milestones: 1977–1980

HISTORY LEARNING SITE UK: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/
russia_invasion_afghanistan.htm!
!Afghanistan hit the world's headlines in 1979. Afghanistan seemed to perfectly summarise the
Cold War. From the west's point of view, Berlin, Korea, Hungary and Cuba had shown the way
communism wanted to proceed. Afghanistan was a continuation of this.
In Christmas 1979, Russian paratroopers landed in Kabal, the capital of Afghanistan. The
country was already in the grip of a civil war. The prime minister, Hazifullah Amin, tried to sweep
aside Muslim tradition within the nation and he wanted a more western slant to Afghanistan.
This outraged the majority of those in Afghanistan as a strong tradition of Muslim belief was
common in the country.
Thousands of Muslim leaders had been arrested and many more had fled the capital and gone
to the mountains to escape Amin's police. Amin also lead a communist based government - a
belief that rejects religion and this was another reason for such obvious discontent with his
government.
Thousands of Afghanistan Muslims joined the Mujahdeen - a guerilla force on a holy mission for
Allah. They wanted the overthrow of the Amin government. The Mujahdeen declared a jihad - a
holy war - on the supporters of Amin. This was also extended to the Russians who were now in
Afghanistan trying to maintain the power of the Amin government. The Russians claimed that
they had been invited in by the Amin government and that they were not invading the country.
They claimed that their task was to support a legitimate government and that the Mujahdeen
were no more than terrorists.
On December 27th, 1979, Amin was shot by the Russians and he was replaced by Babrak
Kamal. His position as head of the Afghan government depended entirely on the fact that he
needed Russian military support to keep him in power. Many Afghan soldiers had deserted to
the Mujahdeen and the Kamal government needed 85,000 Russian soldiers to keep him in
power.
The Mujahdeen proved to be a formidable opponent. They were equipped with old rifles but had
a knowledge of the mountains around Kabal and the weather conditions that would be
encountered there. The Russians resorted to using napalm, poison gas and helicopter gun
ships against the Mujahdeen - but they experienced exactly the same military scenario the
Americans had done in Vietnam. By 1982, the Mujahdeen controlled 75% of Afghanistan despite fighting the might of the world's
second most powerful military power. Young conscript Russian soldiers were no match against
men fuelled by their religious belief. Though the Russian army had a reputation, the war in
Afghanistan showed the world just how poor it was outside of military displays. Army boots
lasted no more than 10 days before falling to bits in the harsh environment of the Afghanistan
mountains. Many Russian soldiers deserted to the Mujahdeen. Russian tanks were of little use
in the mountain passes. The United Nations had condemned the invasion as early as January 1980 but a Security
Council motion calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces had been vetoed......by Russia.
America put a ban on the export of grain to Russia, ended the SALT talks taking place then and
boycotted the Olympic Games due to be held in Moscow in 1980. Other than that, America did
nothing. Why ? They knew that Russia had got itself into their own Vietnam and it also provided
American Intelligence with an opportunity to acquire any new Russian military hardware that
could be used in Afghanistan. Mujhadeen fighters were given access to American surface-to-air
missiles - though not through direct sales by America.
Mikhail Gorbachev took Russia out of the Afghanistan fiasco when he realised what many
Russian leaders had been too scared to admit in public - that Russia could not win the war and
the cost of maintaining such a vast force in Afghanistan was crippling Russia's already weak
economy.
By the end of the 1980's, the Mujahdeen was at war with itself in Afghanistan with hard line
Taliban fighters taking a stronger grip over the whole nation and imposing very strict Muslim law
on the Afghanistan population.
EXCERPTS FROM: http://www.aasd.k12.wi.us/staff/hermansenjoel/
afghansovietwar.htm
Analysts have given a number of reasons for the invasion. One expansionist
view regards the invasion as a step in the further implementation of a
Russian policy espoused originally by Peter the Great and later adopted by
the Soviets as well. This view allows that the annexation of Afghanistan
follows the earlier takeover of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The motivation
for the move is given as access to the warm water ports of the Indian
Ocean. Another reason states that the reform-minded Marxist government
of Afghanistan needed Moscow's assistance. Moscow could not turn a deaf
ear to the needs of a newly formed Marxist state. A third and compelling
reason relates the invasion to the rise of Ruhollah Khomeini's
fundamentalist rule in Iran. Khomeini's expressed intention of exporting his
revolution made Afghanistan and the Soviet Central Asian republics prime
candidates for Iranian ideological expansion. Whatever the primary reason
for the invasion, the Iranian revolution seems to have hastened it.
o
Overview of Cause:
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Soviet Expansion
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Perception of Muslim Regimes (Iran)
§
Instability of Afghanistan
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US Soviet Competition during Cold War
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Warm Water Port on Indian Ocean (continued conquest
as Afghanistan is landlocked)
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Betrayl of Ancient Relationship
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Ethnic divisions within Afghanistan
·
Pashtun 44%, Tajik 25%, Hazara 10%, minor
ethnic groups (Aimaks, Turkmen, Baloch, and
others) 13%, Uzbek 8%
·
Sunni Muslim 84%, Shi'a Muslim 15%, other 1%
·
Pressure for the Soviet takeover had been building for more than a
decade. Amity between the Afghan monarchy and the Soviet government
had been sealed in a friendship treaty in 1921 and a neutrality and
nonaggression treaty in 1926, but Afghan society began to divide along
class lines and between communist supporters and detractors in the
mid-1960's.
