Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 57 - Soviet Afghan War 3: The Lion of the Panjshir

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

The Soviet Army digs in for the long haul while a Tajik warlord named Ahmed Shah Massoud makes them pay for every inch of land they take. Support the show and get access to our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy a shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store If you like military sci fi grab Joe's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Earth-Galaxy-Joseph-Kassabian/dp/1949645347

Hello, welcome to yet another episode of Lions Led by Donkeys. Yes. With me is Nick. I'm Joe from every other episode of the show. by Donkeys. With me is Nick. I'm Joe. From every other episode of the show with us. Today is Laika the podcast dog. Steven Seagal. And a cardboard cutout of Steven Seagal.

And a cardboard cutout of Superman. He said if we didn't tell anybody that he was here, he was going to karate chop us? Snap our necks with his gut. So we are on part three of the Soviet-Afghan War. So if you're just joining us for whatever reason, go ahead and go back to the first episode or you won't really understand

what I'm talking about or live dangerously and start on part three. It's a free country. Do whatever the fuck you want. I am drinking vodka out of a cup with a straw because I'm a fancy lad.

A little flaccid straw. Yeah, it's a silicone straw. It doesn't have a lot of tensile strength. Makes it kind of strange. Does it? Well, like it moves around and flexes when you're trying to drink out of it. It flexes on you? Yeah, like I'm all for saving the environment,

but I feel like we could have a harder plastic and it would probably work better. But anyway. Like limp dick straw. Yeah, it's definitely a limp dick straw. It's like making it kind of difficult. So when we left you last week, the Soviet army was digging into Afghanistan while the Soviet premier,

Leonid Brezhnev, wanted soldiers to withdraw by the end of the first month. The rest of the people in power decided that wasn't a good idea and then said they should stay until the new Afghan government under Babrak karmal could submit its legitimacy uh by 1980 not much had changed other than the soviet military finding itself in combat all

over the country with no idea what the hell they were doing uh because remember they didn't plan on this they still play that whole advisor type role? Yeah, for the most part. I mean, they did not expect to face general combat. They probably expected their Spetsnaz and their elite soldiers to kind of do what our elite soldiers do now, which is kind of hit and run, bring the guerrilla warfare to the guerrillas. Instead, pretty much every unit in Afghanistan was getting ambushed all the time. But none of that mattered, right? They didn't have to win.

They just had to hang on for a few months until Carmel's supporters, which he totally swore that he had, rushed to the government, which would cripple the Mujahideen that were fueled for hatred of Taraki, not Carmel. Now, that is what Carmel told the Soviets. Totally swore that he had? Yeah. The Soviets kind of just took him at his word

that, like, yeah, the Afghan people love me. A total bro. Not to mention, like, remember, he was in exile when the Soviets put him in power, so, like, that should have been the fucking first hint that if he had a lot of support, he wouldn't have been in fucking exile.

He sounds like that kid in high school that swore he had alcohol. He had a girlfriend in Canada or went to a different high school. Yeah. No, dude, I swear. You just, you don't know the school, so you wouldn't have met her. The Soviets seem to take a lot of things at face value when it was told to them by people in the Afghan government

and vice versa. Yeah, they tend to listen to shit that they probably shouldn't do. Yeah, and they're both really fucking guilty of that to an insane degree. Children having power, yeah. So it should come as a surprise to absolutely no one when that support did not show up. Instead, the Mujahideen ranks grew

while the already dwindling support for the government withered away completely. To make matters worse, Carmel was totally unable to govern. In some places where Soviet soldiers went, villagers thought Mohammed Daoud was still in power. Remember, that was like two presidents ago. He had been

killed over two years before. The Afghan people simply did not give a shit. The Afghan people simply did not get a shit i mean the afghan people simply did not give a shit about carmel and also that is true um news does travel very slowly in some of these rural parts of afghanistan which just goes to show how hard it is for a central government any central government in afghanistan to control them um there is numerous tales of u.s soldiers going to remote parts of Afghanistan and the villagers thinking they were Soviets.

Really? Yeah. A lot of it's secondhand, but I mean, yeah, it happened. There's some parts that are just ungovernable for whatever government is there.

It only works if you don't try to fuck with them, which is exactly what they're trying to do. Right. Meanwhile, in Kabul, Soviet soldiers did what Soviet soldiers tend to do, going on looting sprees. Valerie Vestroitin, who is a Soviet captain, claims that neither he nor his unit's political officer were even aware that the Soviet army had a regulation forbidding looting, which it definitely did, and it was not enforced. It was just so widespread, everybody just thought it was okay. Oh, this is just what we do. Yeah.

Even though there was explicit orders not to do it. And they also gave out a pamphlet. It was like how the loyal international socialist soldier helps his Afghan comrades or something to that extent. And it looked almost identical to shit that I got when I went over there. I mean, political stuff aside, they completely didn't put that in there, but like, don't steal from them.

Don't look at the women. Don't get undressed in front of them. Things like that. Like it was, if you put it in English and put it on a PowerPoint, it would look identical to what I looked at. And they just ignored it all.

