Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 56 - Soviet Afghan War 2: Operation Storm 333

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

Another Afghan head of state is assassinated and replaced with an even more insane despot. The Soviets decide if anyone is going to assassinate the President, it is going to be THEM. Support the show and get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys If you're a military sci fi fan buy Joe's book Citizen of Earth: https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Earth-Galaxy-Joseph-Kassabian/dp/1949645347/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2UC12MRLI20M7&keywords=citizen+of+earth+joseph+kassabian&qid=1561376068&s=gateway&sprefix=citizen+of+ear%2Caps%2C199&sr=8-1 Buy some shirts: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store

hello and welcome to another episode of lines left by donkeys i'm joe with me is nick and today we are on part two of the Soviet-Afghan war. So, you know, don't start in part two. Go back and listen to all the revolutionary stuff in part one, unless you want to live dangerously or something. Yeah, you could start. You could wait till we finish. Go part four.

Listen to it backwards. Go to part one and then briefly go back to the end again and then go back to the beginning. Listen to the podcast series as if you're watching the movie Memento. Yes. So when we left you last week, Afghan Premier Hafizullah Amin was very nearly poisoned by his own Soviet allies. I didn't enjoy the cliffhanger. You ended off with Operation 333 and it was fucking sweet.

We'll get there. I promise. Okay. And while all this is going on, Soviet forces, who are nominally advisors, are trickling into Afghanistan at Amin's urging. Also, I feel like I need to say again that Hafizullah Amin smothered his predecessor with a pillow. His smothering pillow. Give me my smothering pillow. He doesn't wash. No. Well, you can't wash the smothering pillow. Give me my smothering pillow. He doesn't wash.

Well, you can't wash the smothering pillow. You gotta keep all the stank on it. So, in the meantime, Afghanistan had been rapidly spiraling out of control, and Amin was quickly proving completely unable to handle any of it. Which isn't that surprising

because even the Soviets thought he kind of sucked already. I imagine they didn't give a fuck, though. Well, they didn't want to fail and they certainly didn't want to put someone in charge. I would do so badly. They would have no choice but to attack as he's doing. That's how badly Amin is doing so far. For instance, within not that long of a time period of Amin being in charge, that the Mujahideen had been rising up all around the country and held around 90% of the territory and all main lines of communications in the provinces of Jaujan, Takkar, Bashkadan, Logar, Gaur, Kapisa, Ghanzi, Zabul, Helmand zabool helman farah harat and bagdas so pretty much the only thing the government controlled was kabul jesus but remember they they purposely set up to not do that and then they did it anyway yeah uh except before the government didn't control the

countrysides but they at least had all the cities for the most part now they don't even have that amin himself like his predecessor distrusted his own army so much that he requested an all muslim battalion from the red army to be his personal bodyguards uh so the soviets agreed and sent thousands of muslim soldiers from their central asian republics uh that joined the other thousands of soviet advisors that were already in the country um which brings us to operation storm 333 yes and again i have to leave you at a cliffhanger because we have to get to the so last episode we only covered the afghan side of how we ended up here oh damn it the soviet side is just as bad just

with a whole lot less pillow smothering and more vodka a lot more um Also, before we go on, last episode, I said Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet premier, was old, senile, and drunk. That part is true. I said he was like 80 or 90. That part is not true. He died when he was 75. So he's in his 70s. I had to correct myself. But he is old beyond his years.

If you look at a picture of him, he looks 80-something. Didn't age well. He was also in horrible health, so he might as well have been 90. So, back on the 8th of December 1979, Brezhnev held a meeting with several others, which the meeting eventually came to the conclusion

that something must be done about Afghanistan. They came up with two options. One was using the KGB to facilitate a change of power to depose Amin and install Bobrock Carmel from exile. If that failed, they would just use the military to do it. This would be the last time that Leonid Brezhnev, who was the head of the Soviet state, mind you, would be consulted at all about the use of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. You really fucked this up. all about the use of soviet troops in afghanistan you really fucked this up so um at this point in his life brezhnev was incredibly sick and frail he was also using copious amounts of booze as

medicine uh for his various medical problems um the politburo around him uh it sure is in the soviet union uh the politburo around him rapidly turned towards the idea of an intervention in Afghanistan. It would only take a few weeks and fed the dying, drunk head of state outright lies in order to sell him on the issue. It's even thought to this day that the directive that would send the Red Army to war was actually

a fake signature planted by the KGB because it looks absolutely nothing like any other signature that lay in a Brezhnev debt. Oh, the shit I used to just to get away from like actually having a like report card signed by my parents oh yeah i did that too yeah they did that yeah yeah they did that to send uh 80 000 soldiers to war i think i did better i mean it also speaks volumes of how little brezhnev what what power he still had. Um,

and he is like, I think he was the longest serving Soviet premier outside of, uh, Joseph Stalin. So he should have had some political clout, but like, well, all these parts are moving.

He could do nothing to stop it. And he didn't know anything about it, which is really weird. Yeah. So there's like almost an outside government, a shadow government. Yeah. And they pretty much made all of their foreign policy decisions. We'll talk about that a little bit later.

