The dated items in this book run from 27 December 1979 to early February 1980; the last is a dispatch on Zbigniew Brzezinski's trip to Islamabad and Riyadh. It was in English and in circulation later that year. A turnaround of a few months tells you what the volume is. The Truth About Afghanistan is not a study. It is a rapid-response file, assembled to be handed to a foreign journalist, a friendly parliamentarian or a Western Communist Party press officer who needed something to say.
It was also not published by Progress. The imprint is the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1980 — this series spans several Soviet imprints, and the distinction matters. Progress was the prestige house: Marx, Lenin, philosophy, textbooks. Novosti — APN — was the Soviet Union's other news agency, founded in 1961 and formally sponsored by public organisations rather than by the state, which was precisely its usefulness. TASS spoke as the government; Novosti supplied material presentable as something other than an official Soviet statement. Note the credit line under almost every eyewitness report here: "Specially for APN."
That phrase is the key to the volume's construction. The "Eyewitness Reports" chapter is the section a reader is meant to find most persuasive, because it is not Brezhnev talking. The witnesses are Phillip Bonosky of the American Daily World, K. Gopalakrishnan of Janayugam and Masood Ali Khan of New Age, Janis Ligas of Rizospastis, Roland Michel of L'Humanité Dimanche, Miloš Krejčí of Rudé Právo, Miguel Urbano Rodrigues of Portugal's Diário — the papers of the Communist Parties of the United States, India, Greece, France, Czechoslovakia and Portugal, plus Pravda staffers and an APN man. Every one was flown to Kabul in January 1980 by the government he then vindicated, and most filed "Specially for APN": commissioned by this book's publisher. The independent corroboration is a closed circuit. It is not that these men lied — Bonosky's account of the emptied cells at Pul-i-Charkhi has the texture of something seen. It is that the book presents as external testimony a set of reports it arranged, paid for and printed itself.
The commission is easy to date. Soviet troops crossed the Amu Darya on 25 December 1979. On 7 January 1980 the USSR vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for withdrawal; the matter went to the General Assembly, which on 14 January demanded the withdrawal of foreign troops by 104 votes to 18, with much of the non-aligned world voting against Moscow. This book is the answer to that vote, and its chapters are aimed at the constituencies that were lost: "US Imperialism and Its Allies Are the Worst Enemies of Afghanistan and All Islamic Peoples" for the Islamic states, "Subversive Activities of Chinese Hegemonists" for the Sino-Soviet front, "Arab Reaction Sides with Imperialism" for Cairo and Riyadh, Gromyko in Damascus and Delhi for the non-aligned.
The vocabulary is uniform across two hundred pages and never slips. There are no Soviet forces in Afghanistan; there is a "limited contingent." It was not sent; it was "brought in at our request." It is not an intervention; it is "assistance," "fraternal solidarity," "internationalist assistance." Brezhnev states the negative outright: "It goes without saying that there has been no Soviet 'intervention' or 'aggression' whatsoever." A further refutation of "slanderous concoctions about 'Soviet occupation of Afghanistan'", one report adds, is "the almost total absence of Soviet soldiers in Kabul." Brezhnev allows one moment of weight — "It was no easy decision for us to send Soviet military contingents to Afghanistan" — the only sentence in the book that sounds like a man rather than a communiqué.
Under the vocabulary sits a question of fact the book cannot keep straight: who asked, and when. It gives three incompatible answers. Brezhnev says the request came "already during the lifetime of President Taraki and later" — Taraki was dead by October 1979, so "later" means under his successor. Brezhnev again, more precisely: "Three successive Afghan governments pressed us to give assistance." And then the book's own account of Karmal's press conference of 10 January 1980: "Karmal said it was the old government that had invited in a limited contingent of Soviet troops. This was not done by Amin, who has been proved to be an agent of the CIA, but by the majority of the Revolutionary Council."