I would imagine so um troops tore their way through stores that had consumer goods that were completely unavailable in the soviet union like tvs and boom boxes which are pretty fucking rad what yeah uh afghanistan so the afghans got their hand on it through the black market trade through pakistan who got it from the u.s um so just imagine um like all these depressed soviet soldiers just get like rolling down the street listen to music at a ghetto blasters it's pretty fucking awesome um many of the first wave of soldiers in afghanistan uh saw it as a relatively peaceful place the people called the uh the russian shavi, I believe it's pronounced, and they were just too busy scratching out their living from the dusty earth that didn't want to give them crops because of bad land redistribution programs. Remember, they were still in the middle of a famine.

Eventually, officers would visit locals' houses to trade stolen military supplies for food, alcohol, and clothes. Everything's based off of stealing? One of the things that is important here is the Soviet soldiers were not actually paid in the traditional sense. They worked off tips? Well, they had a salary. It was really small because remember, they're conscripts. But the Soviet Union got around that by paying them something something called cheque, which is something of like a company script. Are you familiar with what that is?

So a company script is something that kind of happened in the US during the early Industrial Revolution and during like the coal boom. What it was, it was money given to you by a company that only could be sold or only used in company stores and that's kind of what like checky was it was a script given to them by the soviet government that could only be spent in military stores but the military but it was effectively worthless um and the military stores like the people running them wanted to make money too so they just wouldn't accept it because they knew it was worthless the horses system so they're effectively went unpaid um so they did what so the soviet soldiers who remember are badly undersupplied they don't even have the right boots many of them were deployed without just basic supplies there had a uniform on their back and a weapon for most of most of the time

officers and soldiers came to uh to covet the kebabs and beers for sale afghan stalls outside the new bases and because they had no real afghan currency they took to selling tent cloth soap and anything else that the impoverished locals would buy um because they didn't have money yeah yeah just can't sell the vodka nobody had money yeah also remember drinking was strictly prohibited by enlisted soldiers in the soviet army officers could drink but enlisted could not sure the enlisted found the way oh yeah we always do yeah i actually there's an entire episode uh dedicated that down the line which we will talk about in depth so ready for it um one of the soviets most popular acquisitions was something called shara which which is something I have never seen before. It's an alcoholic

drink distilled from grapes. Kind of like moonshine wine, I guess. Unfortunately, if locals are not willing to trade with their new occupiers, that did not stop the soldiers from simply taking it. Robbing people quickly became the favorite way to obtain goods. Most of the shops were only secured

by a small padlock as they stayed closed at night. Soon entire Soviet units would go on patrol at night just to break in and steal shit there was actually it's just a mission yeah uh and everybody was fine with it except the locals obviously yeah uh the reason for this go beyond uh just unsupervised soldiers doing unsupervised soldiers do soviet soldiers and units did not deploy with many logistical units to support their soldiers, nor the supplies for them to live on. Soviet leaderships did not expect soldiers to be facing any real danger, nor did they expect them to be there very long. So soldiers were left largely on their own as deployments got longer and longer to take care of themselves. Almost as soon as the Soviets put Carmel in power, they began to regret it.

Carmel loved to drink but he's one of the guys that when he drank he insists on pouring out shots for everyone else and getting them to drink with him too soon soviet advisors noticed the president his entire presidential guard was completely trashed all the time they had to replace his bodyguards with guys who didn't drink which is probably pretty fucking hard thing to do and find in the soviet army yeah so they interview you for that they probably just wanted people who weren't down with getting hammered all the time um and they were under strict orders to say so hard to find probably uh in the beginning the soviets were very effective

in fighting the growing mujahideen movement in the early stages of the war though that was because they were fighting people who were armed with at best some bolt action rifles um some of the afghan soldiers who deserted in mass had brought their weapons with them, but they're still very lightly armed and badly trained. So the best case scenario the rebels were looking at were deserting Afghan soldiers who got very, very little training in the first place, even less than the Soviet conscripts who got very, very little training. One of the Soviet advisors noted that most Afghan soldiers could not fire their weapon correctly because they simply weren't training them to do so.

So the best case rebels are still pretty bad. Also, they had a really bad grasp on tactics. For one instance, a guy named Akha Yassin, an ethnic Tajik who ran off to join the rebels after he was expelled from school or refusing to attend political rallies, fought Soviet tank columns with little more than rocks and Molotov cocktails. He talks about one guy who wrapped himself in cloth, doused himself in gasoline, and lit himself on fire before running off to fight a Soviet tank.

No, of course that did not fucking work. The guy got shot. It could have worked. I don't know how. Was he supposed to climb up the tank wall on fire and jump inside? That's the only way that could have worked. That's fucking stupid. They also dug traps and covered themselves with logs in order to disable tanks.

