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But now the government’s violence rivaled some of Afghanistan’s bloodiest chapters. Since taking power the year before, Afghanistan’s communist government had accelerated a reform program, including education for women and land redistribution, that had dragged on for most of the twentieth century.
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Nevertheless, Taraki’s killing served more as a pretext for action than a motive. The president’s ouster and murder offended the Soviet leader, especially because Hafizullah Amin, Taraki’s rival, had promised the Kremlin he’d do no such Did the decision to go to war really turn on such random timing and seemingly insignificant personal matters?īrezhnev’s superficial but emotional tie to the country’s first communist president, Mohammed Taraki, was a principal cause of the Soviet invasion. Some of the events and intrigues that led to the invasion strain the capacity to believe, so tight were the twists and uncanny the coincidences. “It would read too much like a detective thriller.”ĭuring my interview with Bogdanov, we agreed that the war involved many levels of authority and many stages of psychological moods or emotional contortions. No one would believe it,” the Russian replied. “You really should write a book about it.” “You know about everything you’ve taken part in here,” the Afghan told Bogdanov. It was with the former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence service, Asadullah Sarwari, who had fled the country in a KGB escape plot Bogdanov had planned. Relating his part in it, Leonid Bogdanov, the KGB’s chief representative in Kabul in 1979, described a meeting soon after the Soviet invasion. Of course, the war was also a tragic human story. While it cannot be said that Afghanistan triggered the Soviet collapse, it did project an image of a failing empire unable to deal with a handful of bedraggled partisans in a remote part of its southern frontier. After Moscow did invade, it found itself locked in conflict-essentially, a civil war-it could barely comprehend. Government to send troops to help put down rebellion by the rural population protesting the regime’s merciless modernization programs. For more than a year, Soviet leaders rejected pleas from the Afghan communist Most Americans view the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a naked act of aggression by a ruthless, totalitarian state. Deserts, river valleys, and narrow mountain passes, in which Afghanistan is rich, have greatly favored the resident peoples who know them. At the same time, mountains and other geographical features on the peripheries have long been intrinsic impediments to conquest. Confluences of waterways and other transportation routes and natural defenses help form the centers of power. A persuasive current of scholarly theory about the nature of empires has it that geographic determinism-the lay of the land as well as its weather- helps define which territories become centers of empires and which remain battle-scarred frontier lands lodged between competing powers. I was traveling there to learn how one of a long line of invading armies-in this case, belonging to a global superpower with virtually no limit to the amount it could spend on its military-became the latest to find defeat at the hands of local rebels.Īfghanistan’s fate has been determined, more than anything, by its position on the globe. I could understand how millennia of conquerors had been seduced. Reputed for its harshness, the small, deeply impoverished country-lodged between Iran and Pakistan, just below old Soviet Central Asia-is also physically stunning. As I peered down from a rattling jet during a recent trip in late fall, the dawn light of a cloudless morning revealed an endless succession of dusty, reddish brown mountain peaks and valleys. Near the end of the overnight flight from Moscow to Kabul on Afghanistan’s Ariana Airlines, the sun rises over that beautiful, battered country. 1 Invasion Considered: A Short, Victorious War