Within several weeks, all of the country’s cities and major roads were under Soviet occupation. Two days earlier, the Fortieth Army had moved in thousands of armed personnel and vehicles from the Soviet border town of Termez. They were disguised as regular Afghan soldiers, and had come to fulfil one objective: killing Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin. During Operation Storm, a seven hundred-strong unit of Soviet special forces infiltrated the city of Kabul. On the evening of the 27 th of December 1979, the Afghan government was effectively decapitated. Little known and appreciated for its significance, the Soviet-Afghan War was one of the turning points of the late Cold War. Furthermore, the fateful Politburo decision was not conceived by Brezhnev, but by a small, cabalistic group of the Soviet Union’s most powerful figures. The subsidiary goal of the invasion was to secure an ideologically-friendly régime in the region. These were arguably to deter US interference in the USSR’s ‘backyard’, to gain a highly strategic foothold in Southwest Asia and, not least of all, to attempt to contain the radical Islamic revolution emanating from Iran. The evidence available suggests that geopolitical calculations were at the top of the Kremlin’s goals. However, exactly why the Red Army wound up in direct military conflict, embroiled in a bitter and complicated civil war-some 3,000 kilometres away from Moscow-is a point of historiographical uncertainty. Historical hindsight has made this evident. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was a costly and, ultimately, pointless war. “Strength, and not a little strength at that, is needed to defend socialist gains.”
0 kommentar(er)