Kind of like tank traps. When fighting in the open turned into a suicide mission, they resorted to sniper attacks. Because of their lack of resources at the time, they began making their own bullets in their houses. A lot of these bullets simply exploded in the guns and blinded people. Oh, God. Yeah. None of that mattered, the caused flourished like i'm willing to bet not a lot of people knew that like hey i bought this baggie full of bullets from this guy down the street well we can go fight the soviets now and no idea is gonna blow up on them but like

they didn't through all of this it simply didn't matter that the ranks of the mujahideen just kept growing at no point did they decline through the entire war. There's probably still the blind dude that's still out there fighting, like, yeah, my AK blew up, but still going at it. Just point me in the right direction, bro. It only happened once. Yeah. What are the chances of it happening again? The Soviets, and by extension, Karmal, did something no other leader in Afghanistan could do. Unite the Afghan people of all ethnicities and political affiliations together under the banner of Islam combined with the healthy dose of fuck that guy. Carmel was fucking up so badly that even other communists began to join the

Islamists to fight the government. There was actually an entire unit of Maoists who existed all the way up until very, very recently who were fighting the government as well so like they were so bad even other communists did a lot in with the islamists who hated communists um they didn't agree that he was trying to change his name to caramel with a c yeah um as the different mujahideen groups considered coordinate uh started coordinating their efforts soviet force began responding to the growing operations against them. In March, Soviet forces

launched their first major operation out of Jalalabad to take control of the rest of Kunar Valley after a major desertion of Afghan soldiers. In other places, the growing rebel forces were annihilated after attempting to conduct operations in large groups, making them very easy to target for Soviet aircraft.

Really? Yeah, they, because a lot, I mean thousands and thousands and thousands of Afghan soldiers were deserting. So they were trying to help the rebels by training them how to fight. And the only way they knew how to fight was conventionally. And admittedly, before the Soviets showed up, the rebels could fight in large formations and not really have to worry about anything because the Afghan Air Force is really bad at its job. So, I mean, they could get hit with a bomb, but it was pretty rare.

Where were they flying? Migs, mostly. Everything they have is from the Soviet Union. Very communist, yes. After getting hosed by gunships enough time, they morph into what everybody kind of knows them as today. Small groups of highly mobile units between 10 and 30 people. The Soviets were completely unprepared

for this. Many of the country's roads were surrounded on both sides by steep cliffs and served snipers very well. Soviet vehicles were even more restricted on the narrow passes, whereas the Mujahideen moved much more freely deep in the countryside and on the well-known mountain passes used to stage most of their attacks. The Mujahideen, who the Soviets had begun

to be called douchman, became notorious for damaging bridges in order to bring long armored columns to a screechingbags, yes. Became notorious for damaging bridges in order to bring long armored columns to a screeching halt and into kill zones that stretch across an entire valley. Fuck.

These well-planned attacks filled Soviet soldiers with fear and many of them began to refuse to leave their bases. Afghans also attacked with acts of sabotage against government buildings, utilities, and fuel lines.

Mujahideen fighters are very courageous, almost to a fault. Muhammad Youssef, who headed the Pakistani Intelligence Agency's Afghan Bureau, who had helped train Afghan rebel commanders and foot soldiers, said he faced difficulties convincing them to state operations stealthily. He wrote that they performed, quote, noise. They preferred noise and excitement with plenty of opportunity for personal glory. One fighter claimed he charged a Russian soldier with an empty rifle and beat him to death with its magazine. Noise and excitement. This actually carries over pretty well to modern day. And I'll continue doing this because unlike every other episode we've ever done, I've been there.

And I've done literally the same job the Soviets are doing in this. There is a well-known book. I think it's called The Horse Soldiers. They made it into a movie, which is called like 12 Strong, which is fucking terrible. Don't watch it. It's not good. The book is good. But there is an incident where a guy was very brightly dressed in like a bright neon blue um robe and it's because like you know the bright colors are

expensive so it lets everybody know that he has money um but he's so he's pimping out there yeah he's wearing bling all right cool and the special forces advisors like hey man you should probably change you stick the fuck out and he was like nope and when they charged the uh taliban positions he ran down the hillside screaming firing his rifle at them while dressed like a goddamn highlighter and he survived it's a power move yeah that's that's big taliban energy right there yeah it is you think he had his wallet kind of open too like he dropped in front of the taliban like oops i bet his wallet had a chain on it yeah a little bit of money spilled out um so in order to stop these small mobile groups the soviets decided to cut the head off their leadership by attacking one of their bases of operation that base of operation was the panjshir valley that valley had been an

open revolt against the afghan government since mid-1979, a revolt that was led by a young man named Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud was an ethnic Sunni Tajik who was born to an upper-class family and whose father was a colonel in the Royal Afghan Army. During his youth, Massoud was a hardcore Maoist, virtually learning Mao's Little Red Book by heart before he went to college in Kabul and found god which honestly sounds like the exact opposite of every other person's college experience he went off to college didn't party learned like the quran by heart and like he's like i don't want to be a communist anymore i want to serve god which is virtually the opposite of every other college student i've ever heard of

i don't know i don't know what his school ranking is on partying. I mean, it was Kabul University, which sounds like a downer, but it was Kabul University. I mean, it's Kabul University and like the pinnacle of the king of Afghanistan. So they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. This is way before shit went to hell. Like he grew up in a peaceful Afghanistan, especially in Kabul, where it was effectively

a very up-and-coming city at the time. Masood fucked. He probably had a chance to party a lot. Oh yeah. Maybe he burnt himself out and that's why he turned to the book. He's like, you know what? I'm done with this life. So through all that, he eventually took part

in a failed Islamic uprising with an organization that was the Muslim Youth Movement. After which, he helped found Jamaat Islami, a more moderate faction opposite of Hekmatar's organization. Since his forces took control of Panjshir in 1979, they had been absolutely wrecking the government and the Soviet shit non-stop. So, one of the key reasons for that is that Panjshir is an incredibly hard place to get to. I've actually been there, back in 2008 during my first trip to afghanistan even after decades on millions probably tens of millions of dollars of working on roads and things um to like extensively rehab their infrastructure it is an incredibly rugged place to get to um no none of our military vehicles could safely traverse the road, so we

