>>410783>The PDPA killed tens of thousands, pushed unpopular policies that hurt people, and the USSR waged total war killing 500k to 2m civilians.I think this should be prefaced by the fact the Soviets did not order the original coup, nor were they particularly happy when the PDPA seized power. According to Afgantsy, there was actually panic at the Kremlin when it happened as they had a good relationship with Daoud's government.
In the year leading up the invasion, they were doing everything possible to avoid a direct intervention, they did not believe Afghanistan was ready for a revolution. They only decided to intervene after Amin killed their favorite, Taraki, despite a Soviet guarantee to protect him. Amin is the one who committed most of the excesses. He idolized Stalin to a pretty extreme extent and ignored everything Stalin did except for the purges which he tried to replicate. It got so bad that the entire country was thrust into an, at first low level, civil war. That's why the Soviets moved in and killed Amin. Their first objective was to stop the massive purges and unpopular policies, not support them. After Amin was killed, the PDPA took a much more moderate approach which alleviated a lot of the immediate issues, but, at that point, the US and Pak had taken notice and turned a ragtag guerrilla force into a somewhat modern army with modern equipment.
Also, I find that 2m figure incredibly unlikely, almost like it specifically calculated to be higher than the civilian death toll during Vietnam. The Soviet force in Afghanistan was tiny compared to the American force in Vietnam.
>If you think Maoists and even anarchists being part of the mujahideen in the opposition of that is bad, then that's disgusting.Bro, most of them fucking sucked, not all of them, but groups that received the most funding were often the most violently religious. Hekmatyar cut his teeth throwing acid on women who attended university. They were counter revolutionaries not freedom fighters, the civil war initially began because the PDPA granted women equal rights. The Mujahideen was funded by wealthy Imams and feudal landlords who were pissed their land was being redistributed. Not to mention Wahhabi funding from Saudi by way of Pakistan and the Chinese playing 5d chess.
>In fact, most Mujahideen-funding came from private muslim organizations across MENA because their cause was just.No it fucking wasn't. They were religious zealots who wanted to maintain the feudal peasant relationship. They wanted women to continue being slaves and the peasants to continue working land that wasn't their own. Again, their funding came from the most reactionary of Gulf leadership and eventually the most reactionary figures within the American Government.
>Every military-aged man was Mujahideen in the 1980s.Where did you even get this from?
> Bin Laden and Omar literally made their own groups after the Soviets left literally to oppose the Mujahideen Islamic state governmentThose groups were created to fight the PDPA Government, not the "mujahideen Islamic state." The PDPA remained in power until the Taliban took Kabul and brutally murdered the popular PDPA president.
I may as well throw this book in. You should read it, It's easily one of the best book written on the subject. Roderick Braitwaite was the UK ambassador to the Soviet Union in the last years of the war, so it's not even tankie propaganda or whatever you'd call it.