Original subtitles

To understand how the war in Afghanistan turned into a major conflict with global

implications, we must go back in history.

The USSR and Afghanistan had always been the best of friends.

Russia was the first major power to recognize the state of Afghanistan in

1919, just as Afghanistan would be the first country to recognize Soviet Russia

in 1921.

Throughout the 20th century, relations between the two countries were

excellent. And Soviet leaders were at great pains to pamper Afghanistan, this

buffer state with its strategic location at the heart of Central Asia, wedged

between the USSR to the north, Iran to the west, and China and Pakistan to the

east.

In the 1970s, Afghanistan was a liberal republic run by President Daoud Khan,

who got on marvelously with the Soviets.

At the time, Moscow was Kabul's main economic partner.

The USSR was actively involved in the country's construction drive and

hundreds of Soviet advisers were sent to Afghanistan.

The honeymoon between the two countries paradoxically came to an end the day the

Communists seized power in Kabul on 27 April 1978.

And the Democratic People's Party of Afghanistan took over.

The conditions were not good.

But it was a successful uprising.

The purpose was clear.

And the majority of Afghanistan was completely in favor of it. Because the

majority of Afghanistan supported and accepted it in the beginning.

That is, without the help of the coalition, the revolution started.

That is our purpose.

The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, led by Nur Muhammad Taraki,

seized power by means of a bloody coup d'état.

Despite Taraki's communist credentials, the Soviets were furious.

It took the Kremlin several months to accept this ill-timed revolution.

The Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev,

finally did so to escape the disapproval of other socialist powers around the

world. In December 1978, eight months after seizing power, President Taraki

finally arrived in Moscow to sign a friendship treaty between the two

countries, an economic and military treaty which secured Soviet aid for the

new communist regime in Afghanistan.

The transition from feudal to socialist society was to be brought about by

agrarian reform.

This was the Afghan communists' first failure.

This excessively brutal reform, which failed to take ancestral traditions into

account, was not well received by landowners in the provinces.

The second stumbling block was educational reform.

The government in Kabul decreed that school was compulsory for girls.

The religious authorities violently opposed this measure.

The mullahs, who opposed the communists, were cracked down on harshly.

Attacking religious leaders can be very dangerous, as the Soviets knew only too

well. Especially as in February 1979, a revolution in neighbouring Iran had just

brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

Right on Afghanistan's doorstep, a veritable theocracy was being

established, an Islamic republic run by the mullahs.

At the Kremlin, events in Iran were observed very closely.

This revolution was a real slap in the face for the American enemy as it

brought down the Shah's regime, which was supported by Washington.

The Soviets repeatedly tried to calm the anti-religious fervour of the Afghan

communists, but to no avail.

The religious leaders or spiritual figures who have a lot of popularity in

the society, they put them to death or put them in prison.

And in addition to that, they started a dictatorial government

that gave people absolute freedom.

No one had the right to listen to the radio, no one had the right to read the

newspaper, and no one had the right to...

On the 15th of March 1979 in Herat, a town in the west of the country, an

entire division of the regular Afghan army rebelled.

It was under the command of Captain Turan Ismail, who would thereafter

become famous under the name Ismail Khan as a warlord of the Afghan resistance.

We were in Afghanistan's Urdu.

We had our own religious and Islamic feelings. We had

our own patriotism.

For a long time, we were able to convey the essence of the Urdu to the people.

The people came and we conveyed the essence to them.

We continued for five days.

There were a lot of conflicts and there was a lot of chaos.

We were forced to leave Herat and

we took some of the necessary weapons to the mountains.

From the mountains, we fought guerrillas and

partisans.

The Herat uprising, in which 30,000 died, was a serious concern for

President Taraki. He phoned the USSR Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin.

The conversation conserved in the Kremlin's secret archives is an edifying

one.

Nur-Mohamed Taraki requested Soviet military aid, advocating a discreet

intervention by the Red Army on Afghan soil.

Kosygin was very reticent.

I don't want to annoy you, but it's very difficult to intervene discreetly. The

whole world would find out, and within a couple of hours, everyone would be

screaming that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan.

But President Taraki was not short of convincing arguments and ideas.

Just send in tanks driven by Soviet soldiers from Central Asia, Tajiks,

Uzbeks, and Turkmenis. There are lots of these people in Afghanistan.

