Afghanistan — The Soviet Union's Vietnam

The comparison between Afghanistan and Vietnam is so common it's almost a cliché, and like most clichés, it's approximately correct while missing some important differences. The Soviet Union, like the United States in Vietnam, committed to supporting a government that couldn't sustain itself without external backing, got drawn into an escalating counterinsurgency, couldn't find a military solution, and withdrew after a decade having failed its primary objective — with serious consequences for the regime that sponsored the adventure.

The Soviets were not in Afghanistan by accident. The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan had seized power in a coup in 1978, but immediately fractured into competing factions. Purges, factional violence, and botched socialist modernization policies alienated the rural population. By 1979, the Afghan government was losing control of large portions of the countryside to Islamist resistance movements. The Soviet leadership — concerned about a socialist ally collapsing on their southern border and apparently believing a quick stabilization was possible — ordered the invasion in December 1979.

The war lasted nine years (1979-1989). At peak commitment, approximately 100,000 Soviet troops were in country. Soviet military superiority was clear in conventional engagements. What they couldn't suppress was the dispersed, rural, religiously motivated insurgency — the Mujahideen — which fought from mountains and villages and could retreat into Pakistan, where they were backed by Pakistan's ISI, Saudi financing, and, crucially, CIA weapons and training.

The CIA program — Operation Cyclone — was one of the largest covert operations in agency history. The US had no particular affection for the specific groups it was arming; the objective was simply to bleed the Soviet Union. Stinger missiles, shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons, began arriving in 1986 and significantly degraded the Soviet air support that had been the most effective tool against the Mujahideen. The human cost on all sides was enormous: approximately 2 million Afghans died, 5-6 million became refugees, and an entire generation grew up in a militarized Islamic resistance culture.

The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 was followed not by Afghan stabilization but by further fragmentation. The communist government the Soviets had supported collapsed in 1992. Civil war between Mujahideen factions followed, out of which the Taliban emerged in 1994 as a movement that could end the factional fighting through brutal suppression. The Taliban government that hosted al-Qaeda until 2001 was a direct product of the Cold War proxy war and its aftermath.

The US program in Afghanistan is often presented as a successful case of bleeding the Soviet Union in the Cold War. As a Cold War calculation, this is defensible. As a policy toward Afghanistan, it was at best negligent — the US funded the creation of armed Islamist networks, achieved its immediate strategic objective, and walked away from the humanitarian and political consequences of what it had funded. Those consequences returned on September 11, 2001.

Afghanistan — The Soviet Union's Vietnam

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