Babrak Karmal (, born Sultan Hussein ; 6 January 1929 – 1 or 3 December 1996 ) was an Afghan politician and statesman during the Cold War.

Karmal was born in Kamari and educated at Kabul University, after which he started his career as a bureaucrat.

Before, during and after his career as a bureaucrat Karmal was a leading member of the Afghan movement.

When the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan ( PDPA ) was formed, Karmal became one of its leading members, and eventually became the leader of the Parcham faction.

Karmal survived this purge, probably due to his contacts with the Soviets, and was sent to exile in Prague.

Karmal was made Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and Chairman of the Council of Ministers on 27 December 1979.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was able to depose Karmal and replace him with Mohammad Najibullah.

Karmal was born Sultan Hussein

In 1967, the PDPA split into two major rival factions: the Khalq ( Masses ) was headed by Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin who were supported by elements within the military, and the Parcham ( Banner ) led by Babrak Karmal.

On 27 April 1978, the PDPA, led by Nur Mohammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal and Amin Taha overthrew the government of Mohammad Daoud, who was assassinated along with all his family members in a bloody military coup.

In the meantime, Hafizullah Amin was killed and replaced by Babrak Karmal.

He was a member of the Parcham faction led by Babrak Karmal.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was able to get Karmal to step down as PDPA General Secretary in 1986, and replace him with Najibullah.

For a number of months Najibullah was locked in a power struggle against Karmal, who still retained his post of Chairman of the Revolutionary Council.

During his ascension to power, several Afghan politician did not want Najibullah to succeed Babrak Karmal because of the fact that Najibullah was known for exploiting his powers for his own benefit.

The question of who was to succeed Karmal was hotly debated, but Gorbachev supported Najibullah.

On 15 May Najibullah announced that a collective leadership had been established, which was led by himself consisted of himself as head of party, Karmal as head of state and Sultan Ali Keshtmand as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

Karmal went as far as to spread rumours that Najibullah's rule was little more than an interregnum, and that he would soon be reappointed to the general secretaryship.

The Soviet leadership wanted to ease Karmal out of politics, but when Najibullah began to complain that he was hampering his plans of National Reconciliation, the Soviet Politburo decided to remove Karmal ; this motion was supported by Andrei Gromyko, Yuli Vorontsov, Eduard Shevardnadze, Anatoly Dobrynin and Viktor Chebrikov.

A meeting in the PDPA in November relieved Karmal of his Revolutionary Council chairmanship, and he was exiled to Moscow where he was given a state-owned apartment and a dacha.

Under him was Babrak Karmal, the leader of the Parcham faction, as Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Amin as Council of Ministers deputy chairman and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Mohammad Aslam Watanjar as Council of Ministers deputy chairman.

The government was divided along factional lines, with President Taraki and Deputy Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin of the Khalq faction against Parcham leaders such as Babrak Karmal and Mohammad Najibullah.

That committee then elected as head of government former Deputy Prime Minister Babrak Karmal, who had been demoted to the relatively insignificant post of ambassador to Czechoslovakia following the Khalq takeover, and that it had requested Soviet military assistance.

Twenty-seven gentlemen gathered at Taraki's house in Kabul, elected Taraki as the first party Secretary General and Karmal as Deputy Secretary General, and chose a five-member Central Committee also called a Politburo.

Taraki was Prime Minister, Babrak Karmal was senior Deputy Prime Minister, and Hafizullah Amin was foreign minister.

Friction among the People's Party members rose in 1980 when Karmal removed Assadullah Sarwari from his position as First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and replaced him with Sultan Ali Keshtmand.

Twenty-seven men gathered at Nur Mohammed Taraki's house in Kabul, elected Taraki PDPA Secretary General, Babrak Karmal as Deputy Secretary General, and chose a five-member Central Committee ( or Politburo ).

Najibullah succeeded Karmal as PDPA General Secretary on 4 May 1986 at the 18th PDPA meeting, but Karmal still retained his post as Chairman of the Presidium of the Revolutionary Council.

On 27 December Radio Kabul broadcast Karmal's pre-recorded speech, which stated " Today the torture machine of Amin has been smashed, his accomplices – the primitive executioners, usurpers and murderers of tens of thousand of our fellow countrymen – fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters, children and old people ..." On 1 January Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Chairman of the Council of Ministers, congratulated Karmal on his " election " as leader, before any Afghan state or party organ had elected him to anything.

In his position as Revolutionary Council chairman Karmal was succeeded by Haji Mohammad Chamkani, who was not a member of the PDPA.

Karmal resigns as general secretary of the PDPA, retaining the less important position of president of the Revolutionary Council.

Karmal resigns from the largely ceremonial post of president of the Revolutionary Council.

The appointment of Karmal, Amin and Watanjar as Council of Ministers deputy chairmen proved highly unstable, and it led to three different governments being established within the government ; the Khalq faction was answerable to Amin, the Parchamites were answerable to Karmal and the military officers ( who were Parchamites ) were answerable to Watanjar.

Under Karmal, Khalqist dominance within the Council of Ministers was destroyed, and replaced with Parcham dominance.

In June 1981, Karmal retained his other offices, but resigned as Council of Ministers chairman and was succeeded by Keshtmand.

Karmal would remain in exile until December 1979, when the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan ( with the consent of the Afghan government ) to stabilise the situation in the country, they killed Amin, the leader of the PDPA and the Afghan government.

As would later be proven by the power struggle he had with Karmal after becoming PDPA General Secretary, despite Najibullah heading the KHAD for five years, Karmal still had sizeable to support in the organisation.

The plan, according to Andropov, was to amass a small force to intervene and remove Amin from power and replace him with Karmal.

When Karmal ascended to power, the Settamites relationship with the government improved, mostly due to Karmal's former good relationship with Badakhshi, who was killed by government forces in 1979.

Babrak Karmal, Afghanistan's new president, charged the Soviets with causing an increase in the unrest, and demanded that the 40th Army step in and quell the rebellion, as his own army had proved untrustworthy.

On the 1 January 1965 Taraki with Babrak Karmal established the Democratic People's Party of Afghanistan, while at the beginning the party was running under the name People's Democratic Tendency, since there were no officially political party law in Afghanistan at that time.

Although the split of the PDPA in 1967 into two groups was never publicly announced, Karmal brought with him less than half the members of the Central Committee.

Taraki and Karmal maintained close contact with the Soviet Embassy and its personnel in Kabul, and it appears that Soviet Military Intelligence ( Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye-GRU ) assisted Khalq's recruitment of military officers.

Karmal visits Moscow, where he signs a series of agreements, mainly economic, with Soviet leaders.

Karmal announces a new set of proposals for negotiations with Pakistan and Iran, either separately or together ; this is a slight departure from proposals he made in May and in December 1980.

Pakistan maintains its earlier stand that any direct negotiation with a representative of the Karmal government would amount to recognition of the regime, contrary to the ruling of the Islamic Conference.

The assassination of Mir Akbar Khyber led Taraki, along with Hafizullah Amin ( the organiser of the revolution ) and Babrak Karmal, to initiate the Saur Revolution and establish the communist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

The main differences between the factions were ideological, with Taraki supporting the creation of a Leninist-like state, while Karmal wanted to establish a " broad democratic front ".