If they put on Afghan army uniforms, they won't be noticed.

President Taraki's idea took root.

The KGB and the GRU, foreign military intelligence, started to round up Soviet

soldiers to form a battalion, which would later become famous as the Musbat,

the Muslim battalion.

For the first time, when they started to give us clothes, without a single mark

of difference, it was very itchy, there was a lot of camel fur.

For what purpose and for what they gathered us, of course, in the far 79th

year, it is necessary to remember that the main intelligence department

remained true to its traditions and kept secrets with all the seals.

The secret formation of the Muslim Battalion in May 1979 shows that the KGB

was starting to get ready. But ready for what?

At the time no one knew, but they were sure of one thing.

The situation in the Afghan provinces was becoming extremely serious,

especially close to the Pakistan border where a large number of anti-communist

combatants had taken refuge.

It was at this point that this still undeclared war drew in new protagonists,

the United States and its ally Pakistan.

The head of the ISI, General Akhtar, came to us with a request for

assistance. This is in the middle of 79.

And, you know, in order to conduct a covert action abroad in modern times,

you have to have the authorization of the president, which is contained in

what is called a presidential finding, which he signs.

And he signed the finding, that was Jimmy Carter, in the summer of 79, to

give non-lethal aid.

to the Mujahideen who were in contact with the ISI and they were revolting

against the Communist Party rule which had begun in 1978.

Already by the summer of 1979, Afghanistan was in a state of total

civil war.

In Kandahar, Herat and Panjshir, all through the provinces, resistance groups

were in a state of readiness.

But it was in Kabul, at the heart of communist power, that the next act of

this tragedy would play out. Look at these two men.

President Taraki and his Prime Minister Havizullah Amin.

Two friends and comrades in arms, two Marxist leaders who believed they could

establish a socialist state in record time.

On the 11th of December 1979, Taraki returned from a trip to Moscow.

He was welcomed by his Prime Minister Amin, visibly very happy to see the

President home again.

Three days later, the same Amin had Taraki suffocated by Secret Service

officers.

Amin seized power without giving Moscow any warning.

He was henceforth at the helm of a country plunged in civil war.

The purges that followed were brutal.

Amin had all high-ranking officers loyal to Taraki either imprisoned or executed.

It was at this point that the Soviets started to wonder who this Hafizullah

Amin really was.

I think it was probably part of the drama that was playing out in Moscow.

they came up with a list of things that the Americans were doing. One of them

that Amin was their guy, that the Americans were going to move short-range

missiles into Afghanistan and any number of other embellishments that simply

weren't true. I don't think anybody in Washington or in the United States

government paid much attention to Afghanistan at that time. But there is

no evidence at all that Amin actually was connected.

with the CIA.

There is an evidence that Amin was trying to play both against each other

because he felt his position was very precarious and his position was not

stable.

Was Amin an agent of the Americans or the Chinese or quite simply a loose

cannon? At KGB headquarters in Moscow, everything was being considered.

Agents in Kabul described a situation which was daily getting worse.

Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, passed on some very alarming memos to Leonid

Brezhnev.

One of the memoranda which was very, very important for Brezhnev, where

Andropov essentially creates the sense of urgency, where we have to do

something now before Amin's government turns to the Americans.

Yet it was Leonid Brezhnev, who as Secretary General of the Communist

Party, embodied supreme power.

It was up to him to take the most important decisions of state, especially

as regards foreign policy.

On the 12th of December, a select Politburo meeting took place.

It was at this meeting that the decision was taken to eliminate the Afghan

leader, Havizullah Amin, whom they judged to be out of control.

At the time, the young Mikhail Gorbachev was just a deputy member of the

Politburo and had no say in the decisions of the Supreme Office.

And here is the old guard, Ustinov,

Minister of Defence.

Andropov, head of the KGB, and Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs.

It was their decision, and theirs alone, to commit the Red Army to this

disastrous enterprise.

For the previous ten years, the so-called détente had been in place

between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Brezhnev was very attached to it, and most of the Politburo understood that

the slightest military intervention could shatter this fragile equilibrium.

Yet these three men managed to rally the other members to their cause, which

consisted of carrying out a coup d'etat against Amin and sending in a contingent

of the Red Army to prop up the new power regime.

