, the government in its mass media reported that people from various walks of life had expressed their allegiance to their leader, Karmal. Except for some messages from party cadres and some government employees, these messages were fabrications. No attempt was made to televise the process by which, even within the official party and the Revolutionary Council, Karmal was elected head of the party and of the state. Only official communiqués were issued to the effect that the central committee of the party and the Revolutionary Council "almost unanimously" agreed to elect Karmal as head of the party and the state

After the Afghans demonstrated in opposition to Karmal, and when other governments, except for those of the Soviet bloc countries, declined to recognize the regime, Karmal invented stories that he hoped would legitimize his rule. According to one of these stories, he entered Afghanistan "through revolutionary pathways" and along with the true members of the party organized opposition with whose help he overthrew the government of Amin. By the phrase "through revolutionary pathways," Karmal meant his two secret flights aboard Soviet military aircraft to the Bagram military airport. The Soviets first flew him in on 13 December 1979, when they expected opponents would topple Amin by a coup. "But when the operation to kill Amin failed, Babrak [Karmal] was hurriedly brought back…to the Soviet Union.”[The Soviets again flew him in after the invasion. So to Karmal the Soviet interference in Afghan affairs, its invasion of Afghanistan, and his becoming a tool of its policy were a "revolution"—but this view could not help him legitimize his rule.

Karmal’s poor performance in interviews with foreign journalists also failed to help his public image. In the first and last televised interview of his life, held before a large number of foreign and Afghan journalists after he was raised to power, Karmal divided the journalists on the basis of the cold war line distinguishing between "the imperialist bloc of the West" and the "socialist bloc countries." In this interview his answer to a question put by a BBC correspondent showed that he lived in the past. Instead of answering the question he was asked, he adopted a confrontational attitude, lecturing the BBC reporter, "We know each other in history because our forefathers had defeated your forefathers in numerous battlefields in Afghanistan." People expected that since Karmal had served twice in parliament and since he had been abroad for over a year, he would now act as a statesman. Instead, he proved himself to be an exhibitionist. It was one thing for him to recite composed statements as an actor; it was quite another for him to answer questions that touched the lives of millions of men and women. He almost never spoke extemporaneously. After this interview the impression became widespread that Karmal, in addition to being a stooge, had no qualities of a statesman.

From the moment Karmal was raised to power, he faced tremendous problems. Whatever weight he had he lost after the invasion. An Afghan author has summed up Afghan feelings about Karmal by stating, "His presence alongside the Red Army is so small that it attracts no attention. People don’t think of him, but evaluate the long-range consequences of this political move [the invasionKarmal’s Soviet supporters reduced him as a person and a ruler. Thus, "by the close of 1979 the PDPA no longer ruled Afghanistan; the CPSU [the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] didFrom the moment Karmal was flown in to Kabul, he was no longer his own master, still less the Afghan ruler. His Soviet cooks, waiters, and waitresses, the Soviet driver of his black limousine, and his Soviet advisers took care of him around the clock. Behind the curtain in his office were a Soviet adviser and an interpreter; his conversations were taped.[] Contingents of Soviet guards patrolled the palace in the city where Karmal lived. Afghan guards surrounded him, but their weapons were without ammunition. The Karmal of the old days, when he roamed freely, suddenly became a pearl. The Soviets were so kind to him that he had no need to meet with members of his family, or at least to meet them without their presence. Karmal’s wife, Mahbuba—a courteous woman who was once one of my students—spent most of her time in the Soviet Union. Karmal no longer needed his mistress, Anahita Ratebzad, since young Russian women gave him, as well as a select number of the politburo members, intimate company. Everything that the Soviets could provide for Karmal’s personal comfort was made available to him. Under Soviet supervision Karmal found himself in surroundings he had never been in before. But then he had to live the life of an unfree ruler, and this is clear from his own words to a friend and the words of one of his friends about him. To an old leftist friend, Asif Ahang, who met him under strictly supervised conditions, the embarrassed Karmal said, “The Soviet comrades love me boundlessly, and for the sake of my personal safety, they don’t obey even my own ordersAnother friend, Zia Majid, said of Karmal after meeting with him, “The hands, feet and tongue of the poor Sultan had been tied, and he had no right to speak [without permission] with his personal friends

