V o L u m e I : a d

As Afghanistan descended into civil war, Moscow grew increasingly con-

cerned. Committed to preventing the overthrow of a friendly, neighboring

communist government and fearful of the effects that a potential Islamic

fundamentalist regime might have on the Muslim population of Soviet Cen-

tral Asia, specifically those in the republics bordering Afghanistan, the So-

viets moved toward military intervention. During the last months of 1979,

the Leonid Brezhnev government dispatched approximately 4,500 combat

advisors to assist the Afghan communist regime while simultaneously allow-

ing Soviet aircraft to conduct bombing raids against rebel positions. Al-

though Soviet Deputy Defense Minster Ivan G. Pavlovskii, who had played

an important role in the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, counseled

against full-scale intervention in Afghanistan, his superior, Defense Minister

Dmitry Ustinov, convinced Brezhnev to undertake an invasion, arguing that

only such action could preserve the Afghan communist regime. He also

promised that the Soviet presence there would be short.

Brezhnev ultimately decided in favor of war, the pivotal factor arguably

being the September 1979 seizure of power by Hafizullah Amin, who had

ordered Taraki arrested and murdered. Apparently shocked by Amin’s act of

supreme betrayal and inclined to believe that only a massive intervention

could save the situation, Brezhnev gave approval for the invasion. Beginning

in late November 1979 and continuing during the first weeks of December,

the Soviet military concentrated the Fortieth Army, composed primarily of

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63

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Central Asian troops, along the Afghan border. On 24 December, Soviet forces

crossed the frontier, while Moscow claimed that the Afghan government had

requested help against an unnamed outside threat.

Relying on mechanized tactics and close air support, Soviet units

quickly seized the Afghan capital of Kabul. In the process, a special assault

force stormed the presidential palace and killed Amin, replacing him with

the more moderate Barak Kemal, who attempted, unsuccessfully, to win

popular support by portraying himself as a devoted Muslim and Afghan

nationalist. Soviet forces, numbering at least 50,000 men by the end of Janu-

ary 1980, went on to occupy the other major Afghan cities and secured major

highways. In response, rebel mujahideen forces resorted to guerrilla warfare,

their primary goal being to avoid defeat in the hopes of outlasting Soviet

intervention.

Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan had immediate and adverse inter-

national consequences, effectively wrecking détente that was already in dire

straits by December 1979 thanks to recent increases in missile deployments

in Europe. Having devoted much effort to improving relations with Moscow,

U.S. President Jimmy Carter believed that he had been betrayed. He reacted

swiftly and strongly to the Afghan invasion.

On 28 December 1979, Carter publicly denounced the Soviet action as

a “blatant violation of accepted international rules of behavior.” Three days

later, he accused Moscow of lying about its motives for intervening and

declared that the invasion had dramatically altered his view of the Soviet

Union’s foreign policy goals. On 3 January 1980, the president asked the U.S.

64

Afghanistan War

Soviet soldiers and a BMD-1 airborne combat vehicle in Kabul, Afghanistan, in March 1986. (U.S. Department of

Defense)

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Senate to delay consideration of SALT II. Finally, on 23 January, in his State

of the Union Address, Carter warned that the Soviet action in Afghanistan

posed a potentially serious threat to world peace because control of Afghan-

istan would put Moscow in a position to dominate the strategic Persian Gulf

and thus interdict at will the flow of Middle East oil.

The president followed these pronouncements by enunciating what

soon became known as the Carter Doctrine, declaring that any effort to dom-

inate the Persian Gulf would be interpreted as an attack on American inter-

ests that would be rebuffed by force if necessary. Carter also announced his

intention to limit the sale of technology and agricultural products to the

USSR, and he imposed restrictions on Soviet fishing privileges in U.S. waters.

In addition, he notified the International Olympic Committee that in light

of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, neither he nor the American public

would support sending a U.S. team to the 1980 Moscow Summer Games.

The president called upon America’s allies to follow suit.

Carter also asked Congress to support increased defense spending and

registration for the draft, pushed for the creation of a Rapid Deployment

Force that could intervene in the Persian Gulf or other areas threatened by

Soviet expansionism, offered increased military aid to Pakistan, moved to

enhance ties with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), approved covert

CIA assistance to the mujahideen, and signed a presidential directive on

25 July 1980 providing for increased targeting of Soviet nuclear forces.

Carter’s sharp response was undercut to a certain extent by several

developments. First, key U.S. allies rejected both economic sanctions and

an Olympic boycott. Second, Argentina and several other states actually

increased their grain sales to Moscow. Third, a somewhat jaded American

public tended to doubt the president’s assertions about Soviet motives and

believed that he had needlessly reenergized the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan, who defeated Carter in the November 1980 presidential

election, took an even harder stand with the Soviets. Describing the Soviet

Union as an “evil empire” that had used détente for its own nefarious pur-

poses, the Reagan administration poured vast sums of money into a massive

military buildup that even saw the president push the development of the

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—labeled “Star Wars” by its critics—a

missile defense system dependent on satellites to destroy enemy missiles

with lasers or particle beams before armed warheads separated and headed

for their targets. The Soviet response was to build additional missiles and

warheads.

Meanwhile, confronted with guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan, the USSR

remained committed to waging a limited war and found itself drawn, inex-

orably, into an ever-deeper bloody quagmire against a determined opponent

whose confidence and morale grew with each passing month. To make mat-

ters worse for Moscow, domestic criticism of the war by prominent dissidents

such as Andrei Sakharov appeared early on, while foreign assistance in the

form of food, transport vehicles, and weaponry (especially the Stinger anti-

aircraft missile launchers) from the United States began reaching the muja-

hideen as the fighting dragged on.

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65

The mujahideen

resorted to guerilla

warfare, their primary

goal being to avoid

defeat in the hopes

of outlasting Soviet

intervention.

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