Why the USSR Sent Troops into Kabul in December 1979

As Vladimir Putin sends Russia’s armed forces into Ukraine in early 2022, I am reading contradictory and heated debates on social media and thinking of the difficulty of ascertaining why the USSR decided to invade Afghanistan in 1979.

I began to think of the Afghan comparison when I saw the photo of Putin meeting his security council on 21 February. Here, an isolated and ageing leader has his decisions rubberstamped by a group of fawning admirers. Later, his ahistorical rant on state television only confirmed the similarity for me: a group of elderly men, alone in the Kremlin, wield the knife of war.

Putin meets his Security Council, February 21, 2022. Photo: AP.

In the paper below, which I wrote for my Master’s degree, I discuss the role of an ageing and increasingly paranoid leadership, the lack of area expertise in the Kremlin, and a host of other factors that explain why the Soviet Union took an apparently illogical decision to declare war on Afghanistan. History doesn’t repeat itself, but the similarities are striking.

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The senior Soviet leaders for months and years before the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 had rejected any possibility of military intervention. General Secretary Brezhnev and the other members of the Politburo under fear of negative international opinion continually rejected Afghan requests even for the friendly presence of Soviet military personnel, let alone an outright invasion of the country, until a sudden change of heart resulted in Soviet forces’ arrival in Kabul on 27th December. Historians and commentators have estimated various dates, from mid-November to the end of December, when the decision to invade was taken. Given the abruptness of the policy change, the exact date is consequential in determining the explicit reasons behind it. With the hindsight of two decades’ historiographical work and the massive release of records after the fall of communism, we can now precisely define who or what caused the sudden volte face—and exactly when the decision was taken.

Invasion

The Soviet armed forces’ incursion into Kabul on December 27th 1979, which resulted in the immediate death of the head of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the effective takeover of the capital, was swift and efficient. Western newspapers on the morning of the 28th were unequivocal in their criticism. ‘The Empire strikes back’; ‘Reds on the march once more’, screamed the headlines. The Western perspective was clear: Moscow’s Leninist-Marxist government, challenged on both the domestic and international fronts, was striking out in a bid to reassert global socialist growth. The state-controlled Russian media, meanwhile, was ready to uphold their country’s defence of Afghanistan’s supposedly legitimate socialist regime, pointing the finger of blame at a capitalist plot to tear apart Afghanistan’s supposedly legitimate socialist regime. Whatever the reason, the true causes of the invasion remain even now cloaked in secrecy. As had happened so many other times in Russian history, a conspiracy of silence bound the country both publicly and privately.[1] Indeed, the resulting decade-long quagmire of guerilla assault and brutal counterattack in which the USSR became embroiled was an especially secretive war characterized by an exceptional level of official surreptitiousness on Moscow’s part. As if the Kremlin’s habitual veil of secrecy did not make it hard enough to discern anything about any top-level decision in the USSR anyway, incidents such as Soviet officials threatening foreign journalists in Afghanistan with ‘elimination’[2] only complicated matters.  As a result firstly of this secrecy and secondly of the relative newness of what official documents are available even now, there is a lack of detailed discussion in both Western and Russian literature of the first-hand archival material relating to the discussions of the Soviet leaders in the months, weeks and days before the attack of 27th December. The journalist Artyom Borovik wrote in 1990, ‘Even if all the secret documents connected with the Soviet Union’s decision to invade Afghanistan were made available tomorrow, I doubt that they would shed much light on the truth’.[3] Using the Cold War-era Politburo records now released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, contemporary accounts of Soviet higher-ups, and the broad range of secondary work and opinion on the subject at hand, what can we say two decades on about Moscow’s decision to invade what was purportedly a friendly country?

Afghanistan and the USSR

The about-face of the Soviet leadership from official bonhomie to armed enmity towards Afhganistan through 1979 is intimately linked to the history of the two nations' mutual relations and the history of the south-central Asian state itself. Events in this country populated by a people of conflicting ethnic and tribal cultures,[4] split not just on the divide between Pathan and Turkic minorities, who looked fraternally to Pakistan and the Central Asian Soviet States respectivey, but also between Sunni and Shia muslims,[5] were dominated by outside influence. Afghanistan had since the 19th century, when it was the battleground of the British and Russian empires, been the Asian buffer zone between Russian and Western imperial ambition. A similar state of affairs continued into the next century. Afghanistan, bordering Soviet Central Asia on one side, the by 1979 Islamic Iran on a second and US-sponsored Pakistan on a third, was the USSR's buffer against competing external ideologies, and had hence received since the 1920s vast amounts of development capital and military aid. The country's first and second five-year development plans (beginning 1957 and 1962) were, for example, part-financed by a Soviet loan, leaving the legitimate Afghan government particularly open to and reliant on foreign pressure.[6] By the late 1950s, the Afghan army was almost exclusively equipped with Soviet-made weaponry.[7] Border clashes with Pakistan and the subsequent severing of diplomatic ties in 1961 further isolated the country from the West and by 1963, Afghanistan was so economically reliant on the USSR that it could not free itself unless there were 'an alternative and strong will to change the course the Soviet Union had exploited to its advantage'.[8] While the country remained until the 1970s a battleground for the competing dominant powers of the century, the USA's involvement was limited to economic and developmental aid which diminished rapidly in the 1970s. From 1966-76, the USSR's investments leapt to $750m while the USA's fell to $150m.[9] Russian backing ballooned in the late 1970s as the Afghanistan question began to press in the minds of the Politburo: from 1976 to the invasion, Soviet aid totalled one billion dollars. It became obvious to observers in Kabul that should the Aghans not repay their debts in cash or kind, they would eventually have to do so politically.[10] The communist government of Afghanistan was thus to a huge degree economically and politically dependent on Moscow. Moscow, meanwhile, would be unwilling either to give up its huge investment in a geopolitically pivotal nation or to tolerate anything but compliance on the part of its leaders.

By mid-December 1979, the USA had detected the escalating numbers of Russian troops on the Soviet-Aghan border and the CIA was confident enough to declare that without doubt 'the Soviet Union intended to undertake a major military invasion of Afghanistan within seventy-two hours'.[11] Although it misinterpreted the exact time scale of the invasion, the claim remains salient. By now it was clear even to foreign powers that military action, if not a certainty, was most definitely on the cards. Given the history of Soviet interference in its satellite states of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, perhaps this is of no surprise. For all that, throughout 1979, in the face of increasingly frequent requests for military aid—not even intervention—the USSR's heavyweights rejected even the friendly presence of Soviet troops in Kabul on the grounds that the West together with Afghanistan's increasingly fractious Islamic elements would consider it an act of heavy-handed and unwarranted aggression.

For instance, in response to the Afghan military's pro-Islamic revolt in Herat in March 1979, Politburo member Andrei Kirilenko commented: 'Whom will our troops be fighting if we send them there? Against the insurgents? […] We will be required to wage war in significant part against the people'.[12] The issue of aggression was highlighted by Chernenko on 18th March: 'If we introduce troops and beat down the Afghan people then we will be accused of aggression'.[13] Andropov concurred, saying, 'We cannot take such a risk', and the minutes of Central Committee meetings of the 17th-19th March show Gromyko, Kirilenko, Ustinov and the then General Secretary Brezhnev in agreement. The position of the USSR's leading politicans remained unchanged for months as the Politburo for identical reasons rejected requests for the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, let alone the notion of an invasion of the country, on 24th May, 19th, 20th, 21st July and the 25th August.[14] Even though Defence Minister Ustinov had a plan of invasion drawn up this early, Moscow apparently had little thirst for any military action, let alone a full-scale war.

