Bruno De Cordier: Parallel Frontlines ... Ten Years of Soviet and American Occupation Compared

Bruno De Cordier works for the Conflict Research Group at Ghent University.

“When I was serving there, it was the latter years of the war, at a time that everyone’s main concern was getting out unscathed and not saving Socialism”, a veteran from the Soviet-Afghan war told me several years ago. “It’s the sort of war and country that gets under your skin, brother. See, lately, I have followed closely what the Americans and Europeans are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. The whole discourse about installing democracy, and the reality on the ground; it’s familiar”. But are both episodes really that similar? It is tempting to say so. For both, the cliched refrain that ‘it’s all about the oil’ doesn’t explain events. More important are security and ideology, though the global geopolitical context, of course, differs. The USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan was the result of the course and circumstances of the Cold War in which both sides had promoted satellite states and military blocs, rather than a war on terrorism and nation-building mission as characterised the 2000’s. 

The Soviets did not face a 9/11 type event. The mission was not retribution for a major terrorist attack, rather the invasion was hastened by a perception that the USSR’s position was under threat on a number of fronts during the 1970s. Nato’s installation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe and the unwelcome course of the Iranian revolution had altered the balance of power. In Afghanistan, which bordered the USSR, the Soviet-backed Socialist regime suffered factional infighting while it was confronted with an Islamist and nationalist insurgency that, according to KGB reports, it could no longer handle. The USSR had already intervened militarily in Afghanistan in the lead up to its fully-fledged invasion. In early 1979, for instance, Soviet fighter jets helped to quell a mutiny in Herat after the city’s Soviet expatriates were targeted by the insurgents, while Russia had maintained a strategic interest in Afghanistan since the nineteenth century. 

Socialist republics and Islamic emirates

This brings us to a second major difference between the two conflict phases: the role of the state in Afghanistan...