The Soviet Occupation

just as analysts have disagreed on the Soviet role in the 1978 coup d'etat, they have drawn different conclusions about the motivations behind the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Although there is general agreement over the immediate causes of the invasion, the assessment of Moscow's long-term goals and strategies is more controversial. One school of thought explains the invasion primarily (sometimes solely) in terms of a short-term preoccupation with rescuing a friendly and dependent socialist regime from external attack and internal disintegration. Troops were deployed to manage an emergency and then depart, similar perhaps to United States military intervention in Lebanon in 1958 or in the Dominican Republic in 1965. The quick fix did not work. In December 1985 Soviet troops had been in the country six years; Moscow was caught in the Afghan "quagmire."

A "strategic" school of thought, often drawing on the determinism of early twentieth-century geopolitics, depicts the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as the inevitable march of a "heartland" power to the sea. In 1904 the British geographer Halford Mackinder published a highly influential article, "The Geographical Pivot of History," arguing that Central Asia (the "pivot" later known as the "heartland°), being immune to naval power, was an impregnable base from which a state (Russia) could assert world domination. Other theorists (particularly A. T. Mahan, a proponent of naval power) argued that Russia needed access to warm water ports because its vast land area precluded easy communication between European Russia and Siberia. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 seemed to vindicate this view. The Trans-Siberian Railway could not ferry supplies in sufficient volume to support the tsar's land armies in Manchuria. The Russian Baltic Fleet sailed eight months, after being denied access to the Suez Canal by the British, to reach East Asian waters. Low on supplies and with mutinous crews, it sailed into the Strait of Tsushima in May 1905 and was decimated by a Japanese fleet. A supply and refueling base was needed in the Indian Ocean. Observers predicted that Russia would seek to carve a corridor, through western Afghanistan or Iran, to the Arabian Sea. In an age of strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles, the dynamic of geopolitics seems obsolete. For many analysts, however, the occupation of Afghanistan was a decisive step in Soviet Russia's march to the Indian Ocean. Moscow's strategy of cultivating friendly relations with Indian Ocean states, such as India, Madagascar, and South Yemen, and the buildup of a Soviet naval presence in the area during the 1960s and 1970s seemed to justify such a conclusion. Once in firm possession of Afghanistan-the reasoning goes-the Soviets could extend their influence and control southward to Pakistan, an unstable and ethnically divided state on the Indian Ocean's rim. One respected analyst has suggested that by the early twenty-first century the Soviets either will have retreated back across the Amu Darya or will be the dominant military and political force in South Asia and the Middle East.

It is impossible to know for certain whether the occupation was forced by circumstances or was part of a long-range plan. The weight of the evidence suggests the former. The strategic advantages to maintaining a military presence several hundred kilometers closer to the Persian Gulf are dubious. Enhanced Soviet military capabilities (long-range aircraft and a fleet in the Indian Ocean) make installations south of the Amu Darya less essential. Nevertheless, the invasion brings certain dividends. A generation of Soviet officers is gaining experience in guerrilla warfare and "ticket punches" for rapid promotion. New weapon systems are being tested in actual combat. The country is rich in minerals, especially natural gas, and these can be exploited more easily than they could when Afghanistan was an independent country. But these advantages do not outweigh the costs, expecially the enmity of Western and Third World nations.

One perspective draws on both the emergency and the strategic schools of thought. It suggests that although the Soviets, for both ideological and strategic reasons, are determined to expand their sphere of influence and control, they are acutely aware of their limitations. Thus, the decision to intervene was taken reluctantly and only after careful consideration. A useful analogy can be made with the history of the British Empire in the mid- and late nineteenth century. British expansionism on the fringes of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere was defensive in the sense that policymakers were less concerned with building new empires than with protecting existing interests. Expeditions into Afghanistan in 183742 and 1878-79, for example, were undertaken not for conquest but to protect British territory in India. A closer analogy to the Soviet case is possibly the British annexation of Upper Burma in 1885. The weakness of the Burmese state under King Thibaw promoted anarchy that threatened British commercial interests. There was, moreover, a perceived threat of French intervention in Upper Burma, an area the British regarded as exclusively in their sphere of influence. When King Thibaw and his ministers proved unable or unwilling to restore order, protect privileges given the British by treaty, and expel the French, troops were ordered in.

