Soviet Military Invasion of Afghanistan — December 1979

Soviet troops flew into Kabul on 24 December 1979 and killed the president they had come to support. The communist government installed by a coup in April 1978 had spent eighteen months making itself impossible. Land reform and literacy campaigns were imposed on the countryside by cadres who did not consult the clergy or the elders, thousands of people were arrested and shot, and the two factions of the ruling party purged each other. Hafizullah Amin, who had murdered his predecessor in September, asked Moscow for troops repeatedly. The politburo refused eighteen times and then agreed, in a decision taken by a handful of men — Brezhnev, Andropov, Ustinov and Gromyko — largely from a fear that Amin would collapse or defect to the Americans, and on an assumption that the operation would take a few months. Spetsnaz troops stormed the palace on 27 December, killed Amin, and installed Babrak Karmal. What followed was nine years, some 115,000 Soviet troops, a war fought against a countryside supported by American, Saudi and Pakistani money, and a strategy of depopulating rural districts by bombing and mining them. Around a million Afghans and 15,000 Soviet soldiers died, and five million people left. Gorbachev called it a bleeding wound in 1986 and completed the withdrawal in February 1989. The Soviet Union dissolved thirty-four months later. The consequences ran far beyond Afghanistan. The invasion ended détente, killed the SALT II ratification, produced the Olympic boycott and the American grain embargo, and drew Washington, Riyadh and Islamabad into arming a resistance whose surviving networks fought them all later.

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