Final-Fan said:
They'd been in power for about a year, since a KGB-backed coup d'etat. So sure, they were invited in, by the guy who had just stolen the house at their behest.
No, wait: it's even worse than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
"In response to Afghan government requests, the Soviet government under leader Leonid Brezhnev first sent covert troops to advise and support the Afghan government, but on December 24, 1979, began the first deployment of the 40th Army.[31] Arriving in the capital Kabul, they staged a coup,[32] killing the Afghan President, and installing a rival Afghan socialist (Babrak Karmal).[30]
Of course, the previous government had also come to power by coup d'etat only a few years earlier, and five minutes of Google didn't show that that one was particularly due to outside meddling. However, he certainly became chummy with the USSR pretty quickly, and they egged him on to fight with Pakistan, with generally bad results. The US didn't intervene from what I spotted on Wikipedia until the USSR overthrew that government for not being friendly enough (the first time, not the second time) and radical communist rebels apparently killed the US ambassador. (Some allege that instead elements of the USSR-backed government were involved, though even if this is true it doesn't necessarily mean that the whole government was involved or that the USSR knew or approved. One senior US official called it "a tragic event which involved either Soviet ineptitude or collusion.")
Really, the whole country got gradually destroyed by the Cold War, from both sides, but I think it's fair to say that the USSR "started it".
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