By such "defensive" moves, the British Empire expanded. A similar dynamic evidently operated in Afghanistan. Taraki and Amin were violent, unpopular, and ultimately ineffectual rulers, like Thibaw. Their misrule created a power vacuum that could be exploited, Moscow feared, by foreign powers. This posed a threat to Soviet territory. Foreign interference in Afghan affairs was the principal justification given by official spokesmen for the invasion. Naturally, the enemy was depicted as acting out of desperation rather than from a position of strength. According to an article published in Pravda on December 31, 1979, the shah's fall had caused cracks to appear "in the notorious, `strategic arc"' that the United States had constructed along the Soviet Union's southern border. A January 3, 1980, Pravda article asserted that "having lost their bases in Iran, the Pentagon and the United States Central Intelligence Agency were counting on stealthily approaching our territory more closely through Afghanistan." According to Brezhnev in a speech to the CPSU Central Committee in mid1980, "we had no choice but to send troops" in order to forestall the creation of an imperialist base in Afghanistan.

Like British imperial possessions in India and Southeast Asia, the Soviet Central Asian republics contain a population that has neither ethnic nor cultural ties-nor a deep sense of loyalty-to the colonizing power. The ethnic factor accentuated Soviet defensiveness. Soviet leaders may have envisioned a "worst case" scenario in which the PDPA regime would be replaced by a militantly Islamic one like the Islamic Republic of Iran. The spread of Islamic militance north across the Amu Darya would challenge Soviet rule over its own Tajik, Uzbek, and other Muslim peoples. Historically, the populations on both sides of the river have close ethnic and even kinship ties. Many basmachi, resisters to Soviet rule in Central Asia during the 1920s and 1930s, had settled in Afghanistan.

Ideology provides the Soviets with both a perspective from which to understand and interpret the world and a rationale for the use of military power. The Kremlin's acknowledgement, apparently by early 1979, of the "socialist oriented" nature of the PDPA regime entailed a significant commitment. Because the party's leadership, with the possible exception of Amin, remained steadfastly loyal to the Soviet model of revolution both before and after April 1978, their incompetence and heavy-handedness could not be dismissed as deviationist. Resistance (Islamic militance and Afghan nationalism) could only be explained-and dealth with-as a contrivance of foreign imperialism and domestic reaction. Moscow could neither admit that it was an expression of genuine popular sentiment, i.e., the result of PDPA misrule, nor tolerate the sacrifice of fellow socialists on its doorstep.

Observers such as Bradsher interpret the Afghan invasion as the culmination of developments that broadened the scope of the Brezhnev Doctrine beyond its original Warsaw Pact context. The doctrine emerged as an important theme in Soviet foreign policy after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. It represented both a response to Western criticism and a warning to other Warsaw Pact states not to inititate their own "Prague Spring." Brezhnev in 1968 asserted the right of the Soviet Union and other socialist states to intervene in the internal affairs of a country in Eastern Europe where counterrevolutionary forces endangered socialism. The invasion of Czechoslovakia was carefully orchestrated to appear as if it were an undertaking of the Warsaw Pact as a whole and not Moscow alone.

With the growth of Soviet military power, the Kremlin could extend assistance to "progressive" forces in geographically remote places. In 1975, with Cuban surrogates playing an indispensable role, the Soviets began aiding the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola on a large scale. Two years later, Moscow and Havana began pumping men and material into Ethiopia to prop up the revolutionary regime of Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam. Developments in South Yemen in 1978 are suggestive of events in Afghanistan a year later. South Yemeni president Salim Rubay Ali was both critical of the Soviet model of socialist construction (he was often described as a "Maoist") and eager to develop ties with neighboring Saudi Arabia to obtain economic aid. When he attempted to purge his rivals in the leftist National Front, Cuban military personnel, flown in by Soviet aircraft, assisted local militia in overthrowing him in June 1978. Rubay Ali was executed and replaced by a reliable pro-Moscow figure, Abd al Fattah Ismail. Ismail's own career subsequently resembled Karmal's. Forced out of power in 1980, he went into a Soviet-arranged exile in Eastern Europe, returning to South Yemen in March 1985 and in October securing a seat in that country's Politburo.

The Soviet Union was the only socialist state to participte in the invasion of Afghanistan. In late 1982, however, highranking defectors from KHAD reported that there were military personnel from Cuba, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Vietnam in training or advisory capacities inside the country. This reflected the Brezhnev Doctrine's emphasis on intervention by the worldwide socialist community.