This is the document confirming the decision to intervene in Afghanistan.

A quite unique piece of paper. It's just one handwritten sheet, something unheard

of for a document of such importance.

Furthermore, the decision itself is worded very vaguely.

merely conferring on the three men the power to take the necessary measures for

restoring order in Afghanistan.

Yet even the word Afghanistan does not appear, the country being designated

simply by the letter A.

Drawn up on the 12th of December 1979, it was only countersigned on the 26th of

that month by the other members of the Politburo, with the exception of

Kosygin, who never approved of it. The coup d'etat aimed at eliminating

President Amin could now go ahead.

sat next to Amin's palace as part of the Muslim battalion. We were dressed in

Afghani uniform.

There was a legend that we were another battalion of the National Guard Brigade,

which guarded the palace, the government and Amin.

Our main goal was not to allow the

counter-revolutionary forces to enter the palace. We were afraid of coups.

They were afraid of the coup.

And it turned out that we were being prepared in order to fulfill the main

task of liquidating the government.

They tried to poison him. A cook was put into his system.

It was not a problem to do it, because that was the kind of trust the Soviet

people had.

to diplomats, to doctors, that there was no need to introduce a chef.

Cola was very popular back then in Afghanistan.

We didn't have it back then, I think.

It's a pretty poisonous drink, but it destroys everything, including poison.

And those who drank cola, the effect of this poison, well, it almost

reached the level of poisoning.

Thanks to Coca-Cola, Amin survived the poisoning attempt.

So the KGB decided to launch a military assault on the presidential palace.

Operation Storm was launched at 7.15 p.m. Its aim to finish off the job and

eliminate Amin.

It's hard to put it into words, because there was a lot of shooting.

Shilka was shooting at the palace, she was shooting at our heads with a grenade

launcher.

And on the second floor, we found Amin lying at the bar.

In my car, there was Ulyabzoy, who recognized Amin. And only after that, I

reported to the center that Amin was not alive.

Specifically, the main ending.

They tried to find a documentary confirmation that Amin is an agent

of the CIA.

I know for sure that a group of people, who were

in my group on the 4th and 4th machines, specifically tried to find these

materials. There were no such materials found in the palace.

In the night of the 27th to the 28th of December, 100,000 Red Army soldiers

poured into Afghanistan.

According to the official wording, it was a limited contingent, aimed at

upholding the communist regime in Afghanistan.

It was this man, Babrak Karmal, who took the reins of power.

Chosen by Moscow, he patiently awaited his moment in a military base.

In the evening, we heard that Babrak Karmal announced that Kouai Shoravi had

come to Afghanistan.

It was a difficult night, and the next day I saw Kouai Shoravi on the streets

near our house. It was a day when I thought that the fate of the people of

Afghanistan had changed, and I myself, who was a student before him, thought

that life had changed for all of us.

How could the Kremlin old guard have believed that sending in troops would

improve the chances of peace with the Afghan people?

The result would be the exact opposite, with an eventual knock-on effect around

the world.

When someone violates the law of a country, it is the right of the state to

stand up against them,

to stand up and to do Jihad.

According to the verses of the Holy Qur'an, the people of Afghanistan have

started their own Jihad against the oppressive forces of the Shura.

And no one can become a Mujahid.

Jihad is the door of mercy that God...

It was at exactly this moment as foreign troops entered the country that the

situation took on a new dimension.

What had been an Afghan civil war was now declared a holy war, affecting the

entire Muslim world.

No one in the USSR was aware of what was going on.

Pravda published a simple dispatch announcing that in response to a request

from the Afghan government, Soviet troops had entered the country to repel

foreign aggression.

The communique ended with the following words, having been judged by his people,

Amin was sentenced to death and executed.

Until that morning of the 28th of December, no one in Moscow had even

known the operation was underway.

I came to rest in Pitsunda.

A man from Georgia came to visit me there.

We talked a lot.

We woke up in the morning.

In fact, there was even a wake-up call.

We were told about the transport of the border contingent

to Afghanistan.

Before that, neither I nor he knew anything.

He was a candidate for the Politburo.

And I was a candidate for the Politburo. We didn't know.

But it was from a branch of the UN.