Okay. So Brezhnev's personal doctor, a guy named Mikhail Khusarov, commented that when Brezhnev was in his right mind and sober, which was rare, he openly spoke out against committing soldiers on the ground to Afghanistan. The Soviet army at this point is not the Soviet army of World War II. It's more closely related to the Russian army of the horrible first Chechen War. Pretty much falling apart. You don't want to be that one.

No, it's everybody knows it to be openly corrupt, falling apart at the seams, pretty much slapped together with duct tape and wire with massive amounts of conscription every year. Everybody in charge

knew that deploying it away from home was a really bad idea uh they just happened to not be anyone anybody listened to um soviet ambassador to the u.s anatoly dobran actually blamed the entire thing on mikhail susalov a longtime political operative who exerted a ton of influence and is considered the chief ideologue of the Communist Party at the time. What is known without speculation is the plans for intervention came from Foreign Minister Andrei Gromko. Grimko? No, one of the other. We're not good at names. Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov and the KGB chairman and future head of the Soviet state, Dmitry Andropov with virtually no input at all from the state politburo or the

head of state himself. The Soviet military leaders who objected to the coming military action were told to mind their own business or simply fired. This included chief of the general staff, Marshall Nikolai Ogorkov, who had suddenly been told out of nowhere to prepare 80,000 soldiers for deployment, something that the Soviet Union has not done in decades. During a meeting on the 11th of December, Ogurkov, seemingly the only adult in the room, pleaded with the rest of the planners an invasion was a terrible idea, even if they were being invited. terrible idea, even if they were being invited. He referred to the Afghan tradition of resistance against foreign invaders on their land, warning that the probability of Soviet troops being pulled

into direct fighting rather than the policing action that they were trying to sell would just all be in vain, all of his arguments be ignored. He said, quote, we will pit all of Eastern Islam against us and we will lose politically in the entire world. If that does not sound prophetic to you, it will soon. So he seems to be the only one that had any understanding of military anything, which isn't that

surprising in a room full of politicians. What is surprising is he immediately saw what would happen. He saw this thing way clearer than anybody else. And at the time, the people really running the war effort, or what would soon to be a war effort, really was saying, this will only take a couple weeks. We're not even going to fight anybody. We're just going to show up.

Everybody will see the support that the PDPA government has, and all this will just come to an end. Which is like the dumbest fucking thing you can possibly imagine. Solid idea. I mean, everybody says this is the Soviet Union's Vietnam and that's accurate. But I think that it's somehow worse because at least going into Vietnam, the U.S. military had some concept of they were going into a guerrilla war. It seems like the soviet leadership was either blind or wantonly ignorant about i think they were ignorant about the whole thing yeah i i'm i'm kind of on both sides i do believe that they thought um they had first world syndrome like yeah these stupid cave people won't dare stand up against us type shit like just dumb

racism type stuff uh and racism was absolutely not foreign in the soviet union which we'll talk about in a little bit um i could absolutely see that of being like another good example is like colonial wars uh where like the british military would routinely send uh groups of soldiers against thousands of native soldiers because like well the british army can't possibly lose to a bunch of savages. Yeah. And then they did and they stopped doing that. And this is what happened to the Soviet union.

So by this point, Amin had moved to the Tajburg palace in the center of Kabul. It was surrounded by his Muslim Soviet bodyguards and several dozen members of the Afghan presidential guard. It ended up being around 2,200 guys. At the same time, thousands of KGB special forces and members of the airborne regiments of the Soviet Union had arrived in Afghanistan. Now, these were all in secret. In order to conceal this from the Afghan authorities, they addressed the civilians and landed in civilian planes.

They were given security plans and the operation of the palace and how everything worked. Did they get a good tan beforehand? did they get a good tan before i would imagine so coming from uh soviet russia which was where most of the kgb and airborne guys came from was like uh to you know afghanistan right they're getting they're getting sunflaked the first time um now the the muslim the muslim battalion was commanded by soviet officers and they are really what it's called yeah yeah that's crazy i mean i mean obviously the so you need a large muslim population they just never really supported religion right um but yeah they they're like well shit we got thousands of muslim soldiers laying around muslim battalion that is your name yeah deal with it they weren't good with names um now operations on the other

hand the soviets also planned the the also planned the procedures and the protective posture of the palace, which they then gave all those plans to the special forces and KGB. So it's like you not are only cheating on this test by getting the answers. You also cheated on the test that you made for yourself. Yeah. Everything is stacked up against the poor Afghans. I have no idea what's coming. Yeah. It's just, everything is stacked up against the poor Afghans. I have no idea what's coming. Jesus.

