Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 55 - Soviet Afghan War 1: A Revolution of Drunks

Episode Date: June 17, 2019

On part 1 of the Soviet Afghan War the Afghan King is overthrown leading to a series of coups, counter coups, and purges that would eventually set the stage for Soviet intervention. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys buy a shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Sources for all related episodes: Gregory Feifer. The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan Svetlana Alexievich. Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War Lester Grau. The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan

🎵 Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. We just got done with our vocal warm-ups. Ugh. No, we did not. Our sweet podcasting voices come naturally. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Balls. Shit. This is bad already. Yeah, so Nick is with me. I'm Joe from every other episode of the show. Yeah, I'm a special guest. And we are on, finally, part one of the soviet afghan war how many parts a lot okay so many uh i think we'll get a shirt out of this yeah i don't know if we're gonna be

able to break the iran iraq war level of of shirt content solid which is actually one of the reasons why this was such a a hard series to script um ir ran Iraq War, and most people don't remember we also did a series in the War of 1812 back in the day. It was our first series. But there's distinct battles. There is an ebb and flow of war. People are losing cities. Trench lines are being taken.

What have you. Even flow. No. No. No. I heard even flow for some reason. Ebb and flow. No, I heard that. Ebb. No. I heard evenflow for some reason. Evenflow. No, I heard that. I heard that, but then my head went

evenflow. When I think Iran-Iraq war, I think Pearl Jam. Sorry. This war doesn't have that at all. It's almost exactly like charting the Vietnam War, except somehow more convoluted and dumb

uh which is why i'm really excited to finally be done russia's vietnam yeah i mean yes absolutely uh for more reason for more than one reason is the soviet union's vietnam um except it had the after effect of destroying the soviet union yeah um obvious well obviously the the afghan war itself did not bring down the soviet union but it definitely had a very large part of doing so um but like every other episode we've ever done in a series before we get to the meat we got to explain how the fuck we got here and like pretty much every other series we've done it begins with a revolution yay Yay. Yeah. So in this case, the revolution was called the Sour Revolution

or the April Revolution. Ooh. Yeah, it's got some stank on it. Elbow stank. Like most things in the 1970s, it has to do with the Cold War. Shocker. Whoa.

Yeah. The Sour Revolution is actually a byproduct of a different revolution. Go ahead and try to keep track at home because I will not do it for you. This is one back in July of 1973. At that time, Afghanistan

was still ruled by an absolute monarchy and its current king. Zahir Shah had ruled since 1933. He was actually a direct descendant of Dost Muhammad Khan, if anybody can remember our titular hero from the Anglo-Afghan war episode. You said 1933? Yeah, that's when Zaheer took the throne, yeah.

Now, many things can be said for the rule of tin pot dictators and monarchies. Obviously, we are generally not on their side, Now, many things can be said for the rule of tin pot dictators and monarchies. Obviously, we are generally not on their side, but Zaheer ruled Afghanistan as a fairly good man. I know it's hard to say that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so maybe you have to take this in the realm of let's look who else has ruled Afghanistan. Oh, okay.

Not bad. take this in the realm of let's look who else has ruled afghanistan okay not bad um it's kind of like if you have 500 bucks and you manage to get a car out of it you still get a car and it works they have a king sure he's an asshole he has an engine in him he's running the country for as much as he can um so one of the things that you can say that he did really well is he refused to let his country get involved in world war ii um and when the war was over he actually managed to establish good relations with both sides of the iron curtain which not many countries can say they did yeah a lot of breakups don't even go that way yeah uh yeah it was the it was the breakup where like you know we should stay friends but like you actually do which i've never had one of those yeah i've

definitely said that on like six occasions. Oh, yeah. I usually try to be the good guy in the end, but... It never works out. Nope. He knew Afghanistan was going to need some serious modernization if he was ever going to keep up with the creeping powers around him. He knew that the situation wasn't going to stay that way for long.

He knew either the Soviet Union or NATO in the U.S. was going to come calling into his front door. So he hired a ton of foreign investors and even established Afghanistan's first university and also included a constitution in 1964 which promised things like universal suffrage, women's rights, and civil rights. So yeah, like I said, he's a good king.

He did all sorts of other horrible shit that we're not really going to get into because this isn't about him. Like the normal oppression type stuff. This wouldn't be an episode without having some type of lines. Well, that's one of the things when it comes with governance, even really good governance is bad. Like everybody can, a good example is now in the year 2019.

People look back a few years ago and try to remember good American governance. But good American governance also involved drone striking a lot of people. People talk about how good Stalin was for the Soviet Union, dragging them, kicking and screaming to the modern age. But also, he was Joseph fucking Stalin. He's the shit. Yeah. He was an asshole. So you got to take the good with the bad.

That's true. Not that I'm comparing any of those to one another. I feel like I'm not comparing the king of Afghanistan to Joseph Stalin. Though somehow the two do end up coming together at some point. Facebook friends? They'd be mutual friends. I don't think they'd, like, message one another. They wouldn't poke?

Stalin's a bit of a poker. He pokes some dudes. His mustache is definitely a poker. Old noodle strainer. Fucking flavor saver. Yeah. His was just cold soup. Unfortunately for

the king of Afghanistan, part of his modernization was the introduction of free elections and a parliament, which immediately devolved into factual infighting and backroom deals for power. This is something that largely exists in Afghanistan to this day. So when the king went abroad for an eye surgery in 1973, his cousin, who was also a newly elected prime minister, Dawood Khan, launched a coup. He's got Khan leave. He quickly declared himself the head of state, the army, and the foreign minister all at the same time.

