The further deterioration of
Afghanistan’s situation in early 1979
moved Moscow’s leadership out of its
inertia, and directly into a trap.[11] For example, some twenty Soviet military
advisers (out of 1,500 in the country)
were publicly lynched and mutilated
by angry mobs in the city of Heart.
From then on, the attempt to create an
Afghan satellite state was justified in Marxist-Leninist terms of the Soviet
Union’s ‘internationalist duty’ towards
friendly neighbours. In a telephone
conversation to Taraki, Soviet Premier
Aleksei Kosygin soothed his besieged
counterpart thus: “We are comrades and are waging a common struggle
and that is why we should not stand
on ceremony with each other.
Everything must be subordinate to this
[relationship].”[12] The Soviet Union’s 1978 ‘Treaty of Cooperation and
Good-Neighbourliness’ with
Afghanistan served as the official
pretext to intervene militarily in that
country. Behind the comradely
rhetoric, though, were the obvious strategic benefits of the deployment. First of all, the Soviet drive into the
heart of Southwest Asia coincided with
an age-long, imperial Russian longing
for a warm-water port.[13] Of course, acquiring such a facility would have
required further expansion—
potentially through Iran to the Persian
Gulf, or into Pakistan—but this can
only remain conjecture. The timing of
the invasion of Afghanistan is also suspect. The fact that it came almost
exactly one year after the 1978
Iranian revolution, which brought to
power a government equally hostile to
US as to Soviet interests, strongly
suggests that the Politburo’s decision was based on a gamble of power
politics. Moscow argued that it was
pre-empting a possible ‘imperialist’
move in the region. This is certainly
evidenced in the political education
which Red Army units received prior to entering Afghan territory. When the
airborne trooper, Yuri Tinkov, was
ordered to hastily prepare for combat,
he quite tellingly assumed that their
destination would be Iran. Instead, he
received the following mission briefing: Our borders are threatened. The
American Green Berets intend to
conquer Afghanistan… [and] set up
their missiles. We don’t have the
military capacity that would enable us
to repel an attack directed from the south… It’s possible that they will start
shooting at us while were still in the air
—that is, if the Americans notice us. [14] The scape-goating of imperialists
reached absurd proportions during
the Afghanistan war. For example, the
opium addictions of many Red Army
soldiers was rationalised by their
officers in bizarre plots. The CIA and Hong Kong drug barons worked
together, they maintained, to destroy
the Soviet armed forces from within. [15] It was just discounted outright that the young conscripts could be
abusing local produce. What this
suggests is that, higher up the ladder,
military and political leaders may have
genuinely feared American
involvement in Afghanistan. Soldiers on the ground were certainly bored
by their political lessons, but the
expectation of coming face to face
with American and Chinese agents
was pervasive. This was chiefly
because, as Ellen Jones brilliantly put it, a Soviet soldier “like the American
consumer targeted by a repetitive
advertising campaign… may ridicule
the medium but he seems to absorb
the message.”[16] Such propaganda, as always, contained a hint of truth to
give it credibility.
e-IR » Why Did the Soviet Union Invade Afghanistan?
