The day itself: history has made its first move, and the next one is yours.
Briefing
25 December 1979. Soviet troops are entering Afghanistan, where the mujahideen have risen against the communists, and special forces prepare to overthrow Amin. In Tehran Khomeini holds American hostages, Saddam Hussein eyes Iran, Vietnam's army hunts the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and a ceasefire is signed in Rhodesia. Carter, Brezhnev, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping – the answer to the intervention will decide what the eighties become.
Real history stays a strong tendency: what happened later is planned for its date – until your actions change the world.
You govern: the orders are the state's.
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The world on 25 December 1979
At three in the afternoon on 25 December 1979 a Soviet motor-rifle division crosses into Afghanistan over a pontoon bridge on the Amu Darya at Termez, while transport aircraft carrying paratroopers land one after another at Kabul and Bagram. The Politburo decided it on 12 December in a narrow circle: Brezhnev, Andropov, Ustinov and Gromyko. Officially the troops come at the Afghan government's request; in truth special forces are preparing to storm Hafizullah Amin's palace, and Babrak Karmal travels with them.
Afghanistan's communists took power in April 1978 and turned the villages against them with reforms and terror. Nuristan, Kunar, Herat and the Hazarajat have risen; mujahideen in camps in Pakistan call for jihad, and the army is melting away. In September Amin overthrew and smothered President Taraki, Brezhnev's favourite, and Moscow no longer trusts him. It fears that after Iran's revolution a hostile Islamic state could grow on its southern border.
Next door Iran lives by Ayatollah Khomeini's law, and since 4 November students have held fifty-two Americans hostage in the US embassy. Saddam Hussein's Iraq eyes its weakened neighbour, oil costs over thirty dollars, and in Washington Carter prepares to face Reagan. Two weeks ago NATO decided to deploy new missiles in Europe. The intervention may be a short operation – or a decade's war that buries détente.