Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 59 - Soviet Afghan War 5: The Rise of Najibullah

Episode Date: July 15, 2019

Babrak Karmal is a failure and the Soviets know he has to be replaced if they are ever going to get a functioning Afghan government. Enter Muhammed Najibullah, a mass murdering psychopath. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy a shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Buy Joe's new book Citizen of Earth: https://www.amazon.com/Citizen-Earth-Galaxy-Joseph-Kassabian/dp/1949645347/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2UP4API8XF65N&keywords=citizen+of+earth+joseph+kassabian&qid=1563190222&s=gateway&sprefix=citizen+of+earth%2Caps%2C198&sr=8-1

Afghan farmers watering their crops came upon this, an anti-tank mine buried for decades. Landmines remain an everyday threat, especially in southern Afghanistan, where they kill or injure nearly 90 people a month. A tractor hit this mine, but it didn't detonate. That's the deminer's job now. About two kilometers up the road, they're clearing mines from the village of Pesab. To do it as quickly as possible, machines till the earth, then deminers check the soil for explosives. This was once a front line. Almost anywhere fighters have been, there could be mines too.

They plant it during fighting. So in different villages, in different houses, when conflict ends, people return back to their villages. It's inside their houses, orchards, streets, and even... Hello, and welcome to yet another episode

You psyched me out. Of the Dumpcast. Yeah, so I did a fake intro before this. To see if Nick was going to do anything stupid. And he didn't. You threw me off my game. And then I threw him off his game. I gotta go.

We gotta redo this whole thing so I can scream swear words into the mic. Yeah. We gotta sink our shit. How have you been? So this is like the longest period we have not spent in this room together in a week in the last week i have spent the last week in iceland and i just got off the plane fucking 30 minutes ago yeah and i am so goddamn jet lagged how's your stomach feel i my stomach is fine. My brain is not sure what country I'm in.

We sleep the same way on airplanes. So we end up at the end of the flight having a lot of gas in our bellies. I just doubled over the in-flight tray table. Yeah. And after your burrito. Yeah. It's not that that's bothering me. It's the fact I have not seen the sunset in a week.

Oh, okay. That has been fucking with me real hard. But I've been self-medicating with copious amounts of Brennaven, which has helped me sleep. As it should. I am just afraid the accumulative hangover is going to kill me.

Speaking of hangovers, we're on Soviet-Afghan War Part 5. Bringing it home. Yeah. We're on the homestretch. Yeah. We are. It is true. We're on Part 5 of what is going to be at least

a seven-part series. Go back and listen to Part 1 or live dangerously. Start part five and not understand any of what I am talking about. That's fine too. It is a free country unless you lived in Afghanistan in 1985 or in Afghanistan right now. Sorry about that.

So when we left, when you, we left you last time, it was with the story of Operation Cyclone and its aftermath. So you have already kind of heard us talk about how by late 1985, the Soviets wanted to get the fuck out of Afghanistan. As I would, yes. Yeah, as we still do. It is becoming clearer and clearer by the day that the Afghan government, still being led by Bobrock Karmal Carmel was an absolute failure and the Afghan military was not going to

stand on its own. Uh, there'd be no greater proof of how bad things were getting them. The psychological breakdown of Carmel himself, who it turned out had lost his motherfucking mind. Just out of nowhere. It was definitely gradual. Like he didn't seem like someone who could withstand the pressures of,

uh, of leading Afghanistan. I mean, maybe even in a normal period of Afghan, Afghan history, but like definitely not during like, what is it? A proxy civil war.

Yeah. Uh, and he has just been flying off the handles. Um, now remember Carmel had come to power because of the murder of his predecessor. So he feared assassination on every corner. And rightfully so. Yeah, I would too.

I mean, he's working for the people who killed his old buddy. I'd eat dinner against the wall. Yeah. When he went out in public, he became such a neurotic mess that in order for him to function in any capacity, he had to be high or drunk. Yes. He smoked a ton of opium and weed and drank a fuckload of vodka. Eventually, his bodyguards,

who were all KGB agents, just put him under effective house arrest as the Soviet leadership feared that whenever he left, he would do something stupid while out in town crazy drunk and high and set their mission back even further. Carmel was also very afraid of being poisoned,

not just through his food, but just like poison in general, like getting some splashed on you. Or I don't mean, also kind of rightfully so, again, the Soviets have a very, very illustrious record of poisoning people.

Yeah. God, I will not put on my clothes today. Yeah. They're poisoned. So you say that, but he fixed his fear of poisoning by almost never wearing the same pair of

pants and shirt twice. Also, he had a rotating team of janitors working around the clock. As it should be through his palace scrubbing every inch at all times to make sure it's spotless. This included the grass and the trees.

Clean freak. He had someone scrubbing trees and grass. That's awesome. Yes. I mean, imagine like honey, I got a brand new job. Really? What is it? I'm gonna buff the grass at the presidential palace. Fuck.

Why do they have grass? Grass is so shit. I hate grass. Sorry. Imagine being the guy that has a well-kept lawn in Kabul. That was probably him. Maybe he got hired for a reason. Definitely. Yeah. So while the KGB is pretty certain Carmel's communications

with the Soviet leadership back in Moscow were secure, somehow the CIA got wind of the fact that the Afghan president was a little more than alcoholic palace hermit and began to spread this information around. The Soviets tried to head this off

by force. What the fuck? That's all international relations is This is a whole bunch of mean girls. Except people get poisoned in nukes. The Soviets tried to head all this off by forcing Carmel to go out and actually meet people for the first

time in his whole presidency. Now remember he kind of came in under a windfall and he didn't really go out much because also he wasn't really leading the country. i mean the soviets were in effect afghanistan at this point really only just a face yeah it's exactly what it was i mean i mean remember when he took over he was in power for some time before people even knew he was in power uh so pretty much as soon as carmel left palace grounds to do meet and greets

and village he was met with a rash of assassination attempts. Oh, fuck. This included someone trying to kill him with a homemade hand grenade and a cook attempting to poison his food with cyanide that he had smuggled into the presidential palace by concealing it in his asshole. Yes. Yes, you got a keister. Keister. Gotta use that prison

pocket. Now, as you can imagine, this only accelerated the Soviets' desperation to find a way out of the war. Because clearly their pet project was not working out. They decided if the government can't win, neither can its army, they would just have to win the goddamn war on their own.

