The Christmas Invasion

By December 1979, Afghanistan's communist government was consuming itself. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan had seized power in 1978 in the Saur Revolution, but immediately fractured into two murderous factions — Khalq and Parcham — that spent more energy purging each other than governing the country. President Hafizullah Amin had seized power from his predecessor Nur Muhammad Taraki by strangling him with a pillow, and had then alienated virtually every constituency in Afghanistan through brutal collectivization programs and grotesque repression. An Islamic insurgency was spreading across the countryside, and the DRA army was hemorrhaging through defection and mutiny.

Moscow watched with alarm. The Politburo — dominated by three aging men, Brezhnev, Ustinov, and Andropov — debated intervention for months. KGB chief Yuri Andropov worried that Amin might be a CIA agent. Defence Minister Dmitry Ustinov insisted Soviet forces could stabilize the situation quickly; he told Brezhnev it would be over in three to four weeks. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko opposed the intervention, reportedly telling colleagues it was 'a trap' they would pay for dearly. He was outvoted. The Politburo authorized Operation Storm-333 and the deployment of the 40th Army on December 12, 1979.

On the night of December 27, 1979, KGB Spetsnaz teams stormed the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul in a forty-five-minute firefight that killed President Amin and his bodyguards. Simultaneously, Soviet airborne troops seized Kabul's Bagram and Kabul airports, communications centers, the Interior Ministry, and military headquarters. The operation was executed with textbook efficiency. The 40th Army — 80,000 troops — crossed the Amu Darya river at the Friendship Bridge in a column stretching for miles. Babrak Karmal, flown in from Moscow, was installed as the new President and announced over the radio that he had 'requested' Soviet assistance.

The Politburo had convinced themselves they were walking into a manageable problem. They had not consulted their military commanders who knew Afghanistan. They had not studied the British disasters there in the 19th century. They had not accounted for Islam, for tribal loyalty, for the mountainous terrain that would swallow armored columns, or for the possibility that the United States would turn their miscalculation into a strategic catastrophe. The three-to-four-week operation would last 3,327 days.