Babrak Karmal
Babrak Karmal was president of Afghanistan from December 1979 to November 1986, the Parcham communist whom the Soviet Union brought into Kabul behind its army, announced over a transmitter in Termez before Amin was dead, and removed six and a half years later when Gorbachev decided he was the reason the war could not be ended. He was the party's other founder, the Parcham faction's chief. He was the son of a general, a Persian-speaking Kabuli of the educated class who had been a student orator in the 1950s, jailed under Daoud's first government, a deputy in the parliament of the 1960s where he made the speeches that the Khalqis, who were Pashtun villagers' sons, resented, and the man who split the party in 1967 and rejoined it in 1977 on Moscow's orders. After the coup of April 1978 he was deputy head of state for ten weeks and was then sent as ambassador to Prague, recalled. He stayed in Czechoslovakia under Soviet protection while Taraki and Amin shot his friends. The seven years were the Soviet war. There were a hundred thousand Soviet troops, the villages of the Panjshir and the Kunar bombed and depopulated, and five million refugees in Pakistan and Iran. There were an army that deserted faster than it could be conscripted, the KHAD secret police under Najibullah that was the one institution that worked, and the government's programme of conciliation, the land reform softened, the mullahs paid, the green in the flag restored, which persuaded nobody. The government's writ ran where the Fortieth Army stood and nowhere else. He drank, which the Soviets noted. He quarrelled with the Khalqis in his own cabinet. When Gorbachev told him in March 1986 that the Soviet Union would leave and that he must broaden the government, he could not. He was replaced by Najibullah as party leader in May and as president in November. He was sent to Moscow. He was born in Kamari, near Kabul, and took a law degree at Kabul university. He came home in 1991 when Najibullah's government was falling, went back to Moscow when the mujahideen took Kabul. He died there of liver cancer in December 1996. He was buried at Hairatan on the Oxus, on the Afghan side of the bridge the Soviet army had left by. That is the place the history put him.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 1996 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: president, politician
