Babrak Karmal

• 1. Introduction

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  Babrak Karmal was born Sultan Hussein on the 6th of January 1929, a general's son from one of Kabul's wealthier families. He would die in Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital from liver cancer in December 1996, having spent much of his final years in exile from the country he had once ruled. Between those two endpoints lies one of the stranger political trajectories of the twentieth century: a man who changed his own name, was exiled twice, hid from assassins in Czechoslovak forests, and was installed as the leader of Afghanistan by a foreign military power that would later depose him just as briskly. How did a student union organizer from Kabul come to depend so completely on Soviet protection? And why, even at the height of his power, could he not give a direct order to his own intelligence service? Those are the questions worth tracing here.

• 2. A Name Chosen, Not Given

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  At Nejat High School, a German-speaking institution in Kabul, the young Sultan Hussein proved himself a charismatic speaker long before he found his ideology. He graduated from the school in 1948 and applied to Kabul University's Faculty of Law and Political Science, only to be denied admission because of his openly leftist views and student activism. He eventually studied there from 1951 to 1953 before being arrested for his activities in the student union. The prison term lasted three years; he was released in 1956 under an amnesty granted by Muhammad Daoud Khan.

  It was inside that prison that the man became Babrak Karmal. His fellow inmate Mir Akbar Khyber introduced him to Marxism, and the encounter redirected the rest of his life. After his release, he formally shed the name Sultan Hussein and adopted Babrak Karmal, a name that translates in Pashto as "Comrade of the Workers." The gesture was deliberate. His father, a dagar jenral in the Royal Afghan Army and former governor of both Paktia and Herat provinces, disowned him because of his leftist views. The choice of a new name was also a severance from the social rank and family wealth that name carried.

  Karmal graduated from the College of Law and Political Science in 1960. He then worked as a translator for English and German, later joined the Ministry of Education's Compilation and Translation Department in 1961, and moved to the Ministry of Planning from 1961 to 1963. The state employed the man even as his politics moved against it. His ethnic background proved equally difficult to pin down. Some sources claimed he was Pashtun; others insisted he was Tajik; still others pointed to Kashmiri origin. Throughout his years in the Afghan Parliament, Karmal deliberately identified himself as Pashtun in some settings and Tajik in others, treating ethnicity as a political tool rather than a fixed fact.

• 3. Fracture in the Party

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  The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan was established in January 1965, in the home of Nur Muhammad Taraki. Karmal was a founding member. During the 1965 parliamentary election, he was one of four PDPA members elected to the lower house of parliament; the others were Anahita Ratebzad, Nur Ahmed Nur, and Fezanul Haq Fezan. No Khalqists were elected, though Hafizullah Amin missed election by fifty votes. Karmal's faction had a financial advantage; he could contribute personally to the campaign, which helps explain the Parchamite sweep.

  By 1967 the party had effectively split. The proximate cause was the Khalqist newspaper Khalq being shut down, and Karmal's public criticism that its leadership should have concealed its Marxist orientation rather than advertising it. The vote on his criticism was close, and it is reported that Taraki expanded the Central Committee specifically to win it. The resulting division was not purely ideological. The Khalqists drew mostly from poorer, rural, Pashtun backgrounds, while the Parchamites were urban, wealthier, and predominantly Dari-speaking. The Khalqists took to calling the Parchamite organization the "Royal Communist Party" because of its alleged connections to the monarchy. Taraki modeled his leadership on Leninist norms; Karmal wanted a broad democratic front. Both men nonetheless held onto their parliamentary seats through the 1969 election.

  In June 1978, three months after the Saur Revolution brought the PDPA to power, Amin outmaneuvered the Parchamites at a Central Committee meeting, winning exclusive control over party policy for the Khalq. A formal purge against the Parchamites began on the 1st of July 1978. Karmal went into hiding at a Soviet friend's home and tried to reach Alexander Puzanov, the Soviet ambassador, to discuss the situation. Puzanov refused to meet him and, critically, revealed Karmal's location to Amin. The Soviets then saved Karmal by sending him to Czechoslovakia.

• 4. Exile, Forests, and a Radio Broadcast

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  Karmal did not return to Kabul from Prague. Fearing for his life, he lived with his family in forests protected by the Czechoslovak secret police, the StB. The Afghan secret police, KHAD, had allegedly dispatched agents to Czechoslovakia to assassinate him. From that position of vulnerability, Karmal still managed to build a network among the remaining Parchamites inside the Afghan government. A coup against Amin was scheduled for the 4th of September 1979, to coincide with the Festival of Eid in the hope that military vigilance would be relaxed. The plot unraveled when the Afghan ambassador to India disclosed the plan to the government. A new purge swept through the Parchamite ranks. Karmal and Mohammad Najibullah were among the few who did not return to Afghanistan when ambassadors were recalled.

  In late 1979, the KGB brought Karmal to Moscow. The Soviet decision to intervene militarily in Afghanistan had been made; Amin was initially informed of the intervention and gave his consent, but was then assassinated during it. On the 27th of December 1979, a pre-recorded speech by Karmal was broadcast from Tashkent in the Uzbek SSR over Radio Kabul, attacking Amin as a torturer whose "machine" had been smashed. The wavelength of the broadcast was altered to match Kabul's frequency. Karmal was not in Kabul when his own voice reached Afghan listeners; he was in Bagram, under KGB protection.