He fucking ran with it. Holy shit. That's like something you do when you have no friends because you can't trust anybody else to do anything. Daoud Khan would just show up at your party with a six pack of cheap beer because he has no friends. Speaking of that my roommate's girlfriend's friend brought fucking cheap beer to he has no friends speaking of that my roommate's girlfriend's

friend brought fucking cheap beer to our barbecue one time she's not allowed back not getting an invitation back no yeah i don't blame you uh he also abolished the monarchy and declared afghanistan a republic now did he do this what was his time span like was it a week it all happened pretty fast it sounds like he did it the day that day i mean there was a lot of there was like months of Did he do this? What was his time span? Was it a week? It all happened pretty fast. It sounds like he did it that day. I mean, there was a lot of... There was months of backroom fighting and things like that going on,

but the action of the coup all happened while the king was out getting his eyes treated. Also, it should be noted, in 1973 when the king was overthrown, it was the last time Afghanistanghanistan has known a time without war so thank you daoud khan oh yeah nice not really not nice without war that was the last time it knew a time without war nick i heard i heard something else i heard time without war i was like oh yeah it's been a sweet i mean i don't know if you've been paying attention afghanistan lately not good it's not good i don't think it is um it should come as a surprise to

absolutely no one that daoud was kind of a shithead as president he was convinced that closer ties to the ussr was the way to go uh as soviet power would allow him to settle bitter border disputes between afghanistan and pakistan uh border disputes between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Border disputes that Dawood not only made worse by training and arming a Balak militant group inside Pakistan. They're like a separatist group. And to get back at

Pakistan, he decided it would be a really good idea to arm and train them to fight the Pakistani government. Not a good way to make friends. No. Pakistan responded in kind by funding and arming militants inside Afghanistan. Some of these names will be important later on, like family names like

Haqqani and Hekmetar. These are elements that still exist to this day. Really? Yes. And it turns out, however, taking a country over rife with political infighting by force does not get rid of the political infighting. Daoud would force a new constitution through in 1977 that pissed off the few people that the old one did not.

Daoud was getting increasingly worried about the country's dependence on the Soviets, a dependence that he created. It should be noted. So in order to show them he was not just another Soviet puppet, he cut away and modernized some Afghan socialist elements. Now, he was – it's kind of hard to explain where he felt politically because it's pretty obvious that when Daoud took over, he cozied up to the idea of Soviet communism just to get free shit. Because we've talked about this a hundred times. In the Cold War, to get just an endless supply of soviet weapons you just had to go you know we love the hammer and hammer and sickle i own one yeah and they just fucking unleash the pipeline of endless arms and the guy that's into free subscription

shit yeah yeah he waits for 30 days and he cancels he's like ah i gotcha got you fuckers he's like every single person who doesn't actually own uh like netflix but has passwords from everybody else yep and then when that's me and then when somebody comes calling like hey man maybe you should get your own whoa oh we're in this together uh but he created all these problems himself um and then he decided to shake up the soviet communist elements they introduced into the country. Because that's kind of how the Soviets got back with or got what was worth the relationship out of them. It's like, you're going to embrace communism.

We're all going to work together, hypothetically. Not normally what it works. Normally involves you give all your shit to Moscow and we give you guns. Good trade. Good trade. All right. And that's kind of what was happening. So he decided to backpedal a bit.

Unfortunately, the Soviets don't tend to like that. Just like, I mean. So he tried. The Soviets are alone in doing this. Yeah. Yeah. You can't cancel your subscription to the USSR, it turns out. No, that iron curtain is really heavy.

I mean, both sides of the Cold War did this too. It's satellite and puppet governments all the time. Like, oh, you don't want to be communist anymore we're gonna have to kill some people i mean look at uh what happened in latin america when they decided that capitalism wasn't really working out for them and they're gonna try socialism we killed like so many of them like this is something that happened throughout the cold war it turns out when you centralize so much power and the ability to end the world with nuclear and biological weapons everybody involved is kind of a fucking asshole. You don't say?

Yeah. It doesn't breed good people. Maybe I'm just saying we shouldn't have the power to end the world. No, we shouldn't. No. So it is with this reformation of Afghan Soviet communism that we get to see how big of a dumbass Daoud is. First of all, domestically.

The communists and the socialists of Afghanistan had been one of his major backers while overthrowing the king, while Daoud wasn't necessarily a believer himself. The communists in the government wanted closer relations with the Soviet because, of course, they did. The problem was, once you had communists in your government wanted closer relations to the Soviet because of course they did. Um, the problem was once you had go, once you had communists in your government in the 1970s, the West wasn't going to work with you anymore.

So you might as well just go all in on the communism. Yeah. Uh, so by trying to tow the line, I would have pissed off both the communists in the government and made the Soviet union worried. He's going to try to turn Afghanistan to the capitalist West. He,

this is like the the simpsons episode where they have the infestation in australia so they introduce another animal and cause another infestation except it's the soviets i guess this didn't really work it worked that analogy didn't really work it wasn't bad it wasn't a bad one so daoud then promptly shot himself in the dick by telling soviet premier uh premier atlanted brezhnev a certified insane person to his face that no afghanistan would not be removing nato advisors that had been working in the north of afghanistan um and afghanistan would not be listening to soviet suggestions on how the country would be ran now we're not going to go deep deep

into how crazy lane and brezhnev is but he was fucking nuts a lot of this had to be certified he was nuts um and there's documented evidence that he was an insane person um a lot of this had to do with the fact he was really fucking old and had no business running a country like he was he was in his 80s or 90s um and he awarded himself multiple heroes of the soviet union medals which is their version of the highest medal in the world um i smell cinnamon like the uh you know the hero of the soviet union for people are not aware is a lot like the medal of of honor except both civilians and soldiers could get it i feel like we talked about it during one of our i think fuck it was had to do with stalingrad uh consider this a primer um so another major problem that david had uh between the two sides was that the soviets were attempting to heal the divide with the afghan communist party uh

so there's a there was a split in the afghan communist party between uh factions the parchams and the cults um who divided largely demographically um it's not really worth going into the difference. It's kind of like Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man. They're the same fucking thing. Just different names? They just, a lot of it had to do with, since Afghanistan's a very, very, very factionalized country and it was even worse back then than it is today.