had to use pickup trucks. There's rocky outcroppings that hang over every single street and road. No matter where you go, you're surrounded by the high ground. I cannot imagine trying to push into that place with thousands of fighters

trying to kill you. It seems like it would be virtually impossible. It's terrible. And the Panjshir Valley is fucking huge. If you try to corner anybody there, they're just going to move further up the mountains and wait you out. Especially because those trails are like

spider webs. They go in every different direction, go into caves. The only people who know them are people who grew up there, and that's who's fighting in them. You just can't win. a better tactic would have been just well let's just build like i don't know like a fence at the mouth of the panchere valley just don't go in there um so to make matters worse you have to go through something known as the slang pass now the slang pass so the slang pass is something that nightmares are made of if you are claustrophobic. The Selang Pass is a narrow mountain road that snakes its way through the Hindu Kush.

It has steep cliffs on one side that just straight fall hundreds and hundreds of feet. You will die if you fall off this road. I would imagine. And the other side is a sheer cliff face. So like, there's only one way through there and that's forward on this tiny one track road if if a big transport truck came down you had to pull off to the side to make room for it and even then it was fucking sketchy um now the soviets are driving through here in armored vehicles and tanks yeah which is absolutely insane to me.

As you can imagine, anything driving down this road is an incredibly easy target. And that was something that Massoud immediately took advantage of to devastating effect. There's also a tunnel through the slaying area. It was a slaying tunnel. It's a narrow tunnel that wasn't quite big enough for all the Soviet military vehicles,

but it was used nonetheless. It was this or nothing. And to this day, it is one of the only ways to get through the area. Jesus. The sling tunnel would eventually become the scene of one of the largest losses of life through a traffic accident in human history. What?

The details of this are sketchy. Sources vary widely, but locals from the area have told me personally about it. So numbers tend to crawl up when you talk to Afghan sources. Like they didn't kill 50 Soviets. They killed 150. Shit like that. But also the Soviets have never been forthright about their losses.

So take whatever numbers I say throughout this entire thing, and it's probably somewhere in the middle. whatever numbers I say throughout this entire thing, and it's probably somewhere in the middle. But pretty much everybody you talk to adds or takes away from a detail from the last guy. It's like a generationally long game of telephone. So what follows is a kind of aggregated version of the story I've been able to put together. A Soviet convoy was driving through the tunnel

when a fuel tanker exploded. Nobody's really sure how or why it exploded, but some people say it was an accident, while other people say it was a rebel bomb. Could go either way. The Mujahideen have never claimed responsibility for it. Either way, a fuel tank blew up into a cascading wall of flame through the tunnel

like something out of, like, fucking Backdraft. Like, do you remember that shitty movie? Oh, that movie was great. I loved it. The fire roared. It's stupid. That movie was great. You're like Chappie. You can't say shit. Chappie was terrible. Shut your mouth.

So when the Wall of Flames died away, 700 Soviet soldiers were dead, along with another 2,000 Afghan civilians. What? That is not the only problem with the tunnel. So that required a fuel tanker exploding somehow that didn't even need to happen so this tunnel was built by hand effectively through people that didn't quite understand complex engineering um so there was a lack of venting now oh yeah uh So now you can imagine.

A real good fart would just stay. Yeah, if it killed you. Yeah. So something as simple as a traffic jam could turn deadly. Soviet records indicate a different incident where there was a traffic jam that caused a backup for several hours. The buildup of CO2 in the tunnel killed 64 soldiers and another 100 Afghan civilians. Holy shit. Yeah.

Did I mention that this pass and tunnel is the only way to get from Kabul to northern Afghanistan? Really? Because I probably should have. Yeah. Wow. You have to go through this area. Yeah. They needed a Kurt Russell.

What? He was in Backdraft. I'm glad you brought it back. I want to watch the movie now. You know what? Just send Kurt Russell to Massoud so he can get shot with an RPG. That's the better way of backdraft ending.

I fucking hate you. God. Why are we friends? I wish I could hate you to death. But you can't. So Soviet forces caught an ambush, had no way to fight back, forcing them to charge up the cliffs

straight at the Afghans who were shooting at them. Now remember, as I told you before, the Afghans were not at all trained to do this, and their boots couldn't even let them do it if they wanted to. So the Soviets tripped and fell up the mountains, slowly making progress up the cliffs,

while the Afghans simply stopped shooting at them, climbed up a bit higher, and then started shooting at them again. That's awesome. Massoud's forces so thoroughly harassed and ambushed the soviet supply convoys that he caused a military fuel shortage to the entire country whoa then just because he was a bad motherfucker masood began launching attacks on bogram airfield itself jesus i i believe overland on roads without getting blown up, that's at least an hour and a half drive. So that's hell of an attack for him to do.

Yeah. This guy's got big energy, yeah. So I don't really go into talking about how Massoud ended, but I'll... So Massoud ended up being killed by Osama bin Laden the day before September 11th happened. By Osama? Yeah, through a suicide bomber posing as a journalist.

