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Afghanistan Cold War

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In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in an effort to preserve the communist government and ensure its own security, but it failed due to the superior tactics of guerilla fighters in a unique landscape and the United States’ support of the Afghan rebels. This war between Soviet forces and Afghan rebels was a struggle between the communist government and its opposition. The Soviet Union was unable to adjust to the terrain and battle space and was forced to withdrawal. This struggle highlights the strategic game that the United States and the Soviet Union played to prevent control by one another during the Cold War.
According to Joseph Collins’ analysis of the Soviet invasion, the motives for the Soviets to invade Afghanistan …show more content…
The Soviet Union and the United States both had interests in Southwest Asia due to the region’s physical location next to China and the oil fields of the Middle East. The security of the Soviet Union came into question when Iran became hostile against both the United States and the Soviet Union following the overthrowing of the shah in 1979 and when the insurgency in Afghanistan against the PDPA indicated that the Afghan government was in danger. Another threat to Soviet security was the increase in US deployments to the area which indicated to the USSR that the US might try to “reestablish its ‘position of strength’ in Iran.” The USSR could not afford to lose control of both Iran and Afghanistan and thus needed to keep Afghanistan firmly in the “Soviet camp.” These concerns were evident in Soviet Foreign Ministry’s Georgy Kornienko’s account of the decision to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan. According to Kornienko, the push to send troops to Afghanistan “came from the stationing of American military ships in the Persian Gulf in the fall of 1979, and the incoming information about preparations for a possible American invasion of Iran, which threatened to cardinally change the military-strategic situation in the region to the detriments of the Soviet Union.” However, military leadership in the USSR was reluctant to send troops because of “the impossibility to cope with Afghanistan with the forces that could be used…without substantially weakening the Soviet groups of forces in Europe and along the border with China.” This reluctance was disregarded when, on December 12, 1979, a group consisting of five Soviet leaders (Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Suslov, Yuri Andropov, Dmitriy Ustinov, and Andrei Gromyko) decided to send troops into Afghanistan. The Defense Minister signed a document on December 24 stating that the purpose of the invasion was to render “internationalist

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