Only by the beginning of December did any member of the Politburo seriously consider sending troops to assist the Afghans against the rising tide of insurgency in rural areas of the country, let alone invading Kabul and deposing the government. Even then, as KGB chief Andropov wrote in a personal memorandum to Brezhnev on 1st December, the question was one of 'possibility' and 'assistance' in relation to 'securing our positions in this country': '[exiled Afghan communist] Babrak and [Afghan government minister] Sarwari […] have raised the question of possible assistance, in case of need, including military'.[15] What was it that caused the Soviet leaders to complete a full u-turn in a matter of weeks? Moscow had tried to counsel a gradualist line from the moment the Afghan communist party, the PDPA, came to power in April 1978.[16] How did counselling caution turn to invasion in fourteen months? What, and precisely at which moment, prompted the change of heart in relation to this economically worthless Asian state? Was the Kremlin afraid of Hafizullah Amin, the PDPA's de facto leader since the assassination of former president Taraki in September 1979, leading Afghanistan into the waiting arms of the West or acting in such a heavy-handed manner that the people would come out in absolute revolt against their Soviet puppet masters? Or in the longer term, was this an act of aggression by a domestically failing USSR desperate to reassert itself on the world stage? A last throw of the dice for the ailing Brezhnev's self-titled foreign policy doctrine? The result of a US-designed trap intended to lure the Soviet Union into its own interminable Central Asian Vietnam? Or perhaps a defence against the rampant Islamist movement now from Iran threatening to sweep a Central Asian domino effect through the Afghan buffer zone and into the USSR's traditionally muslim southern territories? The question is only complicated by the Politburo's decision in September 1979 to outwardly give signs of support for Amin while attempting to undermine him personally.[17] Ascertaining whom or what to believe in this poorly documented decision process is extremely difficult. Only now can the historian begin that task knowing full well the vehemence of the Politburo's opposition to military intervention and the suddenness of its about turn.

Amin and the PDPA

In the immediate aftermath of 1978's April Revolution, the Kremlin's attitude towards the new PDPA government was highly optimistic. Four days after the Revolution, the Politburo approved a delivery of free military equipment to the new regime,[18] believing in these early weeks that the PDPA had a ''firm intention' gradually to create the preconditions 'for Afghanistan's transition to the socialist path''.[19] The key word here is 'gradually': Moscow realised the dangers inherent in foisting on Afghanistan's traditionally Islamic population a rapid upheaval with the goal of socialising the country. If the goal was a gradual transition, the Politburo would be surprised with the insensitive and despotic nature of both Taraki and Amin's actions over the following months, but here the support given is unmistakably evident in the above quote from the Politburo's discussions.

However, the Central Committee was not naively supportive of a group of socialists who had suddenly found themselves at the apex of power in Afghanistan. The Politburo's recorded worries relating to a split in the PDPA between Babrak Karmal's primarily urbanite Parcham, and Taraki and Amin's ethnically Pashtun, non-elite Khalq factions dated back to the middle of the 1970s (lower level worries may well have dated back futher; the documentary evidence available makes no record of this). The Kremlin was 'deeply alarmed' by the rift in January 1974,[20] calling on the PDPA to restore order within its own ranks, and these concerns were reiterated in June of that year, this time with the suggestion that the PDPA focus on supporting the pro-Moscow but non-socialist government of Mohammed Daoud.[21] In fact, Daoud's official visit to the USSR in June 1974 resulted in 'highly valuable official friendship', 'an atmosphere of mutual understanding' and a promise of 'non-interference'.[22] Thus well before Taraki and Amin came to power, the Soviet Union's leadership was concerned by the PDPA's ability to govern either its own functionaries or the country as a whole, preferring the stability of Daoud's even hand to this group of amateurish Marxist-Leninists.

Whether the rift was or was not consequential in practical terms, the Khalq leadership repeatedly denied its importance and even its very existence. Taraki, for instance, rejected the split's existence in June 1978, claiming that contrarily, the PDPA was in fact growing in strength.[23] This, then, is evidence just two months after the April Revolution—and the aforementioned gift of military equipment—that Afghanistan's communist party was beginning to deny the influence of its Soviet paymasters. This did not go unnoticed. In a missive to GDR leader Erich Honecker in October 1978, the Central Committee confessed that it was, 'hopeful of rehabilitation of Parcham functionaries'.[24] A report jointly authored by Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov and (Boris Nikolaevich) Ponomarev in June of the following year disparaged the PDPA's wayward Khalqi leaders: 'The recommendations of our advisers regarding these questions have not been put into practice'.[25] Simultaneously, Taraki and Amin stood accused of concealing from the Kremlin the true state of affairs.[26] If, as already outlined, Afghanistan owed the Soviet Union a political and economic debt, its leadership's continued and increasing lack of deference was a risky gamble.

Even before Amin had Taraki assassinated in September 1979, things were taking a turn for the worse in Afghanistan. The Islamist revolt at Herat in March resulted in bombers piloted by Soviet-trained airmen killing 20 000 Afghans and a surge in popular opposition to the secular government.[27] The Politburo was duly alarmed at the events, yet still rejected active military assistance. As Kosygin said, 'I don't think that we should pressure the Afghan government to request a deployment of forces from us. Let them create their own special units'. The preferred option was to step up economic aid, diplomatic pressure and the delivery of arms,[28] thus preserving Afghan's supposed independence and the non-aggressive stance of the USSR, both to avoid international pressure and an escalation in the scale of domestic anti-communist sentiment. Indeed, as even the Pentagon suspected,[29] the Kremlin was aware of and in opposition to letting the situation unnecessarily get out of hand. The possibility of military action was thus discussed but resolutely and indubitably repudiated.

Meanwhile, the Soviet leaders' experiences with their Afghan comrades—who had had little hands-on experience of the minutiae of effective governance before April 1978—continued to be unfavourable. They found their counterparts 'dense, self-absorbed and unreliable',[30] while the 28th June report complained of the weakness of the Afghan communist party and the selfishness of its leaders.[31] Andropov had a letter drafted that instructed Taraki to cease the internecine squabbling, involve a wider stratum of society in government, soften his stance towards Islam and to recruit mullahs (a public relations exercise to bring the religious population on board). For his part, Taraki still preferred the gun to the debating table. As a result, Andropov's suggestions went largely unheeded,[32] the effect of which was to alienate and gall the Politburo even more. They expected submissiveness and execution of their 'suggestions'—by which they of course meant 'orders'—and from the PDPA got quite the opposite.

After Taraki's overthrow and assassination, it became clear that the Kremlin trusted Amin even less than his predecessor with their billion-dollar investment. The economic assistance kept on coming, but the Kremlin saw that Amin's brutalist form of communist revolution in Afghanistan was bound to fail. As soon as Amin stepped into the breach and made it obvious that he would not submit in the manner of the Polish leader Wladislaw Gomulka in 1956, his tenure as leader was doomed (even if it was not in September 1979 apparent that he would be murdered by Soviet forces in a bloody coup three months later). In the wake of Herat, Andropov stated the following: 'It's completely clear to us that Afghanistan is not ready at this time to resolve all of the issues it faces through socialism'.[33] The 28th June report notes the 'inadequate size of the working class'.[34] The situation was so acute that one Soviet official in 1979 declared that 'if there is one country in the developing wold where we would not like to try scientific socialism at this point in time, it is Afghanistan'.[35] The Politburo were uniformly, openly and without ambiguity of the opinion that Afghanistan was not ready for its 1917 moment. A Leninist revolution could not and would not work in this traditionally volatile and ethno-culturally disparate territory. As a result, when Amin came to power in September brandishing a revolutionary model based on the power of the military to effect socialism,[36] his policies looked even more dangerous to Afghan stability than Taraki's inflexible, uncomprising and insular cult of personality.

