Afghanistan: an Abrupt Shuffle of Puppets

; The storm had been gathering around Party Chief Babrak Karmal for months. In February, at the 27th Communist Party congress in Moscow, the Afghan leader, who first came to power when Soviet troops stormed Kabul in December 1979, was denied a private audience by Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The following month Karmal abruptly disappeared from view, even failing to show up at his country's Revolutionary Day parade--the equivalent, noted a Western diplomat in Islamabad, of "staying away from one's own birthday party." Meanwhile, the Soviet newspaper Pravda ran a front-page story attacking Karmal's failure to build a stable base of support for his Communist regime. Rumors had it that the Afghan chieftain was visiting the Soviet Union for treatment of a lung problem or leukemia. But many observers suspected that his problems were more than medical.

Three days after he returned from Moscow, their suspicions proved correct: Radio Kabul announced that Karmal was stepping down to assume the ceremonial position of President. His successor as General Secretary is Major General Mohammed Najibullah, 39, a doctor known for his hard-line fidelity to Moscow and his ruthless efficiency for the past five years as head of Khad, the dread Afghan secret police. Although the transition was managed peacefully--the previous three Afghan leaders had been killed during transfers of power --Soviet tanks took up positions in the hills outside Kabul, and armored units patrolled the city to prevent a violent backlash from Karmal loyalists. The leadership change seems to have been timed to highlight a major Soviet military offensive in the eastern part of the country and coincide with the opening of the seventh and last round of the Afghan-Pakistani peace talks in Geneva.

Some Western analysts were inclined to downplay the shift. As one Washington official joked, "The puppeteer now has a new puppet." Certainly Najibullah, a loyal protege of Karmal's, seems unlikely to lead his country in any radically new directions. However, having built the secret police into a disciplined, KGB-style network of 60,000 agents, the major general may bring a new intensity to the civil war with the mujahedin rebels. Najibullah is, says a European diplomat in Islamabad, "an efficient killer."

Unlike Karmal, who is a member of the small, Dari-speaking elite, Najibullah has the advantage of belonging to the country's dominant Pushtu tribe. The new leader is therefore well placed to get fellow Pushtuns in Pakistan to cut guerrilla supply lines and unify the ranks of a regime so sharply divided that it is sometimes referred to as an example of "two-party Communism." If Najibullah can consolidate a solid and loyal Soviet-style government, Moscow may feel secure enough to withdraw its 120,000 troops from Afghanistan.