Origins

Situated at the strategic crossroads of four major powers—Persia, India, the Russian Empire, and China—the area that today constitutes Afghanistan was overrun by foreign invaders during the Middle Ages. The invaders—Arabs, Persians, Turks, Mongols, Indians, and Russians—left their mark in a multiplicity of ethnic, religious, and linguistic groupings.

Sectarian divisions made it difficult for the people living in Afghan territory to defend themselves from later invaders.

In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, Britain and Russia competed for influence in Central Asia. In scrambling to protect and expand their empires, they sought control of the vital buffer state of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan–strategic crossroads

For Russia, control over Afghanistan meant consolidating its growing Central Asian empire as well as moving closer to realizing a longstanding ambition to acquire warm-water ports in the Indian Ocean. For Britain, the quest to control Afghanistan was largely an attempt to deny Russia a springboard from which to invade India, the jewel of the British colonial crown.

In what has since become known as the “Great Game,” the British and the Russians pursued their expansionist objectives by resorting to espionage, bribery, and the playing off of one Afghan group against another.

British troops fought three major wars in Afghanistan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - Afghanistan, 1880
© Getty Images, Inc.

An effect of these underhanded tactics was the reinforcement of divisions between Afghanistan’s various ethnic groups, notably the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras. In attempting to prevent the formation of a broad-based nationalist resistance movement, Britain supported a Pashtun king, the so-called Iron Emir, who escalated ethnic tensions by terrorizing and persecuting all non-Pashtun groups.

While British meddling contributed to antagonism between and sometimes within Afghanistan’s various ethnic groups, it also laid the groundwork for antagonism between the Afghan and Pakistani governments. When the British foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand, somewhat arbitrarily separated Eastern Afghanistan from northwest India (which later became Pakistan) in 1893, he also separated Afghan Pashtuns from Indian (now Pakistani) Pashtuns. The new border—the so-called Durand Line—created a volatile political situation because the Pashtuns living near the Afghan-Pakistani border tended to feel more kinship with each other than they did with their own governments or with their countrymen from different tribes.

When Britain gave up its strategic interests in Afghanistan in 1919, it left behind a divided and technologically backward state. Over the next several decades, Afghanistan—under Zahir Shah, the country’s reasonably progressive Pashtun king—moved slowly toward modernity. But the price of modernization was more tension, as reforms often had to be passed in the face of strong objections from the Islamic clergy and some of the more traditional elements in Afghan society.

As internal tensions between modernizers and traditionalists mounted in the 1950s, so did external tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Relations between the two governments deteriorated because of a Durand-Line-linked disagreement over the status of Pakistani Pashtuns. The impact of this rather parochial dispute was felt globally, as Afghanistan—denied military aid from the United States and Britain, both strategic allies of Pakistan—turned toward the Soviet Union.

Telling where Afghanistan ended and Pakistan began was not easy - Afghan-Pakistani border, 1955
© 1955 Getty Images, Inc.

Over the following years, the ties between the governments in Kabul and Moscow grew stronger. By the early 1970s, numerous officers in the Afghan military had trained in the Soviet Union, many Soviet advisors were stationed in Afghanistan, and most of Afghanistan’s military equipment bore a Soviet or Eastern European stamp. Equally significant, Kabul University had turned into a hotbed of communist activity.

Radical students at Kabul University felt that King Zahir Shah was not implementing reforms quickly enough. To speed things up, they helped Sardar Mohammad Daud—a Pashtun whose close ties to the Soviet Union had earned him the nickname, the Red Prince—seize power. On July 17, 1973, Daud deposed the king, abolished the monarchy, and declared Afghanistan a republic and himself its prime minister and president.

Daud overthrew King Zahir Shah while Shah was on vacation in Italy - Afghanistan
© 1958 Getty Images, Inc.

But, once in power, Daud disappointed the radicals. Quite unexpectedly, he purged communists from his government and distanced Afghanistan from the Soviet Union. Then, on April 27, 1978, nearly five years after Daud had ousted the king, communists teamed up with sympathetic elements in the Afghan army to oust Daud. After some fierce fighting, in which Daud was killed, Afghanistan’s communist party—officially, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)—assumed power.

At first, the Soviets hesitated in celebrating Afghanistan’s communist coup or even in recognizing the legitimacy of the new government. The Soviet government in Moscow was apparently worried that the coup would fail, thereby provoking anarchy on the Soviet Union’s southern border and discrediting communism worldwide.