If you've been following us thus far, you know this meant that things just got way, way worse for the Afghan people. The Soviets began to get so desperate for any battlefield victory, they began bribing regional Mujahideen commanders into ceasefires.

Now, you can imagine how- What did they bribe them with? Because they didn't have money. Now, here's the funny part, is the Russian ruble was largely useless to them because they were buying most of their weapons in Pakistan from the Pakistani ISI or American proxies. Pakistani ISI didn't want rubles.

They didn't want Afghani. They wanted U.S. dollars. So you had the Soviet Union using the U.S. dollar to bribe U.S.-backed militias to stop fighting them so they could go across the border and buy more guns from the United States. Here's money to kill us. This is all like if you've ever watched

Philadelphia and you have Charlie Kelly with the string matrix on the wall, that is this situation. But it's all just dumb. God, I love that show. And it's actually something the Soviets would continue to do on a rotating basis throughout the war.

Hey, whatever makes you feel better. It's like if they were getting fucked up real bad in one region, like, just throw money at that asshole until he leaves us alone. And it worked, kind of. I mean, the Mujahideen weren't stupid. They knew that this game wasn't going to last forever.

And people were already thinking of the end game. Like, who's going to be in charge of this like someone's have to govern this mess so if you give me you know two hundred thousand dollars or however much it was and i get to take a knee and sit out for the next couple months of fighting that means i get to build up my strength not take any casualties while all these other fuck faces keep fighting the soviets and the government so i come out on top, both richer and unrested. Power move. The Soviets knew this too,

but they just didn't have a better option. They said, fuck it. I don't give a shit. Now, with the introduction of the Sting around to the battlefield, the Soviets began to operate at a much higher altitude. Now, since it's much harder to hit targets from higher up, they started carpet bombing people.

Much like American tactics during Operation Rolling Thunder during Vietnam or the strategic bombing of World War II. They were just targeting vast swaths of area. Not a good thing. Bombs, however, were not the only thing the Soviets were dropping on the Afghan people and countryside. They also dropped millions upon millions of landmines from canisters

that, like, so they had tons of landmines loaded into canisters. Kind of like a cluster bomb. Yeah. And then they drop it, and then just hundreds of landmines would come out per bomb. Fucking nuts. And these would spread out across the countryside as an area denial

weapon. Now, kind of like the strategic Hamlet program the u.s would use in vietnam or did use in vietnam at this point um they wanted to funnel people into population centers because that was where the soviets were in control they did this by just saying everybody in the countryside is free game so they're going to sew landmines into your fields they're going to landmine your villages they're going to landmineines into your fields. Oh, okay. They're going to landmine your villages. They're going to landmine your roads, everything. And I have walked through several of these landmines,

and they're still everywhere. I think every year, somewhere north of 500 to 1,000 Afghans are still wounded by Soviet landmines. It's fucking atrocious. I mean, that's one of the reasons why the US and Russia, and then the Soviet Union, were not signatories to a weapons control agreement on landmines. Because people are like, well, fuck.

We're understanding that people are still going to go to war, but we need to make sure that we only harm soldiers, not civilians. And landmines will just harm anybody. Yeah. But we're still all about that. So whoopsie daisy. Yeah. So they dropped landmines indiscriminately. They would later drop soldiers off

from those same minefields they created because they didn't even bother to track them. Smart. Yeah. Like to this day, the most accurate understanding of where Soviet landmines are are from the locals.

And they do this through painted red rocks. So they'll paint one side white and one side red, and they'll point the red towards the area where they know landmines are, which generally means they have like a family member will go lose a leg out in that field. Nobody has any like detailed, accurate, overarching maps of Afghanistan

or where these minefields are because the Soviets just didn't give a fuck to track them. Right. Fuck. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this goes back to their tactic of they couldn't control the rural areas,

and they certainly could not. They would simply kill everybody in them or make them totally unusable, unlivable. Many of these landmines were standard fare, but one model in particular ended up being much more nefarious. The PFM Model 1, or the Anti-Infantry High Explosive Mine, which was dropped in the hundreds of thousands

would end up in killing and maiming mostly children. Why was that? Because it looked like a butterfly and would detonate as soon as somebody touched it with as little as 11 pounds of force. It was even brightly colored. A butterfly? Yeah.

So if you look at it fast enough, it does kind of look like a toy, maybe like a butterfly. It has wings on both sides and they're kind of arched upwards and it's about the size of the palm of your hand. I've found several of these. And also, like i said it

only is triggered by 11 pounds of force what else would be hitting with 11 if i step on something away 230 pounds i mean i'm causing quite a bit of force now a vehicle runs over something it's hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pounds of force a child picks up something it's about 11 pounds um now there's something of an urban legend that this mine that the Soviets deployed was somehow specifically designed to target children. I am not saying that. There's no proof of this.

We try on this show to not veer off into wild accusory statements most of the time. I cannot say that the Soviets specifically designated a child landmine. Who said that? It's pretty widely understood that it was used to target civilians, mostly children and women, because fighters would not be dumb enough to fuck with this, generally speaking.

Like, that looks like a mine, because they're dealing with landmines all the time. Yeah. generally speaking, like that looks like a mine because they're dealing with landmines all the time. It was an area denial weapon. If I'm going to use a military term, it was a weapon of terror. If I'm going to use a logical term like most landmines are.

Yeah. But yeah, obviously I have no proof. Nobody has any proof that the Soviets designed a child based landmine. But again, far fetched to be honest to be honest no no it does not um it would hardly be the least fucked up thing that any military has ever done or the most fucked up thing any military has ever done it is hard to see what other use a small brightly colored toy looking landmine that went off a significantly less force than a grown man could have in any other situation that is my

historical opinion call me stupid I don't you probably do anyway that's fine I welcome it that's fine if somebody can prove what other tactical usage that this would have I welcome it I've corrected myself before on bad takes I've had

in the past but I'm definitely not the only person that has this understanding. That isn't to say, however, the Soviets did not specifically target Afghan children, because they did. The Soviets dropped a large amount of chemical weapons on villages, more specifically into water supplies to force civilians from rural villages, their goal being, of course, to strip the Mujahideen of their support base. And that they succeeded. Millions of Afghans fled Soviet atrocities into refugee camps inside Pakistan. So many, actually,

Afghanistan's population is not large. They would lose over, around one half of the entire Afghan population through deaths from the war, deaths through malnutrition, deaths through the spread of disease from the war and displacement. Millions died,

but several millions more ran into incredibly over-cramped displacement camps in the Pakistani border. From those camps, the Mujahideen would just have a never-ending supply of soldiers. That's how counterinsurgency works. So, once inside those camps, most military aged males would end up taking up arms

and marching right back over the border to fight them. This feedback loop in their own tactics led directly to the disillusionment of the Soviet ground forces. Now, this is going to sound really pie-in-the-sky and idealistic of me when I point this out,

but it is noted in many, many soldiers' letters and firsthand accounts that the vast majority of Soviets did believe in the mission when they were deployed to it. Why wouldn't they? They did not live in a situation where they had any other dissenting opinions. People need to remember this.