Moscow's experience with the basmachi uprisings north of the Amu Darya in the early 1920s set a precedent. Bradsher notes that the Soviets combined military force with a policy of co-optation and gradual transformation of the society: "Local people who had fled from any involvement with the Bolsheviks were brought into the government . . . A new generation was trained to appreciate the benefits of adherence to the large new Soviet state and had vested interests in the material progress offered by it . . ." There occurred "stages of gradual encroachment into traditional ways," such as collectivization and the abolition of Muslim trading rights.

As in Soviet Central Asia, programs to promote literacy, health, and a higher standard of living were an important component of Moscow's strategy. Living standards in independent Afghanistan were among the world's poorest. Prosperity, coupled with military force and a Soviet-style education system, would ensure the allegiance of new generations of Afghans.

There was speculation in the mid-1980s that the Soviets were planning to annex the northern region of Afghanistan, whose residents are ethnically similar to those of Soviet Central Asia. Some observers envisioned the creation of a new "Afghan" Soviet Socialist Republic. But if Moscow's dual policy of coercion and cooptation were successful, such a drastic step would be unnecessary. Afghanistan would become a compliant satellite state similar to Mongolia.

There are problems, however, with applying the basmachi and Mongolian precedents to Afghanistan. Although pockets of basmachi resistance persisted through the 1920s, the Red Army had broken the movement's back by 1923. The Afghan resistance (sanctified, unlike the basmachi, with the status of jihad or holy struggle) was still formidable after six years of Soviet occupation. The drawing of Mongolia into the Soviet sphere of influence was a relatively simple matter because Mongol leaders cooperated in order to avoid domination and absorption by China. The Mongols lacked, moreover, the fighting traditions of the Afghans. Though they were the descendants of Genghis Khan, their conversion to Lamaistic Buddhism in more recent centuries made them a nation of monks rather than warriors.

Although the Soviet leadership changed three times in the period between the invasion and early 1985-from Brezhnev to Yuri Andropov in November 1982, from Andropov to Konstantin Chernenko in February 1984, and from Chernenko to Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985-Soviet policy toward Afghanistan displayed singular continuity. Rumors that Andropov, while director of the KGB, had opposed the invasion and was prepared to negotiate a political solution to the crisis became academic after his death in February 1984. In December of that year, Marshal Sergey Sokolov succeeded the powerful Dmitry Ustinov as the Soviet Union's minister of defense. Sokolov had been in charge of operations during the 1979 invasion, and his promotion suggested that the leadership had no second thoughts about their decision to intervene. Although Gorbachev appeared to Western observers to be politically more astute and image-conscious than his grayer predecessors, there was little evidence in late 1985 that he was a "dove" on Afghanistan. Hints of Soviet flexibility during the November 1985 summit meeting between Gorbachev and United States president Reagan were not supported by any alteration of the basic Soviet position: that troop withdrawal could occur only when the survival of the Kabul regime could be guaranteed.

The Regional Crisis

Afghanistan straddles South Asia and the Middle East, two regions that are among the world's most unstable. The 1979 invasion heightened tensions between Afghanistan and its neighbors-Pakistan, Iran, and China-and also between these countries and the Soviet Union. It added a new factor of uncertainty to traditionally hostile relations between Pakistan and India. On the global level, Moscow's policy of championing Third World causes was seriously compromised, and it earned the enmity of practically the entire Islamic world. The invasion precipitated a crisis in United States-Soviet relations. The administration of President Jimmy Carter, already preoccupied with the Iran hostage crisis, was left in the unenviable position of verbally chastising an unheeding Moscow as it tightened its grip south of the Amu Darya. Sanctions were imposed, but they were ineffective in dissuading Moscow from continuing the military occupation (see table 12, Appendix).

Although world interest in the Afghanistan crisis had dwindled appreciably by late 1985, six years after the invasion most nations still voiced their opposition to the occupation. On November 13 1985, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops without specifically mentioning the Soviet Union, as it had each year since an emergency session was convened in January 1980. The vote was 112 nations in favor of the resolution, 19 opposed, and 12 abstaining. This was the largest majority supporting a troop pullout since the January 1980 resolution (the 1984 figures were 119 nations in favor, 20 opposed, and 14 abstaining). The Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact allies (except Romania), Angola, Cuba, Ethiopia, Laos, Libya, Madagascar, Mongolia, South Yemen, Syria, and Vietnam voted against the measure. Significant abstentions included Romania and India.