Hold those together. The three successive governments were Taraki's, Hafizullah Amin's and Karmal's — and the second is the one the book devotes an entire chapter to establishing was run by an American agent. On the book's own arithmetic, a CIA asset invited the Soviet army in. Karmal's fix is to split the Amin government from its own Revolutionary Council: the request came from "the majority" of a body whose chairman was Amin, at a time when Karmal was not in the country. The book concedes the exile elsewhere, noting that Amin's campaign against loyal members "including Babrak Karmal and Anahita Ratebzad" forced some "to emigrate or go underground." Karmal had been shipped out as ambassador to Prague in 1978 and refused to return. He came back to Kabul after the assault, not before. The book never says how he got there.
The chapter that gives this volume its permanent interest is "Amin, Murderer and Imperialist Agent," and its charges are laid out with confidence. Amin was recruited as a student — "Many Afghans who were trained in the United States in 1962–1964 can confirm that Amin, during his period of residence there maintained close contacts with known American CIA agents and officials." The handling continued: "We now know for sure who recruited Amin and guided his spying activities inside our Party and we can say exactly which CIA agents Amin met, and where, in 1973–1978, when he received the assignments to blow up the Party." He was paid — in 1978 "Amin boasted that he had received some very expensive gifts." He murdered Taraki, then plotted with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami a joint coup for 29 December at which the PDPA was to be dissolved and its cadre liquidated, with Washington's representatives promising support "by the strength of US armed forces in case of necessity". Karmal claimed "indisputable documented evidence, including Amin's personal records," showing that Amin "would not have hesitated to annihilate half of Afghanistan's population." The conclusion: "The facts irrefutably demonstrate that Amin and his associates were CIA agents on the payroll of imperialist forces hostile to Afghanistan."
Now ask what evidence is produced. For the CIA charge: nothing. Not one document, photograph, intercept, name of a handler or date of a meeting — despite the claim to know "exactly which CIA agents Amin met, and where." The "personal records" Karmal invoked on 21 January 1980 were never published, then, during the nine years of Soviet presence, or since. The sources are in every instance assertions by members of the government installed on 27 December: Aslam Watanjar, Noor Ahmad Noor, Karmal himself. The indictment rests on the word of the beneficiaries.
The murder of Taraki is a different matter and deserves a different judgement. The chapter prints testimony from Jandad, commander of the presidential guard, and a guard named Hadud, given to an "examining judge" — the shooting outside Taraki's office on 14 September 1979, the disarming of the guard, the house arrest, the order to kill. This is confession evidence taken from men held by the government that overthrew Amin, which is reason for caution. But it is broadly consistent with the settled account: Amin had Taraki smothered, and the announcement of death by illness was a lie. On this charge the book is in substance right — and is using a true accusation of murder to smuggle in an unproven accusation of treason, which is the oldest trick in the file.
And then there is what the chapter does not say. It never mentions that Hafizullah Amin was a founder of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan; that he led its Khalq faction; that he built the clandestine network of officers inside the Afghan army; that it was that network which carried out the coup of 27 April 1978; that he was foreign minister and then prime minister of the republic this book exists to defend. The April revolution is celebrated on nearly every page — General Abdul Kadir is named among the officers "active in the April revolution," the defence minister credited with having "ensured the success of the April revolution," Taraki given full honours as founder and martyr. Amin's name never appears in that company. The chapter's own chronology has him on CIA assignment "to blow up the Party" from 1973 to 1978 — throughout the period in which he brought that party to power. The contradiction is not addressed because it cannot be. The silence is the finding.
Anyone who has read the transcripts of the Moscow trials of 1936–38 will recognise the form: the defeated leader is not merely wrong, not merely criminal, but revealed to have been a foreign agent from the beginning, his whole revolutionary biography retrospectively converted into deep cover. Trotsky dissected the method in The Stalin School of Falsification; the Dewey Commission took it apart charge by charge in Not Guilty (1938). The difference in 1980 is that there was no trial at all, not even a rigged one — because there was no defendant left to try.
