Hafizullah Amin

• 1. Introduction

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  Hafizullah Amin held supreme power over Afghanistan for a little over three months in 1979. In that time he seized the presidency, executed his own mentor, tried to balance between Moscow and Washington, and ended up dead on the floor of the Tajbeg Palace with Soviet special forces still inside its walls. He was born on the 1st of August 1929 in the village of Qazi Khel in Paghman, a Kharoti Ghilzai Pashtun by family, and he died on the 27th of December 1979. Between those dates lies a story of ideology, betrayal, and spectacular miscalculation. How did a schoolteacher from Kabul rise to become the most feared man in Afghanistan? Why did the Soviet Union he had championed decide he had to die? And what does his brief, brutal rule reveal about the forces that would consume Afghanistan for the following decade?

• 2. Teacher Turned Revolutionary

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  Amin's father, a civil servant, died in 1937 when Amin was only eight years old. It was his brother Abdullah, a primary school teacher, who made it possible for him to continue his education. That chain of support carried Amin through Kabul University and the Darul Mualimeen Teachers College, and eventually to the principal's office of the prestigious Avesina High School.

  In 1957 he left for Columbia University in New York City, where he earned a master's degree in education. Columbia was also where he encountered Marxism directly, joining the university's Socialist Progressive Club in 1958. When he returned to Afghanistan and resumed teaching at Kabul University, he carried those convictions with him, using his classroom and his administrative posts to spread socialist ideas among students.

  A second stay in the United States, beginning in 1962 at the University of Wisconsin, deepened his political involvement further. He enrolled in Columbia's doctoral programme but shifted his energies toward politics, becoming head of the Afghan students' association at the college in 1963. That association was funded by the Asia Foundation, an organisation known as a CIA pass-through group. The irony would follow him for the rest of his life: a man the Soviets would later brand a CIA agent had built his political identity partly inside an American-funded student network.

  By the time Amin returned to Afghanistan in the mid-1960s, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan had already held its founding congress. He ran as a PDPA candidate in the 1965 parliamentary election and lost by fewer than fifty votes. In 1969 he became the only Khalqist elected to parliament, a result that raised his standing inside the party considerably. That single parliamentary seat would give him the platform to recruit military officers into the PDPA cause, a task that would prove decisive in 1978.

• 3. The Revolution He Built

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  On the 18th of April 1978, Mir Akbar Khyber, the chief ideologue of the Parcham faction, was killed, presumably by the government of Mohammad Daoud Khan. Khyber's funeral turned into a mass anti-government demonstration, and Daoud began arresting PDPA members seven days later. Amin was one of the last Central Committee members to be arrested, a fact that his biographers read as proof of how poorly the Daoud government understood who was actually organising the opposition.

  Amin had spent years cultivating military officers for exactly this moment, meeting them, as the official account put it, "day or night, in the desert or the mountains." When he learned that Taraki had been taken into custody, he knew the pre-arranged signal had been given. He ordered the revolution to begin at 9 am on the 27th of April 1978. Unlike Taraki, who was imprisoned, Amin was placed only under house arrest, and his son Abdur Rahman kept his freedom of movement, allowing messages to flow.

  The revolution succeeded with overwhelming support from the Afghan military. Defence Minister Ghulam Haidar Rasuli, Army commander Aslam Watanjar, and Air Force Chief of Staff Abdul Qadir all backed the PDPA. Daoud, along with his family and senior loyalists, was executed. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was proclaimed, and the faction that had been quietly building its networks inside the armed forces for years now controlled the state.

  After the coup, Taraki became Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and PDPA general secretary, while Amin took the role of Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister. Within three months of taking power, however, Amin had outmaneuvered the Parchamites at a Central Committee meeting, securing for the Khalqists exclusive rights to formulate policy. Karmal was exiled. The party that had just seized a country was already consuming itself.

• 4. Strongman and Schemer

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  By early 1979, armed resistance against the PDPA government had spread to 25 of Afghanistan's 28 provinces. The Herat uprising, which began on the 29th of March 1979, turned what had been scattered unrest into open war. It was during this period that Amin consolidated his position as Kabul's dominant figure, even as his formal authority was being trimmed by constitutional maneuvers designed to benefit Taraki.

  Soviet ambassador Alexander Puzanov recruited three of Amin's cabinet colleagues, Watanjar, Sayed Mohammad Gulabzoy, and Interior Minister Sherjan Mazdoryar, into a conspiracy against him. These men pressured Taraki to dismiss Amin. The reorganisation that followed reduced Amin's actual power: the new Homeland Higher Defence Council was chaired by Taraki, and most of its members were anti-Amin. Amin was deputy chairman of the council, a post the source describes as having "no specific functions or powers".

  Taraki attended the Non-Aligned Movement conference in Havana in September 1979, where he met privately with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to discuss the situation. Amin's loyal aide Sayed Daoud Taroon learned that in Moscow, Soviet leaders had urged Taraki to remove Amin. Taraki returned to Kabul and tried to dismiss Amin in a cabinet meeting, then suggested Amin accept an ambassadorship abroad. Amin refused, telling Taraki, "You are the one who should quit. Because of drink and old age you have taken leave of your senses."