Because Massoud would end up leading the Northern Alliance during the Afghan civil war after the Soviets left. And once the Taliban took everything over, the Northern Alliance led by Massoud was the only thing left standing that could be considered western friendly and they weren't i mean they committed some pretty gross war crimes too but compared to the taliban they're pretty great um and to this day there's statues of them everywhere in northeast afghanistan

he's known as the lion of the pan shir um is an absolutely awesome historical figure pretty cool yeah he he had so i spent a lot of my time in Kapisa Province in northeast Afghanistan, which is pretty far away from Panjshir Valley. But in the city and like the provincial capital,

there is a huge mural of him and like a five-story building from the ground to the top of it of just his giant face. It's really cool. His influence spread that far? That's fucking sweet. He undoubtedly would have been president for life of Afghanistan if Osama Bin Laden

had not killed him, without a doubt. But unfortunately, history didn't play out that way. Yeah, happens. So, once the Soviet offensives into the valley began, Massoud's forces did much of the same thing as they'd done before they simply head back up in the hills the afghans would pull back further into the valley and shoot the soviets from further up as they got closer they would

just do the same thing again by doing this over and over again this afghans manage to tie up entire regiments of soviet soldiers only handful handful of fighters, exhausting the Soviets and bleeding them dry. Fuck. Because it's not like... The Soviets were still trying to fight a conventional war when they didn't quite understand the Afghans did not give a shit about actually controlling the valley.

So they would retreat, ceding large swaths of the valley to the Soviets, tire them out, then start shooting them again, fall back, fire at them again. And the Soviets are like, look, we took the valley and did nothing. tire them out then start shooting them again fall back fire at them again right and the so it's like look we took the valley and did nothing yeah and did absolutely nothing they you lost like 800 people and the masseuse just gonna come back but we did it yeah this caused soviet armor to just start randomly shelling houses and buildings in some cases when they found uh civilians carrying

some loose bullets in their pocket, they shot them for being rebel sympathizers. The Soviets were getting tired and worn out by constant ambushes and demoralized. This may have been because there was no real mission at all. They were dispatched to simply go into the valley and kill rebels. There was no objectives to

take, and Soviet intelligence had no idea where the bulk of Massoud's forces were. They just assumed they would find them eventually if they marched into the valley. They were literally pointed into a direction and told to march. Go that-a-way. And that's a really old-school way of military

thinking. There doesn't need to be any kind of overall mission objective for the lowest soldier to know what they're doing. Like, well, they'll just follow orders. And for the most part, that's true. But it just doesn't work when it comes to counterinsurgency operations. I mean, I'm a firm believer that counterinsurgency operations simply do not work

without committing just so many war crimes. It's disgusting. The Soviets tried that too. But this kind of top heavy old school way of thinking and military thought just does just not work um but it also helped that the soviets had no idea like there was no plan in place to ever fight this kind of war yeah and they never really got better over time is the craziest part they They would just keep doing the same thing, I would imagine. Pretty much.

And it's telling. Do you see that as an issue? Well, that's the problem is Leonid Brezhnev kind of let the Soviet Union fall apart under his watch. He was the second longest serving head of state after Stalin. And under his watch, the Soviet Union just kind of crumbled and fell apart. He allowed total stagnation, cronyism, and corruption that had never been seen before. So most of the Soviet leadership weren't good at their jobs when it came to being a general. They were just friends of Brezhnev. So there was no forward thinking, and it was so cutthroat with loyalties and things like that.

If you're like, hey, this isn't fucking working, you need to think of something else, you'd be fired. Dissension was simply not tolerated. If there was any kind of evolution of military tactics, they happened really, really, really, really small units. Didn't spread much past that. And it was mostly just the Spetsnaz or the airborne units. That was it.

Yeah. Um, when it came to mechanized infantry, which were, uh, the bulk of the, the backbone of the Soviet fighting force drive up and down the road, see what happens.

And that's pretty much how it went for almost 10 years. Fuck. Yeah. Um, and you know, I just kind of talked about this, but even the smallest tactical decision had to be made at headquarters. There's no real coordination between any units.

The fighting was mostly defensive and on the enemy's initiative. So you have to be really good at defensive warfare, but you also have to be proactive. You have to try to outthink your enemy, and that never really seemed to happen. It almost sounds like they were never on the attack. Very rarely.

The very few offensives that worked happened towards the end of the war and did very little, which we'll talk about a little bit later. The real damage that the Soviets caused was through sheer overwhelming air power and carpet bombing and their special forces units,

which there was obviously not enough of them. The Spetsnaz and airborne units did what you could definitely see like MACSOG doing in Vietnam, with just as many war crimes, if not more. The small units of the Soviet Army were decent um anything past that were were outright garbage um and that's because the soviets had an incredibly top-heavy decision making process um the soviet advantage of overwhelming air power provided little recognizable help to soldiers only aware of their immediate surroundings of which all they could see was

rocks and people shooting at them simply locating the enemy was almost impossible they were hiding Oh, fuck. from afar and snipers aimed lethally for the head or the feet, making wounded soldiers burdens for their units. One young lieutenant named Vladimir Polyakov put it, by the time the Soviet forces left the valley, the only thing they managed to do was march from one end of the Panjshir Valley to the other. And it is interesting to point out that Lieutenant Polyakov took part in Storm

333 and was an absolute believer in the mission. And by this point, he was absolutely done with it. Really? They're like, nobody in the fucking leadership knows what the fuck. No, it's not.