Like Karmal, others in the politburo, the central committee, and the Revolutionary Council did not have to trouble to formulate policies or make decisions. These matters were handled for them. Whatever the guidelines of the Kremlin rulers, they were handed over to the regime’s appropriate agencies. This was done through an invisible body or council, composed of the Soviet ambassador, the local head of the KGB, and the commander of the Soviet army, and headed by the Soviet supreme commander, Marshall Sergei Sokolov. The council met regularly. As the actual ruler behind the scene, Sokolov issued directives to agents of the party and the government. He received Karmal in his presence in his own headquarters. Through his own agents Sokolov likewise supervised how the directives were implemented. In particular, policies on security matters emanated from this body, and they were handed over through its advisers to the regime’s intelligence department (KhAD) for implementation.

The number of Soviet advisers was on the increase. In the first month after the invasion their numbers more than doubled, surpassing total PDPA members at the timeBy early 1984 they were believed to total over ten thousand They worked not only as advisers but also as executives in all the military and civilian departments to which they were assigned. Bureaucrats of the regime found that even routine orders had to be approved and countersigned by the Soviets. In fact, “no minister [could] make a single decision, even a minor one, without consulting his omnipresent shadowAs noted, even Karmal was not permitted to make decisions. “Slowly his power was confined to approving dismissals or appointments which, under instructions from Soviet advisers, the Intelligence Department or his comrades in the politburo would propose. He would neither postpone nor reject such proposals But as a Persian saying has it, “Alive, the hero is happy.” To comrades who complained of the domineering attitude of Soviet advisers, Karmal said, “The Soviets have enough experience in implementing socialism and social justice in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. They will never make mistakes in their accomplishments. Be patient. They have come here to develop our country as a model in the region.”[ During his stay in Czechoslovakia, Karmal’s belief in the Soviet Union had become total. The Czechoslovak leaders had impressed on him that the world’s progress was due to the invincible Red Army. That was why "he did not think he had made a mistake to have come [to Afghanistan] along with the Soviet army

Promotions became a source of profit for corrupt advisers. An adviser in Herat, in return for a golden necklace for his wife, released a member of the Afghan Millat Party who had been sentenced to death. A few Parchami officers were said to have obtained promotion by offering women to their Soviet comrades. Similarly, a Soviet adviser who wished to remain longer in his post sent his own wife to the arms of a senior Afghan official to obtain his recommendation. Not all advisers were qualified. When a non-PDPA official informed Karmal that the advisers attached to his ministry were unqualified, Karmal ignored him and, holding to the party line, told him that “the Soviet advisers were most qualified in their fields, and…Afghanistan should take advantage of their expertise

Soviet advisers composed statements in the Russian and Tajiki languages for party members and government officials to read on official occasions. Party and government experts paraphrased the Tajiki texts into Afghan Persian (Dari). Under Soviet supervision government officials also composed statements. Soviet advisers did not allow government and party officials—even Karmal or his brother Baryalay—to make statements of their own, particularly on issues relating to foreign affairs. Karmal and Baryalay were admonished after making unauthorized statements. However, within the framework of the guidelines, party members and government officials had a wide range in which to demonstrate their talents and to win over the public.