Indeed, the USSR's leaders were transparently uninterested in the advancement of the ideological cause in Afghanistan. Their primary goal was stability, which explains why they were content to deal with Mohammed Daoud. They made it known in 1974 that the Soviet Union would 'assist their southern neighbour in implementing the plans of the republican government directed at […] development of the national economy'.[37] As already explained, the aid continued unabated, because, as the Politburo noted to Erich Honecker, 'the improvement of people's lives should be the primary focus of the new government'.[38] The implementation of ideologically proper socialism was neither mentioned nor promulgated. Moscow was concerned only with the preservation of order and its huge investment in this geopolitically significant nation: 'Activity directed at weakening the ruling party of [Note not 'socialism in']  Afghanistan [brings] only harm'.[39] Gromyko's words elucidate the issue: 'Under no circumstances may we lose Afghanistan'.[40] So long as the government was strong and pro-Moscow, its political ambition was of no import.

In spite of the Kremlin's objections to the PDPA's actions while in government, they had no intention of deposing its leaders. In fact, they were even in mid-1979 inclined towards a rapprochement, looking for 'a form which […] preserves Taraki's authority and […] facilitates an improvement in operational improvement'.[41] Even the day before Amin's coup the Soviets were opposed to directly deposing him by force: 'We cannot take it upon ourselves to arrest Amin with our own battalion force, since this would be a direct interference'.[42] The preferred option was always diplomacy and discourse, not brute force. However, the assassination of Taraki brought the situation to, as Gromyko recalled, 'a critical point',[43] and heightened paranoia amongst the Soviet élites that Amin might go the way of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and turn to the USA.[44] If Daoud had been easy to deal with even when he sought financial backing from non-socialist Arab nations and Taraki was at least manageable, Amin was a headache too far. Where Taraki had envisioned a non-aligned Afghanistan with active Soviet support along the lines of Cuba, Amin intended to court any and every nation with or without Moscow's say so.[45] The Politburo archives make the anxiety about Amin's character apparent. In June 1979 the leadership was concerned by the concentration of power in the joint hands of Amin and Taraki, who 'none too rarely make mistakes and commit violations of legality'.[46] It saw the assassination of Taraki as an opportunistic move to concentrate all the power in Amin's hands[47]—if it was hardly favourable to Amin before the assassination, it was bound to see that event as another nail in his political coffin.

Even before the assassination, moves were afoot to sideline Amin in favour of a compromise government headed jointly by Taraki and Babrak Karmal, who met briefly at a Kremlin-backed meeting in Moscow in September—where it is likely that the Soviets pushed for Amin's exile rather than murder or imprisonment, although the phrasing of the officially documented advice to 'put Amin in his place' leaves the exact mearning open to intepretation now and by Tarak in 1979.[48] In fact, in spite of its agreement to Karmal's exile, the Parcham leader had been wooed since at least 1974, when the USSR, for instance, funded his ticket to Moscow in the interests of 'mutual socialist friendship'.[49] Thus Amin's rise to the apex of Afghan power was highly undesirable prior to its happening, and his subsequent actions caused genuine worry amongst KGB and Party heavyweights: Amin conducted an extremist internal security policy; terrorisation of clergy, intelligentsia and party workers increased; worse, Amin had some contact with Pakistani and American representatives. This was, of course, in direct opposition to Andropov's letter instructing the Afghan communists to work more sympathetically with their religious population. Amin's outright insubordination threatened to shatter the internal security of the DRA and, more dangerously, to invite openly and proactively anti-Soviet powers into what the Kremlin considered as close to its own territory as a foreign country could be.

Consequently, it was apparent by mid to late September 1979 that words had had little effect. Advice, diplomatic pressure and the gift of economic and military aid were ignored by the PDPA. Now at the head of Afghanistan was a man repugnant to the Soviet authorities before the petulant act of personal aggrandisement that was his removal from power of Taraki. As a result, the military solution to remove Amin came to the fore. Almost immediately, the Politburo opted to curtail shipments of weapons,[50] an act that suggests if not direct intervention then that the Afghans could not be trusted with military equipment to behave responsibly internally or with regard to the USSR. Nonetheless, the next day, 16th September, Honecker was told that the Soviet leaders were merely 'following events carefully'.[51] In short, they were concerned, alarmed even, but not so spooked as to demand the sudden removal of Amin by any available means. However, the connotation is that by now diplomatic pressure was not enough: other methods for exerting control were now open to discussion.

Amin continued to do little to help himself and still courted foreign diplomats and agents. Whether he truly intended to break away from the USSR remains unknown—and possibly unknowable—but the effect on the KGB and its masters is obvious. Knowing full well that he had been meeting with the US representatives, but unable to discover the niceties of these audiences, the local KGB agents convinced their superiors in Moscow that drastic action had to be taken:[52] Amin should be killed or in any other way removed. Actions speak louder than words, and Amin's meetings were sufficient cause to conspicuously startle the Politburo. For example, on 29th October, it was noted that Amin was conducting a 'balanced policy' that was likely to be pleasing to Washington.[53] More significantly, the KGB cables were enough to convince Andropov, then KGB chief, of the need for action. Heeding Gromyko's statement made in the wake of Herat, the last crisis point,  that the USSR could not lose Afghanistan at any costs, Andropov imagined that Amin was part of a CIA-sponsored plot to found a 'New Ottoman Empire' that would stretch into Soviet Central Asia.[54] This point of view reached such a state of obsessive urgency that by 1st December, Andropov wrote the following missive to Brezhnev, revealing the manner in which false fears had reached the peak of Soviet power:

Alarming information started to arrive about Amin's secret activities, forewarning of a possible political shift to the West. [There have been] contacts with an American agent about issues which are kept secret from us [and] promises to tribal leaders to shift away from the USSR. The diplomatic circles in Kabul are widely talking of Amin's differences with Moscow and his possible anti-Soviet steps.[55]

Steve Coll attributes this paranoia, removed from any factual basis, to 'blowback'.[56] Early on, the KGB had been eager to put about rumours relating to CIA involvement in Afghanistan in order to justify their own exorbitant running costs,[57] yet now Amin actually did meet with US agents, regardless of the actual decisions arising from those meetings, the Soviets started to believe their own rumours. 

Andropov's growing influence in the Politburo combined with his position as head of the KGB resulted in the security agency's unreliable information being attributed ever-growing prominence. Andropov had been critical of early intervention (as aforementioned), in spite of the political capital on offer to the strong-willed leader while the apparatchiki manoeuvred to replace the ailing Brezhnev. This logically tallies with his 'maximum results, minimum effort' strategy, which relied on indirect controls and pressures rather than less refined methods, which he saw as counter-productive,[58] this perhaps in spite of his experiences as ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 uprising. Indeed, Andropov had backed Karmal from the start and his views towards Amin were only hardened by the increasingly frantic reports being fed to him by his KGB ciphers in Kabul.