Pakistan and "Proximity Talks"

The Soviet occupation had the most immediate impact on neighboring Pakistan. By late 1985 an estimated 3 million Afghan refugees had crossed over into Pakistan. Most lived in refugee camps in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). This area, like the Afghan provinces to the west of the Durand Line separating the two countries, was inhabited primarily by Pashtuns.

Between Quetta in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province and its border with China, there were more than 200 passes leading into Afghanistan. Ninety of these were motorable. The mujahidiin passed back and forth across the sieve-like border to launch attacks against the regime and then return to their bases in Pakistan.

From the Afghan (and Soviet) perspective, Pakistan was a base for counterrevolution. Kabul routinely accused its eastern neighbor of interfering in Afghanistan's internal affairs by offering sanctuary to the mujahidiin. Pakistan viewed the crisis as posing three distinct but interrelated threats. First, mujahidiin operations brought Afghan government and Soviet forces to the border. Islamabad discovered, to its dismay, that it now had the Soviet army as a neighbor. Hot pursuit of mujahidiin by Afghan and Soviet forces resulted in frequent border violations. Second, KHAD agents slipped across the border to assassinate resistance leaders or stir up trouble between the various mujahidiin factions in Peshawar. They allegedly also maintained contact with Pakistanis opposed to the regime of President Zia. Until 1983 two sons of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the prime minister of Pakistan whom Zia had executed in April 1979, resided in Kabul. They headed A1 Zulfikar, a terrorist organization whose most notorious operation was the hijacking of a Pakistan International Airlines airliner to Kabul. Their group was also linked to the assassination of several prominent politicians in 1981 and 1982.

Finally, the refugees posed a threat to internal stability. Tension between the newcomers, most of whom were armed, and Pakistani citizens increased as the passage of years and competition for scarce jobs frayed the edges of Muslim and Pashtun hospitality. Islamabad feared that unless a way to repatriate the refugees was discovered, they might become, like the Palestinians in Jordan and Lebanon, a perpetual source of trouble. There were apprehensions that the Afghans could act as a wedge to disturb the already fragile consensus that existed among the nation's different ethnic groups.

Pakistan pursued two options in response to the crisis. One was dependence on its allies-the United States, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and China-for military and other forms of assistance. Washington committed US$3.2 billion in economic and military aid for the 1981-86 period, substantially more than its postinvasion offer of US$400 million, which Zia hastily dismissed in January 1980 as "peanuts." Both the Carter and the Reagan administrations regarded Pakistan as a "front-line state," vital to United States interests in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Arab and Chinese aid was also important as Soviet border incursions became more frequent and the burden of supporting millions of Afghan refugees increased.

Another option was pursuit of a negotiated settlement of the crisis. Islamabad initially had insisted that a withdrawal of Soviet troops must precede talks with Kabul. But a more flexible attitude was apparent in early 1981, when Zia and Pakistani foreign minister Agha Shahi urged UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim to arrange trilateral talks between the governments of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. It was not until June 16, 1982 however, that the UN under secretary for special political affairs, Diego Cordovez, convened the first of a series of indirect talks between the Afghan and Pakistani foreign ministers in Geneva. These were later called "proximity talks" because, at Pakistan's insistence, the two parties did not meet face to face but employed Cordovez as an intermediary. Iran declined to participate because representatives of the mujahidiin were not included. The winds between Kabul and Islamabad, by way of Geneva, blew warm and cool. Observers sensed Kabul's anxiousness to reach an understanding with Islamabad in its early 1983 decision to expel the Bhutto brothers from Afghanistan.

Between June 1982 and August 1985, five UN-sponsored sessions were held in Geneva, and more were expected in the future. During this time, four principles emerged as preconditions for a mutually satisfactory resolution of the crisis: withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan; mutual pledges of noninterference and nonintervention; international guarantees of a peaceful settlement; and voluntary repatriation of Afghan refugees. There were, however, formidable obstacles to implementation of these points. The Afghans, even if they were free to do so, would not request a withdrawal of Soviet troops as long as a strong mujahidiin movement threatened the regime's existence, and voluntary repatriation of refugees was impossible as long as the Soviets continued their occupation.