They were being told by their government and by the media around them, the state-controlled media, that they were going to help Afghans. The Afghans wanted their help. And they're going to be good internationalist soldiers and serve the communist cause.

It was like a huge slap in the face when they showed up like holy fuck nobody wants us here yeah um and it had to have been i mean because like you know when i deployed even the first time i'm like fuck the afghans don't want me there i knew that it was everywhere i could pull it up on google i could watch the news i could do whatever yeah you had a whole cell phone. Yeah. At the time, I mean, the Soviets didn't have any, I mean, Glasnost and Perestroika hadn't happened yet.

There was no dissenting opinions whatsoever. And if they did exist, they certainly did not get put out in the press. So the soldiers had no reason to not believe their government until they got there and they realized, holy fuck, everybody hates me. So, I mean, and as their own tactics feed into this, like the people get rapidly disillusioned really, really fast. And this ends up being even worse off because remember,

we've pointed out before, the Soviets aren't doing three month, six month or one year tours like American soldiers did. They were doing their entire conscription period in Afghanistan for a lot of people. It wasn't everybody, but a lot of people spent their entire conscription period in Afghanistan for a lot of people. It wasn't everybody, but a lot of people spent their entire time in the Soviet Army at war. You can see how it can be pretty disillusioning. Yeah, it sucks.

When such a large body of people become disillusioned, that makes the whole mission impossible. An already impossible mission, more impossible if that's even possible. Where'd you spend your first contract? Afghanistan. Fuck. Yeah, and it should surprise nobody that less than.5 of all Soviet conscripts re-enlisted. Their retention rate wasn't so good.

No, but also they didn't have to worry about it. I'd imagine. Yeah. Yeah. So years of fighting had taught the Mujahideen new tactics. They would hit them quick, melt back into the mountains. What we all know now is classic

guerrilla warfare. Remember, this is as new to them as it was to the U.S. and Vietnam. And much like it did to the U.S. and Vietnam, this blurred the lines of who's a fighter and who's a civilian. Eventually, any attempts by Soviet soldiers to tell the difference would stop. If a Soviet convoy was ambushed near a village or what they call a civilian. Eventually, any attempts by Soviet soldiers to tell the difference would stop.

If a Soviet convoy was ambushed near a village or what they call a kishlak, the soldiers would either go over to the village and just start shooting people or level it with an airstrike. Soon, they would cross the line from indiscriminate violence into cold-blooded murder. This is from the book

Zinky Boys, which I have quoted multiple times. Yeah. I'm still interested in getting that book sounds great you can find it for free online through PDF I remember that according to the book it said they killed my friend later when I saw a group of them laughing or smiling I shot them

I shot up an Afghan wedding and I got happy when I saw the bride and groom dead I'm not sorry for them. These war crimes are something that badly alienated the Soviet army from their Afghan counterparts because remember they're working with hundreds

of thousands of Afghan soldiers. Because at first they were playing the security role. Yeah and while hypothetically the two were supposed to be working together what really happened was the Soviet commanders thought them to be terrible soldiers and would actually do what i consider kind of nuts and that is put the afghans behind them now i worked with afghan soldiers that were in the afghan police they still have their problems we'd put them up front because that encourages them to not run away because we

would be behind them so we thought it a little bit differently. And I guess rightfully so. If they were going to run away, fuck it, let them run away. We won't have to worry about them anymore. Right. Whatever. So an Afghan army district commander named Yar Mohammed remembered that the Soviets were forcing his unit

to take part in reprisal attacks against a nearby village after Mujahideen raids or ambushes against Soviet forces. The brutality of these attacks horrified and made many of his soldiers switch sides. He also recounts how horrible and xenophobic the Soviets were to his soldiers. The mistreatment was so common that it was just a fact of life. There are countless examples of Soviets stripping heavy weapons

away from their Afghan allies because they distrusted or feared they would just give them to the Mujahideen. You can't blame them for switching sides. No, not at all. Holy shit. For all the faults of the Mujahideen, and there are countless, like the Soviets

were not good allies. And I could say like... They're pieces of shit. No, they're not good. I mean, the Soviets are so racist to one another, I can't imagine how bad they were to the Afghans. And remember, a lot of the same ethnic groups were in both armies.

And they still were racist against them. Yeah, it's insane. It's like... I would imagine this, because I see this as kind of funny. I'd imagine a Soviet going toghanistan getting this nice tan and then some other soviets coming and going like look at you brown motherfucker he's like no no i'm tan dude i'm one of you yeah but still just just because different and it's a lot of it's bread it's self-petuating. And because like in their lead up to the training,

it's like part of the training is like the Afghans are useless. You have to do this. Really? Yeah. And that was part of my training too. So like I can see. Yeah. Yeah.

And so like you, you're, you don't start off like, you know, I would, I would imagine that the, this, the Afghans are hoping,

Oh fuck a new Soviet unions here. Well, we get to start off, a new Soviet Union's here. Well, we got to start off with a fresh slate. Not really. No. And there was plenty of flaws in the Afghan army at the time, but they did get better eventually, but the Soviets never trusted them at all. Now, this fear and distrust that the Soviets had towards the Afghans, the Soviet government was doing much of that to their own soldiers, which is kind of weirdly hilarious.

So we talked a little bit before about Cheki. Yes, yes. The company's script, they effectively were not paying their soldiers. I kind of wish I just had Cheki, just to have. I would love to get my hands on some, but I couldn't even find a picture of it. Really?

Yeah. I think it was literally just scraps of paper. So they did that because they didn't trust their soldiers. Also because they didn't want to pay them because they didn't trust like they were just free things to be used. So the soldiers ended up being penniless. Good thing they had checky. Yeah. That nobody would accept.

