“The sudden arrival of Soviet troops in Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 was immediately declared an ‘invasion’ by the West, but the truth is more complex.”
By Phil Halton
ON DEC 25, 1979, elements of the Soviet Red Army rolled into Afghanistan kicking off nearly a decade of conflict in the Central Asian nation. The campaign soon bogged down into a bloody counterinsurgency war that pitted Russian-led forces against a Western-backed guerrilla army, the Mujahadeen.
Western politicians and the media were quick to cast the Soviet-Afghan Conflict as yet another front in the Cold War, or in even more simplistic terms: as a struggle between the Evil Empire and a rag-tag army of brave Afghan Freedom Fighters.
Of course, such binary narratives obscured the true nature of the Soviet intervention. What’s more, a number of stubborn myths about the Afghan resistance would cloud Western political thinking about the region and later have real consequences on the American-led effort to stabilize the country after the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
This history has become even more difficult to uncover given the chaos in Afghanistan over the past three decades. Many of the participants in historical events have been killed, and records either lost or never created in the first place.
The following nine misconceptions cloud our understanding of the conflict in Afghanistan.
It was more of an intervention than an invasion
The sudden arrival of Soviet troops in Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 was immediately declared an “invasion” by the West, but the truth is more complex. In reality, the operation followed a military coup in Kabul the year before that was dressed up as a popular revolution. The take-over put the leading members of the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan in power in April of 1978.
The new regime selected Nur Muhammad Taraki as leader; his rule was short-lived. In-fighting within the party saw Taraki deposed in September 1979 and replaced by another communist Hafizullah Amin. The factionalism continued. In fact, during 1978 and 1979, the Afghan government made 14 requests for the deployment of Soviet troops to stabilize Afghanistan, but each time Moscow refused.
“Our troops would have to fight not only with foreign aggressors, but also with a certain number of your [Afghan] people,” remarked Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin. “And people do not forgive such things. Besides, as soon as our troops cross the border, China and all the other aggressors will be vindicated.”
When the Soviet “limited contingent” was finally sent in late 1979, it was with great reluctance.
The Politburo thought the Afghans too communist
The 1978 coup was in part a retaliation to a wave of arrests of communist party officials by the then long-serving Afghan president Mohammad Daoud Khan. The Soviets were surprised by the sudden change in government and had misgivings about the People’s Democratic Party’s ability to rule.
Although not ideologically aligned with the ousted former regime, Moscow had enjoyed many years of cordial relations with Daoud Khan’s government. Indeed, the Soviet Politburo considered Afghanistan as being not ready for communism. After the coup, Moscow advised the new Afghan regime to move slowly with Marxist reforms. They were ignored. And so, when the decision was made to oust Hafizullah Amin, it was because in Soviet eyes the regime was too radically communist.
During the 20-months between the coup and the Soviet invasion, the new regime imposed drastic reforms and a series of other equally unpopular policies. These programs led to widespread violence. Opposition mounted, while uprisings in the countryside taxed the Afghan military’s abilities to the limit. Crackdowns followed. By the time Red Army troops entered the country, as many as a hundred thousand citizens had been “disappeared.” The state was verging on collapse.
Afghan leaders coordinated the arrival of Soviet troops
Hafizullah Amin made his last request for Soviet military support to prop up his government on Dec. 17, 1979. Eight days later, the Soviet 40th Army crossed the border from Uzbekistan at Termez and split at Kushka, with each wing fanning out in opposite directions along a lengthy ring road that encircles the country. The two columns linked back up in Kandahar.
Interestingly, not only was Amin fully aware of the Soviet plan for the advance, but the details had been coordinated between the commander of the 40th Army and the Afghan ruler’s own brother. Amin however was unaware that the Soviet strategy wasn’t to prop up his unpopular regime; it was to replace it with a more capable government. Two days into the intervention however, he’d discover Moscow’s true intentions.
On Dec. 27, Red Army forces landed at Kabul International Airport. That same day, 700 KGB, GRU and Spetsnaz operatives dressed in Afghan uniforms seized key public buildings and utilities in Kabul. They then converged on the Tajbeg Palace where Amin was staying. As the Soviets engaged the palace guards, Amin desperately phoned the Soviet embassy and local military commanders to ask for protection, refusing to believe that it was the Russians who were attacking. Amin and his family were killed in an operation Moscow codenamed Storm-333. Another Afghan communist leader who had been living in exile, Babrak Karmal, was promptly installed as the new leader.
The Soviet embassy was unaware of the plan
The secrecy surrounding Moscow’s plan for regime change was so closely guarded, the Soviet embassy in Kabul was kept in the dark. In fact, so out-of-the loop were Moscow’s diplomats, that the day of the attack when Amin and many of his staff had suddenly fallen ill — they’d been poisoned by pro-Soviet traitors in the president’s midst — two doctors from the embassy were dispatched to treat Amin. Both were in the palace when it was stormed. One of the physicians was killed in the hail of machine gun bullets when the KGB and GRU operatives arrived to finish off Amin.