The Soviets prepared the rest of their army for the upcoming war, which they thought would only last a week, two weeks. Because the vastness

of the Soviet Union, they decided it would make a lot more sense to mobilize Red Army troops from the Central Asian Republic, seeing how they were just over the border. And they could be

just driven over land into Afghanistan in only a few hours. Good idea. There's a small problem with that. The Soviets did not think highly of their Central Asian comrades. Despite the equality and egalitarianism of Soviet communism, that did not apparently

extend to the people they called yellow asses. What? Yeah, they're racist as fuck there's also other racist terms that more directly translate to english i will not say because it is oh they're that bad it is damn close to regular old american racism oh that's bad yeah um this is not because they're bad soldiers but because the soviet union was racist as fuck and they thought they were simply too stupid to learn russian which it was weird because they're soldiers and the soviet army made absolutely no attempt to teach them there's something of a problem as

russian was the common technical language of the military so in the u.s army you get manuals and instruction books how to do everything they're all written in english simple enough i mean you do have to have some kind of fluency in english to be a soldier here but imagine if you didn't now like work any of these things you can't read what any switch or toggle or anything says yeah now this is the life that these soldiers were living not good um for example during the first days of mobilization no one paid any attention to the quality, the quality or the quantity of specialists filling out the units. Everybody was confident that the usual inspection was being done and all and

everything would just end up. Okay. So by, by specialists, I mean mechanics, artillery crew, man, things like that.

People would just show up and they're like, well, they probably know what they're doing, but they weren't. It turned out because of their lack of knowledge of the Russian language, none of these guys knew how to drive or operate tanks. Our personnel care carriers use artillery or radio operation systems. That's really vital.

They are effectively a bunch of dudes with rifles. That's really vital. So rather than transport new soldiers in that knew what they were doing, they just, or they just or they just forced these guys uh to use the equipment uh that they had no idea how to do they didn't even set time aside to train them because now you have to put yourself in the way that the soviet commanders are thinking here why does it matter they're only going to be there a

couple weeks throw them into the fire right this is going to be a small fire it's only a few weeks yeah to make matters worse, tens of thousands of reservists simply never received their call-up orders due to bad record keeping. Many of the reserve officers had never actually been sent to the officer's academy. God, I've been an officer

for quite a while. Yeah. When can I go to school? You haven't gone to school yet, Lieutenant? No. Well, welcome aboard. You're going to go ahead and get deployed. Okay. Also, another problem was there was no plan. There's never been a plan like this other than like emergency.

The Soviet Union's being invaded, mobilize everybody. No, this had ever been attempted in the area. As if things cannot be planned anywhere, the Soviets also did not develop any new kind of uniform for their soldiers. They would simply roll into Afghanistan in virtually the same uniform they'd go to parades in.

Everything from their jackets to their pants, and especially their giant fucking jackboots were restrictive and suited for something very little outside of walking down the street. They're literally wearing what looked like this same boots that they wore in world war ii yeah jack boots pretty much yeah those aren't the same things were so bad that anybody with extra money uh simply would have

bought a pair of knockoff adidas tennis shoes called mock buzz mock buzz yeah it's so it's the cyrillic version of Moscow. Because instead of a label that would say Adidas, there's no private companies in the Soviet Union. And the way that they are made from old Adidas machines left behind from the Olympics in the Soviet Union, there had to be something there, like something to fill, but they couldn't leave it blank. So like, well, fuck fuck it it's a Moscow

shoe it's being made in Moscow do they still have the three stripes yeah they did they were identical to Adidas gazelle running shoes this is amazing can we buy these and wear them they went out of print as of 2011

so they're still going holy fuck it was either 2011 or 2009 one of the two but yeah Went out of print as of 2011. So they're still going? Yep. Holy fuck. Yep. It was either 2011 or 2009, one of the two, but yeah. I wonder how, I feel like our size shoe might be a little expensive. Probably a little bit hard to find. Yeah. We're rather large people.

This is actually why in almost every single picture of the Spetsnaz or the Russian airborne troops, they're always wearing counterfeit kicks instead of fucking combat boots. Counterfeit kicks. The knockoff Adidas ended up becoming something of a status symbol within the Soviet army, an army that didn't exactly have a lot of status symbols by design.

Because if you had a pair, you're obviously in the best units in the military. Nobody else got extra pay. Nobody else would be able to get these things. In many cases, the commanders got their hands on them and gave them to their soldiers. So, in essence, these shoes were the Soviet version of a coyote tan baseball cap with a Velcro American flag and beards that we see today in America's toxic military culture. They just had shoes. Yeah.

I think shoes were better. Very. Because I would love to have some mock this. You can just get a pair of adidas they're virtually the same thing just way more expensive i just want mock so with that more than 50 000 officers sergeants and soldiers were called up from the reserves to bring the i have a pair of adidas sorry sorry to cut you off no please talk you see me squatting them pretty often actually so they i'm using them definitely from what they're intended to be used for.

Either climbing the mountains of Afghanistan or squatting on the street corner smoking cigarettes and eating sunflower seeds. So with that, 50,000 officers, sergeants, and soldiers were called up from the reserves to bring the unit strength up to around 8 000 vehicles and 80 000 soldiers now those vehicles were sent from the economy as they said the economy sounds terrible now the economy here means virtually any fucking truck they get their hands on yeah not all of them are military trucks it's like fuck it's a cargo truck it's good enough here's a toyota fucking tacoma go bam now like i said before mobilization measures of this scale had never been tried before or even thought of

in the Turkestan Central Asian Military Districts. Accordingly, local governments, directors of enterprise, farms and draft boards, and the military turned out completely and utterly unprepared for them.

