The Soviet-Afghan War was the longest and most expensive military campaign the Soviet Union fought after the Second World War. From December 24, 1979 to February 15, 1989, the Red Army occupied Afghanistan in support of a communist government that never had the loyalty of the country it claimed to rule. The war cost roughly 15,000 Soviet soldiers their lives, killed an estimated 1 million Afghan civilians, and drove more than 5 million more into exile in Pakistan and Iran. It is the war that ended the Cold War.
Rodric Braithwaite’s Afgantsy (2011), based on Soviet archives and on extensive interviews with veterans, is the standard Western account of the Soviet side. Braithwaite was the British ambassador to Moscow in the late 1980s and read the classified records. He concludes that the war was unwinnable in any meaningful sense from about 1982 onward, and that the Politburo knew it.
Origins
Afghanistan had been a monarchy under Zahir Shah until 1973, when his cousin Mohammad Daoud Khan overthrew him in a coup and declared a republic. Daoud was himself overthrown in April 1978 by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a communist party divided into two rival factions, Khalq and Parcham, that had previously been unable to agree on anything. The Saur Revolution of April 27, 1978, brought to power Nur Mohammad Taraki, leader of the Khalq faction, who was replaced in September 1979 by Hafizullah Amin, his more brutal rival. The two men introduced radical land reform, abolished rural debts, and insisted on girls’ schooling. The reforms were designed by urban ideologues with no understanding of Afghan rural society. They were met with a growing armed insurgency that drew on Islamist networks in Pakistan, the grievances of Pashtun tribesmen — the strategic interests of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.
By early 1979, the PDPA government controlled Kabul and a handful of provincial capitals and nothing else. The Politburo in Moscow debated intervention. The decisive meeting took place on December 12, 1979, in the absence of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, who was ill. The faction led by Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov and KGB chief Yuri Andropov argued that a friendly government in Kabul was essential to Soviet security, particularly in light of the loss of Iran following the 1979 revolution. The opposition, led by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, argued that intervention would produce a long, costly, and ultimately unwinnable occupation.
The decision went to the war party. The letter that Brezhnev signed on December 12 to justify the intervention to the Afghan government was a model of the genre: it acknowledged the “truly critical” situation, referred to “irregular bands” supported by “reactionary imperialist circles,” and pledged the assistance requested. The first units of the 40th Army crossed the border on December 24. On December 27, Soviet special forces killed President Amin in the Tajbeg Palace, replacing him with Babrak Karmal, the Parcham leader who had been waiting in Prague.
The war
The Soviet forces initially numbered around 50,000 and grew to a peak of approximately 115,000 in the mid-1980s. They controlled the cities, the main roads, provincial capitals. They never controlled the countryside, where the mujahedeen operated. The mujahedeen were not a unified force; they were a coalition of seven principal parties organized along ethnic and sectarian lines, with the Hezb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Jamiat-e-Islami of Burhanuddin Rabbani as the largest. Pakistan’s ISI allocated weapons, training, and money; Saudi Arabia paid for much of it; the United States, through the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, provided the weapons and intelligence.
The early years of the war were marked by brutal Soviet pacification campaigns. The operations used mass artillery, bombing, and the destruction of villages suspected of harboring insurgents. The Soviets also planted millions of plastic landmines in the countryside, a legacy that has killed or maimed an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 Afghans in the decades since. The mujahedeen responded with ambushes, assassinations, and increasing use of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons.
The war’s strategic balance shifted decisively in 1986, when the United States began providing the FIM-92 Stinger missile, a shoulder-fired heat-seeking anti-aircraft weapon. The Stinger shot down hundreds of Soviet helicopters and transport aircraft within two years, and forced the Soviets to fly higher and stop using helicopters for close support. The result was a substantial reduction in the effectiveness of Soviet firepower, exactly when the mujahedeen were developing more capable conventional forces.
The war took its toll on the Soviet system. The cost has been estimated at $8 billion per year in 1980s rubles, a substantial sum for an economy that was already declining. The drugs flowing out of the Afghan poppy fields — by 1989 Afghanistan produced the majority of the world’s illicit opium — also began to enter the Soviet Union. Perhaps more important, the war produced roughly 62,000 Soviet veterans who had been exposed to combat and who came home disillusioned. The first major veterans’ organizations were founded in 1988, and their protests contributed to the broader climate of political loosening.
The withdrawal
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985. He told the Politburo within a year that the war could not be won and must be ended. The Geneva Accords of April 14, 1988 set a timetable for withdrawal. The last Soviet troops crossed the Amu Darya at the Friendship Bridge on February 15, 1989. The withdrawal was orderly, and the Afghan communist government under Najibullah held on for three more years before being overthrown in April 1992.
The Soviet withdrawal did not produce peace. The mujahedeen factions turned on each other in a civil war that lasted until 1996, when the Taliban took Kabul. The legacy of the war — the weapons, the trained fighters, the networks of Islamist politics, the drug trade — fed directly into the rise of al-Qaeda and the events of September 11, 2001. The chain is not a metaphor. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden met in the Peshawar refugee camps in 1986; the 9/11 Commission Report traced the operational planning of the attacks to al-Qaeda’s experience in Afghanistan between 1989 and 2001.
Why the war mattered
The Soviet-Afghan War was the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, but the comparison should be handled carefully. Unlike the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union did not have a popular movement at home capable of forcing withdrawal. The Soviet public was largely unaware of the war, and the few protesters who emerged in 1986 were too small to matter. The war ended because the Soviet leadership concluded that it was strategically counterproductive, not because of domestic pressure.
What the war did, more than anything, was to accelerate the crisis of the Soviet system. The war required sustained defense spending while the civilian economy stagnated. It required censorship that became harder to maintain as glasnost progressed. It required alliances with unsavory clients, including the PDPA government, that contradicted the moral claims of the Soviet state. By 1989, the cost of the war was one of the items Gorbachev listed when he explained to his colleagues why the Soviet Union could no longer sustain the global contest.
Key sources
- Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–1989 (Profile, 2011)
- Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin, 2004)
- Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (Basic Books, 2017)
- John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (Penguin, 2005)