Right. A lot of it just had to do with city you were from or what ethnic group you were from. And that just happened to be what part of you were from or what ethnic group you were from. And that just happened to be what party you were a part of. Which you were banging. Gotcha. Daoud knew he was better off with the party divided. Because if they weren't fighting each other, they might fight him.

And if they were, they just couldn't unite. So he was like, yeah, I kind of like it this way. Which is exactly what happened in 1977. Which brought a guy named Taraki and carmel together in the first joint party meeting in moscow this is helped along by the fact that daoud consolidated power by declaring afghanistan a one-party state uh a party of his own creation in the national revolutionary party this move effectively stripped the communists of any power so they went to moscow to have a joint party and the soviets like we got you bro yeah all these parties 70s disco i like this i don't know man

there's not a lot of disco happening in boring ass 70s soviet countries you know that have you listened to their music it's just like some very deep voiced people singing about agricultural equipment it's awful it's not. Just about their fucking hammers. I will say the Soviet Union's national anthem fucking slaps. But other than that, music's bad. So it's rumored around this time that the Soviet Union began funneling large amounts of money and intelligence to the Communist Party, both factions.

It's pretty well known at the time that the government circles that the Sovietviet gru which is like the military intelligence uh was recruiting afghan military officers for a possible coup the grew yeah uh it's like the i was at the he's the fucking hero slash villain of just despicable me so just a whole agency of grues uh the entire country quickly turned into a powder keg that was just about to go off um and the only thing was waiting for Dode's stupid ass to light the match. And he did. Because Dode's a fucking idiot.

In 1978, Mir Akbar Khyber, one of the senior leaders and intellectuals of the Parcham faction, was assassinated outside of his home. Now, Dode immediately pointed out to the Kalk faction, or Hekmatars, militia as being the ones that were probably behind this did he have

any advisors daoud yeah yeah they all just listened to him because they're afraid of being murdered oh okay they didn't advise so they weren't advisors no they're yes men uh most of the time strongmen dumb people who sees the the reins of power don't actually have advisors because everybody's afraid to actually advise a bunch of hype men yeah yeah you do that are you fuck it reminds me of um when mike tyson was like at the height of his popularity and and wealth he hired a guy i think his name's like crocodile uh he went by the name crocodile that would just sit at the back of his press meetings and yell guerrilla warfare randomly and he got paid thirty thousand dollars dude i would love to have that job yeah that that's the kind of guy that do it daoud had

in his office hi i'd like to see your resume guerrilla warfare warfare sir you're hired sweet um so the par champs blamed everybody from the government to the Calcs and even the Soviets to killing him. Regardless, at Kyber's funeral, over 15,000 people showed up to pay their respects. They chanted slogans against the CIA, Daoud, and even the Shah of Iran. Just terrified Daoud. Our third host? Oh, the CIA? Yeah.

Go and hit that hip-hop siren. Beep, beep, beep, beep. CIA always makes a fucking appearance. Also, I'd be happy if 30 people showed up to my funeral. You should just do a dry run. Yeah. Just fake your death and hold awake and see who shows up. I mean, I have a thing.

At a go-kart track? I have a thing. I can't make it. But it'll be at a go-kart track. My dog might make it. It'll be at a go-kart track. No, you should have it at a funeral home. And then so when people

come up to see your casket they'll be like wait there's no body in there what happened and then disco lights come on bass starts pumping hard like fucking tiesto or something and then a dead body comes down on strings yeah who's dead but that's for you to figure out who's dead body that's wearing leather bdsm fucking fucking kip suit so just playing it like a puppet yeah and that is officially the worst thing we've ever joked about while me and you are at the go-kart track sweet we're not going to the go-kart track we have to videotape the fake funeral we get it i set up a tripod and then we can go to the go-kart track okay i want to go to a go-kart track by the way this is this is the problem with today's politics we just had a compromise they don't do that anymore we compromise they should go to the go-kart track maybe we compromised on a go-kart track also a fake funeral so with with a smoke

machine let's make it a smoke machine too so Daoud is now scared of the show of power from people solidifying themselves being the communist party he assumed the entire crowd is communist which they mostly were but he decided this is a good place to show his strength and

they all needed to be shown who was in charge oh does he do some fuck shit? He always does. Uh, Daud ordered a crackdown against the party leadership, regardless of which faction they had belonged to. While Carmel and Taraki were thrown in jail, a guy named Hafizullah Amin was only placed under house arrest.

Uh, Amin sent his son who for some reason was not under house arrest and still had the freedom of movement to alert the calc loyalists within the Afghan army what was happening. By noon that same day, 27 April, a column of tanks was rolling through the streets of Kabul. Jets were swooping low and bombed the presidential palace and the government could not put together

any kind of organized resistance. All because someone couldn't keep an eye on a kid. Jesus. When it got away with it too, was it for you meddling kids? This dude had a fucking runner. All right. Hey,

look here, son. Check this out. I'm under house arrest. As you can tell. Also like imagine being like a, a major or a Colonel or whatever in the Afghan army. And just some kids shows up like,

Hey, I'm a means kid. They're fucking trying to like keep on her house. Arrest is like that checks out. Let's get the tanks. Like who believes kids, right? up like hey i'm a means kid they're fucking trying to like keep on her house harassed he's like that checks out let's get the tanks like who believes kids right and i mean maybe they knew his extended family but like this is a big fucking group of people we're talking about yeah they sent fucking tanks like why did you why did you roll in the why did you start bombing the presidential palace i don't know means kid told me i wonder how much like power this kid had afterwards. He's just like, holy fuck, I can do that?