Not enough uniforms, not enough rifles, shit like that. Well, that's like the the story that i hear where during parades or anything that had to do with the soviet union they'd go back turn around put on new paint and keep going through the parade just to show that their military might i mean that they're so short on shit that's not that surprising um that's they've actually shown that a lot of parades in North Korea

where it shows floods of people marching by. It's like a sleight of eye trick. We've talked about before is like a battle tactic where soldiers will march around and they dip behind cover and pop back around. And it looks like it's an endless stream of soldiers when in reality they only have like 30. They're like, oh man, there's so many platoons like it's just one going around circles you just don't see it double back and around but yeah i mean i would not be surprised at all uh which

brings us back to the palace uh the special forces airborne and kgb operatives have changed into their afghan army uniforms now to go undercover. The day before the operation was to begin on the 26th, the Afghan in the army began to get a little suspicious about the situation going on around them. These guys are fair skinned. These guys don't fucking speak Pashto.

Yeah. As anyone would with half a fucking operating brain when tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers randomly show up in the country. Now, it was pretty obvious that there was a buildup on military bases and in Kabul and stuff like that.

But it was supposed to be a secret. Some of them are housed openly as soldiers and other ones are doing spook shit in safe houses. Pretending to be Afghans. There's thousands of them. There's probably a fair amount of

Tajiks and stuff like that that can play the part and speak to local languages. The Afghans picked up on it. Do you think any of the spook guys ever tried I got a hit on a guy and it was another one of his KGB guys but he didn't realize it and they're just tricking each other like oh I'm gonna get this guy to hit on each other

I feel like they probably definitely did what are you what are you talking about let's say one guy spooked on another guy that was a spook as well one of them didn't know that he was a spook they totally thought each other were just Afghani guys Afghans the money's Afghani. Afghan guys. That's just what I see in my head. I didn't know you were a spy.

Are you a spy? It's spy versus spy because everybody's drunk and probably one of them is going to die. There was an obvious build up. There was already thousands of Soviets there in an advisory role, but there was already thousands of soviets there in an advisory role but like everybody noticed the influx of soviet soldiers they weren't exactly trying to hide it um the soviets also started randomly getting shot at by elements of the afghan army

really yeah and the soviets who were really really confused and without what any orders to do if this happened, didn't shoot back. They all just kind of sat there and waited until the Afghans got bored and left. What? Yeah. There's a reason that the Soviets didn't know why they were being shot at. They didn't know the plan. They were just there.

So only the KGB and the Special Forces guys knew what their ultimate plan was. Everybody else just thought they're in Afghanistan. This is a hardship tour. I'm just going to be here. It's like if you got PCS orders to Korea and had no idea you're suddenly taking part of an invasion of North Korea.

So this was obvious when you understand that the day of the the operation which was the 27th no one soldier knew the entire plan wow uh nobody had been given written orders only verbal ones to make sure that nothing could fall in the hands of the afghans which is only cool if you only read spy novels and never interact with other people in your life um so imagine you're a small unit leader how many people do those orders pass you before they get to you? Dozens. Hundreds, right? Have you ever played a game of telephone where you start on one side of the room with a message?

Yes, I have. Yeah, it's like that, but with around 80,000 people. That's even worse. Yeah. It'll just come out at the end just, nah. Yeah. So the regular soldiers and advisors had no idea that they're taking part in this plan. The only ones that had any remote idea was the special forces guys.

So they're even more confused by the people they're working with are suddenly taking potshots at them. What? Inside the palace, Amin was on cloud nine. He got what he wanted. Soviet troops were in Afghanistan in the thousands. Partying. Something that he had been begging since Taraki was in charge. His inner circle was all Soviet military advisors, KGB agents,

and the only doctor he trusted was also a Soviet. Those guys fucking partying. So nobody around him was like, I don't think these guys are our friends. They're like, the Soviets are great, Mr. Amin. They're perfect. Don't listen to me, Mr. Joe KGB agent. Here's some vodka.

While he was worried about attacks from the Mujahideen or maybe even his political enemies, he trusted the Soviets more than anyone else on Earth. Which we are learning more and more is a bad thing to do if you're in Afghanistan. And that's when Amin's entire family was poisoned. Again!

Again! What was... This time, it was his trusted Soviet chef. What? Why? Because he was trying to fucking assassinate him. Yeah, but why? Because that's the whole plan! Fuck that, dude.