The book's account of 27 December 1979 is unambiguous, and it is the point on which the whole volume breaks. A PDPA official, Abdul Zuhoor, is quoted ridiculing "the story widely spread by the American, Chinese and Pakistani media that Amin's overthrow was the handiwork of the Soviet Union which allegedly ousted him by bringing in the Soviet Army." On the contrary: "The entire planning and execution of the uprising of December 27 was the work of the Leadership Committee of the People's Democratic Party, in coordination with the Kabul City Committee and Army units loyal to the April revolution." Brezhnev says the same: "the people under the leadership of the People's Democratic Party, headed by Babrak Karmal, rose against Amin's tyranny and put an end to it." The chapter's closing sentence has the party "exposed and eliminated Amin."
Eliminated by whom, and how, the book will not say. In two hundred pages it never states that Amin died, never describes his death, never mentions a trial, a sentence or a grave. He simply stops.
What happened is now a matter of record, including in Russian sources: on the evening of 27 December 1979 Soviet KGB and GRU special forces stormed the Tajbeg Palace and killed Hafizullah Amin there. The Politburo had taken the decision to send troops on 12 December. Karmal's proclamation, printed here as a message delivered "over Kabul radio" on 27 December, was in fact broadcast from Soviet territory while the fighting was still going on; the transcript reproduced is dated "Kabul, December 29, 1979."
So: a state killed the head of a foreign government, installed a new one, and then published a book — in English, for the world — devoting a chapter to proving that the man its soldiers had shot was a murderer and an imperialist agent, while denying that its soldiers had anything to do with his removal. The chapter is not an argument for the killing. It is a substitute for admitting the killing happened.
A reader told that everything here is worthless will be badly served, and unprepared for how much of it is true.
The April 1978 government's reform programme was real and so were its enemies. The book's summary of what reached the villages — "cooperative, agrarian reform, cancellation of debts to money-lenders" and the abolition of illiteracy — is accurate. Peasant debt was cancelled; a ceiling was placed on landholdings and land redistributed; a mass literacy campaign was launched in a country where, as the book correctly and repeatedly states, "Ninety per cent of the population is illiterate," and it was extended to women, which is precisely why village mullahs and landlords fought it. Teachers were killed for teaching women to read. When one of the book's reporters puts that to a counter-revolutionary spokesman — "The killers said they were hounding village teachers because they taught not only children but also village women to read and write" — the charge is not fabricated.
Nor is the external backing invented. The insurgency was armed and sheltered from Pakistan with Islamabad's connivance; the Peshawar parties — Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi's National Liberation Front — are named correctly, and the camps listed at Parachinar, Miram Shah, Chitral, Warsak and Quetta were real places. The book notes Senator Charles Percy calling publicly for direct US aid to the rebels, and prints a photograph of Brzezinski at the Khyber Pass. It was right about the direction of travel, and right earlier than it could prove: President Carter authorised covert support to Afghan opponents of the Kabul government in July 1979, months before Soviet troops entered — confirmed by Robert Gates in From the Shadows (1996) and boasted of by Brzezinski in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. Saudi matching funds and the ISI's control of the pipeline are documented. The mujahideen were not innocents and their sponsors were not disinterested.
The long historical chapter, "A Hundred Years of Gross Outside Interference," is the most solid thing in the volume: Anglo-Russian rivalry, British efforts to make Afghanistan a base against Soviet Turkestan, British backing for the revolt that destroyed Amanullah's reforming monarchy, Axis interest in the 1930s, American courtship after 1945. The continuity it draws — that Afghan modernisation had been strangled from outside before, and by some of the same families — is real.