The Soviet invaders were multi-ethnic
The idea that Afghanistan was invaded by an army of foreign Russian occupiers is misleading. While ethnic Russians made up part of the intervention force, the bulk of the troops sent into the country in 1979 were drawn almost entirely from Soviet Central Asian republics like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. In many cases, these soldiers would have shared cultural, religious and linguistic links with the Afghan people. Afghan society however can be deeply iconoclastic and inward-looking; outsiders are not always welcome. Of course, in the isolated and closely-knit villages of Afghanistan’s rural interior, any foreigner is viewed as an “outsider.” That would include fellow Afghans from urban areas, another province or even a villager from the next valley over. So even Soviet troops from majority-Muslim republics would have been considered alien.
There were few “Freedom Fighters” in Afghanistan
Western Cold War logic equated communism with brutality; Afghans however had a more nuanced perspective. Although political parties were largely banned in the country, in the 1970s there were three major streams of political thought. Pashtun nationalists, like President Daoud, neither sought to modernize nor reform the government, but simply to maintain the status quo. They held power through authoritarian means. Then there were conservative Islamists. Kabul University had been a hotbed for such fundamentalism, but many leaders of that movement had been arrested, executed, or forced into exile by Daoud. Finally, there were the communists, represented by two factions within the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The communists were among the only groups in Afghanistan interested in modernization, reform, secularization and equal rights for women. As a result, many moderate Afghans found themselves somewhat aligned with the party, even if they did not ascribe to Marxist-Leninist thought. This is particularly true of women who wanted an education or a career.
Many of the Soviet-era ‘nation building’ efforts might sound familiar
Western involvement in Afghanistan post-9/11 was marked by extensive and expensive international development programs. By some estimates, the American government alone spent $145 billion on these efforts over the course of two decades. But many of the signature aid programs of that era sound remarkably like those from the Soviet era. The Moscow-backed government worked hard to improve education, particularly for girls and women, and provide them with job opportunities. They also spent enormous resources on rural infrastructure, such as roads, irrigation and even markets. Ironically, many of these projects would be repeated by the U.S.-led coalition post 9/11. Interestingly, the programs conducted during both the Soviet and American eras are dwarfed by those conducted in the 1950s and 60s. Ironically, during that period both the Soviets and Americans jointly completed the “ring road” connecting all the major cities of Afghanistan in 1966, and the Americans built the Kajaki Dam hydroelectric project in 1953.
Afghanistan was not the “Soviet Vietnam”
This common comparison between the two conflicts falls apart upon close examination. For starters, the “Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan,” as it was officially dubbed, never rose above a peak strength of 120,000, including the nearly 7,000 soldiers who were present as advisors before 1979. However, the American commitment to Vietnam, a country a fifth of the size of Afghanistan, rose to over half a million troops by the war’s peak in 1968. Moscow’s initial intention was for a short intervention, with the contingent told that they would redeploy within three months. The impact was expected to strengthen the Afghan government’s position and deter the rebels, not unlike earlier Soviet interventions in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). By contrast, the American involvement in Vietnam stretched over decades, and never had a clear timeline. The Vietnam war also drew the involvement of more countries (namely Australia, New Zealand and South Korea), and arguably had a larger geopolitical impact as well. What’s more, U.S. losses in Southeast Asia topped 58,000; Soviet losses didn’t exceed 15,000.
The Afghan Communist government outlasted the Soviet Union
Frustrated by their lack of progress, Moscow ordered a gradual Soviet military withdrawal from Afghanistan beginning in1986. It lasted until Feb. 15, 1989 when Lieutenant General Boris Gronov crossed the Friendship Bridge across the Amu Darya River on foot, becoming the “last Soviet soldier” to leave Afghanistan. Soviet assistance, however, continued and each week after that a 600-truck convoy from the Soviet Union arrived in Kabul, carrying everything from Scud missiles to flour. This allowed the Afghan government to continue its policy of bribing and co-opting opposition groups and arming any community that was nominally loyal to the government. These tactics allowed the Afghan government to maintain a degree of stability and lower the intensity of conflict throughout the country. By 1990, 25 per cent of all opposition groups had signed reconciliation agreements, and 40 per cent more had signed ceasefires. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union in August, 1991 spelled the end of Soviet assistance, exposing the true weakness of the Afghan government. In early 1992, opposition groups pounced on the capital, fighting both the government and each other. The communist Afghan government evaporated, having held out for months longer than the once-vaunted Soviet Union. After four years of civil war, the Taliban would seize Kabul in 1996 and proclaim the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Five years later, they would be toppled by a U.S.-led NATO intervention force.
Phil Halton is a Canadian Army veteran and author of five books. His latest work, Red Warning (2024), is a postmodern crime novel set in Afghanistan. He is also the author of Blood Washing Blood: Afghanistan’s Hundred-Year War (2021).
