Why soviets went to afghanistan

The Soviets, however, were met with fierce resistance when they ventured out of their strongholds into the countryside. Resistance fighters, called mujahidin, saw the Christian or atheist Soviets controlling Afghanistan as a defilement of Islam as well as of their traditional culture. The mujahidin employed guerrilla tactics against the Soviets. They would attack or raid quickly, then disappear into the mountains, causing great destruction without pitched battles.

The fighters used whatever weapons they could grab from the Soviets or were given by the United States. The tide of the war turned with the introduction of U. The Stingers allowed the mujahidin to shoot down Soviet planes and helicopters on a regular basis.

New Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev decided it was time to get out. Demoralized and with no victory in sight, Soviet forces started withdrawing in The last Soviet soldier crossed back across the border on February 15, Braithwaite, Rodric.

Afgansty: The Russians in Afghanistan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Galeotti, Mark. London: Frank Cass, Garland, Nicholas. The Daily Telegraph 3 Jan. Gibbs, David N.. Giustozzi, Antonio. War, Politics, and Society in Afghanistan, Washington D. Hauner, Milan. Lanham: University Press of America, Hilali, A. Kakar, M. Berkeley: University of California Press, Kalinovsky, Artemy. Mitrokhin, Vasili, and Christopher M.

New York: Basic Books, Ouimet, Matthew J.. Saikal, Amin, Melvyn P. Leffler, and Odd Arne Westad. The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Soviet soldiers work with two German Shepherd dogs trained to sniff out explosives in and around their base near Kabul on May 1, Wrecked Soviet vehicles are shoved alongside the street in the Panchir Valley village of Omarz in northeast Pakistan in February of Muslim anti-aircraft gunners in eastern Afghanistan's Paktia Province on July 20, Wheels down, a Soviet transport aircraft seems to brush the treetops as it comes in to land at Kabul Airport on February 8, Soviet pilots flying in out of Kabul took defensive measures, including the firing of flares to divert heat-seeking missiles.

A Soviet air force technician empties a bucket of spent flare cartridges at the Kabul airbase on January 23, A Soviet soldier smokes a cigarette at a checkpoint of the Soviet military airport in Kabul on February 10, as the other one forbids pictures. As the planned withdrawal of Soviet troops began, Afghan troops were trained and supplied to take their place. Here, a soldier crawls with his comrades, during a training session in Kabul on February 8, According to officials, the soldiers were from a new unit formed to defend vital installations in the Afghan capital.

Police and armed Afghan militiamen walk amid the debris after a bomb, allegedly placed by the Mujahideen rebels, exploded in downtown Kabul during celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of the Afghan revolution backed by the Soviet Union on April 27, Afghan firefighters carry the body of a young girl killed in a powerful bomb blast that shattered rows of homes and shops in downtown Kabul on May 14, At least eight people were killed and more than 20 injured by the explosion, believed to be planted in a truck on the eve of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Red Army soldiers stand for review on October 19, , in downtown Kabul during a parade, shortly before they returned to the Soviet Union.

Afghanistan's president Mohammed Najibullah center smiles as he meets Red Army soldiers on October 19, , in downtown Kabul during a parade. Najibullah who became president in , was later hanged in a street near the UN compound in Kabul on September 27, , where he had sought sanctuary since April when Mujahideen guerrillas entered Afghan capital. A Red Army soldier and an Afghan army officer pose for the press on October 20, , in downtown Kabul. A Red Army soldier atop of his armored personal vehicle smiles as Soviet Army troops stop in Kabul prior to their withdrawal from Afghanistan, on May 16, A column of Soviet armor and military trucks moves up the highway toward the Soviet border on February 7, in Hayratan.

The convoy came from the Afghan capital Kabul as part of the withdrawal of Soviet soldiers. An emotional mother embraces her son, a Soviet soldier who has just crossed the Soviet-Afghan border in Termez, during the withdrawal of Soviet army from Afghanistan, on May 21, After the Soviet withdrawal.

So there were no political parties that had the capacity to mobilize people in Afghanistan. Another thing to bear in mind is that the old elite who ran the country prior to this could be swept away so easily precisely because Afghanistan did not have political parties and an autonomous political structure through which it could mobilize people.

The old elite controlled the country by controlling the state, and by controlling the state, they were able to get revenues from natural gas and foreign aid and a few taxes, and use those to redistribute them to buy off a few leaders. It used that to support a clique because half of the ruling elite of Afghanistan if you define the ruling elite as consisting of cabinet members and top generals came from the Muhammadzai lineage.

