In Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev was indecisive and waffled as he usually did when faced with a difficult decision. The three decision-makers in Moscow who pressed the hardest for an invasion in the fall of 1979 were the troika consisting of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko; the Chairman of KGB, Yuri Andropov and the Defense Minister Marshal Dmitry Ustinov. The principal reasons for the invasion were the belief in Moscow that Amin was a leader both incompetent and fanatical who had lost control of the situation together with the belief that it was the United States via Pakistan who was sponsoring the Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan. Androprov, Gromyko and Ustinov all argued that if a radical Islamist regime came to power in Kabul, it would attempt to sponsor radical Islam in Soviet Central Asia, thereby requiring a preemptive strike. What was envisioned in the fall of 1979 was a short intervention under which Moscow would replace radical Khalqi Communist Amin with the moderate Parchami Communist Babrak Karmal to stabilize the situation. The concerns raised by the Chief of the Red Army General Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov who warned about the possibility of a protracted guerrilla war were dismissed by the troika who insisted that any occupation of Afghanistan would be short and relatively painless. Most notably, through the diplomats of the Narkomindel at the Embassy in Kabul and the KGB officers stationed in Afghanistan were well informed about the developments in that nation, but such information rarely filtered through to the decision-makers who viewed Afghanistan more in the context of the Cold War rather than understanding Afghanistan as a subject in its own right. The viewpoint that it was the United States that was fomenting the Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan with the aim of destabilizing Soviet Central Asia tended to downplay the effects of an unpopular Communist government pursuing policies that the majority of Afghans violently disliked as a generator of the insurgency and strengthened those who argued some sort of Soviet response was required to what seen as an outrageous American provocation. It was assumed in Moscow that because Pakistan (an ally of both the United States and China) was supporting the "mujahideen" that therefore it was ultimately the United States and China who were behind the rebellion in Afghanistan.