A few days after the coup, however, Moscow offered the new Afghan government its strong support. But, behind the scenes, Soviet advisors were trying to convince Afghan ministers to proceed with caution. Caution, in this context, meant introducing reforms only gradually and making a concerted effort to broaden the PDPA’s support.

President Nur Mohammed Taraki and his deputy Hafizullah Amin appear to have ignored both pieces of advice. They quickly implemented dramatic reforms, while making little effort to prepare the country for their impact. In redistributing land, abolishing the bride price, and requiring girls to be educated, the Taraki government turned many Muslim clerics and their supporters into bitter enemies.

Women in short skirts and high heels walk freely along the street - Kabul, 1978
© 1978 Getty Images, Inc.

Instead of moderating its policies in accordance with the popular mood, the Afghan government simply crushed the opposition. Within the PDPA, which was really an alliance of two communist parties, Parcham (meaning “banner”) and Khalq (meaning “people”), there was an extensive purging. Taraki and Amin, both of the Khalq faction, ordered the execution of numerous Parcham members on the dubious grounds that they were anti-communist agents. In the country at large, the Khalq-dominated government suppressed dissent ruthlessly and jailed or killed thousands of ordinary Afghan citizens.

It was in this environment—at once, highly progressive and intensely repressive—that several groups of Islamist warriors, or mujahideen, declared a jihad, or holy war, against their government.

The jihad spread throughout 1978 and 1979, with guerrilla training camps in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar producing a steady stream of mujahideen. Violence intensified in March 1979 in the western Afghan city of Herat. There, a demonstration against compulsory women’s education got out of hand, and the protesters ended up murdering dozens of Soviet advisors and their families in gruesome fashion—bodies were hacked to bits and heads were paraded on spikes as trophies.

President Taraki requested Soviet ground and air support to put down the uprising, but the Soviet government refused. Unwilling at that point to intervene, Moscow instead increased military and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and allowed more advisers to go there.

Taraki ordered his military into Herat without Soviet cover, and, in a combined ground and air assault, the mostly Pashtun Afghan troops killed thousands of Herat’s mostly Tajik civilians. Shortly after the slaughter in Herat, the military attacked another town, Kerala, and slaughtered hundreds more civilians. The purpose of such attacks was to kill the anti-government mujahideen and choke off their support. But the targeting was so indiscriminate and the assaults so ferocious that support for, and recruitment to, the mujahideen tended to rise in the wake of the attacks. In Herat, for example, a local warlord named Ismail Khan was able to lead away a sizable force of Tajik warriors, which subsequently launched an effective guerrilla campaign against the Afghan government.

A high-level power struggle and thousands of defections from the Afghan army to the mujahideen brought the Taraki/Amin regime to the brink of collapse. Once again, the Soviets urged the Afghan leadership to try and increase their party’s popular support. But Amin, now the government’s most important figure, once again did the opposite. After Taraki was killed in a party dispute, Amin ordered the execution of hundreds more political opponents and surrounded himself exclusively with family members and handpicked loyalists. Increasingly suspicious of the Soviet Union, he then looked for support from unlikely sources like Pakistan and the United States.

Late in 1979, the Soviet government—which only months earlier had ruled out a military intervention for fear of jeopardizing détente and an arms reduction agreement with the United States—mobilized troops on the Afghan border. Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev was now determined that Afghanistan’s communist government must not be allowed to fall and that everything should be done to prevent victory by the mujahideen.

A soviet tank rolls through an Afghan street - 1979
© 1979 Getty Images, Inc.

As Soviet troops were flown into Afghanistan in December 1979, Brezhnev did not anticipate they would stay long. He assumed their main role would be holding key cities while the Afghan army righted itself and a new Communist government under a new president was installed. But things quickly fell apart. The lie that the army had come at the invitation of the Afghan government was exposed, and Babrak Karmal—the Parcham man installed as president in place of Amin—struggled to find legitimacy.

Even though Karmal, another Pashtun, reintroduced the traditional Afghan flag and recast the PDPA as a nationalist, rather than a communist, party, he couldn’t undo the popular perception that he was nothing more than a Soviet puppet, a communist in Muslim clothing. At night, Kabul residents stood on their roofs chanting Allah-o Akbar, a traditional Muslim phrase meaning “God is great,” in protest.²

In a foreign country propping up an unpopular government, the Soviet army in Afghanistan quickly realized that things would not be easy. However, it is doubtful they realized just how difficult their task would be or how significant the ensuing fight would prove not only for the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century but for the whole world in the early twenty-first.