It is apparent that things were by the beginning of December coming to a head. Andropov in the above memorandum recommended became the first of the Politburo to come out in favour of real and decisive military action to topple Amin, which woud aid in 'securing our positions in this country'.[59] Gone is the fear of being perceived as the aggressor, gone is the fear of foreign judgements, to be replaced by an overriding desire to see Afghanistan securely pro-Moscow, whomsoever the leader of the country might be—and whatsoever his ideological inclinations. As a direct result of these discussions, Soviet forces were by early December being made ready: Andropov, now joined by Ogarkov and Ustinov, agreed to send a motorized rifle division, overtly for the defence Amin's residence.[60] There was again no discussion of direct military action, but as we know, the question had been raised the day before Amin's coup and a plan for a strike had existed since March 1979. No solution was to be excluded, and with the desire to remove Amin by whatever means necessary now strong and with the army on standby, the jigsaw was beginning to fall into place.

In spite of the 6th December resolution, worries about the effects of military intervention still lingered. Chief of General Staff Ogarkov was worried that through interference, 'We will re-establish the entire eastern Islamic system against us, and we will lose politically in the entire world'.[61] Indeed, the military was always against the affair, remaining defiant even after the war. As General Valentin Varennikov, Ogarkov's deputy, put it, 'we [the armed forces] allowed ourselves to be dragged into this drawn-out war'.[62] Nevertheless, according to the available records of the Politburo seniors' discussions, Ogarkov was uniqute in still adhering to these reservations about the wider foreign policy impact of any direct interference; Andropov and Andropov's input must have been the driving force amongst the members of the Politburo. Indeed, his pressure to unleash the Soviet forces was at the same meeting supported by Suslov, Chernenko, Ustinov, Kirilenko and Brezhnev himself. In this light, in spite of the split and in spite of the fact that no mention of war or invasion per se is made, it appears that this 10th December meeting was the moment when the decision to send the Red Army into Kabul was rubber-stamped. Kremlin insider Anataly Chernyaev wrotes in his diary entry of 30th December that it was three weeks prior that the decision was taken—making the 10th December date highly likely.[63] Indeed, later that day Moscow hurriedly recalled its top Afghan military figures to be briefed by Ustinov, who rejected any criticism of the new line.[64] Without any hard proof, this is the date the archival evidence suggests as the most likely for the decision and refutes other suggestions.[65]

That notwithstanding, the very final decision was not taken until the 24th December, just three days before the 'official' start of the invasion: Soviet forces would now enter Kabul to 'interdict possible anti-Afghan actions from neighbouring countries'.[66] Yet even here some element of doubt about the invasion persists, since there is no explicit mention of the army, or any other armed Soviet vassal, being instructed to overthrow Amin or seize control of Kabul. Of course, the wording of the directive quoted leaves much open to interpretation. If the KGB was convinced, and had convinced its masters, that Amin was by now in thrall to the USA and in league with the pro-American Pakistani government, one cannot be certain that he was not included within the remit of an 'anti-Afghan action from a neighbouring country'. As with so much of the USSR's bureaucratic footprint, the precise meaning of the text is woolly.

Regardless of when the decision was finally taken, or how exactly it was made, it was clear that military action as a last resort was in the pipeline for months: in September a unit of Soviet Central Asians was mobilised along with two motor-rifle divisions; in November a further two motor-rifle divisions were mobilised.[67] Russian advisers officially present in the Afghan military conducted an underhand campaign to disarm their supposed comrades by persuading them to turn in live ammunition in order to conduct a training exercise, by removing batteries from vehicles for 'winterisation' and by persuading Kabul air base personnel to take holiday, leaving control in the hands of newly arrived Russian specialists.[68] Even when on 10th December Ustinov ordered an airborne division to be readied and reinforced by paratroopers, the Soviet troops were convinced that this was to be nothing more than an elaborate training exercise.[69] The final decision to invade had either not been taken or the USSR wanted the element of total surprise on its side. Either way, even the military top brass was not altogether sure that the invasion would take place. Indeed, judging by an interview on the morning before the coup, Amin may still have believed that the Soviet military presence was there to support, rather than remove him.[70] Amin may have been blind to the obvious, it may have been that the operation was so secretive that it appeared that there was no invasion force at all, or it may have been that nobody outside the Politburo knew that any action beyond defence of Amin was to go ahead. The available documents cast no light on the question.

Amin, though, must have had some doubts. Three days before the coup, General Paputin, the First Deputy Minister of the Interior, had tried to persuade or threaten him into signing a document officially requesting Moscow to intervene militarily.[71] In spite of its constant rejection of the delivery of Soviet personnel to bolster the Afghan military, the Kremlin was now forcing the ebullient Amin's hand with the offer of a last-chance saloon. Surely this must have been a win-win situation for the Soviets: were Amin to have agreed, they effectively would have invaded and exerted absolute control over their puppet regime; as he did not, this was the final proof that he would not submit to Moscow's authority. The same day Ustinov and Ogarkov ratified the directive that would send troops into Kabul. Unfortunately, a meeting that took place at the same time between Brezhnev, Suslov, Ustinov, Gromyko and Andropov was unminuted.[72] Presumably it was here that the decision to oust Amin was confirmed.

Military intervention against the communist government of the DRA was not thought necessary, in spite of the fears about the rift in the PDPA dating back half a decade, until Amin demonstrated his inability to govern flexibly and without unconstructive bloodshed, but more importantly without the guiding hand of a Moscow desperate to keep foreign elements away from its Central Asian fiefdoms. He was out of control, and the USSR's leaders could not accept power over such a key geopolitical territory placed in the hands of one capricious man. However, the decision process here shows the essentially ad hoc nature of Soviet governance. It was never clear whether the plan was to take Amin dead or alive, nor was the military in favour of the invasion or prepared for it when it was ordered. Indeed, they had no anti-guerilla training:[73] a long-term war was not foreseen. The subsequent actions of the invasion force more than evince the disordered nature of the Politburo's dictates. The initial mission to support the PDPA quickly changed to overthrowing Amin, then to essentially fighting the Afghan civil war on behalf of a PDPA now headed by a restored Babrak Karmal. Amin's actions, from the moment of the April Revolution to Taraki's assassination to his subsequent behaviour, constantly surprised the Politburo, who responded always on the back-foot and without a clear and direct plan of action.

Beyond Afghanistan

It would be wise, though, to look for the logic in the Politburo's pre-invasion reasoning beyond Afghanistan's borders and to the global picture of the 1970s and into 1979. What in the longer term drew the USSR into Afghanistan, this medieval, parochial backwater, almost wholly dependent on foreign subsidy to support any government, let alone a despised communist government? The rural population vastly outweighed the urban population, and development projects such as the already completed by the US, such as the airport at Kandahar, seemed to be rapidly rendered obsolete. The inexperienced and 'second-rate' ambassador Puzanov was just the sort of figure one would expect to find in a country Moscow cared little about.[74] Deposing Amin cannot have been the long-term reason for war in a basket-case country like Afghanistan, indeed, after the initial anti-Amin push, the Politburo's long-term complaints returned to the fore: on January 2nd 1980, Ustinov complained that he saw enemies 'everywhere in Afghanistan and internationally'.[75] It is the international question, not Amin's behaviour, that lies at the heart of the issue.