Now this had the side effect of, now the soldiers are poor, they're going to go out and get things. Where are they going to get them from? They're going to steal them. So they would steal things from the local civilians, pissing off the civilians even further. Now, what actually got worse than that,

I know it's probably you're trying to think, like, what is worse than stealing from civilians? military equipment to the mujahideen which they did to the the enemy yes not directly at least not at least not yet we'll talk about that in a different episode that's awesome hold on wait yeah it gets dumb d Dumber, I should say. So they would sell extra ammo, rifles, helmets, whatever, to bazaars off post, knowing it was just going to be funneled to the Mujahideen. Yeah, they already know it. So they might as well just be selling it directly to them.

Yeah. It's going to them. Yeah. The Great Gamble points out that they used this extra money to buy things they couldn't get at home. Japanese made boom boxes. Adidas tracksuits. Oh, they had those.

They had the Moskos. Which every Mujahideen soldier knows, the fatal shot on a Soviet soldier, the Adidas stripes. Now, for an extra bit of hilarity tried to picture all these like pretty emaciated looking drunken soviet soldiers but they have a bitch and ghetto blaster over their shoulder because that's why the blasting horrible euro horror techno

i fucking could only imagine that underground dungeon porn music. Yeah, as they're just laying around the dust, trying not to starve to death. We're hungry and we're poor. Please send beets. Yeah, just... So it should become no surprise to anybody that thousands of Soviet... Sorry, thousands of Afghan soldiers were deserting.

First of all, I think they used that as a tool for ceasefire. I'd use beats. Everybody can enjoy a good beat. Drop beats, not bombs. Y'all exactly. Um, so thousands of,

of Afghan soldiers were running away from the ranks as soon as they could. Their beats are terrible. Oh, fuck. Yeah. Um, this led to something of a manpower emergency within the Afghan government. as they could. Their beats are terrible. This music sucks. This led to something of a manpower emergency within the Afghan government.

To make matters worse, most countries' militaries are propped up by a large corps of veterans within it. Something that pretty much never formed in the Afghan army. Now that you think about it, when you go to a new unit, how many of those people are new? Not that many yeah not even 25 percent no no every military is based like the backbone of

every military is is people who have been there a while and know what they're doing yeah you got the guy who knows yeah they'd never had that um this is uh here raj he's been in for 10 days he's our veteran yeah he's the fucking platoon commander. Yeah. What? He didn't even run away from battle once. Holy shit. Look at the pair of balls on this guy.

Look at the cones on this guy. And he stayed throughout the beats. 90% of deserters within the Afghan army were gone within the first five months. Holy shit. were gone within the first five months. Holy shit. So within six months, pretty much everybody in your basic training class is gone.

That's if they didn't die. Fuck, am I a general now? Congratulations on your two years of service. You're now the fucking chief of staff. What? So this obviously would lead to the PDPA's conscription program going wildly out of control as members of the Afghan secret police known as the COD begin literally kidnapping people off the street. That five-year-old, take him.

Go. Good for service. That motherfucker's got a mustache. He's old enough. Oh, it's just dirty from the fields. Take him. Speaking of the enough. Oh, it's just dirty from the fields. Take him. Speaking of the cod. Terrible fish.

I don't like cod. Speaking of cod, it is the K-H-A-D, not the C-O-D, not the Call of Duty. I was talking about the fish. Now, cod is an acronym which stands for several things in past true. I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce do one I didn't even write it down oh fuck you let's spare a minute to talk about these assholes and out of a

pile of assholes a spaghetti network of assholes if you will would you say they smell like cod no no these guys smell like something much much worse and that is lots and lots of dead bodies a lot of cod I'm gonna say out of everybody involved every guys smell like something much, much worse, and that is lots and lots of dead bodies.

That's a lot of cod. I'm gonna say out of everybody involved, every governmental organization involved in this war, they're the only one that measures up to the KGB on level of terrible shit. Really? Yes. Honestly, the KGB is kind of comically funny sometimes. I mean, the cod was pretty...

The cod was so inept that it was funny sometimes, too mean, the COD was pretty, the COD was so inept that it was funny sometimes too, like literally kidnapping anybody off the street and throwing them into an army barracks. But at the same time, they were just like horrifically evil to the point that like, that didn't, like you have to stop there.

Like that didn't probably happen. This is just like a really bad biased source that's just making them seem like a whole lot more evil and then like the cod general chief of staff is like yes and then he ripped out his fingernails oh fuck i was thinking like they cut some kid's balloon it flew into the sky if only oh worse what do you think torture is? Can be torture if you're really into that. No, my balloon! I'll tell you anything. You, sir, don't understand how important balloons are to my family.

So, the COD was, for lack of a better term, the Afghan version of the KGB. Quite literally. Do you think they were trying to live up to that standard, or are they just trying to do their own thing? More than that, they were made to be the KGB. Oh. Because throughout the entirety of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, they fell directly under the KGB's command.

Really? But while we can say for all their flaws, and there are literally more flaws than can be counted by a human being, the KGB was an incredibly effective intelligence service. We cannot say the same for the COD. The COD was headed by a guy named Muhammad Najibullah, a man put in place directly by the head of the KGB, Yuriy Andropov. If this guy doesn't party as hard as I think he should. I'm going to say that Najibullah probably has a much longer career arc than you could imagine right now.

Really? Now just wait five minutes. Okay. Under his watch, tens of thousands of political opponents, clerics, mullahs, and Mujahideen sympathizers were kidnapped, tortured, and executed. Ten thousand? Tens of thousands. How? Nobody really knows.

What? They stopped counting at around 70. People? 70,000. Oh, I thought he was at around 70 people 70 000 oh 70 70 yeah keep going so kind of like the purges uh that happened a couple episodes ago they kept pretty detailed notes yeah until things just spiraled so vastly out of control they didn't bother anymore which just to me proves laziness because like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia kept account of like millions of people which is insane which is fucking insane no it is and we'll cover that eventually but I'm just saying like the cod is just is fucking jv bullshit when it comes to

record keeping yeah they just got the dude got lazy he said yeah fuck it it's a lot of writing I have carpal tunnel going on right now and i think a lot of it is when you have these strongman organizations led by men who are legitimately terrifying and najibola was legitimately terrifying people just like stop being good at their jobs like because you mean for all like the the the kgb pipe hitters or whatever you want to call them there was 10 dudes doing paperwork you. There was 10 dudes doing paperwork. You know, there's 10 dudes doing paperwork, probably. A lot of paperwork goes into intelligence services,

but that requires a fully functioning state apparatus, which Afghanistan never really had. So I don't picture the Cod as being this bureaucratic mess that I see the KGB being. I see it being just like a gang of fucking psychopaths. It sounds like a bunch of thugs. It's pretty much what it was. Yeah. Yeah. Just under the KGB being. I see it being just like a gang of fucking psychopaths. It sounds like a bunch of thugs. It's pretty much what it was. Just under the KGB. Exactly. But not the KGB.

