The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – The Post

On the evening of December 27, 1979, the president of the socialist republic of Afghanistan, Hafizullah Amin, was dining in his sumptuous presidential palace when his guests began to feel sick. One after another they slumped into the chairs. Before he had time to react, Amin himself collapsed with his head on the plate where he had eaten until a few moments before. The dinner had been poisoned, and only the intervention of a Russian doctor saved the life of the president of Afghanistan. A few hours later Amin was still recovering from the effects of the toxin when his aides warned him that the building was under attack. Amin left his room in his underwear and with an IV attached to his arm. "The Soviets will help us," reassured his aides. Just then Soviet special forces, including a team of KGB specialists, the Russian secret service who had just tried to poison him for the second time, were competing with the presidential guard for the palace. About an hour after the fighting began, Amin was killed in circumstances that were never fully understood.

The attack on Amin's presidential palace and the simultaneous coup with which the Soviet army occupied Kabul marked the beginning of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a conflict that would last for a decade, costing hundreds of thousands of lives of people, especially Afghans. For the Soviet Union, it was the last major international adventure before its fall, and it marked a generation of its inhabitants in a not so different way from how the Vietnam War had marked the United States. Six hundred thousand Russian soldiers – him afgantsy, as they were nicknamed – they served in the country, and thousands of families had to deal with their physical and moral impairments when they returned.

But the cruelest footprint of the Soviet invasion, and the one that had the greatest consequences, was left on Afghanistan. Until the 1970s, Afghanistan was a poor but stable country, a remote border area long forgotten by the great powers. After ten years of occupation, however, it was a traumatized and wounded nation, divided by a civil war that would only end with the rise of the brutal Taliban regime, the "students of the Quran" led by Mullah Omar, who never managed to completely pacify the country, but whose government was stable enough to give hospitality and support to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who from Afghanistan organized and coordinated the attack on the Twin Towers of 11 September 2001. The invasion of the The US-led coalition, in response to that attack, reactivated a ferocious civil war that continues to this day. It can be said that in the forty years since the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan has not experienced a single day of peace.

On the night of December 27, 1979, nobody imagined that that coup would have had many consequences and so branched out. Indeed, the Soviets thought that their engagement in Afghanistan would be short. The country had been their ally for decades, the Afghan cities teeming with Soviet military and civilian advisers, and Afghan officers had almost all been trained in Soviet academies, so much so that many of them spoke Russian. President Amin was a communist and he himself had asked for Soviet intervention to defeat an insurrection that broke out in the country. The response of the Soviet leaders had initially been negative. At Politburo meetings, in the presence of the eighty-year-old leader Brezhnev, the Soviet notables said – correctly – that sending troops to Afghanistan would inevitably fuel the insurrection, create international tensions and, eventually, would become a sort of Vietnam for them. But in a short time the situation got out of hand.

The Afghan communists, who came to power in 1978 with a coup, were uncontrollable. The Soviets had suggested gradually consolidating their power, taking into account the rural and traditional nature of much of the country, but the local communists led by Amin had no intention of stalling: where previous governments had failed to modernize Afghanistan, they they intended to do it by force. Over the past 20 months since Amin's rule, it is estimated that more than 20,000 people have been killed. Many belonged to the same Communist Party, subjected by Amin and his colleagues to fierce and periodic purges. To those who recommended a gradual approach, Amin showed them the portrait of Stalin he kept in an office and reminded them that the only way to modernize a backward country was to apply the same relentless ferocity that the Soviet dictator had applied to Russia.

These brutal methods produced equally brutal reactions. The first insurrections, supported by neighboring Pakistan, broke out already in 1978: soon the second city in the country, Herat, risked falling into the hands of the rebels. The insurrection was repressed without the need for Soviet intervention, but the Afghan communists felt their power wobble and continued to ask for help from the Russians. The decision to intervene was a slow escalation, said the British historian and diplomat Rodric Braithwaite, long serving in Moscow in the 1980s and 1990s and author of Afgantsy, one of the most important books in English on the war in Afghanistan from Russia's point of view.

According to the reconstruction of Braithwaite, who was able to interview many of the protagonists of those days and consulted the Soviet archives for a long time, a large part of the Russian government, mindful of the lesson of Vietnam, tried to resist the invasion until the end, but accepted one after another the pieces that made it possible. Throughout 1979 the Soviets sent increasing aid to the government of Amin and amassed troops on the border with Afghanistan. In all likelihood, says Braithwaite, the last step was due to Amin himself when in October 1979 he had the president of the country, Nur Muhammad Taraki, supposedly his superior, as well as the closest local leader to Moscow, assassinated. For the Soviets it was a blow. Not only had they failed to influence Afghan politics, but now all power was concentrated in the hands of Amin, considered a bloodthirsty and unreliable leader.

The date that generally coincides with the beginning of the invasion is December 25, 1979, the day when the huge Soviet transport planes loaded with soldiers began to land at the Bagram air base, not far from Kabul. At that moment Amin was still convinced that the Soviets were his allies and he welcomed their arrival: finally his requests for help had been heard. On the morning of December 26, ground troops began to arrive, greeted by border guards and greeted by celebrations in the first villages they passed through. Both the Soviets and the Afghans were convinced that the troops would be leaving soon.

The Soviets had in mind a rapid counter-insurgency operation and an equally rapid and painless replacement for Amin. The leader of an exiled faction of the Afghan Communist Party, ready to replace the government of Amin, had arrived with the troops at Bagram airport, while in Kabul the troops were preparing to take control of the strategic points of the city. The most important operation, to capture or eliminate Amin, was also the most delicate. Fearing that his Afghan rivals or insurgents would kill him, a few days before the attack Amin had settled in the Tajbeg Palace, an imposing building built in neoclassical style on the top of a hill just outside Kabul. The palace had an excellent view of the surrounding area and its defenses had been strengthened. Two thousand soldiers of the presidential guard guarded the only access road to the building that had not been mined with machine guns and mortars.

