Russian-Soviet Expansion towards Afghanistan: British-Indian and Pakistani Counter-Pressures

Abstract

In order to understand the dynamics of Soviet penetration into Afghanistan from the 1950s to the 1970s, it is useful to analyze its historical antecedents, namely: (1) British India and Russia were instrumental in creating the modern state of Afghanistan under Amir Abdur Rahman (22 July 1880–1 October 1901); (2) British India was primarily responsible in establishing Afghanistan’s boundaries with Iran, the Russian imperial possessions in Central Asia, and India, which Pakistan inherited in 1947 as one of the successor states of British India; (3) Pakistan’s policies of integrating the borderlands (the so-called Tribal Belt) with the NWFP; (4) the impact of the global cold war on Afghan irredentism towards Pakistan; and finally (5) the demise of the ancien régime in Afghanistan, when the communists as the Soviet surrogates staged a coup d’état against President Daud’s government in April 1978, and ushered in the calamitous era of the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. This long-drawn-out political process finally culminated in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.