The KGB used the COD for things that even they thought were gross. Really? Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, and the KGB murdered children sometimes. Yeah, they did. That's saying some shit. They had some funny assassinations too. They murdered some funny assassinations too. They murdered a guy with an umbrella.

I think we should just do an episode on assassinations. The KGB did. They're all really bad. They're all fucking terrible. Airstrike. Oh, suicide. That was suicide. There was one in Britain not that long ago. This is the FSB,

the modern day KGB, where a guy got murdered, stuffed in a, in a gym bag with a padlock, then thrown into a bathtub. And the, the London metropolitan police were just like, it was a suicide. Like Jesus fucking Christ.

Do you even know how to do your jobs? There's still a whole bunch of fucking smooth brained ass Bobbies like, oh shit. He killed himself. Can you believe this guy just came up off the street shot this other guy in the head because the other guy wanted to commit suicide. Paid the guy to commit suicide. It reminds me 100%

of the Dave Chappelle joke where he's like, what happened? I don't know. He got shot and he sprinkled crack all over himself. Yeah. That's like a I happened? I don't know. He got shot and he sprinkled crack all over himself. I can imagine the Bobby there. Open, shut, closed case. Suicide. One of the old regular Russian suicides, I see.

I'll be at the pub. Yeah. So, now, you're probably wondering how the fuck did tens of thousands of people fall into being suspicious uh by are considered suspicious by the cot um how long were they operating the cod the whole time um throughout the entire existence of this version of afghanistan okay um now people would fall into their sights if they did something as little as not join the communist party, not graduate from school, or say literally anything against the government.

Their lawn is bad. They don't put the trash cans in the right spot. The COD is what happens if you gave your local HOA the power to kill people. Fuck. So I have to fight my HOA. I mean, if my HOA. I mean, if my HOA is the COD, I'm going to have the best fucking lawn on the block, dude.

Which isn't true. You won't. I'll just die. I'll fight that old bitch that comes around on the block. I'll fight her. I've talked before about denunciations and how people end up getting caught up in that and that's

kind of how the COD worked like if I didn't like you say you owed me money and I knew you're never gonna pay me back I go to my friendly neighborhood COD office like Nick is saying some shit about like communism being

stupid and you would just disappear one night. They just go off hearsay. That's what it sounds like. 100%. They took everybody 100% at face value. Why would he lie? Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Now let's follow that trail of thought

to the worst possible outcome. Did somebody fucking say, hey, you said some shit. And they're like, oh, fuck, and they started just hitting themselves or something. Like the scene from Fight Club? Yeah. Oh, God, that'd be great. That'd be so good.

As you can imagine, the Soviets fell in love with the Kha due to their efficiency in doing horrible violence to others, but they fell more in love with Najibullah himself. This is despite the fact that under Najibullah... Great-looking man. Definitely not any of those things. Now, this is despite the fact that under Najee Bullock... Great looking man. Definitely not any of those things. Now this is

despite the fact under Najee Bullock's leadership the COD had become a hotbed of graft theft and corruption. But they fell in love with the insane torture houses that the COD ran. Inside of a series of prisons dotted around Kabul they put the screws towards anybody who might kinda look Mujahideen-y.

Who looks? There's a look? He's got a beard! Rip out his fingernails! Oh, man. He said he read the Quran once. Break his fingers. They like how they run the torture houses.

It sounds like a Yelp review. Oh, dude, 10 out of 10. Would visit again. Yeah. So, the Qad became so trusted that it was the main intelligence body used by the Soviets. Now I don't mean the main Afghan intelligence body. I mean the main

one. They soon superseded the KGB. Not because they trusted them more than the KGB. Considered a kind of outsourcing. They didn't have to put Russians or Soviet civilians into any dangerous situations anymore. Well, we got the Cod, send them in. And they wouldn't

second guess any of anything they told them. They said, fuck it, let's go. So the intelligence that the Cod gathered in the torture prisons was then filtered down to Soviet paratrooper and Spetsnaz units to act on. Little to no oversight was given to what kind of intelligence the Cod was actually gathering. I think getting the

Cod to do anything was pretty easy. I bet you can't do that. No, there is. It was literally a group of uniformed psychopaths. Yeah, I bet all they did was just occasionally, bet you can't do any of this shit. Yes, we can. Watch us and then do some dumb shit. It's like all that time

like I do if you've ever been out drinking with me. You won't fucking do it. I know you're gonna do it. Yes. I know you're gonna do it. I say it anyway. It's exactly what the KGB's doing. I have a roommate that's the exact same way where I got him to

probably try to sell some of your books at a bar. Thank you for your service. Now, you're probably asking, what was some of this really bad intelligence that the cod was getting and then so boots were actually acting on well that if anybody owned a horse especially a white horse he was definitely a leader of the mujahideen this of course led a soviet helicopter seeing horses tied up outside of houses and then just blowing up the houses what the the fuck? The horse runs off.

The horse is like, I was just eating fucking hay here, man. He just runs off. They also took everybody's word at face value, regardless of what they say. Say somebody was being brutalized in one of those prisons, and the promise of whatever horrifying thing

was being done to them would stop if they just named somebody who supported the Mujahideen. Anybody would give up a name to make this awful, horrible pain. I mean, that's why torture doesn't work. The COD agents would quickly go out

and find the person their victim named, drag them back to the prison, and repeat the exact process all over again. And a never-ending loop of torture, murder, and brutality. We're really doing good on our quotas. Got 10 through this week. Yeah.

I mean, and again, I don't mean to continually bring up the Khmer Rouge, but this is exactly what they did in S21. They're like, we need 10 names. Give us 10 names. I don't know 10 people who don't like you. Well, give us a couple of days. I bet you do. And then those 10 people will be brought in.