Seeing how no one that I've talked about so far has a happy ending, I'm assuming it's not good, man. We don't know. Maybe he went somewhere else. Yeah, so this is all, of course, helped along by the Minister of Defense, the Commander of the Army, and the Air Force Chief of Staff were all in on the plot so i mean he had the um the um the groundwork in place that would all that's all

would be needed which is good um but also again they were all alerted by a small child yeah i don't believe children so no if a kid kid came up to me tomorrow and said, hey, Nick's in danger, get your gun and follow me. I'm like, no, not going to do that. That's stupid. You wouldn't even check in on that. I don't even think you'd text me. Maybe not.

I mean, I guess they didn't have the niceties of just texting someone. Wouldn't that be a bitch? I'm under house for us. LOL. So when the plot was all over with by the next morning, Kabul was totally under the control of the army and Daoud and his brother were dead.

Dead with them was the Republic of Afghanistan in its place to the new glorious Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. No, there was no difference. If you have a piece of If your house is falling apart and you slap a new coat of paint on it, it's still a piece of shit. It's still a piece of shit under that nice, fresh coat.

Most people in Afghanistan, or at least Kabul, were happy with the new government at first. Dawood was a pretty corrupt guy, and they were still dealing with the effects of a famine that actually began under the king, but had gotten much worse under Daud. So Daud gets all the blame for it, which isn't totally fair, but also, fuck him, who gives a shit? Yeah, blame him too.

To try to head off any political infighting, there were strict measures in place to ensure both the Parchams and the Calcs had seats in government. For instance, Taraki, a Calc, was prime minister, while Carmel, a parchem, was senior deputy minister. Amin, the guy who kind of started the whole revolution, was made foreign minister, which kind of sucks if you started the whole thing like, you're on the podium, but you're in third place. Yeah, do you think he's still under house arrest? Like, this is bullshit.

Yeah, it turns out you're a lot better when your kid's doing your job for you. Once in power, the Communist Party, officially known as the People's Democratic Party, began to craft Afghanistan in the image of the USSR. This included changing the flag

and declaring a total equality between the sexes. And this also included letting women be involved in politics for the first time. Women were allowed to become officers in the military and many of them became combat pilots.

USSR started sending them tracksuits. They just started exporting them in bulk because in order to be part of the Soviet Union or follow Soviet Union ideas, you got to have Gopniks. Yep. Kvas. They instituted a land redistribution program

and limited the amount of land any one family could own. And this is a pretty big deal in the staunchly conservative rural areas of Afghanistan, which it needs to be pointed out. Kabul did not control them. What's the limit of the like? It was pretty limited. It was pretty small, but it was made so before there was large landowners and they effectively had serfs and just not as strict. It was kind of sharecropping like after the Civil War, but it was how things had worked for so long. It blew everybody's mind that it changed, But these rural areas, Kabul had never controlled.

One of the reasons why the king had a peaceful Afghanistan that wrecked by civil war is because he understood. He's like, my rule really doesn't leave the cities. It's fine. Do what you do out in the village. It's fucking Thunderdome out there. I mean, it was all ruled by village elders, religious clerics, stuff like that. And for the first time, the government's really trying to control what they do in their everyday life. And they're not big fans.

And also, these lands have been passed on from generation to generation. So it's like, it's not you're taking my land, you're wronging my family. And I mean, there's enough you could say about how fucked up it is just for one family to own all the land and force everybody else to pretty much work as slaves for them. That's wrong.

Don't do that. But this isn't the system to go about it. Chicks out. We're going to take a little bit of your land, but tracksuits for everybody. You know,

you can't eat a track. Good trade. Unfortunately, you can't eat a tracksuit, which ended up being a problem. No, but you can. Unfortunately, while this is all good in theory, giving land out to landless peasants, great theory, it was kind of bad in practice. The government gave the land away to people who had no history of ever running the farms.

Now, many of these people had history in planting crops, stuff like that, but they didn't know how to run a farm. Nor did it provide them with any training to catch up on that knowledge gap. So now, suddenly, all these people had no idea with large tracts of land they had just been given. This quickly made crop yields plummet, because of course it did, and Taraki quickly took the land back

away from the peasants and gave it back to the farming family in the first place, because he realized, holy shit, we're all gonna fucking starve. I fucked up. I mean, they were already suffering from a famine, so again, Taraki kind of gets away with it. He's like, well, things were already bad, so I didn't

make it any worse. But didn't he? It seems like he did. Oh, yeah, because, I mean, the way, I know nothing about agriculture. i grew up in a city same same as these i mean from what i understand these crop rotations have to be planned out months and months ahead of time so crops can be you know grown and then harvested and then people had the fields they were kind of like when do i do this yeah like normally i just

dig holes and pull crops i don't know how to do rotations and stuff nor do i know how to manage a goddamn farm what month are we in this is like taking the guy who works in the mailroom and making him ceo yeah for quality sake it's like you you lost the message somewhere like we get it they he should probably have more money and a saying how the companies ran. Don't put them in charge. They also outlawed Ursary, which I think this is like the third episode we've talked about this, which is weird that we keep talking about banking so often. So for people who don't remember,

Ursary is loans that enrich people who loan money. It's interest, but normally it's like predatory amounts of interest. Unfortunately, Taraki's government did this without offering any alternative traditional money lending systems that had been working in the countryside. This is another kick in the junk

for every working class Afghan who depended on these loans in the countryside. So normally the same people who are running these farms are also fronting money to people who needed money and then they would pay them back it was like a pretty uncentralized banking system and it wasn't good it was definitely a predatory sounds fucking terrible and it is effectively farm-based payday loans yeah the problem being is that's how things have been run for generations

and nobody had any idea how to survive without it and traki didn't give them any alternatives just like nope you can't do that anymore figure it out yeah like this is how we figured it out it's like we literally scratched the dirt for a living man give us something's like no now you can't have money either fuck you this guy's a scumbag they further pissed off the mostly conservative rural people of Afghanistan by changing the country's flag from an Islamic green to a communist red. You're fucked up. This seems like something pretty minor, you would think. But the thing is, even with a king and Daoud in place and whoever else,

the countryside, like I've pointed out, is incredibly separate from the urban people of Afghanistan, and they were very religious. So any even mild slight towards Islam was like, what the fuck? And so they changed the whole country's flag. Could you imagine what would happen if we changed something on the flag?

