Back to Kabul

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan finished off whatever was left of “détente” and ignited the last “proxy war” of the Cold War. As we approach its 40th anniversary, two news items:

First, Donald Trump’s comments in a Cabinet meeting expressing support for the invasion; that the Soviets “were right to be there” because “terrorists were going into Russia.” The only problem was that “it was a tough fight” and “literally they went bankrupt.”

Trump has of course said many astounding things, but this might be the first to make invocation of the 25th Amendment actually seem reasonable. Apparently, someone forgot to tell him that the country he is president of, under a president of the party he ostensibly leads, organized international opposition to the Soviet occupation and gave aid to the Afghans resisting it.

Second, a recent Washington Post report on how Trump’s friend Vladimir Putin is making a concerted effort to paint the Soviet Afghan campaign as a noble endeavor rather than brutal folly, consistent with his broader goal of rewriting Russian history to make it more consistent with the revanchist nationalism that serves as the basis of his appeal.

Thus, we are reminded of the manner in which even outlandish historical revisionism (“useful history”) can find purchase with both ignoramuses and tyrants.

With respect to the ignoramus, as a man who apparently doesn’t read books or listen to people who do, Trump doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and thus allows an empty head to fill with silly beliefs which routinely and reflexively become silly utterances.

With respect to the tyrant, it becomes imperative for Putin to put a more favorable spin on previous eras of tyranny in the Russian experience (which essentially make up all of Russian experience) as a means of legitimizing his own; even Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin have come in for some degree of officially sanctioned rehabilitation for such purposes.

Now the brutal Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

As a young “Kremlinologist” with a specialization in Soviet military affairs, I had something of a front-row seat as we tried to figure out exactly what the Russkies were up to in Afghanistan; more specifically, why they had suddenly airlifted thousands of troops into Kabul on Christmas Eve 1979.

At the time, the Carter administration interpreted it as the first step in a Soviet drive to gain control of the Persian Gulf and the oil flowing through it—hence our boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the ill-considered grain embargo, and a shelving of the SALT II treaty (which Carter had just signed a few months earlier, accompanied by an embarrassing smooch on Leonid Brezhnev’s cheek, at their summit in Vienna, and which was headed for defeat in the Senate anyway).

There was also an increase in the defense budget, a new aid package for neighboring Pakistan (which its dictator at the time, Muhammed Zia, rather ungraciously dismissed as “peanuts”) and the creation of the “Rapid Deployment Force” (RDF), which actually came in handy a decade later when the Saudi oil fields were threatened by a different menace, the Butcher of Baghdad.

But it didn’t take long to figure out that the invasion had less to do with oil than with keeping in power the communist dictatorship that the Soviets had installed in Kabul in a coup 18 months earlier, and which was now besieged by Muslim guerrillas (later to become known, for public consumption, albeit somewhat misleadingly, as the “mujaheddin,” among whose ranks included a certain young Saudi fanatic named Osama bin Laden).

The Soviets’ official line that they were invited in by the Afghan government was, to say the least, contradicted by their execution upon arrival of its head, the justly forgotten brute Hafizullah Amin.

We also now know that the decision to invade Afghanistan was made without much consultation or deliberation by a few out-of-touch fossils in the Politburo, with a senile Brezhnev giving the final go-ahead based on the logic of the “Brezhnev Doctrine”— that once communist is always communist, meaning what’s ours is ours, what’s yours is negotiable.

Afghanistan is often cited as a factor contributing to the collapse of the USSR, with the war becoming essentially unwinnable (a “bleeding sore”) after the Reagan administration began supplying the rebels with Stinger missiles to shoot down those lumbering Soviet Hind gunships.

For my part, a straighter explanatory line could probably be drawn between the rise of Solidarity in Poland and the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade later, but there is no doubt Afghanistan also took a toll. It didn’t “bankrupt” the USSR, as Trump erroneously claimed (all centrally planned economies were suffering the same fate at that time), but it did cause international humiliation and unprecedented public discontent.

Which also points to the most interesting part—that after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power amid the death throes of the Soviet regime and instituted desperate measures like “glasnost” (openness) in an effort to save it, Soviet citizens acquired the power of protest for the first time, including over the stream of body bags coming home from Afghanistan.

And thus came a deservedly dismal end to the ugliest political experiment in history.