Soviet forces were geared towards fighting a massive conventional war against their traditional adversary, NATO as a result, they were ill prepared for a counter-insurgency effort against the many different Afghan tribes of the Mujahideen, which employed guerrilla-tactics to prey upon isolated Soviet units. Initial Mujahideen efforts against the invading Soviets were far from decisive but did manage to foil the Kremlin’s plans for a quick, low-cost campaign. The Soviets couldn’t have been more guilty in defying the independence of the “Moslem people” of Afghanistan.Īlthough American forces were held back from directly intervening, clandestine elements of the CIA trained and equipped the Afghan tribes hostile to the Soviet invasion, eventually known as the Mujahideen. As was typical of most Soviet publications, such fabrications turned out to be far from the truth.
In response, a February 8 th Russian news publication firmly rebuked Carter’s accusations, claiming, “ The American administration’s furious reaction to the recent events in Afghanistan is the result not at all of concern for an “independent Moslem people” but of the fact that plans for converting that country into an anti-Soviet military staging ground, into a stronghold of US policy in this region, have fallen through”. and NATO were convinced, and rightly so, that the move was nothing more than wanton Soviet aggression aimed at expanding their sphere of influence into the Middle East. He went so far as to demand a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Babrak Karmal fulfilled this role and endorsed Soviet actions as Amin’s replacement, thus offering a thinly veiled perception of legitimacy to the global community.Īlready in the midst of the Iranian hostage crisis, President Jimmy Carter turned even more attention to the Middle East and harshly condemned the Soviet Union’s actions in his 1980 State of the Union Address. Moscow masked this treachery under the guise of a legitimate response to requests from Afghanistan’s constitutional authorities to remove Amin for a more socialist-minded leader. When this failed however, the Soviets were quick to abandon any sense of finesse and immediately employed more spetsnaz commandos to simply storm Amin’s holdout and execute him along with his two sons. On December 27 th, spetsnaz operatives unsuccessfully poisoned Afghanistan’s President Hazifullah Amin in a sad attempt to make the political transition seem like something other than a strong-armed, Soviet-backed coup. The Soviets moved rapidly on the Capitol, Kabul. Looks like a solid plan….except for the mountains and feisty natives
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