Relationship:
·
Afghanistan was the first noncommunist Third World nation to receive
Soviet aid during the 1950's, despite traditional Afghan distrust of nonAfghans. Radio Moscow began to broadcast programs in Pashto, the chief
language of eastern Afghanistan, in 1957. Soviet contacts with the
Afghan leadership under monarch Mohammad Zahir Shah were of a
primarily political nature during the 1950's and 1960's. Heads of state of
each country visited the other.Soviet leaders used their visits to determine
Afghan needs, assess access to strategic points, and propose avenues of
cooperation. Afghanleaders spent two or three weeks at a stretch in the
Soviet Union pursuing educational and recreational endeavors as well as
negotiating aid packages.
Impact of Event
·
Relations between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan were cordial from the
end of the nineteenth century almost until the Soviet invasion. Soviet aid
allowed the Afghans to construct a national infrastructure. The hidden price
of this generosity was high. The Soviets gained access to the untapped
resources of Afghanistan, especially oil and gas, at prices well below world
prices and indirectly disrupted the political and social structure of the
country. Words such as mujahid (holy warrior) and jihad (holy war) were
revived, while new terms such as shanty town, refugee camp, holding
station, and artificial-limb center were necessarily introduced.
·
Following the invasion, communists and mujahids traded acid and Molotov
cocktails in the urban centers of Kabul, Qandahar, and Herat. In Kabul, the
Hazara, a Shi'a minority, served as scapegoat. On February 29, 1980,
fifteen hundred were reported killed and two thousand were arrested.
Schools, hospitals, stores, and mosques were bombed by the Soviets. By
March, 1980, more than 110,000 were reported dead, and the killing went
on. In the repeated bombing of the village of Istalif, north of Kabul,
between October 12 and October 19, 1983, five hundred were killed and
the same number were wounded.
·
In the Paktiya, Kunar, and Parvan provinces, farms were seeded with
toylike mines that detonated in the hands of curious children who picked
them up. As a result of such activities, thousand of villagers were disabled
or displaced. Almost four million refugees fled to Pakistan, and half that
many to Iran. Approximately one million Afghans died in the struggle.
Afghancommunists were tortured and mutilated by fanatics.
·
The Soviet invaders did not escape unscathed. The Afghans refused to
take prisoners of war and killed Soviets on sight. More than fifteen
thousand Soviets died and more than thirty thousand were injured. The
Afghans couldn’t take prisoners, they didn’t have anything to feed them.
·
In addition to the obvious and immediate casualties of war, the Soviet
invasion jeopardized the growing links between Moscow and the West.
Leonid Ilich Brezhnev's détente, which began about the same time was
threatened.
·
Furthermore, Moscow intended to play a central role both in regulating
Eastern European contacts with the West and in preventing the formation
of alliances between Eastern Europe and the West that could jeopardize the
acquisition of updated technology and the infusion of easy credit into the
Soviet economy. The invasion of Afghanistan blocked almost all avenues of
negotiation on these vital issues.
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The United Nations condemned the Soviet invasion with a vote of 104 to
18, with 18 abstentions; Moscow could not ignore the worldwide impact of
the condemnation. Neither could it afford the cost of the war, estimated at
one to two billion dollars annually. These and other considerations caused
Mikhail Gorbachev to announce, on April 15, 1988, that the Soviet Union
would withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. The United Nations then
brought the United States, the main force behind the U.N. resolutions,
Pakistan, China, and the Soviet Union to the negotiation table and worked
out a program of phased withdrawal to be completed by February 15,
1989.
·
After the withdrawal, several questions, including self-determination, the
repatriation of refugees, and the creation of a political structure acceptable
to all Afghan factions remained to be answered. In the absence of the
implementation of the full weight of the agreement, Afghanistan remained
a divided land, as it was during the war. The Afghan government
continued to recognize Moscow as its sole source of inspiration.
EXCERPTS FROM THE US DEPARTMENT OF STATE: OFFICE OF THE
HISTORIAN’s WEBSITE: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-1980/sovietinvasion-afghanistan
MILESTONES: 1977–1980
The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. Response, 1978–1980
At the end of December 1979, the Soviet Union sent thousands of troops
into Afghanistan and immediately assumed complete military and political
control of Kabul and large portions of the country. This event began a
brutal, decade-long attempt by Moscow to subdue the Afghan civil war and
maintain a friendly and socialist government on its border. It was a
watershed event of the Cold War, marking the only time the Soviet Union
invaded a country outside the Eastern Bloc—a strategic decision met by
nearly worldwide condemnation. While the massive, lightning-fast military
maneuvers and brazenness of Soviet political objectives constituted an
“invasion” of Afghanistan, the word “intervention” more accurately
describes these events as the culmination of growing Soviet domination
going back to 1973. Undoubtedly, leaders in the Kremlin had hoped that a
rapid and complete military takeover would secure Afghanistan’s place as
an exemplar of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that once a country
became socialist Moscow would never permit it to return to the capitalist
camp. The United States and its European allies, guided by their own
doctrine of containment, sharply criticized the Soviet move into
Afghanistan and devised numerous measures to compel Moscow to
withdraw.
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In response, Carter wrote a sharply-worded letter to Brezhnev denouncing
Soviet aggression, and during his State of the Union address he announced
his own doctrine vowing to protect Middle Eastern oil supplies from
encroaching Soviet power. The administration also enacted economic
sanctions and trade embargoes against the Soviet Union, called for a
boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and stepped up its aid to the Afghan
insurgents. In sum, these actions were Washington’s collective attempt to
make the Soviets’ “adventure” in Afghanistan as painful and brief as
possible. Instead, it took ten years of grinding insurgency before Moscow
finally withdrew, at the cost of millions of lives and billions of dollars. In
their wake, the Soviets left a shattered country in which the Taliban, an
Islamic fundamentalist group, seized control, later providing Osama bin
Laden with a training base from which to launch terrorist operations
worldwide.