The notion that the Soviet invasion was a manifestation of the ailing USSR's aggressive desire to expand internationally is the most easily suggested yet the most easily discounted view. It is true that under Brezhnev, expansionism was accorded an inflated status, but interference was limited to winnable wars in, for example, Angola and Ethiopia. The Red Army was never deployed, and had not been deployed, in any non-Warsaw Pact country since the end of the Second World War.[76] However, if the issue was gung-ho imperialism, why had the Soviet Union not entered earlier, when its economy and military was stronger (indeed, Anatoly Chernyaev wrote critically of the invasion, complaining that the USSR's economy was in a 'state of emergency'[77]) or when the DRA was transparently weak after Herat, and why was the plan of attack barely clear to a poorly-prepared Soviet army even on the day of invasion itself? I draw the reader's attention once more to the constant fear of being perceived as the aggressor after Herat,[78] and again in August, when fears about 'the strengthening of American assistance to the rebels' arose.[79] In reality, Soviet policy had for some time been defensive in nature and the Kremlin was unlikely to take a serious risk that might lead to war. In this case, it was well aware of the USA's interest in Afghanistan and the resultant risk. Moreover, there was by 1984 little evidence that the Soviets were planning or had ever planned to invade neighbouring Iran or Pakistan[80]—and its troop commitments in Afghanistan itself were not so enormous that there was ever obvious an intention to overwhelm the country and simply occupy it in the imperialist fashion. As Chernyaev put it on 30th December, due to the invasion all the international political capital accumulated in recent months and years has 'gone to shit'.[81] The aggression theory may have been popular amongst the West's media outlets, but in reality it is easily discounted.

The suggestion that the Brezhnev Doctrine was now being employed for the final time by its moribund author in the dying moments of his General Secretaryship seems equally dubious. The Doctrine, which asserted the right of a socialist state to intervene by force in another socialist force when socialism there was threatened, worked to retrospectively justify action in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.[82] Superficially, then, the USSR entered Afghanistan to prop up the PDPA, but as established by examination of the Politburo's discussions, there was little intrinsic interest in socialism in the country. It was simply unready to undergo a nationwide revolution. The Politburo was far more concerned with finding a head of state it could work with, and it had had no objections to cooperating with Daoud even when he courted his Arab neighbours. So long as the leader remained tame, his political values were irrelevant. Besides, Marxist-Leninist rhetoric about sustaining socialism only appears in the official documents after 27th December 1979.[83] An examination of the available material from 1st-26th December 1979 shows that not even in the official directives, let alone in Andropov's personal memorandum,[84] is there a single mention of supporting socialism. A Brezhnev Doctrine-style intervention is only evident as a public reason for invasion: the Politburo informed its fellow socialist states on the day of the invasion that it had sent in troops to combat 'counterrevolutionary elements' funded by foreign powers with the goal of nullifying the 'victory of the Revolution'.[85] The invasion was justified behind closed doors in terms of stability of the USSR itself, not in ideological, socialistic terms.

By December of 1979, Andropov's KGB ciphers had succeeded in persuading him that the USA's interference in Afghanistan was significant and highly dangerous. Andropov, as discussed, persuaded his peers of the fact. Much of the available historical literature alleges that White House advisers were keen to design a trap to lure the USSR into an interminable and unwinnable guerilla war,[86] sapping its resources while an economic war could be wages against the Soviets on other fronts. Uninformed and speculative discourse has often coloured the debate thanks to the until relatively recently secretive official attitude towards the war. For eample, allegations that CIA interference in Afghanistan began before 1979 with the establishment of listening posts in Pakistan are entirely false.[87] In fact, the posts, targeting the USSR itself, were simply relocated after they were forcibly removed from Iran.[88] The CIA without a doubt shaped the anti-Soviet campaign in the 1980s,[89] but its involvement was in fact limited prior to the outbreak of war. The only concrete involvement began in July 1979, when President Carter authorised $500 000 of funding for the rebels,[90] and well after the initial invasion scheme was drawn up in March. By the day of the invasion, US involvement was still extremely limited and had had little time to make any significant impact.

That notwithstanding, the Politburo was aware that the US was sticking its nose into Afghan affairs soon after the April Revolution. Deputy Secretary of State David Newsom, for example, voiced concerns to Taraki that the DRA's foreign policy was 'one-sided'.[91] Fear on the Soviet side of US involvement in their geopolitical backyard went back much further into the years of development competition between the two superpowers. Rumours of Amin's involvement with the CIA were circulating in the PDPA in the 1960s,[92] although these and later accusations remain completely without documented grounds. The fears returned two years prior to the invasion, when Brezhnev accused Daoud of inviting UN and NATO 'imperialist spies' into Afghanistan,[93] and were repeated to the Hungarian leadership in late 1978: 'We must not allow the West to trap us'.[94] The problem, though, was compounded by the seriousness of Herat. Gromyko now suspected the hand of virtually every foreign power: China; Pakistan; Iran; and the USA.[95]

In actuality, American influence was at this time imagined. The CIA first proposed anti-communist support in Afghanistan in March 1979,[96] but no actual action, as aforementioned, was taken until July. This minimal US interference would by the time of the invasion have had little real impact—the support was a gesture, rather than a proactive decision to incite open revolt. Indeed, the White House saw this as an opportunity to deflect some of belligerent Ayatollah Khomeini's fire away from itself and onto the Soviet Union, believing that in any case the USSR would limit direct involvement.[97] US policy makers were just as afraid of outright conflict as were the Russians in a country that counted to them for little more than political point scoring. Their involvement was limited to taking a rare opportunity to get one over on the Soviets in the Third World.[98] Indeed, as the National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recounted, 'We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would [with the 3rd July resolution]'.[99] It was not until 26th December that Brzezinski began to realise that the USSR had overreached itself and might be drawn into its own Vietnam—yet even then, he pointed out that the US should not rely on the transpiration of a long guerilla war.[100] Suggestions of the Vietnam idea before then were rare, limited to fairly minor figures in the administration and carried little weight.[101] The 'trap theory' is utterly lacking in grounded evidence. The USA had no documented intention of setting a military trap: it had planned a minor embarrassment and a Soviet Vietnam was only on the cards when the invasion unexpectedly occurred. Indeed, where the USA was not offering sginificant support to the rebels before the intervention, by the end of 1984 it had given them $400m of assistance,[102] thus Afghanistan became a sort of 'trap in retrospect'. The significance of the events as they were, though, was that the Politburo was beginning to get the jitters, to picture false causes of problems, even if the problems that did exist were of a high level of threat to the goal of Afghan stability. Paranoia about US influence was growing as Amin acted increasingly undesirably.