Numbers are hard to come by, but between September, 1980 and September, 1981, the four total offenses into the Panjshir Valley, the Soviets accomplished absolutely nothing while suffering thousands of casualties for this, for the Soviets,

for their part, say they only suffered a hundred wounded, but there's no way that's true. The Soviets, for their part, say they only suffered 100 wounded, but there's no way that's true. 100 wounded and what did you say? 1,000, 2,000 casualties? Yeah, well, I mean, so if you go by, and the book Zinky Boys is a really good book where it's a funny nickname.

I'm sorry, Zinky. So the nickname Zinky Boys. Yeah, please explain that one. It comes to the fact that when Soviets died, the soldiers died, they would be thrown into a zinc coffin. And because they had plentiful amounts of zinc, it would be welded shut and shipped home. So Zinky Boys. It's depressing. Yeah, it is.

Thanks. Yeah. But the book Zinky Boys gives a lot of firsthand accounts. And lieutenants and captains are like, I lost an entire platoon. I lost an entire company. But they never mention any official Soviet letters. And there's no reason that a captain in the Soviet army, of all things, is going to admit losing his entire command unless it actually fucking happened.

Right. Jesus. Yeah. I honestly, my favorite types of books are firsthand account types of books. Zinky boys is one of the few I have found from this war. There's a few other ones, but this one is like completely uncensored.

A lot of these guys, and this came out like right as the fucking war ended. So a lot of them got in a lot of trouble. Fuck. That's like right as the fucking war ended so a lot of them got in a lot of trouble fuck that's actually i'm gonna look this up um i'm not gonna say you can pirate it online through the pdf if you google search zinky boys pdf but you can pirate it if you google search zinky boys pdf it's really good okay i'll go ahead and buy it yeah so if i have not made this clear enough there's no number ever published by the soviet authorities and later the russian Okay, I'll go ahead and buy it. is a lie. Number of dead and wounded suffered under his command to make it higher. I can, however, see why the Soviet leadership would make it lower.

And it should be noticed that these things aren't like... So one of the more enduring symbols of the Vietnam War is people watching the news to see if their family died or if their brother or son, whoever died. That didn't happen in the Soviet Union. Your family was not died. Right. Or if their brother or son, whoever died. That didn't happen in the Soviet Union. Your family was not told. Yeah. Very rarely would you see a letter. Even rarer than that, you would just find a body shipped to you through the mail in

a sink coffin. Just right in front of the mailbox? Just drop it off in front of your house. Yeah. With no explanation of how you died. Just welded shut. Fuck. Your kid is just dead.

And because they were welded shut, you weren't sure it was actually your kid. Is this the wrong family? If you remember when I told you about mobilization, they had terrible records of their conscripts. And sometimes I get my neighbor's mail. So I'd hate to have a dead body in front of my house. And the conscription was so thorough

through the Soviet Union. So the vast majority of the Soviet dead body in front of my house. And the conscription was so thorough through the Soviet Union. I don't. So the vast majority of the Soviet soldiers who are fighting were not Russian. That needs to be explained. Whether that be for nefarious purposes or not, most of the people who died per percentage overwhelmingly from the satellite republics. per percentage, overwhelmingly from the satellite republics. They may have had Russian first names, which is not uncommon due to Russification,

but per population, a lot of them came from much smaller countries in the Soviet republics than Russia. So people in smaller villages and smaller republics were seeing a lot more of the zinc boxes and wounded soldiers show up with very little explanation of why. I wonder if the families knew what it was when it hit their lawn.

Oh, everybody knew what the zinc boxes were. Everybody knew. I didn't know if they thought, oh, cool. Coffee table or something. No, they definitely knew. It did not take long for people to start understanding when a cargo truck showed up and kicked the box out in your front yard, what definitely knew. It did not take long for people to start understanding when a cargo truck showed up and kicked the box out in your front yard, what that meant.

Anyway, this would be far from the only attempts into the Panjshir Valley. However, eventually the Soviet forces gained a foothold in the Ruka, Basrak, and Anvia villages. Unfortunately, that meant nothing. I imagine that foothold was on some sand. It didn't matter. Slip! That's a common misconception

about northeast Afghanistan. Northern Afghanistan as a whole, it's actually quite lush. Once you go further south, you see the deserts and the dirt and stuff like that, but northern Afghanistan is very heavily forested, which obviously does not play into an attacker's benefit either

because then they can just hide behind trees and shit. Like I talked about before, the Soviets really believed in conventional warfare. So like, ha-ha, we took territory. But it just made them an easier target because now they were in the valley.

Their bases gave them control of the valley floor while Massoud's forces controlled everything else. The pressure on the Soviets was so fierce, eventually an entire brigade of Afghan soldiers simply ran off and joined Massoud. What?