Like anything. Literally anything. Like, I'm convinced if we get a new state flag like anything literally anything like i'm convinced if we get a new state people would argue leaving that star out just because for tradition yeah like we've literally changed it 50 times guys it was actually pretty recent yeah it wasn't too far like long ago yeah i'm i'm sure they'll only be okay with unless it's a thin blue line it won't change if there was a line on the flag for

podcasting what color would it be I think green green yeah it would be this green yeah like a baby shit green is this baby shit to you you don't even have one go fuck yourself have you ever seen baby shit?

No, I haven't. I don't have a baby. Exactly. So historians actually place the majority of motivating factors for the Mujahideen joining each other in the coming war at the feet of Taraki's agricultural reforms rather than the Soviet intervention that was to come. Most Mujahideen were poor people from the countryside whose livelihoods depended on farming. And the Land Reform and Banking Acts took food out of their mouths and stole their job.

And honestly, it's hard not to blame them because it really does look like Taraki sat down at a table like, how can I fuck over farmers? While he's eating all their food, too. While he's eating the food that they farmed yeah uh the government also did something nobody else ever would press the shit out of afghanistan um so while prior reforms and modernization efforts from the government like the kings um pretty much just stay in the cities um like the universal suffrage, the colleges, all these education programs.

They were for city dwellers. So is this the fresh paint on the shitty house that we're talking about? This is as if you painted your house over and over and over again, completely ignoring the garage. And then 10 years later, 15 years later, whatever, you decide the garage also needs a paint, like a new paint job.

So your neighbor's like, what the fuck is he doing with the garage? Because everybody's come to accept that's what your shitty garage looks like. And now you've painted it fluorescent pink and nobody's happy with it. HOA gets involved. In this case, HOA is the Soviet Union. That would look great. I think fluorescent pink would look great. So the main problem with this is, like I pointed out, is everybody just kind of accepted that they were part of a country,

but they ignored the government. And the government let them ignore them. And that was the weird handshake agreement they had for generations. This is the first time that's changing. That's super weird just to hear. Yeah. Just because, you know, our government is so involved. We're used to having a centralized government.

I mean, there's many places in Afghanistan today that the Afghan government has absolutely no control over, other than the fact that there's an act of insurgency going on. So the local Afghan leaders and clerics had total control of their villages and families before they took power, pushed back against any kind of secularism and modernization or any kind of implementation of communist ideas in their village. Before this, all it took was for the government to just shrug and move on, but not anymore. So in the book, Soldiers of God by Robert Kaplan, he says, quote, the soldiers knock on the door in the middle of the night, so common in many Arab and African countries was little known in Afghanistan, where a central government simply lacked the power to enforce its will outside of Kabul. Taraki's coup changed all of that. Between 1978 and 1979, Afghan communists executed 27,000 political prisoners at the sprawling Poli Charki prison six miles outside the capital.

Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the tensely religious Afghan countryside. It was carried out in such a violent way that it alarmed even the Soviets. End quote. So, I've been to Policharki. That place is fucking huge, but also

I don't know how you fit tens of thousands of people in it. So I'm assuming there was more like an assembly line of death. Ugh. Like you got brought in, you're guilty, bam. Just right there. Like there's no way. Please, sir, step on the dead body.

Here are your charges. That's how the NKVD and the KGB operated for decades. So I wouldn't be surprised if they used that as some kind of framework. Yeah. Which brings us to the purges. Because of course there's purges. Um, when the saw revolution kicked off,

the Afghan military had around 8,000 officers in it. They're trying to get more and more officers educated in the Soviet union. Uh, and they had gotten that number up to around 800 people by 1978. Uh, these officers were considered politically solid as well as well educated. I mean, you can see why a communist government wants to send their officers to a communist country to get educated.

Political education is important if you want to spread ideas. And also they can get a military education that was just not possible in Afghanistan. And I would argue it's still not possible in Afghanistan today. Most of these helped Taraki come to power. So, of course, he had to get rid of any Daoud loyalists or people still loyal to the king helped Taraki come to power. So, of course, he had to get rid of any Daoud loyalists or people still loyal

to the king in order to centralize power. Who was loyal to him? To Taraki? No, Daoud. There were some people. I mean, Daoud took power in a coup,

so he had enough people on his back. Which, if you notice by the numbers I just gave you, that means he wanted to kill or fire most of his officers. It didn't even matter if you were loyal to the government now and were

to the previous governments. Your past affiliation meant way more than your current loyalty. That is why out of a graduation class of 282 officers who had returned from a Russian military academy, 126 were executed within six months. Holy fuck. Purges were

conducted in the army every month Amin was in power. As foreign minister. Would it be... How were they investigated? Like people in the army? How did they go about it? Or was it just hearsay? Like he supports...

I think... So it's probably a combination. I feel like it's a hearsay. I tell you, there's probably a lot of denunciations. Kind of like during the French Revolution. I den denounce you it's being counter-revolutionary it's all it took uh during the iranian revolution much the same i feel like it's probably a lot of that or if you happen to be an officer when daoud was in power you're just fucked yeah things don't bode well for you uh purges were conducted every month while amin was at foreign minister

the most active, the most independent thinking, and the most ardent who could not accept him were eliminated. To fill the shortage of young officers, a three-month commander's training course was organized

for which passions devoted to him were selected. At the end of the course, they received the rank of lieutenant and were sent to military units. They were known as the fledgling. What? Because they knew,

I mean, normally officer's education is like years long. Right. They were known as the fledgling. What? Normally, officer's education is years long. They didn't three months. The fledgling. The fledglings, because they couldn't even fly. Traki also saw plots and coups around every corner, because he's turning into a paranoid crazy person.