A few days after the troops entered the country on the 4th of January, 1980,

American President Jimmy Carter reacted publicly with a televised address.

This is a callous violation of international law and the United Nations

Charter.

It is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an

independent Islamic people.

Jimmy Carter felt, I think, a huge personal...

insult from Brezhnev, whom he thought he had gotten to know a little bit.

So when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter made the unfortunate

statement, looking very naive, say, I've learned more about the Soviet Union in

the past 24 hours than I've learned in my entire lifetime.

Carter was rather relaxed about the Soviet Union and believed

naively.

that he could go to the bargaining table and sort things out in a way that would,

if not end the Cold War, at least ameliorate it and make it safer.

The reaction around the world was unanimous. In January 1980, the USSR was

condemned by the majority of the member countries of the UN, including those

Muslim nations not traditionally aligned as allies of the Soviets.

Carter froze the ratification of treaties.

The détente between the two blocs was well and truly in pieces.

And very quickly, Carter said, OK, we're going to not go

to the Moscow Olympics next year. We're going to cancel some consular agreements

and some grain deals.

And that was sort of the overt thing. And then he told CIA,

OK.

It's time for you to get to work over there and provide, and this is the

change, lethal assistance to the Afghan resistance.

Just five years earlier, we'd ended our own Vietnam nightmare.

This idea of comparing the nightmare of Vietnam to that of Afghanistan came from

Jimmy Carter's defense advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, known as a fierce anti

-communist.

I remember the day the Soviets walked into Kabul and occupied Afghanistan.

I gave the president a memo which had the sentence in it, we now have the

opportunity to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam.

And we acted accordingly for the first time in the history of the entire Cold

War. Brzezinski came in and completely muddled that policy because he was so

anti-Soviet with his own East European...

background so the origins of that were in january of

1980. then brzezinski goes out and talks to muhammad zeal

hawk the president of of pakistan and he goes up to mitchney point uh looking

into afghanistan there from the khyber pass and he picked up that kalashnikov

and sort of pointed into the

into Afghanistan and at that moment the American commitment was vividly

demonstrated.

That land over there is yours.

You'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have

your homes and your mosques back again because your cause is right and God is

on your side.

He wanted to be a known as one who was in charge of this operation.

And at the level of the La Haute Politique, he was in charge, but in

reality, operationally, it was the CIA that was running it.

We had no presence in Afghanistan.

Who had the presence and the access to the Afghanis

themselves? It was the Pakistani.

When we

approached the Pakistanis.

We said, we're with you on this thing, and we'll pull together a team.

Like-minded countries, the Saudis, the Chinese, the Egyptians, the British, the

Americans, and the Pakistanis. The first thing we did was we bought a huge number

of Enfield 303 rifles from the British.

And within a couple of months of the invasion, we had delivered these into

Pakistan. And at that time, it was the preferred weapon of an Afghan.

And so that began it. And it began with $10 million here, and then Congress

started getting involved, and then another $20 million there. And it grew

over the years.

The CIA's program for arming the Afghan Mujahideen was given the codename

Operation Cyclone.

The Pakistani president, Zia-ul-Haq, a sworn enemy of the USSR, agreed to let

his secret services act as intermediaries for the CIA, but he

insisted on absolute secrecy.

There were to be no American boots on the ground inside Afghanistan.

All the logistical assistance and training of the mujahideen in Pakistan

had to be provided by the Pakistanis, the CIA merely financing and overseeing

the operation.

It was just over the Afghan border in Pakistan

where thousands of refugees flooded, that the resistance was organized.

For better or worse, they were the ones that basically chose the

group together to comprise a seven-party group.

And that meant people like Gulbuddin, Hekmatyar, as well as a more moderate

group. But these were, from the Pakistanis' point of view, the ones that

could be militarily effective.

And it's true.

The Afghan resistance was split into seven political groups, represented by

their commanders, the most radical of whom were Hekmatyar, Sayyaf and Rabbani,

all members of the Muslim Brotherhood and backed by Saudi Arabia.

They were also the main beneficiaries of American aid, since they were the

Pakistanis' favourites. The CIA had no choice but to comply with Islamabad's

choices.

The other group, of course, Massoud, was favored by us

and by the British.

who had a direct contact with them.

The Sayyaf group, which is I think the third group, was mainly financed by the

Saudis.