Empty Promises

In his first radio broadcasts Karmal gave hopeful promises. He said that henceforth there would be no executions and that a new constitution would be drawn up providing for the democratic election of national and local assemblies. He also promised that political parties would function freely and that both personal property and individual freedom would be safeguarded. In particular, he stressed that soon a government representing a united national front would be set up and that it would not pursue socialism. He also promised a general amnesty for prisoners. In normal circumstances these promises would have aroused expectations, but now they sounded dreadful. As noted before, Karmal announced at the same time that his government had asked the Soviet Union to give economic, political, and military assistance, a request that, he said, had been accepted and rendered. Since he had become an agent for inflicting the calamity of Soviet troops on the Afghans, Karmal had no choice but to give the promises of a democratic government. But in this he went so far as to give promises that he could not fulfill even if he wished to.

These promises were nothing but the Leninist tactical move of two steps backward and one step forward. For a Brezhnevian protégé such as Karmal, it was impossible to go ahead with a platform that his masters saw as bourgeois. Also, the Afghans had seen that the same Karmal following the communist coup had, with others, promised that private as well as personal property would remain safe, a promise that they violated. The fact was that he could not become a ruler without the military might of the Soviet Union. Karmal, with a view to taking revenge on Amin and making himself the ruler of Afghanistan, had let himself become an instrument in the hands of foreign masters with no regard for the rights of his compatriots to sovereignty, their dignity as free men and, above all, their lives. To reach his goal, this most slavish of puppet rulers let himself be entangled in a dilemma that was beyond his powers to solve and that brought untold suffering to millions of men, women, and children.

Among the measures promised by Karmal, the most important were the release of prisoners; the promulgation of the Fundamental Principles of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan; the change of the red, Soviet-style banner of the Khalq period to the more orthodox one of black, red, and green; the granting of concessions to religious leaders; and the conditional restoration of confiscated property. Some concessions were also granted to landowners whose lands had been confiscated in the land reform program implemented by Karmal’s predecessors. Except for the release of prisoners, all these measures were taken gradually. What lessened the bitterness of the people was the release of prisoners on 6 January 1980. The Parchami prisoners, numbering about 600, had been released in the early hours of the invasion; the bulk of the prisoners, released on 6 January, numbered 2,000; and about 100 prisoners were not released. Thus, the total number of prisoners before the invasion was around 2,700. Much fanfare was made of the occasion of the release of prisoners. People from the outside were brought in to mingle with the prisoners to make their number appear higher. But the day turned into a day of wailing for thousands of families who were now convinced that they would never again see their imprisoned relatives. After Amin came to power, he had made public a list of those already executed; according to this list, 12,000 prisoners had been executed, but people still hoped that since the actual number of prisoners was higher, their imprisoned relatives might be alive. They were disappointed. (Amin had released 850 prisoners after he became the ruler and intended to release the rest by 1 January to coincide with the sixteenth anniversary of the party.)

After the Khalqis came to power, they ran the country by issuing a series of eight edicts. They suspended all laws except those on civil matters. Another exception was the criminal law of the Daoud period, which the Parchamis, like the Khalqis, retained as a repressive instrument.

In April 1980 the Karmal regime adopted a temporary constitution, the Fundamental Principles of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which had been drafted while Amin was in power. The new constitution guaranteed certain democratic rights of individuals, including the right to “security and life,” the right of “free expression,” and the right “to form peaceful associations and demonstrations.” It also declared that “no one would be accused of crime but in accord with the provisions of law,” that the “accused is innocent unless the court declares him guilty,” and that “crime was a personal affair, and no one else would be punished for it.” It likewise declared that “torture, persecution, and punishment, contrary to human dignity, are not permissible.”

Envisaged for the country was “a new-style state of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan,” guided by the PDPA. It was the only legal party, and the Revolutionary Council, as the supreme state power, was to convene twice a year to approve measures already taken by the Presidium, which was composed mostly of the politburo members of the PDPA. The state was to safeguard three forms of property: state property, cooperative property, and private property. The constitution declared that the state had the right to exploit all underground property and other resources considered state property. The constitution also declared that the state had the power to develop the economy toward the creation of a society free of the exploitation of man by man. The state was likewise empowered to take families, both parents and children, under its supervision

The constitution was inherently contradictory. On paper it was a perfectly democratic constitution, at least as far as the rights of the individuals were concerned; in reality it was a document granting a monopoly of power, since the state that it envisaged was to be steered only by the official party. More important, the way it was implemented was arbitrary. It relied on clauses in favor of the state while ignoring those in favor of individuals. The guaranteed rights of individuals were meaningless words. It was, in brief, a legal instrument of suppression in the hands of the regime. But its impact was limited. By the time it was promulgated, the mujahideen had confined the regime to cities.

