The Afghan-Soviet war

"War puts nations to the test. Just as mummies fall to pieces the moment that they are exposed to the air, so war pronounces its sentence of death on those social institutions that have become ossified."

Karl Marx

On December 24th 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. On that day began a war which wreaked incredible havoc and destruction on Afghanistan for 10 long years. The Soviets stormed in with thousands of troops at the request of the troubled Afghan Communist regime. The Russians believed that it would be a neat surgical military operation. They were wrong. The only resistance to the Soviet invasion were men known as the "mujahideen" or the freedom fighters. They are multinational some even from America, doing everything in their power to revoke the Soviet horde.

Causes of the crisis

##The Soviets by mid 1978 had installed Mohammed Taraki, the head of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) as leader of the Afghan regime.

Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev in the White Ho...

Leonid Brezhnev, portrait on stamp.

English: President Jimmy Carter and Soviet General...

When popular opposition to the regime's changes provoked armed resistance, Moscow supplied weapons and military advisers who took unofficial command of the Afghan armed communist forces. ##By mid-1979, the Soviets sought the removal of Taraki's deputy, Hafizullah Amin. They blamed Amin for antagonizing the Afghan people into rebellion. Brezhnev was angered by Amin's overthrow of Taraki on 14 September 1979. Brezhnev and other Soviet officials also feared that Afghanistan's communist regime might be defeated by strengthening Muslim guerrillas,## that such a defeat would damage Soviet prestige worldwide, and that the adjacent Muslim areas of the USSR would be destabilized. The soviets believed that Amin was backed by the United States because he had lived there for a number of years and had made diplomatic contacts. In the course of the...