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WI Afghan President Mohammed Daud had been able to prevent (or crush) the 1978 coup that overthrew (and killed) him and installed the People's Democratic (Communist) party in power? (Let's say he's more successful than in OTL in weeding out PDP supporters from key military positions.)
Had there never been a Communist regime in Afghanistan, it is unlikely the Soviets would invade -- all their their postwar invasions (in Hungary and Czechoslovakia as well as Afghanistan) were of countries where the rule of pro-Soviet Communist parties had already been established and now seemed threatened. (Another purpose of these invasions was to assure that the Communist parties in these countries were headed by people sufficiently loyal to Moscow -- hence the murder of Hafizullah Amin.)
(Of course the invasion of Afghanistan did have an aspect that bothered the West more than Czechoslovakia or Hungary had done. It suggested that the USSR would use invasion to keep even the most recently established Communist regimes in power -- and subordinated to the USSR; and hence it meant a potential expansion of the "Brezhnev Doctrine" from a few long-established eastern European Communist regimes to anyhere in the Third World where a coup might being a Communist regime to power, however briefly.)
So let's say that Afghanistan continues under Mohammed Daoud Khan as a Soviet influenced state but at least nominally neutralist in its foreign policy and certainly non-communist in its internal policy (this was pretty much its status before 1978, both before and after Daoud's own 1973 coup) It avoids the "reforms" the PDP announced which so alienated the Muslim clergy.