You kind of have to, and you piss off so many people, and you're just like killing thousands and thousands of people you're like someone's gonna come knocking for you eventually right uh while you're watching tv you just pause it for a second just look over the shoulders it's like i'm guilty this late at night you hear something like huh what was that he completely misses that step he hears something, someone's trying to kill me. That's what my dog does. Yeah. Somebody's in the house. That's exactly what, every time the wind blows, your dog

barks at it. That's him, except he's a man, and he has guns and an army, and he's just shooting people instead of barking at the wall. Oh, it was just the maid. During a Politburo meeting, Politburo meeting, Taraki managed to get the party to support his new idea,

which was only Kalkists were allowed to make any political decisions, effectively making the Parchams powerless. If that wasn't enough, the Kalks suddenly became aware of a Parcham plot to overthrow the government

and restore themselves to power. This led the Kalks to just murder everyone they didn't like. No, the plot was not real. They completely made it up. Because of course they did. Okay.

So this guy favored Kalks. Kalks. With an L. I'm going with Kalks. I heard Kalks. In September of 1979, a list was published of people executing during the purge. It listed 50,000 people. It's a giant blacklist.

It was considered a partial list. A partial list? Jesus, that's like... So, it's pretty recent, actually. I heard a change of command speech recently. This motherfucker said, all right, I'll make this a short speech. I would hate to hear his long speech.

It was fucking terrible. And this is a partial list? 50,000 people? Dead, yeah. I would hate to see the actual list. I just don't think the actual list exists. Which, I don't know, I'm torn, because say one thing which you will

about most despotic governments, but the Soviet union and most of their functionaries and satellite states are really good at keeping records um so there's a good chance that there's a full accountability somewhere but i just don't know it's like it's it's like the holocaust we know as much as we know about the holocaust because the germans kept a really good paperwork yeah um so it's probably a lot like that. Douchebags were really good at paperwork. Yeah, it turns out when you make a

giant soulless bureaucracy, it does what giant soulless bureaucracies do and just generate massive amounts of paperwork. So all of this oppression and murder eventually caused a mutiny within the ranks of the Afghan army in the city of Herat in 1979.

The soldiers were soon joined by Imams and Mullahs who were upset by the un-Islamic reforms of the communist government. The government lost control of the city in a matter of hours. What followed was nothing short of anarchy. Soldiers and civilians rioted and burned half the city to the ground. Government officials were killed on sight and anybody with an uncovered head, which indicated being not religious, suffered the same fate. The Afghan Soviet advisors were also killed, putting the number as high as 200.

Their families also had an unhappy ending. This led to Taraki requesting Soviet assistance to quell the mutiny. The Soviets refused refused thinking that introducing their forces would only make the situation worse instead they began to pour weapons and vehicles into afghanistan and try to slap some duct tape on taraki's rapidly deteriorating army uh about one week after the mutiny began the afghan army was able to retake the city through carpet bombing and indiscriminate artillery barrages.

Around 25,000 people were killed. In 1992, a mass grave was found that dated back to the uprising that uncovered around 2,000 soldiers and mullahs who were executed in the direct aftermath of the government. This is pretty obvious because their hands were tied behind their back and they were shot

in the back of the head. 2,000? 2,, and a neat line. Oh, it's good. It's neat. Soon, mutinies and rebellions begin to flare up all around the country as Taraki rapidly lost control of the country. This included one in the capital of Kabul itself at a historical fortress

named Bala Hasar. No longer was it conservatives pushing back against reforms. Soon, these conservatives were joined by anti-government communists of all backgrounds and dissident army soldiers. Cherokee fucked up so badly, he pissed off other communists into joining the fight. There's a lot of shit going on here.

Yeah. And this is right up there with that lion's disappointment. I know it's coming too. Yeah, well, I don't know how I could be more disappointed. Everybody's just shooting each other. This growing insurgency could not be handled well by the factional government of Afghanistan. Soon, Taraki and his second command, Amin, began to think of different ways to handle the situation. They blamed everyone but themselves for the insurgency, of course.

Taraki blamed the UK and the British Broadcasting Corporation, of all people, while Amin blamed America, India, and Pakistan. Amin tried to win over their enemies by playing a part of a devout Muslim. Like, well, look, some of us communists still believe in Allah. Instead, all he did was piss off the Shia Muslims who read a rebellion of their own inside Kabul. There's another disappointment. Yeah. There's just so many. They're just not good at this.

It's like the monkey's paw. It's like, I wish everybody would believe. I really like that story, though. It's such a good story. I really wish people would believe I'm a devout Muslim. A monkey paw with finger curls inward. Only the Sunnis believe you. Fuck!

Oh. I still want to know what happened at the end. So the cascading series of problems caused Heraclitus to retreat into his office and do what any of us would do whenever we're faced by insurmountable problems. Get shit-faced. This caused everyone around him to begin to

question his ability to lead the country. These guys get shit-ass in his office. He's trying to challenge us to flip cup on his desk. Sir, there's a rebellion in Kabul. Shut the fuck up and watch me make this beer pong shot. God damn it. You missed again, sir. Who said that?

As Amin was technically the sober one of the group, he managed to get a Politburo of Afghanistan to agree to a collective leadership scheme. This generally was used as a way to rule by consensus. He's the DDD, the drunk designated driver. He's the best drunk out of all of them. Yeah, because he was drinking heavily too. He played like the devout Muslim in public,

but like most people in power, he was using drugs, prostitutes, and drinking his ass off. Hookers and cocaine. Yeah. Hold on. Let me lay out my prayer rug. There's cameras nearby. And do lines off it.

