Consequences of the Soviet-Afghan War

Abstract

The completion of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was not a moment of rapturous joy for Afghans, although there were certain grounds for celebration. On the one hand, those who had battled Soviet forces since the December 1979 invasion felt overwhelming pride that a superpower had been forced into what they saw as a retreat. But on the other hand, the suffering which the people of Afghanistan had been forced to endure during a decade of occupation was enormous, and even on the most optimistic of scenarios, the damage which had been inflicted on the country would take years to put right. From the Soviet point of view, too, there was little about which to be satisfied. Thousands of young soldiers had perished in a harsh land for little gain, leaving grieving relatives to ponder how and why such a disastrous commitment had come to be undertaken. Yet the war affected the two states very differently, and the aim of this chapter is briefly to identify some of the more important of these effects, together with two particularly important lessons of the war. In Afghanistan, the war produced a multilayered destructuring of politics, economy, and society, in ways which remain massively apparent at the beginning of a new century.