  On the 13th of September, Taraki invited Amin to lunch at the presidential palace. Amin declined, saying he would prefer their resignations to their company. Soviet ambassador Puzanov persuaded Amin to visit the following day, the 14th of September. Inside the palace, bodyguards opened fire. Amin's aide Taroon was killed; Amin was wounded but escaped. He drove to the Ministry of Defence, placed the army on alert, and ordered tanks from the 4th Armoured Corps into the city. That same evening he returned to the palace and arrested Taraki.

• 5. Ninety Days at the Top

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  On the 16th of September 1979, Amin named himself Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Chairman of the Revolutionary Council, and General Secretary of the PDPA Central Committee simultaneously. His elevation was confirmed unanimously. The only cabinet members he replaced were the four who had plotted against him; historian Beverley Male read this restraint as a sign that the rest of the ministers supported him.

  Amin moved quickly to reframe the communist government as compatible with Islam. The Jamiatul Ulama officially endorsed his leadership on the 20th of September 1979, supporting the announcement that he was a pious Muslim. His government funded mosque reconstruction, distributed copies of the Quran, and Amin himself began invoking Allah in public speeches. He even claimed the Saur Revolution was "totally based on the principles of Islam." The campaign did not persuade most Afghans.

  He released a list of 18,000 people who had been executed, placing responsibility on Taraki. The army was shrinking badly: from roughly 100,000 soldiers at the revolution's conclusion, the force had fallen to somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 through desertions alone. Meanwhile the KGB had penetrated the PDPA, the military, and the government bureaucracy. Amin kept a portrait of Joseph Stalin on his desk; when Soviet officials criticised his brutality, he replied, "Comrade Stalin showed us how to build socialism in a backward country."

  Taroon, the aide who had warned Amin of Soviet plots and who had been killed in the 14th of September ambush, had been one of his most trusted allies. With Taroon gone and enemies embedded throughout the state apparatus, Amin was running out of people he could count on. He is believed to have ordered Taraki's death regardless: Taraki was reportedly suffocated with pillows on the 8th of October 1979. When Brezhnev learned what had happened, he was, according to the source, shocked and upset.

• 6. The Soviet Trap Closes

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  Andropov, the KGB chairman, argued to Brezhnev that Amin's mass repression had destroyed both the military and the government's ability to manage the insurgency. The Special Commission on Afghanistan, which included Andropov, Foreign Minister Gromyko, Defence Minister Dmitriy Ustinov, and Boris Ponomarev, concluded by late 1979 that Soviet influence in Afghanistan had to be preserved by force. A Soviet Politburo assessment described Amin as "a power-hungry leader who is distinguished by brutality and treachery."

  Amin, however, trusted the Soviet Union until the end. When Afghan intelligence delivered a report warning that Moscow planned to invade and topple him, he dismissed it as imperialist fabrication. His reasoning had a certain logic: after months of friction, the Soviets had finally done what he wanted and sent troops. On the 25th of December, Ustinov issued a formal order for the 40th Army and the Air Force to cross into Afghanistan at 15:00 hours. Large numbers of Soviet airborne troops landed in Kabul. Amin had approved their arrival, believing they were there to secure his government.

  Concerned for his safety, Amin had moved on the 20th of December from the Presidential Palace in central Kabul to the Tajbeg Palace, the former headquarters of the Central Corps. Its walls could withstand artillery fire. All roads to it had been mined except one, which was defended by heavy machine guns. The Presidential Guard numbered 2,500 troops and three T-54 tanks. Several Soviet commanders thought attacking it was "crazy".

  The Soviets had tried to poison Amin as early as the 13th of December but nearly killed his nephew instead. On the 27th of December, hours before the assault, they tried again at a lunch Amin had organised to show guests the palace and celebrate Ghulam Dastagir Panjsheri's return from Moscow. Amin and several guests lost consciousness. He survived because, according to the source, the carbonation of the Coca-Cola he was drinking diluted the toxic agent. KGB agent Mikhail Talybov had been assigned responsibility for the poisoning.

• 7. The Last Hours

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  As the assault on the Tajbeg Palace began on the 27th of December 1979, Amin still believed Soviet forces were there to protect him. He told his adjutant, "The Soviets will help us." The adjutant replied that it was the Soviets who were attacking. Amin dismissed this as a lie. Only after he tried and failed to reach the Chief of the General Staff did he say, "I guessed it. It's all true."

  The precise manner of his death has never been confirmed. He was killed either by a deliberate attack or, according to another account, by a random burst of fire. His son was fatally wounded and died shortly after. His daughter was wounded but survived. It was Gulabzoy who had been given the orders to kill Amin, and Watanjar who later confirmed he was dead.

  With Amin gone, Radio Kabul broadcast a pre-recorded speech by Babrak Karmal: "Today the torture machine of Amin has been smashed." Karmal was installed as the new Soviet-backed leader. The men of Amin's family were executed either immediately or shortly afterward; his brother Abdullah and nephew Asadullah were killed in June 1980. The women of the family, including his daughter, were held at Pul-e-Charkhi prison until President Najibullah released them in early 1992.

  On the 2nd of January 1980, on the PDPA's 15th anniversary, Karmal called Amin a "conspirator, professional criminal and recognised spy of the U.S." in the Kabul New Times. The Soviet intervention that followed Amin's death lasted nine years, a fact that gives his three months in power a significance far beyond what his brief tenure might otherwise suggest.