Yep. Holy shit. That's kind of a curveball. At the same time, the Mujahideen struck back the following month, when a battalion of the 201st Motor Rifle Division made its way southeast, and they ran into a well-laid ambush. After Mujahideen's killed off their officers and radio men, the disorganized unit could not single for help nor coordinated defense. They stayed in their armored personnel carriers

firing weapons till their ammunition ran out. The guerrillas then overwhelmed them, destroying the entire battalion, leaving only a few survivors. Oh, God. I mean, that is horrifying. That's terrifying. I mean, it was not uncommon for Taliban fighters to attempt virtually the same thing, targeting the first and last vehicles, which is very, very common. And it's very, very common

because they developed it against the Soviets. But that just goes to show you how terrible the leadership was within the soviet union uh the soviets army where if like it did not so there were sergeants and there's corporals and there's warrant officers the warrant officer is much much different than what you think of as warrant officers nowadays in our military um but the sergeants and the corporals were only really in charge of like physical discipline if any like they weren't non-commissioned officers in the traditional sense they had no small leadership abilities so if you're a lieutenant or captain or whoever died nobody had any idea what to do no like it wasn't like a down train thing like well if the lieutenant dies the sergeant's

in charge and this is what he has to do that simply did not happen in the army so like when they had no orders they would simply sit down and die or run that was it jesus and this happens so often the soviet military um did a complete refurbishment of its warrant officer corps to be more like we would think of a modern day non-commissioned officer which is really weird but that's how they did it they realized the system wasn't working and it didn't work then either but it was a it was an improvement when you start at the ground floor anything is an improvement but that happened a lot um this the soviets did not want to get out of their vehicles which i don't blame them yeah frustrated soviet soldiers did what almost every other soldier trapped in

Nova guerrilla war has done. Unleash their anger and frustration on the civilian population. Soon, instead of clearing houses and looking for enemy fighters, they would just chuck hand grenades in and fire machine guns through the windows. One paratrooper's testimony about fighting in the Kunar Valley describes a platoon's reaction to shots fired from the direction of a village building in which

civilians were hiding. The Soviets blew up the entire structure with grenades and plastic explosives, after which Afghans began fleeing a different direction. The crowd included elderly women, men, and children, as well as a few rebel fighters. Like, we're not saying that there was no fighters

there, but still, human shields. The soldiers began slaughtering the Afghans saying quote among those running out the door was an old man who tried to escape a soldier recalled my friend shot at his feet and the old man jumped in fear and ran and to hide behind a bush my friend aimed directly at the bush and fired around after which just the legs slid into view under the bush he was supposed to be hiding my friend told me laughing another time the soldiers captured a small boy who had shot them with an old musket, then brought the prisoner to a company commander. Quote,

he split the boy's skull in half with his rifle, killed the boy with one blow without even getting up from his place. Jesus. And this is definitely not only something that happened in this one unit. Yeah. According to a Mujahideen commander named Mohammed Asif, a

Soviet Union left behind two dead soldiers during the same battle in the Kunar Valley. When a detachment returned to collect the bodies, the Afghans ambushed them from higher ground, killing seven more. The Russians were retaliated by massacring livestock and villagers. Mujahideen estimates put the number of dead at 1,800

civilians killed in just 12 days. That is like some Reinhard Heinrich type anti-partisan shit. It's awful. Is this the depressing episode of this? No. Oh, okay, cool. Thanks.

So it gets worse. Wait. It gets worse. Not only is that the tagline of our show, that's the tagline of all of Russian history. It really is. God only is that the tagline of our show, that's the tagline of all of Russian history. It really is. God. Yeah, silicone sock. Yeah.

So, you remember how the Afghan Druze packed their invasion force with Muslims from the Central Asian Soviet Republics thinking it was a good idea. Not saying that it was not a good idea. It turned out to be bad as far as Soviet leadership is concerned. That's not surprising. So, one of the things that is important with Central Asia

is their cultures are mostly tribal and ethnically based, and they go back thousands of years. The advent of these borders, dividing them into republics, is rather new. So many of the same people who are in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and all the other republics are also in Afghanistan. Those people are large parts of Afghanistan. The problem was the Afghan population saw those groups, even though they were from a Soviet republic and not Afghanistan, as traitors.

republic and not afghanistan uh as like traitors so they vented their anger on those ethnic groups who lived in afghanistan um they just like slaughtered wholesale by members of the uh the mujahideen even though like masood was an ethnic tajik yeah he didn't do that um he was a huge fan of russians but he i, it doesn't require a lot of thinking to think those are different. And some of those, those Soviet soldiers who the Soviet government thought like, oh, we have to pull these guys back because they might join the Muslims. They might join the Mujahideen to fight us. That did happen on a few occasions.

They went over to the other side. Very, very few. Some of them are still in afghanistan today who we will talk about in the later episode i hope so god do we have anything good coming out of this by any chance we mean good good and bad is relative in this podcast exactly that's why i want something like this is really depressing so far um depends i'm a pretty big fan of masood so i like this episode yeah i'm not i'm not i like actually uh i bought so there's um i lived in the provincial headquarters uh which is like a

police base in uh in um bagram that like the the city not the the airfield um and they had a whole bunch of masood stuff out and it was really in vogue to wear the same hat as masseud yeah like it was in the stuff like if you if you were considered a soldier whether you're an at like you wore a masseud hat and uh like what is a masseud hat i don't know it's like a trucker hat with his patch on it or something no uh it's kind of hard to explain i have to show you a picture but uh i don't know what it's actually called um but i definitely bought one for like 10 bucks did you wear it oh fuck yeah it's comfortable yeah and it was really warm for when it got cold but um yeah like uh all the afghan generals wore them the policemen wore them like fuck yeah this thing's good there's got to be a point behind them yeah it's really comfortable i'll consider it kind of looks like an afghan beret but not dumb

