Why soviets invaded afghanistan

Indeed, justice has been served, albeit insufficiently. Abandoning Afghanistan in indecent haste has paved the way to hell. As the Taliban conquer ever wider swathes of territory , the hope of negotiating peace recedes. As the saying goes, when elephants fight the grass gets trampled. But Pakistan cannot be exonerated either. And so for decades the Taliban leadership, fighters and their families were provided residence, healthcare, and protection by Pakistan.

No one believes us when we claim otherwise. If Afghanistan is ever to become a civilised country, it must be governed by a constitution allowing freedom of expression, elections, power sharing and human rights alongside Islamic basic values.

Wild-eyed men who have forcibly seized power will lead the country from one disaster to the next. The Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban — the ones who slaughtered children at the Army Public School in December — are ideological brothers.

One wants to capture Kabul and likely will whereas the other hopes for Islamabad but will satisfy itself with terrorist acts. This article first appeared in Dawn. Share your perspective on this article with a post on ScrollStack, and send it to your followers.

Contribute Now. Modi must accept moral responsibility for it Born years ago, what is Fyodor Dostoevsky telling us today through his novels? The current situation dates back to the late 70s, when the Soviet Union chose to invade their neighbours. The treaty was signed in and the two countries agreed to provide economic and military assistance.

Afghanistan borders Russia and was always considered important to its national security and a gateway to Asia. Russia had long tried to establish strong ties, holding interests there for centuries. A communist revolution in Afghanistan and its subsequent one-party state, run by head of the communist party Nur Mohammed Taraki, was extremely unpopular with the Afghan people and the Soviets attempted to bolster it with the treaty.

However, in September Taraki was overthrown and killed by members of the Afghan Communist Party who were unhappy with him. Within a few days, the Soviets completed a special assault against Tajberg Palace and secured Kabul. The resistance was fierce but brief. Soviet ground troops enter from the north.

The groups united through their belief the invading atheist Soviets undermined Islam and their culture. The groups crossed ethnic and ideological lines, but initially were defectors from the Afghan army. They were backed by the West who often referred to them as freedom fighters. They were funded by the United States and Pakistan. Funnelling money and weapons through Pakistan leads to fraud, and Pakistan would pick which of the Mujahideen factions would receive the most support, often favouring those with more fundamentalist views.

Under President Reagan US support increased. The US introduces shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, called Stingers, which allowed the Mujahideen to shoot down Soviet planes and helicopters. This turned the war. The Mujahideen controlled most of the country by this point. Based in Pakistan, bin Laden had been a a major financier of the Mujahideen in the 80s, spending his own money and using his connections.

He also trained foreign Muslim volunteers who wished to fight. Some 15, Soviet soldiers were killed. The Mujahideen, which is still receiving funding from Washington and Islamabad, continues to fight against the Najibullah Government, which is still being backed by Moscow. The Afghan constitution is written and confirms that the country is officially an Islamic state and the last references to communism are removed.

The creation and use of the Taliban by Pakistan was supported by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and by the United States on the pre- text of isolating Iran and stopping the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan. The Taliban never fought the Soviet Union and were only created in the mids. India, Iran, Russia, and all the central Asian republics except Turkmeni- stan were alarmed enough by the Taliban into working together in support of Ahmed Shah Masood and his Northern Alliance, a grouping of anti-Taliban forces.

India had very limited relations with the Rabbani government from to Elements in the Taliban initially reached out to India but their brutality against Afghan Hindus and Sikhs soon ended that. Their training of Kashmiri, Pakistani, and foreign militants in Afghanistan in preparation for a jihad in Jammu and Kashmir was soon apparent. In —, under Indian pressure, the United States came close to declaring Pakistan a state sponsor of terror. Pakistan consequently moved many Kashmiri terrorist group bases to eastern Afghanistan.

Bin Laden was encouraged to join the Taliban in by Pakistan as he too was sponsoring bases for Kash- miri terrorists in Khost. The effects of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan were brought vividly home to all of India by the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC to Kandahar on December 24, , which only ended with the release of three Pakistani terrorists from Indian jails.

The Taliban ex- ploited the Kashmir jihad knowing that Pakistan could refuse them nothing so long as they provided bases for Pakistani and Kashmiri militants. The Afghan Taliban, however, were resistant to some Pakistani interests and never recog- nized the Durand Line, something no Afghan government has found possible. Events in Afghanistan in the s and s still reverberate today. The tools of Islamic extremism and terrorism were forged, found bases, and gained strength there, as did various counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strate- gies.