By the time the doctors arrived, everyone in the room was convulsing or unconscious. Amin himself was considered in serious condition. Two Soviet doctors, who had no idea that they were interfering with their own government's assassination plot, saved the man's life and restored his breathing and pumped his stomach. Jesus. At 19.50 hours, Soviet forces began their assault on the palace, starting Operation Storm 333. Most of the Soviet manned anti-aircraft

batteries that were protecting the palace spun around and started shooting at it. Holy fuck! Under the command of Soviet forces, many of the president's own bodyguards started shooting at each other, and the Muslim battalion, I mean, issued bodyguards,

immediately turned around and began securing the palace. I'm so tripped up on the... shooting at each other? That means issued bodyguards immediately turned around and began securing the palace. I'm still tripped up on the... Shooting at each other? Yeah, there's a lot of people that start shooting at each other. Like just Spider-Man and Spider-Man just going like this? Who are you with? But with AKs? Yes.

KGB special forces in Afghan army uniforms began to scale the side of the palace using ladders and ropes. Soviet armored vehicles charged through the security checkpoints. In one case, crushing the Afghan soldier who was manning it and attempting to surrender. This is a movie. Yeah, it's a bad movie. It's a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. There was only one road

leading to the palace with every other route being heavily mined. So, there was the one route that Soviet APCs could use to advance all of them immediately started getting shot at from the palace as as afghan uh soldiers started figuring out what exactly was going on in real time when the shit's going down yeah uh one of the apc commanders said quote we hardly had begun to move when our vehicle stopped the driver mechanic who was one guy uh was frightened jumped on the bmp which was an apc that they had

and fled but i hadn't yet managed to decide on his replacement when he returned it turned out it was even more frightening outside the vehicle holy fuck another one of his soldiers uh had attempted to jump off the apc and then this immediately fell under its tracks and got crushed. Oh, fuck. Why? They were terrified. They had no idea what they were doing. They're like, oh, we're at war now. Despite the withering fire, the Soviets managed to get up to the palace door and breach them.

All the various groups of soldiers were confused and each one was acting in their own direction. And there's a reason for that. There was no single command of the operation holy fuck every single unit had their own orders and no one was talking to one another like an elementary school playground yeah it's like you're playing uh you're playing army in the backyard the whole bunch of kids and they all think they're in charge that's very true and then you kill somebody and they're not dead in there but they're dead because you hit them now there was one single unifying goal. Get to the walls of the palace as quickly as possible, hide behind them, and then just sit there. Because remember, not everybody knew the mission was to kill the prison of Afghanistan.

Their mission was to take the palace. But once inside the palace, nobody knew what the fuck to do. Did they essentially just kill anybody that was in there? They kill everybody and anybody to include themselves oh so they shoot at each other too yeah what the fuck this is great that was when soviet forces began shooting at each other again because the special forces were in hostile territory and foreign uniforms without documents and without any recognition whatsoever there's only one symbol that showed that they were Soviet soldiers.

That was a white armband tied around their sleeve, which was not brief to other Soviet soldiers at the time, because it would give away the fact that KGB and Spetsnaz were attacking the palace. You can see where this is all a problem. Who came up with this? Nobody really knows.

I wonder if everybody at the same time was just like, hey hey let's attack the palace the fire was so heavy that the safety glass and all the apcs were shot out fuck and the armor skirting was punctured in every square centimeter when the soldiers said that the appearance uh that it looked like a strainer or a colander uh it turns out the special forces had been saved by their bulletproof vests, although they were all practically wounded by friendly or hostile fire. That's not good. Once inside the palace, the special forces soldiers cleared every single room

by throwing hand grenades and sweeping them with automatic weapons fire, taking no prisoners. During this time, Amin had finally woken up from his coma, because remember, he had been incapacitated with poison, finding himself in the middle of a war zone. It happens. When the commander of his presidential guard, seemingly the last loyal Afghan in the palace,

rushed in to tell him what was happening, Amin told him to call the Soviets for help. When the commander told him that the Soviets were attacking, Amin called him a liar and fired him. Like, motherfucker, you can't fire me. I'm trying to help you the russian doctors who were treating him in assumed they were under attack by the mujahideen and began to get worried

and that's when they heard russian soldiers screaming swear words down the hallway and realized it was their own people oh that's where you gotta hide under the bed yeah because you gotta wait you can't run out there and say you're one of them because you'll get shot. After about 45 minutes, the battle inside the palace was over and Hafizullah Amin lay dead behind a bar counter. He died wearing straight boxer shorts and a polo and was shot in the face.

See? To this day, nobody's really sure who killed him and nobody has taken credit for it, but it's all but certain that the KGB special forces had orders to kill him on sight. The attack was so confused and badly planned that as soon as the palace was secured by Soviet forces,

it quickly came under attack again. Who do you think attacked it? I want to go with the Soviets again. An entire airborne division of the Soviet army. They charged at their own men, bayonets mounted, and the result was a confused two-hour-long firefight

that killed at least 50 people. That is insanely funny, to be honest. Oh my god. I was joking. The main source that I'm using for this series is a book called The Great Game. It's great. Read it. I actually read that chapter three times to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding something. There's a lot going on on one side of the faction.

