The Cold War's Proxy Conflicts: Ideology, Oil, and the Limits of Superpower Control

# The Legacy: What the Proxy Wars Left Behind

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the Cold War ended. The proxy wars it had generated did not. Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mozambique — in each case, the external patrons withdrew but the internal conditions that had sustained the conflicts remained. What was left was a set of societies that had been systematically armed, economically disrupted, and politically fragmented by two decades of proxy warfare, now managing that destruction without external support.

The cleanup costs of the Cold War's proxy strategy were never seriously accounted for in the strategic calculations that authorized it.

## Afghanistan: The Clearest Case

The United States funded, armed, and organized the Afghan mujahedeen to fight the Soviet occupation from 1979 onward. The program — Operation Cyclone — was one of the largest covert operations in CIA history, eventually reaching $630 million annually in American funding alone, matched by Saudi Arabia. The goal was to make the Soviet occupation unsustainably costly. It succeeded.

The Soviet Union withdrew in 1989. The Afghan civil war that followed was, if anything, more destructive than the Soviet occupation. The various mujahedeen factions, armed with American weapons and experienced in guerrilla warfare, fought each other for control of a devastated country through the early 1990s. The Taliban emerged from this chaos, took power in 1996, and provided the base for al-Qaeda — which had been built partly from the Arab foreign fighters that the CIA, Pakistani ISI, and Saudi intelligence had channeled into Afghanistan during the proxy war against the Soviets.

The September 11, 2001 attacks were planned from Afghanistan. The costs that were not included in the proxy war calculus turned out to be considerably larger than anyone had anticipated.

## The Landmine Problem

Proxy warfare generated a literal legacy that continues to kill people decades after the conflicts ended. Anti-personnel mines — supplied by both superpowers to their various proxies — are still active in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries. The Mine Action Service estimates that between 15,000 and 20,000 people are killed or maimed by landmines annually. The vast majority of those casualties are in countries that were Cold War proxy conflict zones.

Both superpowers supplied mines widely. Neither bothered much about removal. The 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mines has been signed by 164 countries; the United States and Russia have not signed it.

## The Institutional Damage

The deepest legacy of Cold War proxy conflicts is institutional. Stable political institutions require time, practice, and the gradual development of norms and expectations. When institutions are repeatedly disrupted — governments overthrown, civil services dismantled, judiciaries replaced with military courts — the institutional memory that makes democratic governance possible is destroyed.

Guatemala hasn't had an uninterrupted democratic government since the 1954 coup. Angola's civil war lasted twenty-seven years. Cambodia is still governed by a leader who has been in power since 1985 and who came to power through the chaos that the Khmer Rouge — itself a product of Cold War disruption, including the 1970 American-backed coup and the bombing of Cambodia — had created.

## What the Accounting Missed

The strategic logic of proxy warfare — cheap investment to impose expensive costs on your adversary — was sound as far as it went. What it systematically omitted was the accounting for what economists call externalities: the costs imposed on people and societies not party to the superpower competition.

The United States and Soviet Union both treated proxy war victims as acceptable collateral damage in a necessary strategic competition. The populations of Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Nicaragua had not asked to be laboratories for superpower ideology. They were used as such, and the bill — in lives, in institutional development, in decades of poverty — was charged to them rather than to the powers that designed the competition.

The Cold War's proxy wars weren't mistakes. They were rational strategies that worked, to varying degrees, for the powers that employed them. Understanding that is important. It's also important to understand what that rationality cost, and who paid for it.

The Legacy: What the Proxy Wars Left Behind

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