Fear of a supposed US desire to replace Iran, now lost to Khomeini's muslim revolution, with Afghanistan as its Asian outpost was matched by a fear of the Islamist movement now sweeping across Asia. As Alexander Haig, the former US Secretary of State, put it, 'Any successful Islamic movement at your southern borders will inevitably influence the Soviet Muslim republics'.[103] With hindsight, the fear is justified. Afghan rebels fired missiles into Soviet Tajikistan in March 1978[104] and without the iron grip of Soviet power, fundamentalism-driven civil war engulfed that country in the 1990s. In Afghanistan itself, the Islamic fundamentalist IA party had been the dominant competition for the PDPA in the 1970s, and now in the wake of the Iranian Revolution the Russians became increasingly worried by ties, established by Daoud, between Afghanistan and its Islamic neighbours.[105] After the Islamist Herat uprising, Ustinov complained that the PDPA's leaders 'not did not sufficiently appreciate the role of Islamic fundamentalists. It is under the banner of Islam that the soldiers are turning against the government.'[106] The issue was again raised in October 1978, when it was feared that 'a strengthening of the Islamic republic [of Iran] will lead to a weakening of the position of the regime in Afghanistan', and crucially, 'exert a certain influence on the muslim republics of the USSR'.[107] This, then, was a real problem as opposed to the imagined problem of the USA's hand. Nevertheless, Russia's insular and ageing leadership failed to see even then the significance of the Iranian Revolution and employed few experts on Islam.[108] It is striking that the old enemy, the USA, was without good cause suspected by the troglodyte Politburo of far more interference than this new, challenging and very real opponent.

It is hardly surprising that for years the Kremlin had been essentially unworried by the issue of Islam. Earlier in the century, the Bolsheviks swept through Central Asia and transformed pastoral Islamic socities into godless police states. As Steve Coll writes, 'so it would be in Afghanistan'.[109] In spite of the tide of fundamentalism rushing across the Middle East and Asia in the late 1970s, the Soviet Islamic republics remained basically unaffected. There was some growth in Islamic feeling, but this was primarily progressive, rather than reactionary, and the mass of the populace remained apathetic to religious rite in all but its symbolic enactment.[110] Until 1979 nobody in the Soviet Union's government had any idea how serious the Islam issue was to become. Throughout that year it became, as shown in the Politburo notes cited, a recurring theme in discussion of the situation in Afghanistan.

The Islam issue was thrown into sharp focus in November 1979. As US involvement was suspected more and more by Andropov and the KGB, as Amin became more unruly, now Islamic fundamentalist was to explode into action in neighbouring Pakistan as muslim rioters sacked the US embassies in Islamabad and Tehran.[111] This could hardly have been surprising to a well-informed government, since by the end of the 1970s Islamic parties, reinforced by transnational religious networks, had begun to assert themselves across the muslim world.[112] If the USA had lost Iran and was under threat in pro-American Pakistan, the same could happen to the USSR in Afghanistan. The longed-for national stability was under serious threat on all sides. After all, the threat Afghanistan's primarily Islamic insurgency posed was not merely the fall of a Soviet-backed state—the country was of negligible economic value and was, to all intents and purposes, totally reliant on injections of foreign capital, and even the stubborn Politburo recognised quickly that the masses would not easily or quickly learn to partake in the Leninist-Marxist vision—but a sort of Central Asian 'domino effect'. Should the insurgency have spread into Central Asia, it might even have inspired revolt in the more ostensibly valuable European socialist states. In spite of the fact that a real resurgence in Islamic feeling did not occur in the former USSR until the 1990s and was even then moderate rather than extremist,[113] the Politburo felt threatened by this unknown foe.

Conclusion: Panic in the Politburo

It was not a single issue but the concatenation of geopolitical and domestic Afghan problems in late 1979, which had fomented for years but now burst forth in unexpected and volatile directions, that shook the Politburo into a state of frenzied urgency.  Amin may have been extremely difficult to deal with, but he was at least a known quantity. Only now, in November, no matter how dangerous they were in reality, the issues of US interference and Islamic fundamentalism in a flash were thrown into the mix and looked to the Politburo extremely menacing. Even though the initial stages of the military operation in Kabul on 27th December were carried out slickly, the military objectives kept changing and the army was clearly unprepared to conduct a long-term war in rural Afghanistan. Indeed, so rushed was the decision that there was no discussion of at least one major question: if Amin's attempts at propping up his government with the gun had failed, why did the Politburo expect Soviet brute force to have any other effect? Ultimately, the reason for the change of heart from non-interference to invasion was paranoia stoked up in and by the members of the Politburo themselves.

The Politburo allowed themselves to be unduly panicked by the KGB. Gromyko even in late September admitted to the Afghan foreign minister that the Soviets in fact had no idea about the USA's intentions in the DRA.[114] Although the majority of the KGB files are still frustratingly kept under lock and key by the Russian government, there is ample evidence of their role in the affair at hand. The discussions were dominated by Andropov, whose star was rising even as Brezhnev's waned. It was Andropov's KGB who, in a state of equal panic, started to believe their own conspiracy theories. The agency, which maintained many of the contacts and financial commitments, by passing diplomats, was almost totally unaccountable in the region.[115] Its reports were the sole basis of decision-making, and its ciphers were the sole authors of its reports, a fact recognised but glossed over by the Soviet higher-ups:[116] for instance, it was the KGB that informed the leadership of the USA's growing sense of panic in the region.[117] Indeed, it was Andropov and not Brezhnev (who was by now virtually sidelined and entirely dependent on the caprices of his advisers and inner circle due to illness[118]) who first proposed the realistic option of military action on 1st December, and if any more proof were needed that this was a KGB affair, it was the agency's Alpha Group that stormed Amin's palace on 27th December.[119] Thus when it transpired that the situation in Afghanistan was completely out of control and that the PDPA would neither admit it nor autonomously solve the problem, the KGB's reports added to a growing sense of urgency. The acute paranoia left no time to question the veracity of the information gathered, while as a result of Andropov's influence, the Soviet leaders failed to properly consult either the experts or the foreign policy advisers.[120]  Action that, if left too late might threaten the very fabric of the Soviet Union through the collapse of the Central Asian republics to US-funded Islamic insurgents, was demanded. The only option was to effect the last resort—as it were, the insurance policy—of a military intervention.

The contribution of this paper is to analyse in depth the primary sources available and set them against the historiographical interpretations of the Soviet Union's volte face in late 1979. By drawing together those disparate threads, it is clear that the prevailing atmosphere in Moscow, and the reason for the sudden change of heart, was one of desperation, not calculation. Moreover, the blind panic that decided the fate of Afghanistan is representative of the failings of a centralised and stagnant government. In this respect, that panic is contiguous with the history of the USSR in the 1970s: in spite of all suggestions to the contrary, the decision to invade was not anomalous. Most political systems depend on the informal nod and wink to some degree, but the formal structures of power in the USSR had by 1979 become little more than rubber stamps for the ad hoc gatherings of various grandees.[121] In this instance, the primary sources referenced show that the group making all the decisions was limited to Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov, Ogarkov, Kornienko, Suslov and Brezhnev, and that that group was dominated by Andropov. Serious discussion in the month of December was put to one side, and those outside of the inner circle had little understanding of or input into the ongoing discussions. The invasion—a public relations and diplomatic gift to the USA, to Egypt, to Iran and to the Islamic fundamentalist movement—was, as even the influential Chernyaev has it, a dish 'cooked up somewhere on the sly' with the majority of the senior figures of the USSR kept out of the loop.[122] Indeed, in his diary entry of 30th December, Chernyaev sounds sleighted at a decision taken without due process. Eduard Shevardnadze, then a candidate to the Politburo, noted that the decision was made behind closed doors, after which he was 'simply informed of the fact'.[123] So tightly drawn was the inner circle that Chernyaev even went so far as to claim that it was narrower—and thus worse—than at any time in Russian history, even under Stalin.[124] As a result of the limited nature of the discussion and the lack of advice considered aside from that given by the KGB, the decision to intervene militarily was made in a panicked and paranoid manner by a group of men who saw enemies on all sides: a USA desperate to replace Iran with a new Asian outpost and surpassing the USSR; a China vastly larger than the USSR in population and irrational in is hostility to them; and a frighteningly efficient Japan now in rapport with China. To that we can add the tide of Islamic fundamentalism sweeping through Asia. Rightly or wrongly, and whether any threat to the USSR's territorial or socio-economic integrity existed in relation to the internal stability of Afghanistan, these were the psychological conditions of the Soviet mindset at the close of the 1970s.[125] In the final analysis, the underlying rationale behind the decision to send forces into Afghanistan, and the agitation associated with the immediate causes of the resolution, was symptomatic of the inadequacies of Soviet communism.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

·    The majority of the primary sources used are taken from the Cold War International History Project’s Virtual Archive on the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, available at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=va2.browse&sort=Collection&item=Soviet%20Invasion%20of%20Afghanistan. Accessed March 2011.