Oh yeah. And those 10 people give out 10 names a piece. And then, you know, that's how a million people get murdered but if you just pinch my triceps i'll give you 20 names i'll give you a good amount i will cave to people playing old town road like if you play old town i'm like you know what fuck it my mom's an isis just make it stop solid yeah uh another one of Codd's tactics, whose agents would tag along with Soviet forces during counterintelligence mission, was to summarily execute men they found who had smooth, clean hands.

Of course, operating under the assumption that anybody without calloused, gross farmer's hands must be Mujahideen. First off, you need callouses. Now. Great for lifting. There's a problem with this. Because clearly fighting a resistance war and hiking through the mountains leads to soft men there's one so

there's an important fact that all these cod people forgot which is unsurprising because they all came from cities clerics and mullahs were normally exempt from manual labor in villages so again just amounted to a pogrom against religious

leaders in the villages. Which just keeps happening. They don't seem like the smartest type. No, they're fucking idiots. Because you know what? Yeah, no, I can't think of anything. That's terrible. The Cod had another favorite tactic, which may have been the worst of all of them.

Afghan village life revolved heavily around families. Entire generations would live in one compound, and that happens pretty much to this day. If you go into a house, there's a good point you're going to meet three generations of the same family. And that was how

life was ran back then, too. Knowing that, the Qad knew that most people in rural areas had at least one family member actively helping the Mujahideen. They weren't entirely wrong. Is that a solid number? What? One family member in that house?

It's not. It would be shocking. Because Cod? Nah, not trustworthy. It would be surprising if the entire extended whatever family didn't have at least one Mujahideen sympathizer, that makes sense, especially in the rural countryside,

there's a good chance that everybody in that family was actually a sympathizer. I mean, in the rural areas, very rarely did that feeling tilt towards pro government. It tilted towards, I don't care. Just leave me alone.

And also then pro Mujahideen, there was no pro government. Um, those people were all largely And also then pro-Mujahideen. There was no pro-government. Those people were all largely in the cities and probably already in the army because they were drafted. It just seems like a safe number to say, like at least one member. Yeah, sounds really safe.

And they probably were not wrong. But how they went about it was insane. First, Qaeda agents and Soviet soldiers would land in a village and then Qaeda would kidnap somebody. Anybody. A random person that they saw. First one, you're coming in the helicopter.

You smell like Mujahideen. Hey, you with the face. So once aboard the helicopter, the agents wouldn't demand. The terrified Afghan civilian guided the helicopter towards a place his family, who were definitely Mujahideen, were living. Now, the civilian has been around the block a couple definitely Mujahideen were living. Now, the civilian has been around the block a couple times. He's dealt with Soviet soldiers before and he's probably dealt with the Qad before.

He knew what was going to happen to their family if he opened his fucking mouth. He would just point out random houses or houses owned by people whose family didn't like or owed money to. Whoever! Anybody that was in his family. They effectively made

random Afghan villagers accomplices in mass murder. My neighbor would be fucked if we went down that road. The Soviets would then blow up the house and then throw the civilian out of the helicopter

to his death. Wow. Because this wasn't quite evil enough, the soldiers would then kidnap women, fly away with them while raping them in the back of the helicopter. When they were done, they'd kick them out to their death.

This brand of helicopter death was not unique to the cod. However, throwing prisoners out of helicopters came so common that there are multiple firsthand accounts of it from Zinky boys. Quote, we captured a bunch of terrorists and interrogated them. Where are your arms dumps? We asked them. We took a couple of them up into the helicopter

with us and asked them again. They refused to answer, so we threw them out into the rocks. This is like one of ten times it's brought up in the book. Wow. So this isn't like one of those like... So it's popular. It happened all over the country. There's a good chance if a paratrooper unit existed, they did it.

Yeah, that makes sense. I know that is a general statement, a huge generalization of tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers. But if you were a paratrooper working in close contact with a helicopter lift activity, an aerosol, you did it. Almost to that question. with helicopter lift activity, aerosol. Aerial unit, yeah. You did it. Almost to that question. If one book brings it up 10 times,

you got some numbers against you. And I think that book only interviews about 70 people. Really? So, yeah. Yeah, you got numbers against you. Yeah. Which brings us back to the Soviet Union looking for a way out of the war. Mikhail Gorbachev called the war a bleeding wound,

and he was rapidly trying to find a way out of the war. Mikhail Gorbachev called the war a bleeding wound, and he was rapidly trying to find a way out. Now, he wanted to build the Afghan army to begin to take over the majority of combat operations. First, they'd slap together a former... So before they came up, or they could come up with this functioning army, they had to come up with a semi-functioning government to run that army, right? Their first step to do that was to, you guessed it, get rid of Bob Rock Carmel. Oh, fuck yeah, dude.

Hold on. He's still partying. I know he is. Oh, he is at this point paranoid partying. At this point, Carmel is full on

Howard Hughes and up in the presidential compound drinking his own piss and telling people to get into one airplanes and shit. There's no way that guy is operating well.

That's awesome. Soviets did that in a way that thus far, they seemed unable to even attempt. Political intrigue, not outright murder. They didn't kill Bob Rock Carmel. That's really surprising. Yeah. I thought they were going to kill him.

So they did, however, show incompetence in doing this. Carmel was brought to the Soviet Union for a health checkup with the sole express purpose of a doctor to tell him that he was too frail and sick to continue to rule Afghanistan. The Soviets

had a reason to believe that this would be the outcome. Carmel's health had been going to shit. He wasn't sleeping and he was drunk most of the time and he's addicted to opium. I would too if I looked over my shoulder every waking second of my life. Instead, however, the doctor gave him a clean bill of health. He wasn't on the fucking page?

No, apparently. On the same page as everybody? I think they were just banking on the fact his health had to have been going to shit and didn't even bother to tell the doctor. You're as healthy as a white horse. Yeah. Don't look up at the sky. Now this is really stupid because have been going to shit and didn't even bother to tell the doctor he is a white horse yeah don't look up at the sky uh now this is really stupid because this is the kgb playing the downfall just tell the doctor to fucking lie but they didn't so instead the kgb bribed the afghan minister of defense to confront carmel when he returned to tell him that he needed to resign from his

permission which he did that's it yeah it was that easy i mean now when you get the minister of defense especially in like afghanistan to do this like it's a it's it's the implication if you don't resign i will resign you like i have the army yeah it's that easy yeah yeah uh i mean a lot of this had to do with the fact that like he knew the minister of defense wouldn't have been doing this if he didn't have the soviets like thumbs up so like he's like fuck the soviets don't like me anymore I need to get the fuck out of here before they kill me the shit that I've been fearing my whole time in here yeah after which he was sent into exile in Moscow now uh Carmel tried to do some like in-house political and fighting bullshit in Afghanistan.