Every time he went down, just. I love it. This coke is good. So, really, the government of consensus was really just a way for Amin to out maneuver Taraki who was too drunk to see what was going on around him which it worked soon only Amin's

people would be in government now he had all his free time on his hands Taraki stopped over in Moscow where the USSR begged him to remove Amin from power while more and more Soviet military advisors flooded into the country, Amin openly talked about how he questioned the Soviets' intention

and began to move closer to China. At the same time, Taraki's aides hatch a plan to kill Amin because if you can't outmaneuver him, you can kill him. Just give maids. Which failed miserably because Amin was alerted to the men's intent

before it happened. When Taraki arrived back in Kabul, he immediately held a cabinet meeting where he tried to fire Amin was alerted to the men's intent before it happened. When Taraki arrived back in Kabul, he immediately held a cabinet meeting where he tried to fire Amin. Amin, who was sitting right there, confronted Taraki about the fact he just tried to have him fucking killed. You're a bitch.

And demanded everybody involved in the plot be hung. Taraki actually laughed in his face and said Amin should take his position being an ambassador overseas somewhere, effectively exiling him. Amin, in a rage, called him a worthless drunk and said that he's the one that should be exiled. If I was at the table, I'd be like,

who's in charge? None of the government ministers involved was like, I'm not sure who I should be listening to anymore. I'm just going to sit here and do drugs with the president. Whichever one parties the hardest and it was then on 13 september two days after the last meeting amin was invited to have lunch with taraki and he declined saying he'd rather have his resignation which i i guess is as close as the government comes to dropping a sick burn um but amin was pushed by the so ambassador to go to lunch. I hear assassination.

I hear it. So did everybody else. So he went to lunch. Pretty much as soon as he arrived. Poisoned food. Nope. He just got shot. Food good. This isn't a hamburger. It's an AK-47. But he escaped only lightly wounded what i mean jumped in a car

and drove to the ministry of defense in order to uh all the men to arrest haraki before the sun went down tanks are once again rolling down the street who's in charge imagine being a citizen of kabul like oh fuck the tanks are back i guess we have a new president now. Yeah. And Amin again returned to the presidential palace, this time backed by dozens of soldiers and placed Taraki under arrest. So in case you're losing track, Amin is now technically in power. Yeah, it's okay.

Knowing how much the Soviets loved Taraki, Amin gave the Soviets the courtesy call and asked Leonid Brezhnev, head of the Soviet state, if he cared if he killed him. Brezhnev reportedly said, quote, it's up to you, I don't care. I'm joking.

Give us. I mean, if that just goes to show you how powerful it is just being a friend of the Soviets or how little it actually means, it's like, I don't give a fuck. Just shoot him, I don't care. Yeah, I imagine he don't give a fuck. Just shoot him. I don't care. I imagine he didn't give a fuck. Friendship with Taraki, cancelled.

Amin, his new best friend. Shouldn't have missed with the food gun. This told Amin that not only did the Soviets not care about Taraki, but now they supported him. Which means I think he kind of missed a pretty big car there. The Soviets didn't really give a shit about either one of them.

It's like, dude, I don't care. Just handle your shit. Handle your shit. Get all your shit together. Put it in a suitcase. Handle your shit. I'm sure if Taraki made the call, they would say the same shit. No, I mean, the Soviets just didn't give a fuck.

I don't give a fuck. Do something. The Soviets did not care who was in charge. They just wanted Afghanistan to get their shit together. You guys are repping us and fucking it all up. You're making communism look real bad over there. Yeah. Who's in charge?

So you would imagine that, like, I don't know, Taraki would be shot, hung, stabbed maybe. What'd they do? Smothered him with fucking pillows. Of all things. That's adorable.? Smothered him with fucking pillows. Of all things, they smothered him with pillows. Did they let him sleep first? They let him sleep forever.

Maybe he was having a good night's sleep. The goodest night's sleep. This is all in the middle of a gunfight with tanks rolling through the capital. What? Which is really weird because all this is going on. Like, no,

no, Rocky, let's go where the magic is made. Like drag him into his bed and then smother him with a fucking pillow. Give me my smother pillow. Yeah, no, no,

no, not my sleep pillow. My smothering pillow. That's my pillow fight pillow. So as you can imagine, Amin's appointment to every leading seat of the government was unanimous. He also began to try to reduce Afghanistan's ties to the Soviet Union, which include him meeting with leading anti-communist in the country,

Hekmatar. Ooh, that's a name you said earlier. It is. Unfortunately for Amin, nobody liked him anymore. Once in charge, he tried to pivot to the religious crowd again,

claiming the revolution was about Islam. And he began to hand out copies of the Quran wherever he went. Remember, he just had a hand in killing thousands of mullahs because they didn't like his brand of communism. You can imagine that absolutely nobody was buying this shit. Hey guys, I'm cool as fuck. This is exactly like every time a critical thinking person, like an American politician, starts quoting the Bible, but you know that motherfucker had some deep state abortion

from some hooker or a side piece that he had back. And they're like, dude, you're just painting, you're just slapping a cross on it and calling it good. He just slapped a Quran. He's like, we're good now, right? I grew a beard. I got a Quran. We're friends. Nobody bought this shit. Absolutely nobody. He's that old

guy that tries that cool. How's it going, my fellow kids? Yeah. How's it going? How about we Pokemon go to the mosque? If Amin wanted to get closer to the US, that was also no longer a possibility because after Amin accidentally killed an American ambassador to Afghanistan.

