The December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan was a watershed event, one that definitively ended “détente” between the global superpowers, the United States and the USSR, and inaugurated a new and more intense phase of tension. The invasion was a clearcut violation of international law and was widely condemned. At the time, it appeared that the Soviet invasion was completely unprovoked, either by the Afghans themselves or by the United States.
In the nearly half century that that has elapsed since the invasion, a large amount of new information has emerged that casts doubt on the benign image of the US government, as a bystander in the Afghan calamity, and suggests that US officials deliberately provoked the invasion; and then, after the invasion occurred, some US officials actively welcomed its occurrence.
A reexamination of the 1979 Afghan case seems especially relevant today, given the obvious parallels to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the US response to the invasion of Afghanistan offers a model of what US officials should seek to achieve in Ukraine. The similarities between the two historical cases are indeed striking: Above all, the 1979 Afghan invasion was widely viewed at the time as being an unprovoked act of aggression, very much the way that the Ukraine invasion is being viewed now. We will see that such claims are contradicted by the historical record. It was US provocation that triggered both conflicts.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was widely presented as a major threat to Western security, but this was largely a propaganda invention. If one surveys the record of declassified documents from 1945 all the way to the late 1970s, one finds little US interest in Afghanistan, which was regarded as a strategic backwater, due to its exceptionally rugged geography and lack of access to the sea. The overarching US perspective was succinctly stated by a 1973 article in the Wall Street Journal, which was entitled: “Do the Russians Covet Afghanistan? If So, it is Hard to Figure Why.” The article went on to characterize Afghanistan as “a vast expanse of desert waste.” From the US National Security Council, a 1974 document stated: “Afghanistan is of no major importance to us.”
Hellbound and Down 