Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

In late December 1979, Soviet forces entered Afghanistan to shore up a struggling communist government in Kabul. What was meant to be a short intervention became a nine-year war that killed huge numbers of Afghans, drained the Soviet Union, and helped reshape the final years of the Cold War. Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, but Afghanistan's conflicts continued long afterward.

The background lay in the 1978 Saur Revolution, when communist officers and the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan overthrew President Mohammed Daoud Khan. The new government pursued rapid land reform, secularization, and literacy campaigns, often by coercion, and it brutally repressed opponents. Revolts broke out across the countryside, and the party itself split between rival factions, the Khalq and the Parcham. In 1979 Nur Muhammad Taraki was ousted and killed on the orders of his rival Hafizullah Amin. Moscow distrusted Amin and feared both the collapse of a friendly regime on its border and the possible loss of influence to the United States.

The Soviet operation began around Christmas 1979. Airborne troops landed in Kabul and other forces crossed the border. Soviet special forces stormed Amin's palace, and he was killed. Moscow installed Babrak Karmal, a Parcham leader, as head of government. The Soviets expected to stabilize the regime and leave, but they found themselves fighting a widespread insurgency. The rebels, known as the mujahideen, were a loose collection of groups motivated by Islam, local autonomy, and resistance to foreign occupation.

The war was fought largely in the mountains and villages, where Soviet airpower and armor were less effective. Soviet and Afghan government forces used aerial bombing and sweeps that devastated rural areas, and millions of Afghans fled, mostly to Pakistan and Iran. The mujahideen received weapons and money from Pakistan, the United States, Saudi Arabia, China, and others. The arrival of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles in the mid-1980s is often said to have made Soviet air operations more costly, though historians debate how decisive they were. Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, came to see the war as a "bleeding wound" and sought a way out.

Under the 1988 Geneva Accords, the Soviets withdrew their troops by February 1989. Estimates of Afghan deaths run to around a million or more, and Soviet deaths are usually put at about 15,000. The communist government under Mohammad Najibullah survived until 1992, then collapsed, and civil war followed, eventually bringing the Taliban to power. The war also strained Soviet finances and public confidence, contributing to the pressures that led to the USSR's dissolution in 1991. Comparisons to the American experience in Vietnam are common, though the two wars differed in many ways.