  That evening, Yuri Andropov, the KGB Chairman, congratulated Karmal on his rise to the Chairmanship of the Presidium of the Revolutionary Council before any formal appointment had been made. Karmal returned to Kabul on the 28th of December, travelling alongside a Soviet military column, and spent the following days in a KGB-guarded villa on the outskirts of the city. On the 1st of January 1980, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin sent their congratulations on his "election" as leader, the quotation marks embedded in the message itself.

• 5. Power Without Authority

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  Two major uprisings hit Kabul early in Karmal's rule: one on the 22nd of February 1980, the date known in the Afghan calendar as 3 Hoot, and a sustained wave of student protests that followed. Karmal had promised, on taking power, an end to executions, democratic institutions, free elections, a new constitution, and the legalization of opposition parties. He released a general amnesty for prisoners, freeing 2,600 of 2,700 held, including 600 Parchamites. He replaced the red Khalqist flag with the traditional black, red, and green. He replaced the Khalqist flag with the traditional one. The Fundamental Principles of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which came into force on the 22nd of April 1980, guaranteed rights to free speech, peaceful assembly, and a fair trial. The document also, in the same breath, declared the PDPA the only party permitted by law and gave the state the right to take "families, both parents and children, under its supervision."

  The gap between the promises and the reality was visible to nearly everyone. Karmal admitted to a friend that "The Soviet comrades love me boundlessly, and for the sake of my personal safety, they don't obey even my own orders." This was not an exaggeration for effect. When Karmal personally ordered KHAD to release two members of the Afghan Mellat party without trial, the agency ignored him. He then sent a letter repeating the order; it was also ignored. He demanded the release of five detained university professors; KHAD tried and sentenced them anyway. Soviet advisors held the real authority over KHAD and the agency operated according to Soviet interests, not the Afghan government's instructions.

  The defence budget reflects the trajectory of the regime. The military budget before the Soviet intervention had been 6.4 million US dollars in March 1979. By 1980 it had risen to 208 million US dollars, and by 1981 to 325 million US dollars. The Afghan army before the intervention had been able to field 100,000 troops; after it, only 25,000 remained, as desertions spread through every unit. Karmal doubled military wages in January 1981, issued promotions, and decorated one general and thirteen colonels in an attempt to stabilize the force.

• 6. The Soviet Verdict

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  Mikhail Gorbachev told the Soviet Politburo his core concern directly: "If we don't change approaches to evacuate Afghanistan, we will be fighting there for another 20 or 30 years." The Soviet leadership had identified Karmal as the problem. Gorbachev said plainly that "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." Andrei Gromyko had actually discussed the possibility of Karmal's resignation with Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the United Nations Secretary-General, as early as 1982. There appears to have been a consensus by 1983 that Karmal had to go, though it was Gorbachev who would act on it.

  During Karmal's visit to the Soviet Union in March 1986, Soviet officials tried to persuade him that he was too ill to govern. A Soviet doctor examined him and told Karmal he was in good health, which undercut the approach. Karmal told the Soviets he understood their recommendation and would step down as PDPA General Secretary, then left for Kabul. The Soviets did not believe him. They sent Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB's intelligence directorate, to Kabul to close the matter. At a meeting there, Karmal professed his love for the Soviet Union and compared it to his Muslim faith. Kryuchkov concluded he could not extract a resignation and left the room. Shortly after, the Afghan defence minister and state security minister arrived at Karmal's office and informed him he had to give up one of his posts. Karmal resigned the General Secretaryship at the 18th PDPA Central Committee plenum and was succeeded by Mohammad Najibullah.

  He did not stop fighting from the margins. He spread rumors that he would be reappointed General Secretary and used remaining loyalists within the party to limit Najibullah's authority. At a Soviet Politburo meeting on the 13th of November 1986, supported by Gromyko, Eduard Shevardnadze, Anatoly Dobrynin, and Viktor Chebrikov, the decision was taken to remove Karmal from the Revolutionary Council chairmanship as well. He was exiled to Moscow and given a state apartment and a dacha. His successor as Revolutionary Council chairman was Haji Mohammad Tsamkani, a man who was not even a member of the PDPA.

• 7. Return, Collapse, and Judgment

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  Karmal returned to Kabul on the 20th of June 1991, at Najibullah's invitation and possibly on Anahita Ratebzad's recommendation; she had been close to Karmal and was respected by Najibullah. If Najibullah expected the gesture to consolidate his standing among pro-Karmal Parchamites, the opposite happened. Karmal's apartment became a centre of opposition to the Najibullah government. When Najibullah fell in 1992, Karmal briefly emerged as the most powerful politician in Kabul through leadership of the Parcham, but negotiations with rebel forces collapsed quickly. On the 16th of April 1992, rebels led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar took Kabul. Karmal withdrew to Hairatan, where those who spoke with him noted his apparent lack of interest in politics.

  In the years after losing power, Karmal turned publicly against the very revolution he had helped make. He told a Soviet reporter: "It was the greatest crime against the people of Afghanistan. Parcham's leaders were against armed actions because the country was not ready for a revolution... I knew that people would not support us if we decided to keep power without such support." The man who had broadcast his accession over Radio Kabul from Tashkent in 1979 was now calling that entire project a crime. He left Afghanistan again for Moscow, where he died in the Central Clinical Hospital in December 1996. Even the date of his death was disputed, reported by different sources as either the 1st or the 3rd of December. The Taliban's summary of his rule was unsparing, noting that he "died of cancer in a hospital belonging to his paymasters, the Russians" - an epitaph that, however hostile in intent, describes his situation with a certain accuracy.