So the government in Afghanistan was like a club for Muhammadzais and a few of their allies. This is why so many other newly educated elites who were not Muhammadzais resented them and became Islamists or radical nationalists or communists or Maoists. Still all this political contention was in a very small circle.

Loya jirga is a state practice, not a tribal practice, but it is based on the tribal ideology that the Afghan state should represent. Some exiles sympathetic to the national idea of the old regime tried to hold such a loya jirga a couple of times in Pakistan in order to constitute a kind of national resistance. The Pakistan government and military not necessarily in that order; they were actually the same thing at the time refused to allow this loya jirga to meet and used the religious parties as their channels of influence with the Afghans.

They would not let the ex-king or his family come to Pakistan because they were associated with the demand for Pashtunistan. They also liked to have different parties so they could manipulate them against each other; their nightmare would be the formation of an Afghan state in exile in Pakistan Pashtunistan.

Within the Pashtun tribes there were and are two different competing elites, the tribal elites and the religious elites, with different ideologies and different bases of power. The tribal elites were strengthened and were relied upon by the Afghan government whereas the religious elites were marginalized.

Who were these religious elites? The Taliban. The religious elites were tribal, rural ulama, and every government since Amir Abdul Rahman Khan in the s, has tried to marginalize these people and keep them from declaring jihad.

They even created a new class of religious elites based on state madrasas some of whom were also sent to al-Azhar like Rabbani to try to marginalize those old rural elites who subsequently became the Taliban.

But they were very important, along with other groups like the new Islamists, to the Pakistani strategy of undermining not only the Communist government but also the tribal nationalist forces within Afghanistan that had tried to undermine Pakistan and had allied with India.

The ranks of the Afghan mujahideen were, from the outset, complemented by non-Afghan volunteers eager to join the anti-Soviet jihad. One of the first to do this was Osama bin Laden, who worked very closely with the CIA to collect funds from affluent Saudi citizens.

Is this correct? There are two points here: first, the volunteers really did not come in significant numbers until the lates, particularly after the Soviet withdrawal, which is when they became important. The Chinese were also involved although they were and are still rather discreet about this. There were four intelligence agencies who met every week in Islamabad. A lot of weapons from China went into Afghanistan as well but they were not paid for by the Chinese.

There was a division of labor between these groups. The foreign volunteers particularly the Arabs were organized by the Saudis, at least at the official level. He knew Prince Turki bin Abdul, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency. Volunteers became more important after The private Arab money was important because sometimes the official money would run out and this was what saved the system, as Brig.

Yousaf says in his book, The Bear Trap. There was a lot of money required to keep the system moving, and of course, a lot of the money went through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International BCCI. That was part of the whole set-up. The volunteers became important after because after the Soviets withdrew a lot of the Afghans stopped fighting. They were paying them, this was their new strategy.

There is some monetary data from this period which shows this trend. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was important. Hekmatyar and Sayyaf were still fighting and were also making a lot of use of these volunteers. They were on an ideological quest much more than other Afghans were. These people got military training in Pakistan as well as to a certain extent in Afghanistan as well. The camps that the US bombed in date from that period. They gained military skills but, perhaps more important than that, they were able to link into a transnational network; the Islamic movement had always been a series of national Islamic movements.

At that time, there were all these people from different nationalities who came together in Afghanistan and developed this transnational movement.

So what we see now with Osama bin Laden and company is completely different from the Islamic movement that existed before. Osama has a somewhat Saudi focus he is concerned primarily with the US troops in Saudi Arabia which is why he broke with the Saudi government in Nonetheless he has got people from all nationalities there and they are just looking at US targets everywhere.

The movement is now entirely transnational, denationalized, and this area serves as an important focus, but you need infrastructure to build up such a network, and the Afghan war provided it although now it is more or less self-sustaining. The war had numerous long-term implications, the effects of which are still visible today. Could you discuss some of these?

For instance, you mention in one of your books that from , Afghanistan was the 5th largest importer of arms in the world. Other consequences, such as the refugee crisis and the destruction of what little infrastructure existed at the time health, education facilities, etc. What the war did, including the political conflict and the repression associated with the war, is it destroyed or greatly damaged everything in Afghanistan that supported governance and development.

So first of all, the state. As I mentioned, the army disintegrated from the very beginning although the Soviets managed to keep it together to a certain point. When the Soviet Union dissolved, and Najibullah fell, all the security forces that had been built up by the Soviets during the war, also dissolved and split up into ethnic factions and became allied with different mujahideen groups basically along ethnic or opportunistic lines.

The other problem of course was that there was no government in place and everyone was armed.