Iran shares an 800-kilometer border with Afghanistan, running north-to-south from its border with the Soviet Union to the northwestern tip of Pakistan. (see fig. 1). The regions that it passes through are desert but not as rugged as those along the AfghanistanPakistan border. Thus, it was more difficult for mujahidiin and refugees to cross undetected. In late 1985, however, an estimated 1.9 million Afghans resided on Iranian soil (whether most came after 1979 or were earlier arrivals was unclear). Guerrilla movements operated along the border, though not on the scale of Pakistan. Because of the immense costs of the war with Iraq, Tehran could not devote its full energies to helping its eastern Muslim neighbors. Its influence was most strongly felt in the predominantly Shia Hazarajat region in central Afghanistan; there, groups whose members were followers of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini formed an important component of the resistance.

The day after the invasion, the foreign minister of Iran, Sadeq Qotbzadeh, delivered a protest to the Soviet embassy in Tehran calling the invasion a "hostile action against Iran and all Muslims of the world." The occupation confirmed Khomeini's perception of the two superpowers as equally perfidious. An important factor was historical fear and distrust of the Soviet Union. In November 1979 Tehran repudiated a 1921 "friendship treaty" that gave Moscow the right to intervene militarily in Iran if its territory was used as a base of military operations against the Soviet Union. During and after World War II, Soviet troops had occupied portions of Iran and had sought to promote separatist movements among ethnic minorities. Iranian leaders feared the growth of Soviet influence in the region even as they denounced the United States as the "Great Satan."

Relations between Tehran and Kabul were acrimonious. In November 1981 Tehran proposed a "peace plan" involving the replacement of Soviet troops with an "Islamic peace unit." This was, needless to say, rejected by the Karmal regime. In late 1985 Iran continued to refuse to participate in the Geneva "proximity talks," insisting on inclusion of the mujahidiin as a condition for its participation.

China and Afghanistan

China's view of the invasion, like Pakistan's and Iran's, was strongly critical. On December 29, 1979, the Chinese government labeled it "another grave international incident following the Soviet armed occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968." It also condemned the Soviet action as a "threat to peace and security in Asia and the whole world." Relations between Beijing and Moscow had been laden with suspicion and hostility since the early 1960s. Afghanistan, however, was peripheral to China's major security concerns (Soviet troops stationed along its borders and in Mongolia and a hostile, Soviet-backed Vietnam to the south after 1975), but the two countries shared an 80-kilometer border where the Wakhan Corridor touches China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The inhabitants of the corridor, mostly Kirghiz, have close ties to the people of Xinjiang. In ancient and medieval times, what is now Afghanistan skirted the fabled Silk Road between China and the West.

Although relations between China and the Soviet Union improved noticeably during the 1980-85 period, Afghanistan remained an issue of serious contention. Afghan and Soviet spokesmen regularly accused the Chinese of aiding the resistance. In June and July 1981, Soviet troops occupied the Wakhan Corridor, expelling the original inhabitants and sealing it off from Chinese infiltration. The Chinese offered Pakistan moral support and aid as a "front-line state." During talks between Chinese and Soviet leaders in the mid-1980s, the Chinese insisted that the Soviets end the occupation. This issue, along with reduction of Soviet border troops and an end to encouragement of Vietnamese expansionism, was defined by Beijing as a precondition for normalized relations with Moscow.

India was the one major noncommunist state that maintained amicable relations with Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. Although the Indian government called for a withdrawal of Soviet troops on December 31, 1979 it also expressed its apprehensions about United States military commitments to Pakistan. New Delhi feared that newly acquired United States arms could be used against India, rather than to secure the Afghan border. Its close ties with the Soviet Union, highlighted by a treaty of friendship in 1971, were another factor in its relative reluctance to issue public condemnations of the occupation. Leaders voiced support for apolitical resolution of the crisis and deplored the use of "cold war rhetoric" to describe the situation.

An Indian observer notes that on two occasions Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in meetings with Soviet leaders in 1980 and 1982, privately urged a pullout of Soviet troops. But before her assassination in October 1984, member nations of the Nonaligned Movement repeatedly criticized Gandhi's reluctance to publicly condemn Soviet actions. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, elected prime minister in December 1984, was equally circumspect. He avoided criticism of the Soviet Union in his address before the UN in October 1985. As on five previous occasions, India's representative to the UN abstained in the November 13 1985, vote on the General Assembly resolution on withdrawal.

This page maintained by Luke Griffin and last updated on 01/14/2002 .