Okay, so a guy named Adolf Dubs. That's a terrible name. Yeah, you can't have the name Adolf anymore. You really can't. I mean, this is technically close enough where he could have had this name before World War II. Ambassadors are normally old. have had this name before World War II. Ambassadors are normally old.

So American ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolf Dubs, was kidnapped by somebody. To this day, everybody argues about who did it, whether it was anti-communist Islamic militants, the government, the Soviets.

Nobody's really sure. Just a bunch of randos. Just a bunch of guys trying to get money. All these things are possibilities. I would put my money on the PDPA government. Because what I could see happening is Amin is desperately swinging for the fences, trying to make friends. And he's like, I know a good way to make friends with the u.s i'm gonna kidnap the ambassador

so i could rescue him and look really good the problem was you look good they stormed in the building killed everybody including the ambassador we're saving you stop resisting in the meantime soviet officials showed concern with the's increasingly brutal crackdown methods as he attempted to quell the growing insurgency in Afghanistan. They were outright alarmed when Amin reached out to the president of Pakistan, who is a U.S. ally, for a meeting. And I don't know what exactly he was doing, but whatever he was doing was horrible enough to scare the Soviets, who, like, wrote the doctrine on fucking up dissidents. who wrote the doctrine on fucking up dissidents. Just to underline how wide the gap was between the two sides, when a Soviet official met with Amin in his office in Kabul,

the official pointed out that Amin still had a portrait of Joseph Stalin on his desk, and even the Soviet Union had moved on from them. So for people who are not aware, after Stalin died, Khrushchev took power and pretty much immediately denounced Stalin and the process called de-Stalinization where they're like,

Stalin did a lot of fucked up shit and he was a criminal and he was bad. We're moving on. We're not doing Stalinism anymore. So like the Soviet Union even admitted that Stalin was a bad guy.

So even after all those intensive de-Stalinization programs, Amin idolized him for, quote, building socialism in a backwards country. Mustache. And it should be noted that even Lenin did not want Stalin to take over when he died. He wanted Trotsky to take over. Instead, fucking Stalin had Trotsky beaten to death with a goddamn ice axe while he was in Mexico. It's a completely different story. So shortly after that, on December 13th, the Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan,

Alexander Puzinov, took part in an attempt on Amin's life, which failed. An army cook slipped poison into Amin's food that was provided to him by Puzinov. When the face is a poos, action goes boom. That's all I can say. The problem was, Amin was trying to cut down on

liquor. To cut down on liquor, he was drinking Coke instead. They slipped the poison into his Coke. The carbonation of his Coca-Cola rendered the poison powerless. Well well mostly powerless it wouldn't kill him did he get like a gnarly fucked him up pretty bad it made him pretty sick um amin was still feeling uh had a feeling that the soviets were involved on this attempt on his life

and he openly said so to his cabinet which unfortunately was so thoroughly infiltrated by kgb agents uh that it did not take long uh long for that information that Amin blamed the Soviets to be immediately reported back to the Soviets, who then reached out to Babrak Karmal, who was hiding in exile after the crackdown on the parjams. Finally, the head of the KGB himself, Yuri Andropov, argued in favor of direct intervention in Afghanistan's affairs, which I would argue just happened because they tried to kill the president of Afghanistan. But whatever. He blamed Amin directly for the near destruction of Afghanistan's military through desertion and mutiny and the instability of the government. And he couldn't handle anything without resorting to mass repression. All those were facts.

Everything checks out. Now, this whole time, it needs to be pointed out that Amin was asking for Soviet intervention, direct Soviet intervention. And the Soviets were saying, no, no, no, we don't want to get involved in this insurgency. This finally broke their back. want to get involved in this insurgency. This finally broke their back. And that was when the Soviet Union launched Operation Storm 333 on the 27th of December, 1979 to overthrow

Amin. And that is where we'll pick up next week! No! Yeah! Gotta leave you at a cliffhanger. You really do. That's a great name, Storm 333. The Soviets had a penchant for solid operation. Yeah, because it's almost as good as order 66 i mean back in the day the u.s used to be good at operation names too until they

started calling things like freedom and liberty operate operation i'll get fucked yeah operation enduring enema or whatever like it like operation overlord was like the D-Day. It was fucking awesome. Operation Neptune, Avalanche. Not so cool. Market Garden was such a good story though. Market Garden sounds like going to the market. Like we're gonna go to the garden section. And harvest bodies. The farmer's market was great when we went.

Yeah, Operation Farmer's Market. Which by the way it's where you walk down the street and get harassed by dudes with top knots. Almost bought Viking armor. Yeah, that's really weird. It's really weird to find where we live. So we live in a small town in Washington State. And we have a small town farmer's market.

Great market. I love it. There's a guy selling handmade Viking armor. And we weren't going to buy any because we don't have any money. But there was someone there arguing, yeah i'm part viking yeah that was some random shit like we heard while we were eating our uh and because it was a really small town i know that guy he's the librarian so he did have the library booth yeah um and he's I'm part Viking yeah super weird conversation it looks like he's part Big Bird but whatever anyway thank you for tuning in to Afghan Soviet part one our patreon goal is still up we're trying to hit 500 bucks maybe get Viking armor who knows uh if you do make us uh help us

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podcasts out there. You know what you call three white guys that get together? Tell me. Podcast. We broke that mold because you're not white. Take that, internet. And we don't have a third. No, we don't. Because Superman doesn't count over there.

Neither does Steven. Steven Seagal is very white. Yeah, but... I don't know. Just look at him. First of all, Superman is technically an alien from outer space. He's not white. I consider him...

Clark Kent over there. There we go. Steven Seagal is a white guy in yellow face attempting to act Asian. So he's like double the white. He almost like cancels out your mexican so check this out let me put my glasses on the superman clark kent white guy then you won't know it's superman that's fair that's fair all right so thank you everybody for uh listening and we will see you next week even flow