Other primary sources used are as follows:

·    Chernyaev, Anatoly, Dnevniki A.S. Chernyaeva: 1979g. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/rus/text_files/Chernyaev/1979.pdf, p.52. Accessed 23rd March 2011.

·    'Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU', 23rd May 1979. http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/pdfs/afgh/ct126-74.pdf. Accessed 24th March 2011.

·    'Memo to President from Zbigniew Brzezinski', December 26th 1979. http://tinyurl.com/65coc6r (from ncssm.edu). Accessed 1st April 2011.

·    'On information for the leaders of the Afghan progressive political organisations 'Parcham' and 'Khalq' about the outcome of the visit of Mohammed Daoud to the USSR', 26th June 1979. http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/pdfs/afgh/ct149-74.pdf. Accessed 23rd March 2011.

·   'Zbigniew Brzezinski: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen', 1998. http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html. Accessed 22nd March 2011.

Secondary Sources

·    Bonosky, Phillip, Afghanistan – Washington's Secret War (New York: International Publishers, 1985)

·    Borovik, Artyom, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: Grove Press, 1990)

·    Coll, Steve, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10  2001 (London: Penguin, 2004)

·    Gai, A. & Snegirev, V., Vtorzhenie: Neizvestnye stranitsy neob''iavlennoi voiny (Moscow: IKPA, 1991)

·    Galeotti, Mark, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union's Last War (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1995)

·    Gates, Robert M., From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, ed. 2006)

·    Gibbs, David 'Does the USSR Have a 'Grand Strategy'? Reinterpreting the Invasion of Afghanistan', Journal of Peace Research, Vol.24, No.4 (Dec. 1987)

·    Girardet, Edward, Afghanistan: The Soviet War (Worcester: Billing & Sons, 1985)

·    Haghayeghi, Mehrdad, Islam and Politics in Central Asia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995)

·    Hassan Kakar, M., Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Aghan Response, 1979-1982 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995)

·    Henkin, Louis, International Law: Politics and Values (Dordrecht, London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1995)

·    Malashenko, Aleksei (ed.), Afganistan: itogi beskonechnoi voiny. Materialy «kruglogo stola», posviashchennogo 10-letiiu vyvoda voisk iz Afganistana (Moscow: Carnegie Moscow Center, 1999)

·    Prados, John and Savranskaya, Svetlana (eds.) 'Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War’, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/. Accessed 21st March 2011.

·    Pringle, Robert W., Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence (Lanham, MD, Toronto, London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006)

·    Rasanayagam, Angelo, Afghanistan: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003)

·    Steele, J., 'Soviet Muslims', The Guardian (United Kingdom), 23rd November 1979

·    Webber, Mark, ''Out of Area' Operations: The Third World', in eds. Edwin Bacon and Mark Swindle, Brezhnev Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)

·    White, Ralph K., 'Empathizing with the Rulers of the USSR', Political Psychology, Vol.4, No.1 (1983)

[1] Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: Grove Press, 1990), p.7

[2] Edward Girardet, Afghanistan: The Soviet War (Worcester: Billing & Sons, 1985), p.9

[3] Borovik, op.cit., p.4

[4] Girardet, op.cit., p.5

[5] Mark Galeotti, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union's Last War (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1995), p.3

[6] M. Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Aghan Response, 1979-1982 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), p.8

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., p.10

[9] Girardet, op.cit., p.94

[10] Ibid., p.95

[11] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10  2001 (London: Penguin, 2004), p.49

[12] 'Transcript of CPSU CC Politburo Discussions on Afghanistan', 17th March 1979. From the Cold War International History Project's Virtual Archive available at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=va2.browse&sort=Collection&item=Soviet%20Invasion%20of%20Afghanistan. Accessed March 2011. In subsequent footnotes the collection is referred to simply as 'CWIHP'.

[13] CWIHP, 'Exerpt from Politburo meeting', 18th March 1979

[14] See relevant CWIHP documents.

[15] CWIHP, 'Personal memorandum Andropov to Brezhnev', 1st December 1979

[16] Galeotti, op.cit., p.7

[17] CWIHP, 'Gromyko-Andropov-Ustinov-Ponomarev Report to CPSU CC', 29th October 1979

[18] CWIHP, 'The Delivery of Special Equipment to the DRA, CC CPSU Politburo meeting’, 21st April 1978

[19] CWIHP, 'Political Letter from USSR Ambassador to Afghanistan A. Puzanov to Soviet Foreign Ministry, "About the Domestic Political Situation in the DRA," (notes)', 31st May 1978

[20] CWIHP, 'DECREE of the Secretariat of the CC CPSU - An Appeal to the Leaders of the PDPA Groups “Parcham” and “Khalq”,' 8th January 1974

[21] CWIHP, 'CC CPSU Information for the Leaders of the Progressive Afghan Political Organizations “Parcham” and “Khalq” Concerning the Results of the Visit of Mohammed Daud to the USSR', 21st June 1974

[22] 'On information for the leaders of the Afghan progressive political organisations 'Parcham' and 'Khalq' about the outcome of the visit of Mohammed Daoud to the USSR', 26th June 1979. http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/pdfs/afgh/ct149-74.pdf. Accessed 23rd March 2011. Translation from the Russian is my own.

[23] CWIHP, 'Record of Conversation, Soviet Ambassador A.M. Puzanov and Taraki', 18th June 1978

[24] CWIHP, 'Information from CC CPSU to GDR leader Erich Honecker', 13th October 1978

[25] CWIHP, 'Gromyko-Andropov-Ustinov-Ponomarev Report to CPSU CC on the Situation in Afghanistan', 28th June 1979

[26] CWIHP, 'Transcript of CPSU CC Politburo Discussions on Afghanistan’, 17th March 1979

[27] Coll, op.cit., p.40

[28] 'Transcript of CPSU CC Politburo Discussions on Afghanistan’

[29] Coll, op.cit., p.43

[30] Ibid, p.41

[31] 'Gromyko-Andropov-Ustinov-Ponomarev Report to CPSU CC on the Situation in Afghanistan'

[32] Coll, op.cit., p.45

[33] 'Transcript of CPSU CC Politburo Discussions on Afghanistan’

[34] 'Gromyko-Andropov-Ustinov-Ponomarev Report to CPSU CC on the Situation in Afghanistan'

[35] As quoted in David Gibbs, 'Does the USSR Have a 'Grand Strategy'? Reinterpreting the Invasion of Afghanistan', Journal of Peace Research, Vol.24, No.4 (Dec. 1987), p.373

[36] Angelo Rasanayagam, Afghanistan: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), p.73

[37] CWIHP, 'Top Secret Attachment, by KGB cipher Kabul’, 2nd June 1974

[38] 'Information from CC CPSU to GDR leader Erich Honecker'

[39] CWIHP, 'Decree of the CC CPSU Secretariat Concerning an appeal to the Czechoslovak Communist Party about K. Babrak’, 15th November 1978

[40] 'Transcript of CPSU CC Politburo Discussions on Afghanistan’

[41] CWIHP, 'Record of Conversation between Soviet Ambassador to Afghanistan A.M. Puzanov and H. Amin’, 21st July 1979

[42] CWIHP, ‘CPSU CC Politburo Decisions on Afghanistan (excerpts)’, 13th September 1979

[43] Borovik, op.cit., p.4

[44] 'Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War’, eds. John Prados and Svetlana Savranskaya. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/. Accessed 21st March 2011.