Among the palliative measures that Karmal was to take, the most important was the one intended to have an immediate effect on the current situation. This was the question of forming a government representing a united national front, which Karmal had promised. By definition, such a government would be composed of those groups or individuals having the power to influence national politics. Karmal had neither the desire nor the power to form such a government. The government he did form was composed of the Parchamis, Khalqis (Taraki group), and three persons of no national significance. A number of well-known noncommunist Afghans were also appointed to various ministries But these collaborators, who set the precedent of cooperation with the regime, found that they had been given posts without authority. Besides, by then it had become a fact of Afghan politics that any one who collaborated with the regime was no longer socially significant.

The next step toward the formation of the government of national front was the appointment of a large number of junior bureaucrats in various ministries. The regime made a big fanfare of this, but these officials were ordinary civil employees, not politicians. This was what Karmal and his Soviet advisers meant when they spoke of a government representing a united national front. As has been pointed out, “no totalitarian regime can afford to share real power with any group outside its own immediate control Karmal had failed to unite the party, although calling it a unified democratic party. He had also failed to form a truly national government. Yet he and his associates called their regime “a new evolutionary phase of the glorious April Revolution.”

All this time armed opposition was mounting. Within weeks of the invasion the mujahideen had wrested the rural areas from the control of the regime. The regime ruled the city of Kabul, the provincial capitals, and those strategic areas where the Soviets and the regime had stationed military contingents and militia units. Even cities were unsafe for PDPA members. Worse still, the mujahideen killed Soviet soldiers in large numbers. All this was a spectacular feat for the mujahideen. (The situation remained the same until the Soviets withdrew their army in 1989.) Opponents of the regime spread rumors to the effect that the Kremlin rulers had decided to replace Karmal. But luckily for him, no one else within the party had even his meager standing.

Years later, when Karmal’s inability to consolidate his government had become obvious, Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, said, “The main reason that there has been no national consolidation so far is that Comrade Karmal is hoping to continue sitting in Kabul with our help Colonel Nikolai Ivanov, a Soviet military writer, even wrote that “he [Karmal] was a nobody Both statements reflect the failure of Soviet foreign policy. It was because of this policy that Karmal was unable to achieve “national consolidation,” that he had become “a nobody.” Prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Karmal not only was not “a nobody” but was an important somebody. Twice the people had elected him to parliament. When his Kremlin comrades used Karmal as a tool of their policy, they turned him into a nobody. Then this “nobody” was unable to achieve “national consolidation.” He even had to plead with his Soviet comrades: “You brought me here [to Afghanistan], you protect me.”[ The Soviet invasion had generated forces of resistance beyond the control of even the strongest ruler with the best mind—let alone a puppet such as Karmal. In addition, Karmal was inexperienced in running the country, a particularly severe weakness at a time when the nation had turned against him. The truth of this statement Gorbachev accepted when in a politburo meeting he told his peers, "If we don’t change approaches [to evacuate Afghanistan], we will be fighting there for another 20 or 30 years be To make Karmal a scapegoat for the Soviet failure is wrong, but doing so was standard practice for the Soviet leaders. At any rate, the Soviet leaders stuck with him for six years. Hoping to prop him up, they received him and his delegation with pomp in October 1980 in the Kremlin, where they lectured him on how to run the country What was needed was a lecture to the Kremlin leaders themselves on why they had blundered in invading Afghanistan and raising to power a person whom their own historian called “a nobody.”