We tried to monitor independently what was going to these various groups, but

it was difficult.

You know, the bulk of the fighting and the brunt of the fighting was borne by

the Afghans themselves.

So in that sense, it was an indigenous resistance assisted by outside powers in

terms of technology.

in terms of resources, in terms of weapons, in terms of training.

But even without these inputs the resistance would have carried

on. This is a point that most people seem to miss.

They believe that it was the provision of assistance and the technology and the

resources and the training and the money that did the job. No.

The increasingly well-armed and trained Mujahideen were starting to pose serious

problems for the Red Army.

The Soviet soldiers were surprised by the effectiveness of the resistance in

the provinces.

The loyalty of the Afghani people, which lasted for decades, has changed by 180

percent in a year.

Why? Because no one loves them, especially the Afghans. And what kind of

people will love it when they get a weapon? With all good intentions.

The entire population thinks that if it weren't for the Soviet troops, they

would have dealt with the Afghan army in 5 seconds.

The leaders of Afghanistan solved their political issues.

relying on our bayonets.

Why? Because the army is self-proclaimed. You need to prepare,

you need personnel, weapons, equipment. And here everything is.

And that's why the army was drawn into these combat clashes.

As a result, such a twist happened.

The more we fight there, the more fire, the more the civilian population becomes

on the side of the enemy.

This is such a dialectic of a small-scale war.

In Moscow in early 1980, preparations were underway for the Olympic Games that

summer, a genuine source of pride and joy for the Soviet citizens.

They were already aware that the United States and 65 other countries were going

to be boycotting the Games, but no one really knew why.

This was because officially, there was no war in Afghanistan.

For the moment, the secret was still well under wraps.

There was a special ruling on censorship.

It was published in 1980.

It can and cannot be published in the press.

There are no military operations.

The troops only carry out humanitarian missions.

In 1982, I was given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

And in the newspaper, in Krasnaya Vizie, it was written that Captain Avyshev, the

commander-in-chief with free troops, gave...

But in Moscow, one solitary voice dared to break the silence.

The voice belonged to Andrei Sakharov, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Sakharov was already a well-known dissident by that time.

Before the beginning of the Afghan campaign.

He thought it was an unfair war.

He thought the Soviet Union was interfering with the other side.

That he was taking part in a civil war on one side.

That the Soviet soldiers were dying there completely senselessly.

That the civilians were being killed there, which is bad.

Andrei Sakharov's open letter drew an angry reaction from the Kremlin, and he

was sent into internal exile to the town of Gorky. A few years later, having been

elected a deputy of the people, Sakharov reaffirmed the reasons for his earlier

action loud and clear.

He was against the introduction of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and for

this he was sent to Gorky.

This was the main reason, and I am proud of it.

I am proud of this transfer to Gorky as a reward that I received.

The order has come, and by the order we stand up, taking the

AKM.

Sit down at night in the plane at that early hour.

When the earth around slept in Afghanistan.

The order of will carried Afghanistan.

Beautiful mountain wild land, the order is simple.

Get up, go and die, but how is that?

Afganistan!

In the people's eyes, the relationship was bitter.

So many people, sometimes even unprepared.

These coffins from Afghanistan.

It was such a shock for the whole country.

But the traumas the Soviets were starting to undergo were as nothing

compared to the nightmare being suffered by the Afghan people.

In the space of just a few months, the Red Army's intervention had turned into

all-out war, with civilian victims already numbered in their tens of

thousands.

The war was now spilling well beyond Afghanistan's

borders. as the call to jihad against the infidels resounded throughout the

world. Spurred on by this man, Abdullah Azam, a Palestinian scholar and advocate

of global jihad, recruitment centers for voluntary combatants opened in many

countries. From his base in Pakistan, Azam coordinated the network of jihadist

fighters drawn from all over the world.

Some people came from outside to fight alongside the mujahideen.

People came from the Philippines, the Moros, and people came from the Middle

East, people came from India, and people came from America itself, the Muslims of

America, and Europe, and the Far East. But they were few and far between.

The Arabs who came were usually Salafi, so they didn't just come to do jihad

against the Soviets, but for them, there was an element of preaching in it.

And so the Afghan resistance

became the breeding ground for worldwide jihad.

