On Christmas Eve 1979, the Soviet Union launched an invasion of Afghanistan, its Central Asian neighbor to the south. First, it dropped elite troops into major Afghan cities. Soon after, he deployed motorized divisions across the border. Within days, the KGB, which had infiltrated the Afghan presidential palace, poisoned the president and his ministers, helping to launch a Moscow-backed coup to install a new puppet leader, Babrak Karmal. The invasion sparked a brutal nine-year Afghan civil war.
By the time the last Soviet troops withdrew in early 1989, crossing the ironically named Friendship Bridge, the conflict had claimed the lives of an estimated 1 million civilians and some 125,000 Afghan, Soviet and other fighters. The war wreaked havoc not only in Afghanistan, but also in the Soviet Union, whose economy and national prestige were badly affected. The military misadventure would contribute significantly to the subsequent collapse and break-up of the USSR.
So why did Moscow do it?
Afghanistan had long been of strategic importance
A political cartoon of Nicholas II and General Obruchev looking at a ‘war map’ with ‘Russia’ on one side, ‘England’ on the other and ‘Afghanistan’ between them; under the table, after passing through a trapdoor, is “the special correspondent of the Herald”, c. 1885.
Photo12/Universal Pictures Group/Getty Images
From the beginning of the 19and century, Afghanistan became a geopolitical pawn in what has been called “the great game” between the empires of Tsarist Russia and Great Britain. Fearing that Tsarist Russia’s expansion into Central Asia would bring it dangerously close to the frontier of India, their imperial jewel, Britain fought three wars in Afghanistan to maintain a buffer against Russian encroachment.
Neither the Russian Revolution of 1917 nor the end of British colonial rule in India changed the geopolitical importance of Afghanistan. In 1919, the year Afghans gained independence to conduct their own foreign policy, the Soviet Union became the first country to establish diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, which, in turn, was one of the first to officially recognize the Bolshevik government. Over the following decades, the USSR offered both economic and military aid to a neutral Afghanistan. When the British Empire declined after World War II and the United States became a dominant world power, Afghanistan remained on the front lines of the Cold War.
Moscow struggled to lock in Afghan allegiance
In 1973, the last king of Afghanistan was ousted in a coup by his cousin and brother-in-law, Mohammed Daoud Khan, who proceeded to establish a republic. The USSR welcomed this turn to the left, but their joy soon faded as the authoritarian Daoud Khan refused to be a Soviet puppet. In a private meeting in 1977, he told Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev that he would continue to employ foreign experts from countries other than the USSR. “Afghanistan will remain poor, if necessary, but free in its actions and its decisions.” Unsurprisingly, Soviet leaders disapproved. In 1978, the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew Daoud Khan in what became known as the Saur Revolution. Daoud Khan and 18 members of his family died.
Despite Afghanistan’s nominally communist leadership, the Soviet leadership still could not relax. The new, divided and unstable PDPA regime faced fierce cultural resistance from conservative and religious leaders, and opposition in much of rural Afghanistan to the communists’ sweeping land reforms. In the fall of 1979, revolutionary Hafizullah Amin orchestrated an internal PDPA coup that killed the party’s first leader and ushered in his brief but brutal rule. National unrest swelled and groans from Moscow intensified.
Moscow feared growing US involvement
Soviet troops in Kabul, Afghanistan, December 29, 1979
Francois Lochon/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
Afghanistan’s chaos alarmed Soviet leaders primarily because it increased the chances that Afghan leaders would turn to the United States for help. Top members of the Politburo warned Brezhnev in late October 1979 that Amin was seeking to pursue a “more balanced policy” and that the United States was detecting “the possibility of a change in the political line of Afghanistan”.
A few weeks later, KGB Chief Yuri Andropov joined USSR Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and his Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov in sounding the alarm. They persuaded Brezhnev that even if the Americans did not actively try to undermine Soviet influence in Afghanistan, Amin’s ruthless but unstable rule would create weaknesses that the United States could later exploit. Moscow, they said, should act.
The Soviets confirmed the “Brezhnev Doctrine”
These warnings probably fell on receptive ears. A decade earlier, in 1968, Brezhnev had introduced his new dogma: all socialist (read: Communist-friendly Moscow) regimes had a responsibility to support others, using military force if necessary. The “Brezhnev Doctrine” was a response to the “Prague Spring”, a brief period of liberalization under Czechoslovakia’s new ruler, Alexander Dubček. Even Dubček’s modest steps away from hardline communism offered reason enough for the Soviets to invade Czechoslovakia and take it.
In 1979, Afghanistan, a failing regime and once friendly, offered a new chance for the USSR to apply the Brezhnev doctrine militarily. Failure to act, the leaders realized, could jeopardize the Soviet will to keep other regimes on its side of the so-called “Iron Curtain”, the physical and ideological border separating the USSR from the rest of Europe. after the Second World War.
Afghanistan could exacerbate the USSR’s “nationality problem”
The Afghan mujahideen fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Pascal Manoukian/Sygma/Getty Images
Throughout its history, the vast territory of Russia has encompassed a wide range of national and ethnic groups inhabiting their historical homelands. During the Soviet era, which overlaid a repressive system of centralized power, Communist leaders worried about internal challenges erupting in its satellite states, especially those in rapidly growing Muslim-majority Central Asia. While propaganda portrayed Soviet life as a joyful multi-ethnic melting pot where different traditions flourished against the backdrop of national unity, the reality for some groups involved purges, deportations and labor camps. For the Soviets, any dissent or change of alliance on the part of Afghans – even those who call themselves communists – risked sparking similar movements in adjacent states such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, which all shared a common identity. ethnicity, religion and history with Afghanistan.
With 20/20 hindsight, it is easy to conclude that launching an invasion of Afghanistan in support of an unpopular regime was a stupid and doomed endeavor. For the Soviet leaders in Moscow during the short winter days of December 1979, however, the decision to do just that seemed logical and inevitable.