It turns out the Soviets could kick their own ass a whole lot better than the Afghan army could. I bet you they did it on purpose just to show. Like a fucking boss move. You know what's a great training idea? Let's just attack each other with live weapons. That's a great idea. How else are you going to show how badass you are?

We'll kick our own ass. I don't need your help. I can do this myself. So the palace however was not the only building targeted in the operation here is probably my favorite story from the whole saga the general

staff of the Afghan army was also targeted and generally went a whole lot easier than the palace operation when soldiers saw they were being attacked by soldiers of the Red Army was also targeted and generally went a whole lot easier than the palace operation. When soldiers saw they were being attacked by soldiers of the Red Army and not Mujahideen, they pretty much surrendered immediately. The same thing cannot be said for the Afghan Chief of Staff

General Yakub, who was actually in the middle of a meeting with the Soviet military advisor from the 103rd Airborne Division, a major named Ivan Raznov, when the whole operation kicked off which it should be noted that the major also had no idea what was going on either nobody knows anything so in the middle of all this um yakub gets a a phone call that the soviets were under attack

the soviets were attacking them and to uh order his men to mobilization uh major rosnoff overhears the phone call realizes that the two are apparently at war now and they quickly get in a fucking fist fight this is awesome it's like oh i guess we have to kill each other now like something out of a fucking john clancy movie you say john clancy that's not his name is it no it's not it's tom clancy you got joe clancy you got tom clancy john clancy's tom clancy's shitty cousin yeah that made terrible books um also this is great I just like these two guys in the middle of a meeting like probably having tea probably drinking

vodka and then like somebody get a phone call like I guess we have to murder each other now they just set their tea down like indeed and they just start beating the dog shit out of each other and that's when one of the major's aides kicked open the door of the room and shot Yakub in the arm. What?

Why? Because you don't want a fair fight. It's fisticuffs! Like, Major Rostov looks at him like, no, no, no. He's mine. And, like, just pulls a knife out of his fucking Adidas tennis shoe. Shit. Honestly,

this is awesome. And then Yakub surrendered because he got fucking shot i would do yeah i would do good call on that one uh another soviet force made its way to the radio and television center across the city their goal was to secure it and broadcast a message to the afghan people uh to you know let everybody know that bob rock Kamal is coming to save them all. Shit like that. Also, we do not know who we are fighting, so just stay away. The Soviets' whole plan was actually to roll in, take over the radio center, and start playing some awful Soviet pop music.

Oh, yes. This fucking bass-ass techno music. Afghans are like, Jesus Christ, what is this? Honestly, when they dance to that music, it looks like they're fighting. This all stems together. This is great.

That's how you train to be a soldier. You listen to fucking Russian techno music and kick the air. There was actually an Afghan tank unit stationed in the area, in the area, and had been ordered to combat readiness. One small problem. Who were they fighting?

They had no idea. They had, someone just said, we're under attack, get ready to defend yourself. Like, yeah, right. But like, who? So like,

the Soviet soldier simply walked up to them, like, hey, surrender. They're like, all right. And that was it. Whatever. They're just done. All right. All right. You seem all right to me uh another force at the ministry of eternal affairs uh compound

and instead of walking up and just telling them to surrender they immediately begin attacking the afghans with uh automatic grenade launchers confusing the hell out of the defenders had no idea what was happening uh it took about 15 minutes for them to capture the building wow by the morning of the 28th, Kabul was all but secured and the Afghan government toppled by their allies. That day is when the... That was probably the best

ever. This is the best shit I've heard in a while. Fighting! Yes! All coked up. Ah! That was when the Soviet limited contingent of the armed forces of the Soviet Union, which was their official name for the Soviet mission in the country, began to stream into the country across the borders from the Soviet republics.

I wish you could see what's in my head right now. This is great. That battle plan is exactly what would happen if you looked at any battle plan from like counter-strike everybody just jumping up and down spinning around in circles and firing an ak and full auto while screaming racial slurs yes that's how i assume this looked like i saw it as also a video game you did not disappoint with part two uh so on the evening of the 28th carmel was driven in a convoy caramel caramel uh bab rat caramel uh was driven in a convoy to kabul to take a seat as leader of afghanistan a seat that was probably still warm from the guy the soviets just murk

once he got there oh oh wait, hold on. So wipes off some of the blood. All right, it's all yours now. The KGB officer's like, oh, sorry, we left a piece of him behind. Our bad. As he's just standing around the smoking presidential palace full of corpses like, yes, all this is mine now. We also did fight our own people, but it is yours. Yes.

Carmel officially announced via radio that Amin had been tried and executed by a revolutionary council of the people. He also immediately began a purge of Amin loyalists. It's definitely not the people. Because of course he did. It's like, I don't know how many people Amin's purge killed. Tens of thousands, I assume, like all the other ones.