It was in the Afghan mountains that a certain Osama bin Laden, from a wealthy

Saudi family, cut his battle teeth fighting infidels.

At the time, Washington wasn't in the least bit concerned about jihad.

On the contrary, in 1983, Ronald Reagan decided to go public about the United

States' involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

The young lady underwent torture for four months while being held by the

Soviets.

There's a man here whose wife was killed in front of their two children, former

justice of the Supreme Court in Afghanistan, and they're here to try and

tell the outside world, the free world, what's really going on in Afghanistan.

And then at that point, Reagan broke the secrecy, and he just announced they were

going to give the Mujahideen everything they wanted.

And so it no longer became a secret that the U.S. was doing that. The rules had

changed. And we weren't just fighting to bleed the Soviets or to give them their

own Vietnam.

We decided that President Reagan, after he took office, and Bill Casey, who was

the director of the CIA, said, let's go win this thing.

And so Casey called me to his office and said, you're going to Afghanistan or to

Pakistan.

and we're going to try to win.

The two blocs were back in Cold War mode, fighting a war of influence and

communications.

The Americans were arming the rebels, while the Soviets were ordering the

Afghan leaders to organize anti-American protests in Kabul.

You have to understand that Brezhnev invaded.

promptly died.

And Andropov took over and promptly died. And Chebrikov took over and

promptly died.

And then Gorbachev. Gorbachev wasn't even among the signatures on sending the

limited contingent into Afghanistan.

In the three years between 1982 and 1985, the leadership at the Kremlin

changed three times.

and the warmongering old guard of the Politburo all but disappeared.

Coming to power in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was convinced that Soviet

society was in need of rapid reform.

The period of perestroika was just getting underway, and Gorbachev was

prepared to take a whole series of economic and political measures in this

direction. But the most urgent measure of them all concerned Afghanistan.

There were several notes in it, so as not to forget.

They were short.

The first note was to implement

a realistic policy towards Afghanistan, to prepare for the withdrawal of

troops.

So Gorbachev found himself in a really, really tough situation.

He was losing money, he was losing people, he was losing domestic support

for the war, because now with glasnost, everybody heard about terrible things

that were going on in Afghanistan.

The first

effect of

perestroika was the freeing up of public opinion in the USSR.

Previously muzzled, the Soviet people were now free to express themselves and

were gradually becoming aware that this war was a catastrophe.

Gorbachev knew he had to bring it to an end. He also knew to whom he had to

speak about it first.

But the United States was very uncooperative, because within the United

States, especially when Reagan came to power...

people who wanted to bleed the Soviet Union in Afghanistan prevailed.

And so the Reagan administration was not interested in the Soviet withdrawal.

What it wanted to achieve is the defeat, decisive defeat of the Soviet Union in

Afghanistan. By the time I was called in to go take over the program in 1986,

on very short notice, I was called to Bill Casey's office and he said,

I want you to go over there and I want you to win.

I'll give you a billion dollars. Is that enough?

And that was a billion dollars. Sounds like a lot of money in 1986.

He says, you can have the Stingers, which were already approved.

And, you know, I want you to, we're going to win now.

The famous Stingers, which, according to some, changed the course of the war,

were ground-to-air missiles fired from ultralight shoulder-mounted launchers.

enabling a single man to bring down an enemy helicopter or fighter plane.

While the Soviets had clearly announced their intention to withdraw, the

Americans delivered from 500 to 2,000 Stinger missiles to the Mujahedin.

The first Stingers were used at Jalalabad in September 1986, and they

downed three.

Russian helicopters.

And overall, the Russians suffered great losses in helicopters.

I think it was something like a thousand.

American deliveries of Stingers helped

the Mujahideen inflict a first battlefield defeat on the Red Army.

In 1986, Moscow decided to replace President Karmal by a man who seemed

better suited to the situation – Mohammad Najibullah.

Gorbachev thought he could impose his own version of perestroika in

Afghanistan and launched the idea of a national reconciliation of the Afghan

people.

This is your country, you have to make a deal, and so on.

And the information was that we were leaving.

And slowly, we began to hand over the equipment, prepare them. And for three

years, we prepared the consciousness of the leadership of Afghanistan, the

leadership of the armed forces, and all the population, that we were leaving.