because i hate berets. Me too. So to make matters worse, the rest of the Soviet army made out of Slavs, Armenians, and various other Eastern European groups began to deeply distrust their Asian Muslim comrades who were, again, Soviet citizens. So the Soviets pulled all of the reserve units out, leaving virtually no speakers of any of the local language and country. Get fucked. You thought it was hard now? Just wait. While all of this was happening, the Afghan army that the Soviet Union was trying to simply prop up

began to rapidly disintegrate. When the Soviets... What? I assume, did they go to the other side? Because I think I would've. Some did. Some decided they wanted nothing to do with this war and went home. But the simple fact remains they were no longer in the Soviet Army, or no longer in the PDPA Army. Yeah.

When the Soviets showed up, the Afghan army was around 100,000 men on paper, give or take. They could track down about 100,000 people. Paper's completely different. Within six months, how many people do you think they have left? Out of 100,000. 100,000? Okay, so six months. I'm going to go with how our show standard kind of goes.

Go with the kind of short amount. I'm going to go with about 30,000, 20,000. You're actually exactly correct. That's 30,000. In six months, they lost over half of their military. Yeah. That's like Luigi Cadorna bad. Yeah.

Luigi's up there going, this is the shit. But at least Cadorna lost them all in battle. The Afghan army lost, I'm going to say 90% of their soldiers without them ever firing a shot. As soon as their lieutenant or sergeant wasn't around, the fucking soldiers beat feet and got the fuck out of there. Especially if they weren't from the capital, the government had no way to track them back down.

What? There's no social security numbers. There's no real address system. There wasn't then, there isn't now. They just had secret handshakes that they gave to each other. And it'd be really easy to change your name. Most Afghans only go by one name. Really? Yeah, so it's really easy to each other. And it would be really easy to change your name. Most Afghans only go by one name.

Really? Yeah, so it's really easy to just vanish. Okay. That's just... I can't get my whole mind around that because I'm obviously used to... Right, right. I mean, traditionally,

they'll have their first name, which they go by, and they'll have a last name, but it's... Is there anything on paper saying that this is who they are? Ever? People have tried multiple times to do that. So,

uh, one of the, I'll close with this. One of the things that they, like I said, they had a hundred thousand people on paper. They probably didn't. Uh,

those are called phantom soldiers. Um, this, we ran into this issue. United States ran this issue where um corruption is so endemic in the afghan government in the afghan military that um people will sign up and then vanish or like they'll sign up under the agreement they'll give their commander half their money um and then they'll vanish or people will just sign up people that simply don't exist

because there's no identification system. So pay had nothing to do with the name. It only had to do with physically if you were there? You had to physically be there sometimes. Okay. And they're still doing this today, though it has gotten slightly better. But outside of Kabul,

because like I've pointed out probably a dozen times now, it's really the only thing the government ever controlled. So any kind of reform when it came to that did not really leave the Capitol. And that's why a lot of those, I guess you can call them memes. It's not really a meme. You see shared on Facebook and sometimes Twitter,

like, see, this is what the Afghanistan looked like before the Taliban. It's not true. Like, you see women walking uncovered, wearing short-sleeved shirts and jeans and stuff like that. That was only Kabul, and it was under the communists. But it didn't stay that way for long. Yeah, that's a bad meme. I don't know.

It's mostly based on hating Islam. Yeah. But yeah, it's a bad meme. I don't know. It's mostly based on hating Islam. But yeah, it's xenophobic. Once you point out that like, well, that's what Afghanistan achieved under communism, you really don't like that. And also Afghanistan... The truth is really... The truth is somewhere in the middle

where a lot was accomplished in the city of Kabul under varying communist governments, but never really good stuff. But yeah, all the reforms that tried to force Afghan society, kind of like, um, uh, how he had a picture of Stalin on his desk because he thought he wanted to be

Stalin by ripping Afghanistan into the 20th century through violence. And that was what he was trying to do and failing. so with that, that's where we'll leave you for this week. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. It gets worse, too. I can assure you it gets worse, but maybe not in the ways you would expect. Oh, you're throwing me a curveball.

This whole thing's curveballs, baby. So rate and review us on iTunes. Thank you so much. I've noticed we have like damn near 100 of those, which is awesome. Thank you so much. We've met our Patreon goal, which is outstanding.

Yeah, I don't know what we did to do that. I don't either. But if you think what we do is worth a dollar, throw us a dollar. You'll get access to one bonus episode a month. Steven Seagal keeps looking at us. It's terrifying. do is worth a dollar throw us a dollar you'll get access to one bonus episode a month steven sigal keeps looking at us we need we are fine we owe him money or he'll do bad things to our friends and family um five dollars and up we'll get hopefully one bonus episode a week um we're

still working on the logistics of that um you need shirts to wear out in public oh yeah make it one of ours uh if you like military buy some of our used shirts in the from the room because we get pretty sweaty in here from time to time no we'll start selling no we will not do that um we won't do that dm joe please don't uh about some sweaty shirts if you like military sci-fi my book citizen of earth is out and we will see you next week later