The Talibanization of Pakistani politics is a long-term phenomenon that seems unlikely to be reversed in the foreseeable future. The effect on states in the region, particularly Pakistan and Afghanistan, weakening already fragile state structures, has been baleful and long lasting.

If Soviet decline was a fact even before the war in Afghanistan, the defeat in Afghanistan certainly has-ened its collapse. The greatest victim of the terrorism spawned by the Afghan war was, of course, west Asia where radical ideologies and terrorist groups have spread. Afghanistan poisoned U. The war showed once again why India cannot be and is not politically neutral to what happens in Afghanistan. The war against the Soviets in Afghanistan further solidified the alliance between the United States, Pakistan, China, and some Islamic countries.

He chose his moment with care, just after India had to send troops into the holiest Sikh shrine to clear the Golden Temple in Amritsar of terrorists in Operation Blue Star in June Gandhi and Defense Minister R. Venkataraman neu- tralized the Pakistani effort in northern Jammu and Kashmir. Acting swiftly and decisively, they sent Indian troops to the Siachen glacier first, which India has held ever since—the highest battlefield in the world, more than 18, feet above mean sea level.

An Afghanistan under the Taliban was first a refuge, then a base, and finally a launch pad for Islamist extremists and terrorists from around the world, including Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who planned and launched the September 11, , attack from his base there. In many ways Afghanistan was the model or archetype for what we see of Islamic terrorism in Central Africa, west Asia, possibly central Asia, and on a smaller scale in southern Thailand and the Philippines. It was terrorists funded, armed, and trained by Pakistan and aided by the United States, who ultimately nurtured and gave sanctuary to those who bit the hands that fed them and have made Pakistan what it is today, a dysfunc- tional society with an outsize army, a feeble state backing terrorist armies and organizations as part of daily life.

Pakistanis in authority like to portray themselves as victims of terrorism. Even so, Pakistan is more fundamentally a victim of its own flawed stra- tegic vision and the actions of its own intelligence agencies than of the terrorists who were their chosen instruments. A strong Pashtun movement in either Pakistan or in Afghanistan would threaten its hold on the North-West Frontier Province now called Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas east of the Durand Line and west of the Indus river, whose population has more in common with fellow Pashtuns across the Durand Line than with the rest of Pakistan.

Neither of these Pakistani goals was achieved or now seems attainable. Instead, an unstable area is overshadowed by a mul- tipronged power sharing among tribes, extremist and terrorist groups, and the Pakistan Army. If anything, the situation is worse than the ambiguous but rela- tively stable frontier constructed by the Raj, where Indian law extended up to the Indus, Indian power extended to the Durand Line, and Indian influence enjoyed periods of strength in Afghanistan.

Zia believed the message of the Afghan mujahideen would spread to central Asia, revive Islam, and create a new Pakistan-led Is- lamic bloc of nations. What Zia never considered was what his legacy would do to Pakistan.

Taking the longer view, in history Afghanistan developed as a buffer state between competing empires—the Russian and British and, briefly, the Chinese—and then, during the Cold War between competing alliance systems, the Soviet and the American. Regional instability and escalating Cold War tensions tore the state apart from the s onward, when it moved from being a buffer state to a battleground, the arena of superpower contention.

The Soviet invasion and the fragmentation of society when communists attempted massive social change in Afghanistan broke state structures and tribal loyalties. Soviet counterinsurgency strategy, the way Pakistan channeled U. Today, the question is how a fragmented and divided Afghanistan will fit into the larger consolidation of the Eurasian landmass that China is attempting through projects like the Belt and Road Initiative.

Russia and China are today working together with Pakistan in Afghanistan and are persuading the Americans that the Taliban should be brought in from the cold into government. A tired America wants a face-saving way out of its very long Afghan commitment. Whether the Taliban are ready to be domesticated or to be junior partners in an Afghan government is another matter, and one does not know what price they are willing to pay to see the United States depart.

Clearly, peace in Afghanistan requires including in the government the widest and most representative coalition possible, includ- ing the Taliban. But the terms on which this might be done remain unclear.

And Afghanistan and its people continue to pay the price.