But like, hmm, what is my first order of business in this country with all these problems? I'm gonna kill my own people! He's a product of his environment. Once he got there, he saw the dead body. He's like a dog chasing a car. He has no, like, he wants to be in charge,

but he has no idea what he's gonna do to actually govern this mess once he actually has it. So, why not? There's so many problems. You mean, why not commit a purge? Because purges are bad. Name one purge that was good other than, like,

de-Stalinization. The movie was alright. The first one sucked. The second one was good. I liked the second one. The third one was awful. I haven't seen that one. Save yourself some time. So this is the pattern that the Soviets' intervention kind of fell into, which was much of what had been happening before the Soviets got there. Soviet soldiers occupied cities and attempted to patrol main highways

in between them to keep logistics channels open. So hold on. Do they know who they're fighting at this point see the so so the soviets do don't think they're there to fight okay because remember they don't think this is a war a tour if you will they see it as a little more than a policing action that will that they'll be home within the month so they're not fighting okay gotcha that's the problem they are and they did not prepare for this. Mujahideen pretty much occupied everything that the Soviet soldiers were not currently standing on. The Soviet leadership thought the introduction of 80,000 Red Army soldiers would pacify the growing insurgency.

In fact, it did the exact opposite. It unified various rebel groups who had been spending their spare time fighting each other along with the government around the flag of nationalism and Islam. A full 80% of the entire country was fully out of government control many rural afghans who had chafed under amin's reforms are now on the verge of joining the spontaneous resistance they had been on the fence kind of hoping for amin to come around and govern the country effectively right but they also sympathize with the with the mujahideen but they're very suspicious of soviet forces that claim that they're there only to help them uh these people were armed with mostly 19th century muskets world war ii era lee lee infield rifles and ak-47s most of them coming from government stockpiles muskets yeah jazails uh

holy fuck yeah like uh so if you're if you're not familiar with a jazail uh it's you know a black powder musket yeah heavily decorated they look baller as shit it's like if you wanted to bling out a gun this is what it would look like if i wanted to go on a african hunting trip i'd bring a jazail i mean it's not really africa's thing it's not i mean if you want to look if i wanted to look like a douche bag. Oh, just sales. I'll make it look like douche bag.

Exactly. Going into, and I wear some short shorts, American version of a Giselle would be an AR 15 that you handed down to your kid that had a spinner rim on the buttstock. But like Giselles are cool as shit. There's actually multiple accounts of people finding them to this day. Uh,

they're pretty much priceless. They're, they're heirlooms. Um, hopefully not a lot of people took them to this day. They're pretty much priceless. They're heirlooms. Hopefully not a lot of people took them as war trophies because it's a fucked up thing to do. But they look fucking awesome. Exactly. They took that stockpile and prepared

to fight against what they saw as what was another in a long stream of foreign invasions of Afghanistan. And that was the thing that kind of tipped the Mujahideen from being controlling the countryside. And now they can threaten everywhere because there's a lot of fence sitters in Afghanistan who didn't really like the Mujahideen, didn't really like the government. They're just going to sit it out and hope that things return to normal, that the government leave them alone, let them farm, go back to their villages,

whatever. This was the tipping point. The Soviets pissed a lot of people off by coming there uh remember because outside the cities it's a very conservative country very deeply tied to the religion and the soviet union had prided itself for decades for being an atheist country which is like stands in stark contrast of everything that the afghans stood for outside their own government um not to mention they don't like foreigners like stay the fuck out if they get if nobody has made this more clear than afghanistan i don't know who you're not maybe the vietnamese all they know is foreign oppression they're really good at throwing them off yeah uh that all this caused things to quickly spiral out of control for the soviets soon their policing action and uh came under increasing amount of attacks and their convoys

pretty much could not go from point a to point b without coming under fire um the guy that the soviets put in charge bob rock carmel had the balls to actually blame the Soviets for all this unrest, which, sure, they did just kill the goddamn president and give him a new one, but it started way before then. Also, the Soviets were invited. They didn't invade, technically. They're technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. I mean, it's technically, but it kind of sounded like an invasion it so amin had been asking for them and carmel also wanted them there he got his face scooped out by them yeah i'm not saying inviting the soviets to your country is a good idea i'm just saying they did it yeah okay

um they rsvp'd yeah i mean this insurgency had been going on four years and about, like, fucking three liters ago. You know, like, the Soviets didn't cause this. Yeah, no, they didn't. The PDPA caused this. And even Daoud caused this by overthrowing the goddamn king. Oh, yeah, Daoud is a bitch. Like Amin, Karmal did not trust his own army, and

it, too, began to erupt into outright mutiny, leaving the Soviet army to fight them alongside the Mujahideen. This is despite the fact that the bulk of the Soviet forces were never intended to fight anyone. Instead, they were supposed to be a little more than a show of support for the PDPA.

Which leads us to the massive disconnect the Soviet leadership in Moscow had with anything resembling reality on the ground in Afghanistan. Do they still think that they're just there to police? Oh, one more than that. Leonid Brezhnev, on the 28th of January, back in Moscow, who would never step foot in Afghanistan,

thought their job in Afghanistan was over, and he ordered all regular Soviet ground forces to leave the country. That's it, guys. War in Afghanistan is over. Great job. Thank you for tuning into the podcast I'm just fucking

kidding of course it didn't happen shit went on for nine fucking years you said this was multiple parts two is multiple

so that is when the triumvirate of Andropov Gromko and Ustinov just kind of stepped in and overruled him

no they were not allowed to do that but they did it anyway he She stepped on his dick. Just stomped on it. Yeah. With the heel of their Adidas track shoes. Check out these motherfucking makpas, bitch!