First, Herat. The book describes the March 1979 rising as an incursion: bands "equipped with American and Chinese weapons, intruded into Herat, Afghanistan's third largest city, occupied military installations and food stores." Herat was a mutiny of the army's 17th Division joined by a mass urban insurrection, in which Soviet advisers and their families were among the killed, and which the government suppressed by bombarding its own third city. Estimates vary widely and the historiography is contested, but the dead run into the thousands. Converting an internal revolt into a foreign invasion is the most consequential falsification here, because the legal case for the "limited contingent" — Article 51, collective self-defence against external aggression — depends on the insurgency being imported rather than domestic.
Second, the terror. The book states that "over two thousand Party members were arrested within as few as nine or ten months preceding the December change of government, and close on 500 of them were shot," and calls Pul-i-Charkhi "Amin's Bastille." Those arrests and executions happened. But the prison filled from 1978, under Taraki — this book's martyr — with Amin the operative power beneath him. Confining the terror to Amin's hundred days rescues the April revolution at the cost of the record.
Third, the promises. Karmal's proclamation of 27 December is printed in full: prisoners released, freedom of the press and assembly, "the freedom to create progressive patriotic parties," and, on the war, "The fate of those persons who were involved in the armed struggle against the government will be decided by political means." The 40th Army left in February 1989, after nine years, upwards of a million Afghan deaths and five million refugees.
The claim this book cannot survive is the one it never states outright: that a socialist state may settle a political crisis in a neighbouring party by sending its army to kill that party's leader. It would be dishonest, though, to pretend the anti-Stalinist left met that claim with a single voice. It did not, and the record is public. Intercontinental Press of 3 March 1980 printed three rival resolutions side by side, noting that the first "was adopted by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International by a majority vote at its January 26-29 meeting", and that "Following the resolution are two resolutions supported by minorities at that meeting."
The majority refused political endorsement — "They do not give the slightest political support to this intervention" — but also refused the demand for withdrawal, arguing that invoking Afghan sovereignty here "would be nothing but a democratic guise for the aims of reaction and imperialism", and that "In so far as the Soviet army actually is opposing the enemies of the workers and peasants, they favor its victory over them." The first minority went further: Soviet military power used against the reactionary forces "is progressive, regardless of the motivations of the Kremlin". Such positions were reached honestly, by people who had watched Chile in 1973 and would not be neutral about a mujahideen victory. They were also wrong, and conceded Moscow the one thing that mattered.
The second minority did not concede it. Written in January 1980, before any archive had opened, it says exactly what this book denies: "Without a doubt, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is being carried out in gross violation of the right of peoples to self-determination. It is, in fact, well known that the Soviet troops themselves overthrew Amin in order to replace him by Karmal, who they brought from exile with them." It adds that "there is no qualitative difference between the regimes of Taraki, Amin, and Karmal, each of which has been supported in turn by the Kremlin" — disposing of the agent story in a line — and concludes that "it is imperative that the Soviet troops withdraw from Afghanistan immediately", while insisting the demand not be confused with support for the "mujahedeen". Set that beside Abdul Zuhoor's claim about the Leadership Committee: the book is answered by a contemporary, from the left, on the evidence then available.
The argument ran another year and the withdrawal position won it. A report from the Belgian section's La Gauche, translated in Intercontinental Press of 8 March 1982, records the International Executive Committee vote: "one defended the old majority position (it was rejected by a vote of 24 to 9, with 6 abstentions); the other proposed a change in orientation and was adopted by a vote of 20 to 13, with 6 abstentions." Michel Lequenne, in Rouge and reprinted in the same issue, described a government "put in the saddle by Soviet troops" which no longer had a social base of its own, and ended: "What will go rotten in Afghanistan is the Soviet army." He was six years early.
The final word came from Moscow. On 24 December 1989 the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR adopted a resolution declaring the decision to send troops into Afghanistan deserving of moral and political condemnation. The state that published The Truth About Afghanistan repudiated the book's central claim within a decade, in its own parliament, in public. There is no better argument for republishing it. A propaganda document loses its power when the sponsor recants; what remains is evidence — of how the case was made, to whom, in what words, and at what cost to the people in whose name it was made.