Some context here. The leaders of Afghanistan's Commie party were Amin and Taraki. Both of them were army officers who'd gotten their training in the Soviet Union, so they were friendly with the Soviets.

These guys went to the Politburo with their plan for a Commie revolution in Afghanistan. Brezhnev and the Politburo advised against this. In the Soviet view, Afghanistan was still a very tribal and religious primitive society of illiterate subsistence farmers. Communism was a horrible fit for a whole host of reasons. The Soviets advised Amin and Taraki against staging a Commie revolution. They said it would make far more sense to just work on improving literacy.

The Afghan Commies didn't listen, and staged their revolution. Russia advised them to change as little as possible, but this advice was ignored. The PDPA launched a full-blown socialist revolution.

The goat farmers freaked out about these ideas of girls being educated, and tribal leaders hated land reform (because they were usually the biggest land owners). They started protesting. The PDPA responded with violence, killing lots of protesters and hoping this would make the problem to away. It didn't - it got worse. Every time the protests increases, they responded with more violent repression. They started to feel like they were losing control, and asked the Russians to send the Red Army to help.

The Politburo turned down two requests for armed assistance - not because they were deeply moral people, but because they were smart enough to understand that an officially atheist army would likely make things worse. They advised the PDPA to scale back their reforms, but the momentum of the protests was already too great. (This was the period when Brzezinski and ISI started to help the jihadis - Brzezinski wanted shit to fall apart so bad, the Russians would have no choice but to ride in to rescue their Afghan buddies).

Finally it happened - the PDPA lost control of an entire city, and the army garrison sided with the protesters. This was no longer a protest movement, it was a rebellion that had seized its first city. The PDPA responded with all-out violence, killing 3000 people. They put the rebellion down, but it was looking shaky. All this tension resulted in a schism between the two Afghan Commie leaders - Amin fixed this by killing Taraki and assuming sole control.

The problem with this, Taraki had been the smarter of the two, and the one most interested in Moscow's advice to chill the fuck out. Brezhnev personally liked Taraki and saw Amin as a simple brute.

Amin sent one more request to Moscow to send him troops to put down this rebellion. This time, Brezhnev said yes. Russia couldn't allow this madman to keep butchering people in the name of Communism. Somebody had to fix this, and Russia felt they were the ones most responsible for this disaster. The Red Army went into Afghanistan, where their first mission was to kill the stupid bastard Amin, and hope that his removal would help stabilize the country.

By this time a new industry had been born. Rural Afghans were some of the poorest people on the planet. Rural areas still practiced a form of serfdom - you were bound to your clan's land, and no other clan would take you in without your clan's approval. So most people didn't get paid in money - you'd get food, fuel, a plot of land for your own food, and maybe once or twice a year a cash bonus.

So then Pakistan's ISI comes along and offers you cash money every month, and all you have to do is kill foreign atheist commie occupiers. The Pashtun tribes live according to a code that predates Islam, and that code values bravery above all things, along with a duty to expel outsiders. Given a choice between being a broke ass shepherd whose only job benefit was unlimited goat fucking, or being a rich noble warrior, it was easier than hell to recruit as many people as they wanted. And they wanted a lot of people.

From the Soviet perspective, Afghanistan should have been an easy mission. All they had to do was stabilize the situation, and then find some local who could take charge and run Afghanistan in whatever way would be stable. The Soviets weren't going to insist on educating girls or stopping buggery of prepubescent boy or any of the other lovely traditions, they wanted it clean and then they'd get out.

So they meet with all the tribal elders and explain how they have no goal of spreading atheism or the Russian language. They're caretakers only, until they can hand over power. All the tribal elders smile and are very happy, and agree this is a good plan. They leave, and that night their men attack and kill a bunch of Russiam soldiers. Why? Well, they're all being paid well to fight, and you bastards are foreign occupiers after all, so it's honorable to kill you.

Russia was trying to figure this out, and then Brezhnev died. Afghanistan was his baby, and now it's a cluster fuck. So the new guy says "just keep doing what you're doing and pacify the country so we can leave".

This doesn't work of course - Afghan rural guys are living the gangster lifestyle. They're heroes, they're brave and noble, and they're earning more money for their families than they'd get from a whole lifetime of work.

Before the Soviets can figure out a plan, Brezhnev's replacement dies. The new guy sees the cluster fuck and doesn't want it, so he tells the army to continue to pacify until they come up with a better plan. Then that leader dies.

The Soviets had no aspirations for Afghanistan. There were no minerals they didn't have in abundance on their own. Afghanistan would have held two strategic value while Iran was a US proxy, but now Iran was an Islamic state. And Afghanistan was only valuable as a transport corridor in the first place if it was friendly or at least neutral. Amin and Taraki had ruined any chance of that.

Everybody who fought in Afghanistan did so as hired guns for the CIA and ISI. Once you bought off a clan's leader, you bought off the whole clan - their warriors came as a package deal. It was all as corrupt as imaginable - fighters had to pay for their own guns and bullets. (Few had money to start, so they were indebted to their clan leader and further bound to him).

The CIA didn't want peace, nor did ISI. They were paying for a war, and as long as they were paying, the Pashtun were more than happy to be their whores. The wrecking of your country is a small price to pay for the noble life of a brave warrior living by the ancient values of Pashtunwali.

Najibullah was able to get everyone in the north on board - the Uzbeks and Turkmen and Tajiks and Hazara all made peace. The only ones fighting were the ones addicted to CIA crack. (A lot more money started to flow from GCC states, where funding foreign jihad became a popular way for decadent kings and emirs to prove their piety).

Thank you if you've borne with me so far. Despite my infective, I do deplore the tragedy that befell Afghanistan. I don't think the Soviets had that much to do with this tragedy - it was the US that wanted to give Russian "their own Vietnam". They were happy to pay to kill Russians, and they didn't give a damn if Afghanistan was destroyed in the process. Tribal leaders failed their people. If they'd had the smarts to recognize that foreign money could pervert Afghanistan even easier than foreign troops could, this disaster could have been avoided.