They argued withdrawing would be a serious mistake. Amin may have been removed, but it would take time for Karamal to exert his authority and stabilize Afghanistan. Soviet forces should remain until the Afghan government was strengthened, they explained in a report to Brezhnev. Pulling out would prompt the Afghans

to claim Moscow was an unreliable partner. Which, you just invaded their presidential palace and killed the president. You're an unreliable partner. You did more than kill the president. You killed a lot of people. You killed your own people. You killed a lot of people. You killed your own people. Yeah. You killed a lot of your own

soldiers. But the Soviet, they argued the Soviet Union would have to stay and help. In case any of this sounds familiar, you've been paying attention to the news the last, oh, 20 years. And that is when Soviet forces would start digging in

for the long haul. And that is where we forces would start digging in for the long haul and that is where we'll pick up next week you keep ending this on cliffhangers I got nine years of cliffhangers here we got plenty of cliffhangers you're ending these all our other parts there weren't so much of cliffhangers

it's probably because I don't know what to expect for this one this one so far has been really insane. So I do have to say, it continues being dumb insane for the next almost decade of war for the Soviets. Yeah. It doesn't get good.

I don't expect it to get good. Whenever I sit at this table, I don't expect anything good. I mean, that's why I had an, every like 10 episodes, I make sure I schedule one that's actually a happy story. I think that's why we're friends. Yeah.

So thank you for real this time for tuning into the show. Support us on Patreon if you think what we do is worth a buck. Buy a shirt. You got to wear a shirt. Why not make it one of ours? Right. So a donation to the show for a little as a dollar gets you access to our communal discord with the hell of a way to die podcast podcast.

And there's are pretty closely intertwined now, but also the discord is, is pretty cool for discussions of everything. That's actually where I got the lead for the mock bus shoes. Really? Yeah. I knew that every picture I found of Spetsnaz operators who were wearing tennis shoes,

I always thought that was weird. But also none of the book sources I found noticed that. I always assumed that, as you said, was a status symbol, as you said. Right. I kind of assumed that too because I always assumed they're just Adidas. Yeah, I didn't know that they were their own brand and even made in moscow even the story behind the mock buzz is equally equal parts funny because like during the olympics in moscow

um they made a rule where if western companies were going to sell things and this is you know even back in the 80s uh late 70s and 80s, there was no private enterprise in the Soviet Union. I mean, it's a communist country. Right. Ideally, they don't want any of that shit there. So there was official sponsors of the Olympics. The Soviets said, yeah, you guys can still come, but you have to make your stuff here. And they're like, fuck it, whatever.

This contract's worth the money. We'll bring all these heavy equipment and machinery over to the Soviet Union. The Soviets also knew, and that's why they did that, that most people would make their money off the contracts and leave all the Western equipment behind that at this point, the Soviet Union had been falling far behind technologically than the West. This isn't the glory days of sending up Sputnik and splitting the atom. This isn't the glory days of sending up Sputnik and splitting the atom. Like under, uh, landed Brezhnev,

the Soviet Union had stagnated really bad. So like they couldn't build the stuff on their own. Right. So they knew when Pepsi and Adidas, which, uh, the, uh,

the gazelle, I believe they were called was the official running shoe of the Olympics would have to leave all their equipment. It's a good animal. Yeah. If I was going to, my man, maybe if I wanted to run, I mean, I'm going to probably need their equipment behind. That's a good animal. Yeah. If I was going to, I mean, maybe a cheetah. If I wanted to run.

I'd probably need my shoes as a cheetah or something. But they knew that when they left, they would just be able to put Soviet workers in place and immediately crank out their own knockouts. And that's exactly what they did.

It almost reminds me of, I know it's probably far off, but it reminds me of like any type of CrossFit brand where they go, you could only wear this brand for here. You can't wear anything you're sponsored by. But Alico did the same. When they started their thing, you could only wear Alico-branded shit. Well, there's been professional athletes.

I think it happens a lot in football where they'll be like sponsored by under armor or whatever brand it is and um the nfl says you only can wear their their official sponsors at um nfl games and events so you'll see people wearing shirts with like just random bits of fucking like electrical tape over it yeah uh there was an iranian weightlifter who uh i think he set the the world record for a clean and jerk and he had a big fucking piece of duct tape talking about over his chest covering up i think it was like nike or something this is a western brand i thought that was kind of funny but yeah so that that's the story of the mockba and that is why like the discord is really funny we'll talk about books we'll'll talk about Soviet footwear history.

Talk about anything. A dollar gets you in, but, you know, thanks anyway. Anyway, rate, share, and review our show on iTunes because that helps us. And we will see you next week for part three. Another cliffhanger. Oh, yeah.