It's really unimportant. He just went to exile. Did he do anything cool afterwards? No, he just died of cancer or something a couple years later. Oh, okay, cool. Now, who do you think the Soviets tapped to replace him? Tell me. Najibullah!

Yes. Now, once Najibullah was comfortably installed in power it began to restructure the Afghan army to match the Soviet one that included conscripting anybody left who had not been conscripted by force yet ramping up the army's number to about 300,000

it also centered the army's power on the Qad itself an attempt to break up any major body of power that was not centered directly on Mahabhanajibola. This is of course to stop any kind of coup from taking place. You could also pay your men in these scraps of paper

that we saved for you. Have you thought about not paying any of them? We found it very successful. As you can see, we have one man with a boombox. He might not have food, but check out them sick beats. He's just laying down listening to beats. Is that one dead?

No, he's sleeping. So Najibullah began a system of government militias. Now, this is all pretty much based on bribery too. Most of these militias had at one point been involved in the Mujahideen or gangs, some kind of weird mountain mafia deal. They weren't loyal government people. That's fucking awesome. Is that a show on like how they had the Amish mafia?

Oh, that was so fake though that'd be great though yeah i i'd write that screenplay hit me up netflix give everybody else a show yeah because the amish mafia was fucking terrible it wasn't real whoever believed that shit somebody out there did so a shit ton of people somebody listening to the show's like that was fake so as you can imagine all this swirling mess of militias that were now in the government payroll did not make things any better for the Afghan government. Does it get worse?

It always gets worse. It gets worse until everybody's dead, which hasn't quite happened yet. What Najibullah did instead was plant the seeds of his own death. So he promoted a man named Abdul Rashid Dostum, who led an entire division of these militia fighters now full disclosure i wrote a full very negative article on abdul rashid dostum uh for charlie lima news uh sorry lima charlie news it was two years ago I think so that was incredibly biased

this is not because that was based on current events on he tends to use rape as a weapon against his political opponents he did back then as well but not as much proof is documented about it for instance at one point he was

the minister of defense and the vice President of Afghanistan. He was not allowed in the country. What? Yeah. So he did that at the same time, but not being in the country? Yes. This makes sense. But that being said, Dostum commanded

a huge number of fighters. He'd become... Najibullah would become so accustomed to relying on Dostum rather than his actual own army. Um, that he was given the hero of the Republic of Afghanistan award, as well as reporting to Najib directly skipping over any military chain of command.

Um, which Najib was not a military person. Yeah. What's the criteria for that award? So it's the, it's So it's their Medal of Honor. Yeah. But also, if you... Now, here's the difference between hero of the Soviet Union,

hero of the Afghan Republic, and the Medal of Honor. You can get the hero of those awards, and I guess the hero of the Russian Federation now exists because the Soviet Union does not, for not always military stuff. Like you can get like, I think I already said, Leonid Brezhnev gave one to himself. Yeah.

So the criteria bends and flexes heavily depending on how powerful. Ah, yes. Yeah. Dostum and the militias he commanded turned into little more than state-sanctioned death squads. And it could be argued that's kind of Dostum's job to this day. By 1987, the Soviet Union had one foot out the door. They had finally accepted that not only were they not winning the war, they simply lacked an army that had the ability to win.

No matter how hard they tried, the Soviet army seemed in a constant state of collapsing Edward onto itself. One thing they tried to do was to extend the length of deployments. Great idea. Now, in the very beginning when they had what was called a limited contingent of Soviet armed forces in Afghanistan,

it was a couple months because they didn't think it was going to last that long. By this point, like I've said before, it was a full two years. Soviet conscripts would only get about a week or two of training before being sent into the country. The Soviets believed that learning in the country is better than training. It was faster and much cheaper.

That's probably the real reason. Yeah. You didn't have to spend a whole lot of money on them. I can see that. I mean, you don't waste any money on a conscript if they die in their first patrol. That's true. And if you just give them paper as money.

Yeah. I think the loss of money I'm thinking just give them paper as money. Yeah. I think the loss of money, I'm thinking of as a loss of equipment. Yeah. That's not the loss of a paycheck. But no matter how hard they tried, they were fighting an uphill battle.

Early in the war, this easily covered up through superior weapons and firepower. Also, a shitty conscript still had more training than a farmhand with a bolt-action rifle. But nearly a decade rifle. Sorry, fuck. Let me try that again.

But nearly a decade later, this is not the case anymore. As soon as the two year long deployment ended, those conscripts would go home, right? How that system works. So enlistment was virtually non-existent. So just so long. Yeah. Right? That's how that system works. So, enlistment was virtually non-existent. Fuck, two years is so long.

Yeah. Now, the chance that a soldier would return to fight again was incredibly low, but it did happen when the soldiers we use as a source at length, Valerie Verstreiten,

would return to Afghanistan for like five tours, and he said that he quite enjoyed the war. What? Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about him later. He enjoys it? So here's the thing. Not to continually bring the current Afghan war into this

but Verstruyten and most people in his military class made their whole careers on this war. He started as a lieutenant. He ended as a fucking colonel. And they saw the war as a means of

advancement. Even long after the point of like, we're going to fight to defend Afghanistan. It was career advancement. If that doesn't sound familiar, hmm. I won't go much further past that. But sounds very familiar

yeah I could see that now like I was saying the vast majority of those Soviets did not come back however the Mujahideen did not have this problem in fact they only turned into a more effective fighting force as the conflict

grew older pair that with the Mujahideen's massive growing pipeline of foreign weapons and advisors along with the waves of Soviet-trained Afghan army conscripts joining them instead of fighting for the government, the Soviets simply saw there's no way they're ever going to win. By 1987, the Mujahideen were a significantly more successful fighting force than the Afghan army,. It could certainly be argued that they were better than the Soviets as well. A small side note here about the Afghan

conscripts who found their way into the Mujahideen. In the documentary Jihad, during which a journalist follows a unit of Mujahideen fighters. So, side note to the side note, same journalist would follow the Soviets after this.

