The Road to Afghanistan - George Washington University

1. Find a way to remove H. Amin from the position of leading the country by makinghim personally responsible for the senseless repressions and miscalculations indomestic politics.2. Convince Taraki of the necessity of creating a democratic coalitional government,which should be headed by PDPA members, including representatives of Parcham.Representatives of patriotically minded clerics and tribal leaders, as well asrepresentatives of ethnic minorities and the intelligentsia, also should be engaged inthe new government.3. Release from prisons and rehabilitate political prisoners, in particular members ofParcham who were unlawfully convicted.4. Conduct an unofficial meeting with the leader of Parcham, Babrak Karmal, who iscurrently in exile in Czechoslovakia. Issues related to stabilization of the domesticpolitical situation in the DRA must be discussed during the meeting.5. Prepare leadership—a reserve of new leaders of the PDPA and DRA in case offurther escalation of the crisis in the country.”The most experienced readers of Kryuchkov’s document immediately took note ofthe first item, which proposed finding an occasion to remove Amin from power and puttingall the blame for the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan on him. Kryuchkov, a veryexperienced bureaucrat, sought to kill two birds with one stone—he was proposing tosimultaneously remove obnoxious Amin and turn him into a scapegoat.However, there were not many experienced people with a good sense of thesituation among those who read the document. Brezhnev by then had difficulty488