The Road to Afghanistan - George Washington University

Ponomaryov’s unofficial visit to Kabul again appeared not to have producedsignificant results. Conversations with the Afghan leaders were lifeless. The guest fromMoscow did not receive any new, interesting, or compelling information, and no specificagreements were reached.Both Taraki and Amin sensed that Ponomaryov was not the person who was makingdecisions in Moscow. They perceived him as a high-ranking party bureaucrat who hadabsolutely no power and was unable to come up with any personal initiative or defend hisown point of view. They were hopelessly uttering the customary requests for directinvolvement by the Soviet military against the opposition. Ponomaryov, in turn, was againappealing to the Afghans, without any hope of being heard, to work in a collaborativemanner and to mind the principle of collective leadership in the party.Ponomaryov’s role in the situation was not to be envied. The Politburo had taskedhim with an impossible mission. By the summer of 1979, the situation in Afghanistan hadbecome so tangled, controversial, and complicated that it caused widespread confusionamong the Soviet leaders. When the subject of Afghanistan was brought up in meetings inthe Kremlin and in the Central Committee of the CPSU, the reaction of Soviet leaders wasone of irritation and a wish to transfer responsibilities for Afghan affairs to somebody else.Instead of the promised building of socialism across Amu Darya, chaos, bloodshed, and areal war within the Afghan leadership were developing there.As to the breakup within Khalq and the threat looming over Taraki, it should bementioned that there were other factors that contributed to Moscow’s inadequate reaction.Along with the information supplied by the KGB, messages arrived via other ministerialchannels. For example, the military advisers Generals Gorelov and Zaplatin highly valued445