Really? Yeah, and the Soviets knew about him following the Mujahideen. Ooh. And he was like, yeah, if we would have caught you at the Mujahideen, we would have killed you too. And he's like, okay. So during his time with the Mujahideen, it shows the Afghan army units, like the Mujahideen lay an ambush

and engage the Afghan army units, and they just break it for the first time in contact, just throwing their weapons down, running off and surrendering as soon as they could. And afterward, the Mujahideen separates them into two groups. One group was the young conscripts who still had their heads freshly shaven and the other was the ones with the hairs

grown out. The bald conscripts would be allowed to join the Mujahideen or simply return home. People with beards, long hair, executed on the spot. Ooh. The idea being that the heavily politically indoctrinated

Afghan conscripts were bought in like they had been in long enough where if they were going to desert they would have done it by now yeah they're just kind of there now they either for me maybe I could never see myself

deserting even if that was available to me mostly because I'd just be too afraid to. I feel like that's probably a decent number of these guys, but it didn't really matter. You didn't run, you were going to die. But the idea being, of course, that these fresh conscripts could be flipped, or they would just go home,

and they probably would not want to fight again. Oh, yeah. That did not stop several Soviet-educated officers who had trained in the best Moscow academies from joining the Mujahideen, however. Really? Yeah. What? I mean, it wasn't a ton of them, but it happened.

Yeah, that's still insane. The fact that they are allowed to join, was there an incentive that the Mujah dean saw that like this was an advantage for them intelligence yeah i mean if i'm gonna so if i'm starting a popular resistance movement out of myself and the local suburbanite community and i have some dude who went to west point or ocs or whatever he's a captain. Hey, I want to join. I'm probably not going to turn him down.

I mean, even if he doesn't know anything about battle tactics, like the sheer wealth of intelligence that he has on the everyday functionings of the army would be pretty advantageous. I mean, he'd be a wealth of knowledge. Now, would I kill him as soon as he's done being useful yeah probably so Soviet officers were actually useful they knew a lot now just because their rank structure

didn't seem like they knew shit you know I think the main problem with I think the Soviet military and most militaries structured like it I know the Chinese military has structured a lot like it until very recently. It's incredibly top-heavy.

And decision-making processes flow downward. That's how the Japanese military is. Yeah. NCOs have very little sway. I think they're called Paparoff Chicks or something like that. They weren't squad leaders

like they they were fire team leaders but they did not conduct things on their own they followed the commands of their platoon commander who followed the commands of their company commander who followed the commands of their right nobody was making independent decisions like there's a very good especially this far advanced in the war there's a really good chance that most of these guys who had survived this long knew what the fuck they were doing but if they didn't do what whatever idiot

lieutenant captain major whoever over them told them to do they were fucked like and we have talked about before and we'll talk about a little bit more later on how much just any officer not liking you could be a death sentence um like they controlled their very lives like your leave when like i know so when when americans are deployed if you're deployed for a year you get two weeks

leave technically so did the soviets but you're willing if you were to guess randomly which one of those soldiers got their leave to prove who do you think it'd be oh fuck if you're willing if you were to guess randomly which one of those soldiers got their leave to prove who do you think it'd be? If you're the person questioning their lieutenant or their captain or whoever it ain't gonna be fucking you. Some people rolled the dice and decided their life would be a lot easier

if they just didn't open their fucking mouth. Remember, this isn't a society of people who decided it's in their favor if they don't open their fucking mouth so dissent didn't really exist um but remember the soviets had to kind of like set up their afghan allies here so the the whole house of cards didn't come crashing down as soon as they exited. They decided that they would do the same thing to the Afghans that do their own soldiers, just throw them into combat.

Hilariously enough, they called this process Afghanization or leading with an Afghan face. You'll never guess what term we use to do the exact same thing. Really? Yes. Holy shit. It's almost like history repeats itself

if people are stupid. So, until now, the Soviets had been the main fighting force in the war. Like the flip of a switch, they would change that. The Afghans would be the main fighting force on the ground, while the Soviets would support them with heavy weapons like artillery, bombers, helicopters,

advisors, professional positions that the Afghans didn't quite have yet, like Spetsnaz. Sounds familiar. But the giant regimental offensive operations were to be at an end.

At least for now. Yeah, it was going to be on the Afghans. Oh. Nobody was a smaller fan of this. Nobody hated this plan more than the Afghan government itself. Oh, fuck. We got to do something. Nobody in the Afghan government

Trusted their army Like cause remember Najibullah Like all the other presidents before him Had Soviet bodyguards Doctors and everything else He didn't have Afghan shit Fuck everything's red Yeah

Najibullah considered it a betrayal But The Soviets didn't really give a fuck what he said. They decided to prove him. So the Soviets could tell him all day long, that like, dude, we built you this army. It will work. But the Soviets are like, you know what, motherfucker?

Let's prove it to you. Let's show you that this army works. Did they? About that. Oh, okay. That was when the soviets ordered an entire afghan army unit to attack a well-known and well-mapped out mujahideen stronghold in the argadab valley in kandahar now they picked a battle that was the most favorable battle that the Afghan army could have. That is,

it was a conventional battle. They were trained in Soviet conventional warfare, like large-scale battles. They weren't given any specialized counterinsurgency training. They were attacking a literal trench line and a building complex.

They would even have full Soviet. Aircraft and artillery support. So you're saying they should have this in the bag? Yeah there's no way the Mujahideen should win. So of course the Mujahideen won. They not only held their ground. They counterattacked. And routed.

Really? An entire Afghan army regiment. Wow. Soon, it became clear to the Soviets that their best hope of leaving Afghanistan was launching one last huge operation to smash the Muzahideen while forcing the Afghan government

to reform into something that might be able to function without them. That is where we'll pick up next week. Fucking cliffhanger. Sylvester Stallone. So. I want to see that movie again. I will say next week is the final episode

of the main story of this series. We will have a spinoff. Yeah. But it'll be a little bit more fun I guess I don't know but thank you everybody for tuning in this wasn't fun I had a blast yeah I had a great time yeah

I'm not sure if that was a landmine joke or what but yeah but thank you everybody for tuning in review us on iTunes it all helps. The sweaty shirt idea got turned down for some fucking reason.

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