I invited him to Jabul.

And in a conversation in Tashkent, I told him, you must know,

They told the others, you must know that we will leave Kyrgyzstan.

I am doing this to you in advance, so that you go and prepare to take it all

on yourself.

I say, it does not mean that we refuse any help from you. No.

But the troops will leave, and we will not participate in

the war.

The Soviets were trying to bring the moderate opposition.

into the government.

The Soviets were negotiating with Shah Massoud, who was the commander,

legendary commander of the northern territories in Afghanistan, northern

part of Afghanistan.

The United States supported the most radical, the most fundamentalist forces

among the Mujahideen.

did not accept Dr.

Najibullah's recommendations.

This was the reason for the war to continue.

I think not everything was done in order to establish relations with the

opposition forces.

Although our political forces also helped to

talk to everyone.

We talked to India, we talked to Pakistan,

we talked to Iran.

It was clear to the Americans.

And there was a conference in Geneva.

At the UN in Geneva in 1988, negotiations were concluded.

Despite the reticence of the Americans, the regional powers managed to hammer

out a series of treaties regarding the resolution of the situation in

Afghanistan. It was now official.

the Soviet troops would be leaving the country.

We were putting the Soviet Union, in what we now know were its last days,

under a great deal of pressure.

And the ignominious defeat in Afghanistan was certainly part of that.

It was psychologically significant, it was politically significant.

On the ground, The Soviet generals had long understood that the war was

unwinnable and had secretly begun negotiating with certain resistance

chiefs, especially with Commander Massoud, who was master of the entire

north of the country, the territory through which the withdrawing Soviet

troops would have to pass.

If you want to support us,

you have to support us, especially in Salang.

It was one of the issues of the Nizari Council.

We had to be responsible for it.

One day I remember that I was by the road in Salang.

I think it was Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army, Mr. Gromov.

He came to me with 50 vehicles and asked to talk to me. He had suggested 14

materials to me.

One of his words was that if you...

Despite the Afghan army's show of strength, President Najibullah was

extremely worried.

He knew that once the Soviets had withdrawn, he would have to face the

resistance chiefs, who had now become fearsome political adversaries.

Although the Soviet generals had managed to negotiate a ceasefire with Commander

Massoud for the duration of the troops' withdrawal, They now received a contrary

order to deliver a killer blow to him.

It was an order from the politicians.

the most authoritative politicians at the time, and those who had enough

power. They were against everyone.

The commanding army, the commanders of the regiments, the divisions, the

combatants, the soldiers, yes.

But how? We were leaving, and we had a task to crush them head-on.

No matter how they were there, we interacted with them, organized

interactions, drank tea.

They said that we were going to leave soon, and that we would be happy to

stay. And in one beautiful morning, we almost destroyed them. But an order is

an order, a decision is a decision, and we did it. Here you go.

When the military was against all levels, all levels, and the politicians

insisted on the request of Najibullah, here is a clear example. I am an

eyewitness to these events and a participant.

For 48 hours, from the 24th to the 26th of January, 1989, the Red Army carried

out Operation Typhoon, shelling Commander Massoud's positions and

killing over 600 of the mujahideen.

Yet Massoud patiently bore this deluge of fire, not reacting to this final

attack by the Red Army.

It was ended by them,

while there was a war going on in Afghanistan between the government

forces supported by Shouravi and the Mujahideen. But the Shouravi forces did

not need this war.

What were the arguments within them?

What were the reasons behind this very cruel attack?

That is something that may have come today in the memory of the Shouravi

generals of that time.

It was a big mistake, neither humanly, nor militarily, nor politically

justified. Of course, it was a very bad decision to make.

Disgraceful for... It was impossible to do that.

Especially when... And even after that, they didn't resist.

They just let us leave and that's it.

This shameful act was the final act of this disastrous war, an enterprise which

the whole world called the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but which the

Kremlin right up to the end maintained was a deployment of a limited

contingent.

The figures from this war are staggering.

1,200,000 dead on the Afghan side, 15,000 on the Soviet, and 6 million

refugees. A country in total ruin.

And today the never-ending conflicts still continue in Afghanistan, a land

known since time immemorial as the graveyard of empires.

It was the war that changed the world, and was the starting point for yet

another war, the outcome of which no one yet knows.