In the oldest of Soviet military traditions, the commanders on the spot decided to attack the palace with a direct infantry assault. Seven hundred men were chosen for the attack, five hundred of whom came from the "Islamic battalion", a special unit made up of men from the Soviet republics of Central Asia, Muslim and where languages ​​similar to those spoken in Afghanistan were spoken. The rest came from a chosen battalion of paratroopers and special units from the KGB Alpha and Zeniht. For almost all the participants it was the first action of their life.

The assault was brutal and the fighting was fierce. The Soviets drove their armored vehicles straight against the Afghan defenses and then fought meter by meter in the corridors of the building. To try to deceive the defenders, Russian soldiers had worn Afghan army uniforms, reminiscent of the old Soviet uniforms of the Second World War, while the defenders of the presidential guard wore old helmets previously purchased from Germany. Surrounded by the uniforms, while fighting around the marble staircase of the palace, a Russian soldier is said to have felt as though he was assaulting the Berlin Reichstag in 1945. The clash was very hard and fourteen Soviet soldiers, including their commander , were killed in the operation. Most of the participants suffered some injuries. Two hundred Afghan soldiers were killed and Amin was also killed, although it has never been clarified whether it was the fault of the crossfire, or by one of his Afghan rivals who had accompanied the operation to recognize him. It was never made clear even if the assault team had been informed that a KGB agent would try to poison Amin that day, making the attack superfluous.

What is known is what happened next. On December 28, the new Soviet-backed leader of the country, Babrak Karmal, announced by radio that the "Amin torture machine" had been destroyed and that the country was heading towards a new era of peace and prosperity. In reality, a brutal occupation began from which the Soviet Union did not withdraw until 1989, in the last days before its collapse. Although the Soviets never suffered a real military defeat (like the Americans in Vietnam), at the same time they never managed to tame the insurrection. The mujaheddin, as the insurgents were called, proved to be skillful and courageous guerrillas, experts in the terrain and always able to disappear in the mountains after making an attack.

The mujaheddin never formed a united front, but throughout the conflict they continued to remain divided, often clashing with each other. As soon as the Soviets withdrew, their rivalries turned into an open conflict, which inflicted even greater damage on the country and its cities than the Russian occupation. This second phase of the conflict produced many characters who entered the history of the country and, soon, that of the rest of the world. For example, Mohammad Najibullah, the last Communist president of Afghanistan, who distinguished himself from his predecessors for interrupting the regime's most brutal practices and attempting national reconciliation. When the Russians left the country and the rebels occupied Kabul, Najibullah resigned and took refuge in the United Nations base, where he lived between 1992 and 1996, translating into Pashtu, the most spoken language in Afghanistan, The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk, one of the most famous books on the country, which tells the long rivalry between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia for its dominion. Najibullah was tortured and killed together with his brother when the Taliban occupied Kabul in 1996 (today Najibullah is one of the protagonists of a popular theater show dedicated to the history of Afghanistan).

Many other people who became famous during the war continued to play a key role in contemporary Afghanistan. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who founded a radical Islamic party in the 1970s, became one of the main leaders of the anti-Soviet guerrilla, receiving broad support from the Arab countries and Pakistan, who appreciated his religious views. He did not join the Taliban government, but from 2011 to 2016 he fought with them against the Afghan government and the American army. Another popular mujahideen, Jalaluddin Haqqani, became famous for the vast support received by the CIA and for being termed "personified goodness" by US congressman Charlie Wilson, the one played by Tom Hanks in a popular film written by Aaron Sorkin. After the end of the Soviet invasion, Haqqani became an important and ruthless Taliban commander, accused of having carried out an ethnic cleansing in the area inhabited by the Tajika-speaking minority. Haqqani died in 2018 but his organization, the Haqqani Network, remained an ally of al Qaida and the Taliban and is still engaged in the conflict against the Afghan government and the United States Army.

The most famous of all the mujahideen who made their bones during the Afghan conflict probably remains Ahmad Shah Massoud, the "Lion of Panshir", from the name of the valley which he defended for more than two decades first from the Soviets and then from the Taliban. Moderate, cultured and fascinating Islamist, belonging to the Tajika minority, Massoud is one of the characters who have most affected western public opinion and is remembered as a martyr and a hero also in Afghanistan. Long neglected during the Soviet invasion, because Pakistani secret services that brokered the money of the CIA and Arab countries preferred to finance more extremist leaders such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar, Massoud was the only one of the great commanders to successfully oppose the Taliban. Precisely for this reason, Mullah Omar entrusted al Qaida with the task of killing him, which the group led by bin Laden managed to do on September 10, 2001, exactly one day before the devastating attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

The Soviet invasion, the guerrillas it produced and the enormous funding that came from the United States, Pakistan and the Arab countries, contributed to transform Afghanistan forever, radicalizing its politics and systematically favoring the most extremist and violent groups. Afghanistan became a gymnasium where a generation of Islamic fighters were trained who exported the skills learned in the country throughout the Middle East: from Iraq to Libya, from Syria to Saudi Arabia. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright said in his book The tall towers, the Soviet invasion is one of the fundamental moments among those that led to the birth of modern international Islamist terrorism. The assault on the Tajbeg palace and the beginning of the invasion in the last days of 1979 were thus the last event of a year which, together with the Iranian Revolution and the assault on the Great Mosque of Mecca, still remains one of the most important in defining our present.