by Ben Kritz

Created on: January 23, 2009

On Christmas Eve, 1979, elements of the Soviet Special Forces seized the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan in the first action of a massive invasion by three airborne and four ground divisions of the Red Army. (ACED, 2000) Within days, the Soviet invaders captured the seat of the government and installed a puppet president, but soon found themselves mired in a bitter struggle with rebels known as the mujahadin, who were receiving covert support from the United States and other countries. After ten years of war and thousands of casualties, and with the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse, the invaders agreed to withdraw, having never really been able to put Afghanistan under their control. Although the direct cause of their failure was the tenacity and fatalistic bravery of their Afghan opponents, the seeds of the Soviet disaster were actually sown long before, in the history and policy that led to the invasion, and the American involvement that may have provoked and certainly at least aggravated the situation.

The war, described by former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski as "the Soviets' Vietnam" (Mid-East Realities, 2001, and Baxter, 2001), had far-reaching effects. Afghanistan, a poor and economically-struggling country to begin with, was wrecked by the conflict. An estimated one to one-and-a-half million Afghanis perished in the war, along with 15,000 or more Soviet servicemen. (Tarzi, 2003) An estimated one-third of Afghanistan's pre-war population was displaced, mostly into refugee areas in Pakistan and Iran. (Galster, 1990) A bitter civil war between the victorious mujahadin factions followed the Soviet withdrawal, leading to the eventual rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990's. (Katzman, 2004) The "quagmire" of Afghanistan is generally regarded as a significant factor in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. (Warner, 1999) And for America, the Soviet invasion would have equally serious implications: As Amin Tarzi (2003) states, "If the events leading to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States are viewed historically, their origins are inextricably linked to the events of 27 December 1979" [the date of the capture of the palace in Kabul by Soviet special forces].

Afghanistan's historical relationship with Russia dates back to 1868, when the Amir of Bukhara signed a "peace treaty" with the Tsar that extended Russian control to the banks of the Amu Darya River, the northern border of Afghanistan. (Baxter, 2001)

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