[45] Hassan Kakar, op.cit., p.35

[46] 'Gromyko-Andropov-Ustinov-Ponomarev Report to CPSU CC on the Situation in Afghanistan'

[47] See CWIHP, 'CPSU CC Politburo Decision with report by Gromyko, Ustinov, and Tsvigun’, 15th September 1979

[48] Hassan Kakar, op.cit., p.37

[49] 'Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU', 23rd May 1979. http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/pdfs/afgh/ct126-74.pdf. Accessed 24th March 2011. Translation from the Russian is my own.

[50] 'CPSU CC Politburo Decision with report by Gromyko, Ustinov, and Tsvigun’

[51] CWIHP, 'Information from CC CPSU to GDR leader E. Honecker’ 16th September 1979

[52] Coll, op.cit., p.48

[53] 'Gromyko-Andropov-Ustinov-Ponomarev Report to CPSU CC'

[54] Coll, op.cit., p.48

[55] 'Personal memorandum Andropov to Brezhnev'

[56] Coll, op.cit., p.47

[57] Borovik, op.cit., p.9

[58] Galeotti, op.cit., p.9

[59] 'Personal memorandum Andropov to Brezhnev'

[60] CWIHP, 'Extract from CPSU CC Politburo Decision’, 6th December 1979

[61] CWIHP, 'Summary of a meeting’, 10th December 1979

[62] Borovik, op.cit., p.7

[63] Anatoly Chernyaev, Dnevniki A.S. Chernyaeva: 1979g. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/rus/text_files/Chernyaev/1979.pdf, p.52. Accessed 23rd March 2011.

[64] Galeotti, op.cit., p.10

[65] Steve Coll, for examples, suggests the 26th November, almost a week even before Andropov's memo to Brezhnev (Coll, op.cit., p.28).

[66] CWIHP, 'Directive Nº 312/12/001 of 24 December 1979 signed by Ustinov and Ogarkov', 24th December 1979

[67] Galeotti, op.cit., p.9

[68] Hassan Kakar, op.cit., p.24

[69] Galeotti, op.cit., p.10

[70] Girardet, op.cit., p.13

[71] Ibid.

[72] Galeotti, op.cit., p.12

[73] 'Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War’

[74] Galeotti, op.cit., p.8. Speculatively, I suggest that this is further evidence that the decision to invade was taken suddenly in late 1979. If it had been a longer-term plan, the Kremlin would surely have wanted a more experienced individual on the ground.

[75] CWIHP, 'Report by Soviet Defense Minister Ustinov to CPSU CC on "Foreign Interference" in Afghanistan', 2nd Jan 1980

[76] Mark Webber, ''Out of Area' Operations: The Third World', in eds. Edwin Bacon and Mark Swindle, Brezhnev Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp.111-3

[77] Anatoly Chernyaev, op.cit., p.46

[78] 'Transcript of CPSU CC Politburo Discussions on Afghanistan'

[79] CWIHP, 'Report from Soviet Deputy Defense Minister Army Gen. Ivan Pavlovskii, during visit to Afghanistan’, 25th August 1979

[80] Gibbs, op.cit., p.375

[81] Chernyaev, op.cit., p.51

[82] Louis Henkin, International Law: Politics and Values (Dordrecht, London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1995), p.118

[83] For instance, see the cables from the Kremlin to friendly socialist states announcing the invasion on 27th December 1979 (CWIHP).

[84] See the CWIHP.

[85] CWIHP, 'Politburo Decree P177/151', 27th December 1979

[86] Indeed, as late as 1999 Russian historian Alexander Liakhovskii alleged that the USA did everything it could to draw the USSR into an 'unbearably burdensome' war: Alexander Liakhovskii, 'Posledstviia afganskogo konflikta dlia SSSR i Rossii' in Afganistan: itogi beskonechnoi voiny. Materialy «kruglogo stola», posviashchennogo 10-letiiu vyvoda voisk iz Afganistana, ed. Aleksei Malashenko (Moscow: Carnegie Moscow Center, 1999), p.11

[87] Phillip Bonosky, Afghanistan – Washington's Secret War (New York: International Publishers, 1985), p.59

[88] Coll, op.cit., p.xxx

[89] Coll, op.cit., p.18

[90] 'Zbigniew Brzezinski: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen', 1998. http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html. Accessed 22nd March 2011.

[91] CWIHP, 'Record of Conversation between Soviet Ambassador to Afghanistan A.M. Puzanov and Taraki’, 18th July 1978

[92] Hassan Kakar, op.cit., p.32

[93] Ibid., p.13

[94] CWIHP, 'Soviet communication to the Hungarian leadership on the situation in Afghanistan’, 17th October 1978

[95] 'Transcript of CPSU CC Politburo Discussions on Afghanistan'

[96] Coll, op.cit., p.42

[97] Ibid., p.45

[98] Ibid.

[99] 'Zbigniew Brzezinski: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen'

[100] 'Memo to President from Zbigniew Brzezinski', December 26th 1979. http://tinyurl.com/65coc6r. Accessed 1st April 2011. 

[101] Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, ed. 2006), p.98

[102] Galeotti, op.cit., p.18

[103] Borovik, op.cit., p.10

[104] Ibid.

[105] Hassan Kakar, op.cit., p.13

[106] 'Transcript of CPSU CC Politburo Discussions on Afghanistan'

[107] CWIHP, 'Information of KGB USSR to CC CPSU International Department’, 10th October 1979

[108] Coll, op.cit, p.40

[109] Ibid., p.39

[110] J. Steele, 'Soviet Muslims', The Guardian (United Kingdom), 23rd November 1979

[111] Ibid., p.22

[112] Ibid., p.26

[113] Mehrdad Haghayeghi, Islam and Politics in Central Asia (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p.72

[114] CWIHP, 'Meeting of Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko and Afghan Foreign Minister Shah-Valih, New York', 27th September 1979

[115] Coll, op.cit., p.41

[116] Chernyaev, op.cit., p.52

[117] See CWIHP, 'Information of KGB USSR to CC CPSU International Department', 10th October 1979

[118] Ibid.

[119] Robert W. Pringle, Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence (Lanham, MD, Toronto, London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006), p.12

[120] Borovik, op.cit., p.6

[121] Galeotti, op.cit., p.6

[122] Chernyaev, op.cit., p.52

[123] Borovik, op.cit., p.6

[124] Chernyaev, op.cit., p.52

[125] Ralph K. White, 'Empathizing with the Rulers of the USSR', Political Psychology, Vol.4, No.1 (1983), p.130